“Live life and enjoy it. That’s the real key to beauty!”
“It’s never too late to reclaim your inner diva and reclaim your inner strength.”
“You don’t have to give up your dreams in order to earn a living – they can go hand in hand.”
“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder for real.”
“The minute I enter my house or a hotel room on the road, wherever I am, the first thing I do is light a candle; that’s my favourite thing.”
“Years and years of therapy taught me to speak up because speaking up is what gets things done and gets your story and your voice heard.”
“Growing up in New Jersey, teen clubs were your life. I’m not kidding! That was it. I was literally tied up five days a week with teen clubs; my parents would drop me off. Like, I didn’t even drive.”
“Life is the greatest teacher.”
“’RuPaul’s Drag Race’… is very little about boys who dress up in girls’ clothing: it’s very much about grit, integrity, heart, power of perseverance, and the power of love. It’s also opening a dialogue up about the persecution and the marginalization of trans people, of queer people, of gender non-binary and gender fluid people.”
“I am very much about peace. There is so much turmoil in this world.”
“I am a competitor, I am a Virgo, and for me, I would never quit anything.”
“My parents both worked; I was a ‘latchkey kid.’ We were lower-middle class, and they did everything that they could to give me anything I wanted, within reason. We were not rich by any stretch of the imagination, but being an adopted kid, I think we had a different connotation. My parents tried extra hard, I think.”
“Growing up in the ’80s in central New Jersey as a weird kid with a blue mohawk listening to the Sex Pistols and dressing really funky, I was bullied pretty badly. It was every single day in elementary school and kept going into middle school, too. I felt totally alone, without a single person there for me.”
“Listen, there’s an expiration date for everything, but I mean, we’re not burning out on ‘Top Models,’ are we? We’re not burning out on making things in a ‘Runway’ room, are we? We’re not getting enough ‘Got Talent,’ right? We’ll never run out of talent. So, how could there be a ‘Drag’ burnout?”
“You can all get what you want to get, and so my journey was to show you how many times along the way adversity has stared me right in the face, and I’ve looked it right back and said, ‘No.’”
“It’s taken me a long, long time to figure out how to deal with negativity, because it used to really upset me. I was always that girl that, if I was performing in the club and there was one person not paying attention or not liking me, the whole club could be packed with people loving me, but I’d be obsessed with that one person.”
“I got involved in the underground world known as ballroom culture, and I used to walk a category called ‘face,’ and it was a very heavily Latino culture – it’s black and Latino – and they used to call me ‘cara,’ which means face in Spanish, so I started putting ‘cara’ on everything: hats, jackets.”
“I’m too much of a broad; I make men shake in their boots because I have a male dominance in my make-up that makes them feel emasculated.”
“I love creating. I love being with creative people who can think quickly on their feet.”
“I am a massive bargain hunter, so my list of bargains goes on and on and on.”
“I love me a bit of Katie Price.”
“I’m down for anything. I’ll try anything once. I’m a party girl that way!”
“I know television. I’ve done it for a while, and I know that most of the time, you don’t get second chances.”
“Even though I present as heterosexual, I’ve been all over the planet sexually and proud of that and never tried to hide it.”
“We love trans women; all of us know that drag wouldn’t be an art form without trans women. I know that, RuPaul knows that, everybody in the gay community knows that. Trans women have always been a part of and the face of drag. And I can guarantee trans women will always be a part of ‘RuPaul’s Drag Race.’”
“I do drag. Just because my drag is not the drag of Creme Fatale or Holy McGrail doesn’t mean it’s less drag. I perform live; I just sing with dancers. It’s drag on a different level.”
“As a mom to biological children and adopted gay children all around the world, nothing gives my heart strings a tug as much as seeing a parent stand by their queer/gay/trans child with beaming pride.”
“We must keep fighting until using the word ‘equality’ isn’t necessary because we will all be living as one.”
“I don’t do CDs. I only do radio. That’s the truth.”
“Style is objective, akin to art, so it varies.”
“I think Jennifer Lopez, Gwen Stefani, and Victoria Beckham all have an aesthetic that I admire, but I also love extreme risk takers like Miley Cyrus and Rihanna.”
“To me, even what the glossies would consider a fashion disaster are still self expression.”
“I’m a huge mediator.”
“I was one of the people that always got chosen last, and I think I bulked up my comedy bone to make up for my lack of friends.”
“Human lives are human lives.”
“I had a dialect coach from the Royal Shakespeare Company who was from Sheffield.”
“The Brits know how crazy Adele is. Americans have no clue about Adele and how crazy she is!”
“I hate – I hate – queens coming on and doing boy drag on ‘RuPaul’s Drag Race’ because I feel like it’s not edgy; it’s not different. You can see it anywhere.”
“I would create the best ‘Big Brother All-Stars!’”
“’RuPaul’s Drag Race’ is a show about love, art, passion, acceptance, and the quest for finding America’s next drag superstar. No show on the telly box has more grit than these queens.”
“My humour is spot on.”
“Ru and I have been best friends since, well, let’s just say they used the telegraph when we first met. Being able to work with my BFF is a dream come true and even more? To see what he has done for himself, the art of drag and the gay community in general constantly blows me away.”
“I agree with Ru that it’ll never be mainstream, because mainstream means everybody knows it, everybody loves it, everybody accepts it. That’s never gonna happen with drag, but it’s definitely become more mainstreamed for people that never knew anything about it, being opened up to it as a form of art.”
“I love Oxford Circus, so I can do Primarni, and I can do River Island and Topshop and Selfridges.”
“Selfridges – we just look; we don’t shop!”
“For the kids out there that are worried about what the future holds, especially the LGBTQI+ kids, our brothers and sisters that came before us didn’t fight for nothing. Trust me: we will only move forward, but you need to put your fear aside and find the strength to believe that.”
“Personally, I think what’s happening in my beautiful country is embarrassing, but I also know that Trump doesn’t speak for the majority of us.”
“I never felt welcome in the heteronormative groups.”
“I was the class weirdo, but I didn’t own that weirdo moniker until much later.”
“When I moved to New York, the gay community welcomed me with open arms and told me how beautiful I was. I will never turn my back on them.”
“It’s very difficult to be fully accepting of who you are when you’ve got that superficial world out there.”
“I love candles.”
“I try to be happy as much as I can. I’m really not a downer; I hate victims. I hate needy people. I’m that person who always tries to make the best of any situation. I’m probably happiest when I’m with my kids or with a gaggle of gays.”
“Any time you get to see a bunch of drag queens performing music and performing songs and being idiots, I’m in.”
“I hit the road with a bunch of drag queens every year, sometimes two times a year. Again, as such a fan of drag, it’s the art form that excites me and the longform presentation that they do. So it’s super exciting to be with them, doing what they love to do and doing it well.”
“The beautiful thing about ‘Drag Race’ is it’s the most inclusive television show, probably on the planet. It’s the place where kids go because they feel like they don’t fit in anywhere else. It’s the place they go to feel safe.”
“The challenge of ‘Drag Race’ is always the appearance and the challenge. It’s never just the challenge. It’s always the combination.”
“’Drag Race’ is the escape that everybody needs – gay, straight, or otherwise.”
“To see queer people keeping each other down makes me so sad because I’ve been around for a long time – I’ve seen the people who came before us fight for what we have right now, and they did not fight like that for us to go backwards.”
“I’m the parent of a queer child, and for my kid to know that they can always come to me and I’m going to love them no matter what is the biggest gift.”
“I’m a real theatre kid – that’s all I ever wanted to be.”
“When I was younger, I would write a ton, mostly because my mom told me I had incredible creativity and a gift of using words, only these were words that didn’t get me in trouble.”
“I help tons of people through their sobriety and getting help, but not because I have lived it but because I love them, care about them, and want them to live their best lives possible. If I can help anyone through that, then that it is my honor.”
“For me, my favorite Mariah Carey songs were never the singles, ever. My favorite Mariah song of all time is ‘Sent From Up Above’ from her first album, or ‘Vanishing,’ songs no one talks about.”
“I was raised in a Jewish family, but since I was adopted, my parents sent me to Hebrew school and Bible chapel, so I got the best of both worlds – singing in both a choir in Bible chapel and a chorus in Hebrew school. It shaped me and my voice.”
“I’m a musichead. My favorite Gaga song of all time is ‘You & I’ – it might not be the popular vote in terms of charts or sales, but it’s my favorite.”
“I think if you buy the ‘Christmas Queens 2’ album, there will be songs you love and songs you hate, just like every other album.”
“When you go into a show, you pray it’s successful, but you just don’t know what’s going to happen.”
“I’m loud and hard and in your face, and I tell the truth, and I think a lot of people fear the truth.”
“I’m an intimidating figure.”
“I get tons of emails every day from a lot of gays and young girls asking for help with their self-confidence and to heal and to feel. Even though I’m not an equipped social worker, I think the mom presence that I have makes them feel safe.”
“My husband’s my soul mate. At the same time, RuPaul’s my soul mate.”
“There have always been drag queens everywhere.”
“There’s only RuPaul.”
“I always tell the parents, ‘You don’t have to approve of your children; you just have to accept them for who they are.’”
“I always felt ,like, I’ll leave autobiographies to the people who are kind of iconic.”
“Give Good Face is about keeping an air of confidence on the outside and showing everybody that you have what it takes.”
“There are different types of people in this world, and I am the type of person who loves to give.”
“There are a lot of kids out there that look at me as their mother, and I have my two biological children, and there are so many queens that look at me as an aunt or some sort of confidante, and I can absorb it really well.”
“As an adopted kid, it means a lot when I hear women say, ‘I don’t want kids.’ I have a lot of respect for them.”
“I’m a heterosexual, married woman with children. I’m a mother who’s also a track mom, who cooks and cleans. And I just happen to be an ally for the gay community.”
“Drag is never going to be completely mainstream because it’s still a queer art form.”
“I think we’ve seen every type of drag come across the stage of ‘RuPaul’s Drag Race,’ and there is no end in sight of what can be on the stage.”
“You can’t get anything gayer than ‘RuPaul’s Drag Race!’”
“I was really into punk rock but also into musical theater.”
“When I moved to New York City to go college, my mother said, ‘If you want to be recognized, you need to go out to a club.’ Because we didn’t have computers. We didn’t have social media. We didn’t even have cellphones. So you had to go out to be recognized.”
“When I grew up where I grew up, things were very, very different, and nobody had a filter. And that’s what brought us together.”
“You get one go round in this life. Why are you going to settle for second best when you can get everything you want out of it?”
“My mother was incredible.”
“I love Marc Jacobs and what Kim Jones is doing for Dior Homme.”
“For red-carpet gowns, Christian Siriano is one of my favourites.”
“I was raised in New York, so that’s the greatest city in the world to me, but if you take that out of the equation, then London is my favourite city, and I’m a huge fan of Dublin as well.”
“Dublin is really fun, and Irish people are hilarious.”
“I am just forthcoming – completely blunt and honest.”
“If you listen to what I’m saying, there’s always a reason for it. Always. And it always comes from my heart, a place of love.”
“I am a biological female. I have two children. I’ve been married for 16 years. I’ve never been a man.”
“I was a theater major, and I remember being in college, and whenever my professor would assign me songs that I hated, I really had a hard time singing them. One time, I even faked sick so I wouldn’t have to sing a song.”
“We have to fight for what’s right the same way the brothers and sisters that came before us did. The ultimate example, and there are many others, was The Stonewall Inn. They were pushed until they could take no more.”
“It takes an awful lot to offend me.”
“I moved to New York City in the ’80s to be an actress and to be on Broadway. That was always my dream.”
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