There’s an awesome interview making the rounds between Michaelangelo Signorile and RuPaul. It was original conducted on Signorile’s SiriusXM OutQ show and reprinted on the Huffington Post. The world’s favorite drag diva gets all candid on MANY topics..
On President Obama:
For someone like Obama to survive — he’s a very smart man — he’s had to do some dumb things because people, people don’t want the truth. It’s the same thing with drag. You know, drag breaks the fourth wall and people have been up against drag because drag queens are saying, “You’re not who you think you are. You’re not who you appear to be on your driver’s license or your birth certificate. You are actually — you’re actually God in drag.” But nobody wants to break that fourth wall. Nobody wants to hear the truth like that. You have to dumb it down. And it’s unfortunate because we all suffer when we dumb it down.
On the word “Tranny”:
It’s ridiculous! It’s ridiculous! Words — it goes back to grade school: Sticks and stones, you know the rest. The thing is you have to look at the ego, you have to follow the money, and the payoff. And the payoff is that the ego wants attention no matter what. It will try to get it wherever the hell it can, whether it’s positive or negative. So you have to ignore it basically — you have to starve it out. And unfortunately in our culture one person can write a letter to the network and they shut something down. It’s unfortunate. But I love the word “tranny.”
And no one has ever said the word “tranny” in a derogatory sense. In fact, you have to go to the intent of the person saying it. Of course Lance Bass, his intent would never be to be derogatory. Never. So, you know, that’s really ridiculous. And I hate the fact that he’s apologized. I wish he would have said, “F-you, you tranny jerk!”
On the LGBTQ uproar over the just canceled ABC men in dresses comedy, “Working It”:
We live in a culture where everyone is offended by everything. Everybody’s like, “Oh my god, I’m offended!” It’s an ego-based culture we live in. The ego has everything to do with identity. So, you know, drag actually mocks identity. So it doesn’t really make any sense. I think, in my world, in my circle of friends, we mock everything! [laughter]. Everything is up to be mocked. Don’t take anything seriously.
How can you not love RuPaul? He says the stuff out loud, most people are too afraid to admit to.
But, not everyone agrees…there are some negative comments about some of Ru’s viewpoints over on the comment thread for the Towelroad post about the interview and some rather dull PC comments as well.
MORE after the jump.
Frankly, I’m thrilled that Ru and I both think words are words and they can have different meanings and we shouldn’t get so freaked about their usage. Thousands of words in the English language have more than one meaning or intent. “Shrimp” could refer to a tasty seafood snack, a small human, or sucking on someone’s toes. “Rosebud” could be a young flower, a sled in a film, or your butt hole. “Gay” might mean colorful and festive, a homosexual, or something that’s banal and foolish. I don’t think of toe sucking when I have a shrimp cocktail, or refrain from smelling a rose because it reminds me of a bunghole, or think being gay is necessarily festive OR lame. I’m smart enough to realize, one word can mean many different things.
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