It was only when RuPaul saw Sheena Easton perform on TV for a New Year’s Eve event that he recognised how femininity could be harnessed for its alluring power. After more than a decade of dishevelled punk looks, RuPaul embraced a modelesque “high femme” appearance, completely reconceiving his drag in the process. With anxieties about desirability as an androgynous Black man, RuPaul explains that this femme drag enabled a rich new power found in our “sexual hierarchy”, one that was intoxicating and liberating all at once.

Soon, the wider fame he so hungered for arrived via the runaway success of one song celebrating 1990s supermodel worship. Supermodel (You Better Work) was part parody (with RuPaul as said supermodel) and part paean to the culture deifying such statuesque women to the domain of stars. “Finally, I had snapped into focus, just in time for the whole world to see,” he writes.

It’s at this professional peak that RuPaul met his long-time partner, Australian-born Georges LeBar, at a gay club. But the allure of substances for escape did come for LeBar and RuPaul (again), who began a slippery slope back on alcohol and drugs after years of sobriety. Only after taking himself to a 12-step program did some clarity and resolve begin for RuPaul – and a renewed chapter together for the pair.

Throughout The House of Hidden Meanings, RuPaul adopts the language of psychoanalysis (especially the idea of “ego”) to convey the psychological home truths he found on his journey to self-understanding. Some may find it confected – especially appearing in a celebrity memoir – but it’s a raw and revealing gesture, especially one coming from a queer man of colour. It resonates because RuPaul also draws on ideas of power, privilege and gender identity to stitch together an enlightened retelling of one very vulnerable life, now best known for its elan and artifice.

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The psychic house that RuPaul illuminates, room by room, was one previously constructed entirely by “self-seriousness”. Kindness and play remain the only hope for weathering the tight strictures imposed on us, RuPaul argues, and for ever achieving a higher self-realisation. Even when touched by fame or wealth, it’s only by embracing self-love and theatricality that any of us can truly emancipate ourselves from life’s regular cruelty or our own past trauma.

The House of Hidden Meanings is an intimate and edifying chronicle about finding this rare self-understanding. For a 63-year-old drag performer who has long embraced the performance and conceit of gender play, RuPaul leaves only one message to impart with readers: “You’re born naked and the rest is drag.”

RuPaul’s Drag Race streams on Stan, which is owned by Nine, the owner of this masthead.

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