RuPaul is with his Australian partner, Georges LeBar, since 1994, when they met at the “Limelight” Night club in New York. They married in January 2017 on their 23rd anniversary. LeBar is a painter and runs a ranch in the height of 60,000 acres in Wyoming.
“I’ve never said this on television before, but we are married. We got married on our 23rd anniversary. I met him on the dance floor at Limelight club in New York City in 1994, on his birthday. So we got married on his birthday, the anniversary of when we met, this year — in January.”
RuPaul’s hit reality show “RuPaul’s Drag Race” won three Emmys this year.
“The whole point of drag is that we are not separate from one another; each of us are in drag. You’re born naked, the rest is drag. Ain’t no two ways about it. It’s not just about little boys who want to play in girls’ things. It’s about the identity that each of us assigns to ourselves, and that’s why it’s political. That’s why it’s really important. That’s why it ruffles so many feathers, because a shape shifter — drag queen — is telling you you’re not who you think you are.”
RuPaul is widely considered to be the most commercially successful drag queen of all time. He has been accredited with creating wider exposure for drag queens from LGBT culture in to mainstream society, thanks to his early-career chart success, and later, the successive climb in viewership of RuPaul’s Drag Race.
In 1999, RuPaul was awarded the Vito Russo Award at the GLAAD Media Awards for work in promoting equality in the LGBT community.
By pioneering queer representation on television, many believe RuPaul to have essentially revolutionised the portrayal of the LGBTQ+ community on screen.He first won an Emmy for his work on the show in 2016, and one year later the show garnered 8 nominations, including Outstanding Reality-Competition Program for the first time in it’s 11-season run, and a second consecutive win for RuPaul in the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Host for a Reality or Reality-Competition Program. In 2017, he was named by TIME Magazine as one of the most influential people in the world, where model Naomi Campbell cites: “it’s incredible what he’s done for the drag queens bringing them out, introducing them to a mainstream audience and letting them be proud of who they are and what they want to be”.
Drag says: “I’m a shapeshifter, I do whatever the hell I want at any given time”.
