RuPaul has revealed that his drag persona is called Monster.
The TV star and drag queen, 59, opened up about his well-known diva look to Vanity Fair, saying the image helped him break into the mainstream.
He told how when he was trying to break through, he “started doing my David Bowie thing, my androgynous thing at nightclubs”.
He said: “People would see me and go, ‘It’s cute, Ru, but when are you gonna do Star Booty? When are you gonna do the drag thing?’”
The Drag Race star went on: “I changed my ideas about myself.
“I said, I’m gonna do this in drag. Not only am I going to do this in drag, I’m going to do it in glamazon drag.
“And I’m going to take some of the sexual subversiveness out of it and make myself like a Disney caricature, so that Betty and Joe Beer Can won’t feel threatened by the sexual aspects of drag.
“They won’t be threatened by the fact that I’m actually mocking identity.
“That was the scientific combination that I used to break through to the mainstream. So that’s what I did.
“I enlisted the help of all my friends, my tribe members, and together we came up with this look. That’s how Supermodel happened. That cracked the code.”
But the star said “true drag really will never be mainstream”.
“Because true drag has to do with seeing that this world is an illusion, and that everything that you say you are and everything it says that you are on your driver’s licence, it’s all an illusion,” he said.
“Most people will never in their lives understand what that is.”
