RuPaul shares the touching message he’d give to his younger self

RuPaul has told an audience the advice he’d like to be able to have given his younger self.

Speaking at the Royal Festival Hall in London on Sunday (7 April) as part of the press tour to promote his memoir, the Emmy-winning TV host was asked what he would say to his younger self – much as finalists on RuPaul’s Drag Race are.

And Ru had a touching message to share with little RuPaul Andre Charles.

“Get out of San Diego,” the superstar, now 63, joked at first.

“I was reading magazines about Andy Warhol and David Bowie and Liza Minnelli,” he went on, more seriously. “I wanted to be a part of that, and nothing was happening in San Diego. It’s a very sleepy town, I wanted to go find my tribe.

“So, what I would say to younger me? I would say: ‘Honey, it’s gonna get real good, just hold tight’.

“I packed a suitcase at 15 years old, and have never unpacked it since.”

RuPaul’s Sunday Times best-seller, The House of Hidden Meanings, lifts the lid on his career and life before he hit the big time.

As well as opening up about his relationship with husband Georges LeBar, the book tells of the drag superstar’s struggle with substance abuse over the years.

“There had been clues. There are always clues. I had been stoned every day I could [be] since I was 10 years old,” Ru wrote. “After cleaning up my act in the early 90s, the partying had crept back in, little by little.

“I had started getting high again here and there. As I’d become famous, there was always a bottle of champagne backstage, and, as my workload increased, I had been smoking more and more weed, until I was smoking first thing in the morning.”

The House of Hidden Meanings is available from Amazon, Waterstones and Barnes & Noble.