The only natural thing about any of this is the light

From an article by Abby Aguire in Vogue, May 2019:

If you approach Mother Ru from the side, as I did, the first thing you will need to process is the eyelashes. The skull-to-eyelash ratio is so physiologically improbable that it’s a good 30 seconds before I realize that Ru is not dressed as any of his familiar alter egos. Rather, he’s a modern facsimile of Queen Elizabeth I, clothed in a billowing gold-brocade skirt, a corset, and a halo of red dreadlocks.

He knows which side is his good side. He knows how the light is hitting. He knows to lower the lashes to half-mast and let them hover there as the camera clicks. And when, after a while, Leibovitz suggests he remove his headpiece, he knows to object.

“It becomes something else without the piece,” Ru says, gesturing to the rest of his puffy-sleeved costume. “The piece sells everything else.”

“Your hair becomes a crown,” Leibovitz says gently. The exchange goes on for two minutes. Finally, RuPaul puts his (combat boot–clad) foot down. Remove the piece, and he is no longer in character. “Everything here is overdone,” he says, motioning again to his look, and then to the surroundings. “The only natural thing about any of this is the light.”

It occurs to me that RuPaul has just offered up a definition of camp. (“The essence of camp is its love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration,” Susan Sontag wrote in “Notes on ‘Camp.’ ”) More remarkably, he and Leibovitz have just unwittingly re-created one of the photographer’s most memorable shoots.

You see, twelve years ago, when Leibovitz took official portraits of Queen Elizabeth II in full regalia at Buckingham Palace, one of America’s most well-known portrait photographers asked England’s longest-reigning monarch to remove her “crown.” (It was a tiara.) A BBC film crew captured the exchange.

Leibovitz: “It will look better - less dressy - because the garter robe is so...”

Queen Elizabeth II: “Less dressy? What do you think this is?”

The queen of the United Kingdom did not want to take off her headpiece. And here in beautiful downtown Burbank, neither does the Queen of Drag.

RuPaul is 60 years old today.

All Hail!

RuPaul (born RuPaul Andre Charles, 17th November 1960)