Personally, I experience success when I enjoy what I'm doing. I love the creative process, even if the end result isn't embraced by anyone else.
RupaulRead
Drag is involved with changing identities and not taking identities too seriously at all. That's why drag is such a hard sell to a network - or anyone, really - because it's up against the ego.
Interpretation
Drag celebrates fluid identities and challenges the seriousness of societal norms.
In this quote, Rupaul highlights how drag performs a critical role in changing perceptions of identity, emphasizing the importance of not taking oneself too seriously. The art of drag confronts ego and societal expectations, making it a difficult concept to market to mainstream media, as it destabilizes conventional understandings of identity and self-expression.
In practice
During a speech at a pride event to emphasize acceptance of different identities.
Personally, I experience success when I enjoy what I'm doing. I love the creative process, even if the end result isn't embraced by anyone else.
The secret of success in every field is redefining what success means to you. It can't be your parent's definition, the media's definition, or your neighbor's definition. Otherwise, success will never satisfy you.
All things to do with drag are inherently therapeutic because the realization of your own insanity is the beginning of sanity.
I started out in this business in rock and roll bands and stumbled into drag. Drag just happened to be my vehicle for my creativity. So, you know, it's afforded me the opportunity to create new shows, to make music.
Drag breaks the fourth wall, which is why it's never been quite accepted, because nobody wants to be told that they are really a caricature of themself and to not take yourself too seriously.
From childhood, we're trained to be a certain way, to behave a certain way - so that the power base can control us, really. And punk and drag are completely outside of that.
The most important thing to realize is that everyone is capable of telling a story.
If a serious statement is defined as one that may be made in terms of waking life, poetry will never rise to the level of seriousness. It lies beyond seriousness, on that more primitive and original level where the child, the animal, the savage, and the seer belong, in the region of dream, enchantment, ecstasy, laughter. To understand poetry we must be capable of donning the child's soul like a magic cloak and of forsaking man's wisdom for the child's.
You always hear these stories of how Hollywood is so merciless on composers and how they all get beaten up. Nobody beats me up as much as I beat myself up. This is what I love doing and I have one life to do it in, and I better do it right. I better do it well.
CBS really wants me on TV. That's their aim. My aim is to have an all-gay sitcom someday, with heterosexuals as token guest stars. Let them be the next-door neighbors for a change.
I started under my master, Etienne Decroux, who taught me a new grammar for mime he called statuary mime. This grammar brings style creations. Without it, no art survives.
I'd say, if you want to be an artist, start with your art; start with making great music and it will, hopefully, eventually cut through all of the nonsense that is out there.
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