Visage Voyage | Pocketmags.com

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Visage Voyage

It’s exactly nine years this month since RuPaul’s Drag Race first sashayed onto American television screens, courtesy of the Logo TV network. Since then the show has not only become a pop culture phenomenon, but a triumphant new strand of queer programming, credited with helping change the face of LGBT+ representations and educating a new generation about the fight for queer rights.

“ People think of ‘Drag Race’ as a camp show about boys dressing up in girl’s clothing, but that’s on the surface.

It’s also brought drag into the mainstream, catapulting queens like Bianca Del Rio, Sharon Needles, Trixie and Katya, and Courtney Act into the firmament of global stardom, while its creator and star, RuPaul has ascended to become a kind of queer Oprah – her message at the end of every show - “If you can’t love yourself, how the hell you gonna somebody else?” – becoming the new mantra.

Sitting firmly but fabulously by RuPaul’s side since season three of Drag Race has been Michelle Visage, and over over the course of seven seasons of the show, and two seasons of RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars, her persona as a straighttalking ally who takes no shit has become part of the show’s overall ethos. Alongside RuPaul, Michelle has evolved into a kind of straight mama to the gays, helping mend the broken kids who come through the Drag Race doors to lip-sync for their lives.

The contestant pool has included survivors of assault, people abandoned by their parents or kicked out of their homes, and people for whom being gay or trans nearly cost them their lives. Season two winner Tyra Sanchez (aka James Ross IV) was homeless when he entered the competition. Season four contestant Timothy Wilcots, aka Latrice Royale, had served jail time, while All Star contestant, Jujubee was so used to being homophobically abused as a child, he answered to the word ‘faggot’.

“People think of Drag Race as a camp show about boys dressing up in girl’s clothing, but that’s on the surface,” Michelle tells me as we chat on a break from her filming schedule with Ireland’s Got Talent, on which she’s a judge (more of which later). She’s impeccably made-up for the cameras, jet-black hair coiffed, eyeliner sequined, and the Drag Race persona is fully intact. She talks a mile-a-minute, her opinions forthright and peppered with expletives, but at the same time she touches my hand or arm at regular intervals, forging a kind of instant intimacy for the brief time we have together. It’s hard not to want Mama Michelle to like you.

“Really the show is so much more about life, about integrity, about grit, determination, love, loss, self-endurance, selfloathing, self-love…” she says, her intricately painted fingernails grazing my wrist. “We actually bring families together. These queer boys, however they identify, have lost touch with their parents or family members because their families didn’t accept them.

“A lot of these parents kick their kids out on the street when they come out, and they only thing they have to turn to is selling sex, selling their bodies. They don’t believe they have what it takes, the self-worth, the self-love, to do anything other than tricking. So we end up with drug issues, suicides, homicides… LGBT youth homelessness is a big deal, so with our show a lot of times the parents come around and say, ‘Oh my God, I am so sorry, I didn’t see what was right in front of my face, all you really needed was for me to love you’.

“Or if that doesn’t happen, if there is no epiphany, they realise there can be a relationship. Maybe it’s slow, but the relationship happens.”

Visage herself is the mother of a queer child – her 18 year-old daughter, Lillie identifies as bisexual. “I knew I’d end up with a queer kid,” she laughs. “I just thought it would be a choreographer, or an interior decorating boy or hairdresser, but it ended up being a girl who is still questioning and finding her way.”

While a bi kid couldn’t hope for a more clued-in mother, Michelle says it’s only recently that she’s come to accept the viability of bisexuality.

“Back when I started with the community, in the 1980s, it was close to a death sentence to come out as gay. It was safer for the boys, not the girls, to come out as bisexual even though they were gay. So, it’s only in the past three years or so that I’ve realised bisexuality is a viable way of being.

“My daughter identifies as bi and non-binary. She’s dealt with some pretty serious depression issues, so she’s finally coming out of that now and exploring her bisexuality. She’s 18, so it’s later in life, whereas some kids might do it at 13, so I don’t know if she even needs that validation yet. She might, in university, realise how important it is, because bis and trans get the shitty end of the stick. It’s not fair. Being the mother of a bisexual kid, I will scream louder for her rights, which do matter and are real.”

Although the America in which Lillie is coming of age is a much more evolved place than when her mother was living it up on the New York underground with her best buddy, the young RuPaul (aka Andre Charles), one year into the Trump administration, with the roll-back of protections for trans people and rhetoric, along with the erasing of gay recognition, there are clear efforts to turn the evolutionary direction backwards.

“It’s very hard in America right now,” says Michelle. “But the stronger and louder we are, and if we band together, we will be heard. Our brothers and sisters did not fight in Stonewall all those years ago for it to go back to the way it was. We’re no longer being pushed back into the closet; we’re no longer being silenced.

“As a mother of a queer kid, I can only look to the future. It’s a lot easier to be under the queer umbrella these days than it has ever been, in my life, so I want those kids to know why.

If we keep informing them, letting them know the history and not letting them forget… then they’ll get it, and they’ll know why they were able to come out of the womb shitting rainbows and glitter.”

Visage herself was born to an American-Irish mother in 1968, then adopted by a Jewish family in New Jersey and christened Michelle Lynn Shupack. “My mother couldn’t have me, other circumstances got in the way, but she loved me enough to give me up for adoption,” she says early on in our chat, but later, when we’re talking about Drag Race again, it becomes apparent that this presented its challenges.

“If it were me growing up, my self-loathing, and the hatred I had for myself, not knowing why I’d been given up for adoption, if I’d had a show like Drag Race, maybe I wouldn’t have had an eating disorder, maybe I wouldn’t have thought I was ugly, or didn’t fit in or had nobody who didn’t understand my weirdness,” she says. “But I didn’t have that, so I had to go through all that shit, to come out the other side and realise,

I’m not going to sit back and let somebody bully somebody else the way I was bullied.” Perhaps it was the tracing her birth mother and learning that her grandmother was from Cork that somehow originally brought Michelle to Ireland’s media. Ireland’s Got Talent isn’t her first time to appear on our airwaves.

“ If we keep informing them, letting them know the history and not letting them forget… then they’ll get it, and they’ll know why they were able to come out of the womb shitting rainbows and glitter.

“I did radio here in 1997 for three years on 2FM with Dusty Rhodes,” she tells me. “He’d have me on once a week to take a bite out of the Big Apple, sponsored by Cidona. He flew me to Ireland a few times to do events. Then in 2009 I was back on 2FM with Michael Cahill at the weekends. So, I’ve always had a relationship with Ireland.”

This relationship should be further enhanced when Ireland’s Got Talent begins broadcasting on TV3 on February 3. Is she going to get shady as she searches for charisma, uniqueness, nerve and talent amongst the Irish public, or will she be more Mama Michelle?

“In RuPaul’s Drag Race I have a very specific role,” she says. “I grew up in this community since I was literally weaned off the plastic tits of a drag queen. I have a background and standard that I’m holding these queens to, when I know they can do better. I’m a lot tougher on them because I need to be.

Michelle and RuPaul with fellow Drag Race judges, Ross Matthews (left) Carson Kressley (right)

“Our brothers and sisters did not ight in Stonewall all those years ago for it to go back to the way it was.

“If a child comes up on Ireland’s Got Talent or somebody who has something but they’re not quite ready, I’m not going to shoot them down and tell them this sucks, because that’s not who I am. I want to encourage everybody to follow their dream. If they don’t have that talent I’m going to tell them, ‘I don’t know if this should be your dream, you should have a back-up dream’. But I’m not going to stop anybody from chasing what they want.

“I like to give constructive criticism. It’s not going to help me to cut someone else down; it’s going to help me help somebody else. I’m a Virgo; I want to help everybody. I want everybody to be happy.”

As a certain drag queen might say: shantay, gurl, you stay.

‘Ireland’s Got Talent’ begins on TV3 on February 3. Listen to our Q+A podcast featuring this full, unedited interview on Apple Podcasts. It’s sickening.

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