The other contestants gasped, visibly intimidated. “I’m just here to fight,” she announced, bullhorns mounted atop her wig, fists positioned on the defensive. The drag queen in question, the Vixen, whose real name is Anthony Taylor, arrived on the show like a deleted scene from an alternate Bad Girls Club. (Years later, she would rescind and apologize for her remarks, explaining that she’d allowed Berle’s inappropriate behaviour to pierce her statesmanship: “Of course, what I should have done backstage is told him, ‘Get your dirty hands off of me, you motherfucker!’”)īut this was in 1993, long before RuPaul’s career peaked long before she learned to edit her speech for the cameras and white executives long before she became the world’s most famous drag queen long before the first season of her lauded reality competition series, RuPaul’s Drag Race, in 2009 long before the recent conclusion of the show’s 10th season, during which she would berate another black drag queen for exhibiting the very same candor and fighting spirit she eventually learned to swallow. Here, RuPaul immortalized herself as an image of black rage and defiance. Instead, she was a regular person nursing a bruised ego, standing before millions of viewers and refusing to be ridiculed refusing, as the poet Claudia Rankine writes, to carry what didn’t belong to her. In this iconic moment of candid brazenness, RuPaul was not performing, though she was onstage. “It’s one of your old ones!”īerle’s exhibition of mockery and harassment - he insistently groped Ru’s breasts and, allegedly, grabbed her butt backstage - infuriated RuPaul, who undressed the comedian with martial wit: “You used to wear gowns and…that’s funny, now you wear diapers.” But RuPaul’s face betrayed twitches of irritation from the minute Berle began his routine, he was ogling RuPaul’s chest and smirking at the audience. The pair was expected to cordially present the night’s Viewer’s Choice award - which would go to the classic rock band Aerosmith, for their political anthem “Livin’ on the Edge” - in the same diplomatic fashion in which two politically opposed heads of state might meet publicly, at a national press conference, to feign camaraderie. Beside the vertical grandeur of RuPaul’s impressive six-footedness, Berle looked like a neglected accessory.
In September 1993, RuPaul Andre Charles, who was still in the glittery naissance of a monumental career, swanked onto the MTV Video Music Awards stage in a twinkling gown, flanked by actor and comedian Milton Berle.
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