The Diva Rules Read online

  Soon, all the Latin queens who knew me from the clubs and the balls started calling me “Cara,” Spanish for “face,” rolling the “R” off their tongues. “Cara, Cara! Come here, Cara!” Almost instantly, I left my God-given name behind and started going by my new queen-given moniker. Mirrored letters were everything to every club kid at the time, thanks to Patricia Field. But since I could not afford her designs, I went to Pearl Art Supply and splurged on two Cs, four As, and two Rs, and then epoxied “CARA” on the back of my white leather motorcycle jacket and on the front of my baseball hat. Unfortunately, the white kids on the street would mess it up all the time. They’d yell, in their New York accents, “Hey, Cara!” as if it rhymed with Farrah, and I hated it.

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  IF YOU WANT TO SUCCEED, YOU’VE GOT TO LEARN HOW TO GIVE GOOD FACE, and that doesn’t mean you’ve got to be pretty. It means you’ve got to own who you are and what you’ve got, know that you’re beautiful, and, baby, act like it. On Drag Race, I often critique these young queens by saying they’re not showing enough of themselves. They hide behind the wigs and the makeup and the characters they play, fearful that if they reveal who they really are, they’ll not be good enough, or likable enough. We all do that in life sometimes. When we’re scared that we don’t measure up, we hide behind things: excuses, other people, schticks, fake personas. But here’s the thing: If you’re constantly hiding behind something or someone else, life will pass you by. Opportunities will pass you by. Relationships will pass you by. Back in the ball scene, if you wanted to win the Face category, you had to be willing to strip yourself down, take everything off, and let your own best features shine through. The same holds true in life. If you want to win, you have to be willing to be vulnerable. Believe me, I know. That’s what gave me my name, and ultimately, my power.

  Having taken six years of French, the international language of sexy, I changed Cara, which means “face” in Spanish, into Visage, which means “face” in French. I guess you could say it’s my drag name, but I earned it not from putting on makeup to become someone else, but by taking it off to reveal myself. To this day, I do my damnedest to uphold the legacy of my name, Michelle Visage.

  rule no. 7:

  YOU DO YOU.

  I don’t care who you are, everybody needs to feel loved. In fact, that desire is so strong in all of us that sometimes we’re willing to do anything to get it, including becoming someone we’re not. But here’s the thing: If you start changing yourself—who you are, how you act, and what you care about—just to please other people, you will fail not only them but, more important, yourself.

  Believe me, I know how easy it is to get sucked in. I’m a chameleon myself. When I went to England on vacation with my parents at age thirteen I returned with a British accent, which lasted most of the summer. And not even a sometimes British accent, like Madonna had when she was married to Guy Richie. Oh no, I was full-on Downton Abbey. On the opposite end of the spectrum, in high school, rap music was my life. It took over my soul the first time I heard Rapper’s Delight as a child, in 1979. When I hung with fellow rap fans, who were usually the black kids of South Plainfield and Plainfield, I talked and acted just like them, because I was one of them. I was down. But my most dramatic transformation happened when I was eighteen and started hanging out with pier queens in New York City.

  By the time I graduated from college, I was lucky enough to be living on the corner of Mulberry and Houston streets in a brand-spankin’-new, twenty-four-hour doorman building, in a one- bedroom apartment. I know that sounds flossy and pampered, but the catch was; I was sharing a one-bedroom apartment with two other girls. Yes, a tiny-ass, NYC apartment with ONE bedroom to be shared by three girls, nay, women. ONE BATHROOM, three twin beds in one bedroom—ya feel me? Looking back, it was a terrible decision, but it was the only way to live in the element we wanted and be able to afford it. Now, pretty much every single night of the week, I’d go to the clubs with my gays. They were my family. Max, Danny, Jeannie, Cesar, Fidel, David, Tony, Jerome Pendavis, and Princess, in particular, were my closest friends in the world. We spent every free moment together, and my apartment became the usual preclub gathering place. I’d be in the bathroom getting ready, and they’d be hanging out on my couch, playing mix tapes or watching TV. Then, we’d go to the clubs and dance our tiny little asses off. When the clock struck three, we’d tumble into Florent, a popular diner in the meatpacking district (my GOD, that neighborhood has the biggest double entendre of all!), which was not unlike being in the club itself, since it was entirely the same group of people, just now eating disco fries.

  When I wasn’t in the clubs or getting ready to go to the clubs, I was hanging out on the piers with all of NYC’s finest, most legendary queens. And that is where my greatest transformation happened: I became a gay man. I wanted Max and Cesar, everyone in my family, and all these kids along the river to know that, though I was white, a biological female, and hetero, I was one of them. And so I started acting and talking exactly like them. If you’ve never heard it (or have never seen the documentary Paris Is Burning—which, child, why not?), then understand this: The pier queens spoke their own language, and it was the furthest thing from the Queen’s English you could imagine.

  Because Rosetta Stone doesn’t offer a five-day immersion course in it, allow me to give you a quick lesson in Pier Queenese:

  QUEEN’S ENGLISH: What I am about to tell you is the unabashed, 100 percent truth.

  PIER QUEENESE: Here’s the T, girl . . .

  QUEEN’S ENGLISH: You look beautiful.

  PIER QUEENESE: Oh, Miss Thing, you ah oh-vaaaaaah (which is derived from the word “over.”)

  QUEEN’S ENGLISH: I’m so happy.

  PIER QUEENESE: Guurrrrl, I am liiiiiiiving.

  QUEEN’S ENGLISH: Let me see your outfit.

  PIER QUEENESE: Turn it, mama. Or, WEEEEERRRRRKKKKK! Past tense: She TURNT it OUT!

  QUEEN’S ENGLISH: Definitely. No doubt, 100 percent.

  PIER QUEENESE: Boots. The house down.

  QUEEN’S ENGLISH: Ignore it.

  PIER QUEENESE: Pay it dust.

  QUEEN’S ENGLISH: She is feeling amazing and wants the world to know.

  PIER QUEENESE: She is feeling her oats.

  QUEEN’S ENGLISH: This is an amazing [insert any noun here].

  PIER QUEENESE: Tens across the board.

  QUEEN’S ENGLISH: OMG! Look at how gorgeous she is!

  PIER QUEENESE: She betta werk!

  QUEEN’S ENGLISH: Let’s go tell a joke, be silly, and have a laugh.

  PIER QUEENESE: Let’s go have a kiki and carry on.

  QUEEN’S ENGLISH: She was being dramatic and causing a ruckus.

  PIER QUEENESE: She was CARRYING!!!

  QUEEN’S ENGLISH: You are absolutely correct.

  PIER QUEENESE: Okayyyyyy?

  And that is exactly how I talked nearly twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week (except when I was at work or talking to my mother on the phone). Every other sentence out of my mouth sounded like a complete effing meltdown of a ball-walking category delivery. The deeper I got into the scene, the more abundant my Pier Queenese got. I opened my mouth and rainbow, glitter, and unicorns holding pink purses flew out. But understand something: I wasn’t trying to fake the funk, I was being authentic . . . or so I thought.

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  WE ALL SO DESPERATELY WANT TO BE ACCEPTED, which is why it’s so easy, when you join a group (whether it’s a new circle of friends, an office, or a community) to let it swallow you up. But I’m telling you now: Do not let that happen to you. Don’t be so quick to give up your own identity just to fit in. Because, in the long run, just belonging to a scene isn’t enough. To be a diva, you’ve got to cultivate your own strengths and your own personality within it. Hang on to what sets you apart, because that is what makes you special. When I look at all of my friends who survived those many nights on the piers, the ones who made it, the ones who are truly happy now, they are also the ones who nev
er lost themselves there. They could pop, dip, and spin with the best of them, but they also studied dance, music, photography, fashion, or whatever was their personal passion. Sure, they no longer rule the piers . . . because now they rule the world.

  One night, when we were on the pier, Vogueing, kikiing, and carrying on, Max, the gentlest and apparently the wisest of my circle, pulled me aside. “Guuurl, I’m worried about you,” he said. “We love you very much. You’re one of us. You’re already in our family, so please do yourself a huge favor and stop acting like a faggot.” To this day, I absolutely despise that F word, but I knew EXACTLY what he was trying to say. He went on, “Out of all of us, YOU have the biggest chance at a future. YOU are going somewhere. You will not be down here Vogueing on the piers forever, because you have talent. You don’t have to be a gay man. You’re already fabulous, so just be yourself.”

  Max was right. I had changed. So, I toned it down a bit. Instead of saying, “Guurrrlll, you ah oh-vaaaaaaah,” I’d say, “Girl, you are ovah,” and I’d top off that compliment with my own signature look of approval. It was my first step in realizing that my words had more power when I was saying them. Don’t get me wrong: I’m not saying I stopped hanging out with my pier queens (as IF!) or loving my gays (that will never stop). I just realized I didn’t have to give up my identity to be a part of the group. And you know what? When I revealed my even truer self to them, they loved me even more, and we got closer as a family. That’s why to this day when I see baby gays jumping over hoops for attention or sheblamming themselves into the ER, my heart goes out to them, and I just want to hug them and tell them they don’t have to try so hard. It’ll be OK. And it will be.

  rule no. 8:

  KEEP YOUR SHIT TOGETHER.

  If you think for one minute that anybody you send a résumé to isn’t going to Google you, check your Facebook, read your Twitter, watch your YouTube, and basically search for photos of you falling down drunk, then I’ve got some swampland in Florida with your name on it. I guarantee you this: They will find whatever is out there, and if what they discover does not make you look good, you’ll miss out on big opportunities in your life, no matter how hardworking, enthusiastic, or otherwise smart you are. Don’t get me wrong: I’m not saying you have to become a Mormon. I’m not going to judge you if you do a little partying. But what I am saying is this: If you’re going to be a drunken fool, get ready for what’s to follow. If you’re going to let your boobs hang out, be prepared for someone else to post a photo of them swinging in the wind. Nobody else is going to look out for your best interests. That’s your job, and if you don’t take it seriously, that one moment of stupidity could haunt you for years.

  That’s why the one (and only) sex tape I made—with my husband, mind you—is under lock and key in a safe and will remain there until I am long gone and my children figure out the combination to the safe (that will be a fun posthumous viewing party!). It’s also why I don’t drink. The six times in my life that I have been drunk, I became someone I didn’t like at all. Let me say this: I am a Virgo, and I admittedly have control issues. I was the girl who didn’t know how drunk she was until she was crouched between two parked cars, puking on her own Doc Martens. And after I’d spew my Malibu and pineapple juice, my Kahlua and cream, my black Sambuca, basically anything with a sugar content of 5,000 grams or more, girl, that’s when the party really started. Booze does things to me that make me want to do things to other people. It makes me lose all control of my sexual urges, like ZERO boundaries. If I’m Princess Sluttypants when I’m sober, give me a few cocktails and I’m suddenly Whorella, Queen of the Harlots. Every single one of those six times I got wasted, I’d throw myself at whichever guy or girl was within reach. Once in Manhattan, once in Brooklyn, and once in Jersey, I’ve even awakened in an orgiastic pit of naked people only to regret what I didn’t even know. Not really my scene. And I’m damn lucky all of this happened before smartphones and the Internet. So, yeah, it didn’t take long for me to realize drinking was not a good look for me. At all. Ever. I do, however, enjoy always being the sober one and watching the shenanigans. There is definitely a reason why the stuff is called “spirits.”

  Luckily, drugs never held much appeal for me either. I’ve smoked pot three times, twice in high school and once in college, and after the third time, I ate a dozen Boston cream donuts all by myself, which was not a path I wanted to go down. I did speed once too. I bought something called a Black Beauty from a girl named Susan in the bathroom of my high school, right before I sat down to take the SATs. I was so amped during the four-hour-long exam that rather than filling in the dots that correspond to the correct answers, I drew butterflies all over my answer sheet, which, of course, tanked my score and saddled me with six months of tutoring before my parents would let me take them again. That right there, all of the above is literally the full accounting of my drug and alcohol use. Ever.

  But I lived and learned. And, by the time I moved to New York, my desire to become a star outweighed my desire to party. My priorities were clear (and so was my head), and that made a major difference in the trajectory of my life. We didn’t have Facebook or Instagram in the late eighties, so we had to curate our images in real time. (No filters. No retakes. No Photoshop. No cropping out the ugly.) And for those of us like me, who didn’t come from money or have connections, being seen in the flesh in the clubs was our only shot at landing a break. If we were ever going to get noticed by a celebrity, music producer, artist, fashion designer, or talent agent, it was going to happen there, and trust me, you didn’t want them to see a sloppy, messy, falling-down girl who was trying to convince them she was the next Madonna.

  Unfortunately, at any given time, about 90 percent of the kids in the clubs were too high out of their minds to notice. Dust, K, crack cocaine, meth—you name it, they were doing it (and often even being carted out on stretchers, only to return the very next night for an encore performance). So many of them had gobs of charisma, uniqueness, nerve, and talent, yet I watched them night after night miss their big breaks because they were too effed up to notice them when they came along.

  Not me. Never me. I was often the only sober person among those fierce hordes of drunks and addicts, and I’m convinced that’s part of the reason why I earned the attention of the legendary nightclub impresario Susanne Bartsch, the Swiss Miss of New York nightlife. (The other parts were, of course, because in my head I was sexy as hell and could out-Vogue any female who came for me, and most of the boys too.) Susanne was the most fabulous woman in the world, and she still is. She was a downtown boutique owner known for giving people such as John Galliano and Vivienne Westwood their starts in America, and her parties were what the New York Times would later call “the nightlife equivalent of a couture label.” Everyone who was anyone in the music, fashion, and art worlds attended her events—Grace Jones, Thierry Mugler, Leigh Bowery, James St. James—and if you wanted to join the crowd, Kenny Kenny, Susanne’s right-hand man, would have to choose you out of the eager masses waiting on the street. Not everybody got in. My baby, Kenny Kenny, would only tap-tap the most fabulous children, like those dressed in nothing but Swarovski crystals from head to toe, or in catsuits, or in designer labels, the tags of which they’d literally pull out to show off. (“Look, this is Mugler, baby.”)

  When Susanne approached me for the first time, I knew who she was. I mean, everyone knew who she was. I was on the dance floor at the Copa, Vogueing with my crew, when she leaned into my ear and, over the thumping bass, grunted in her thick German accent, “Doll, I love vat you do. I vant to pay you for it.” She opened the door for me, and, baby, I strutted right through it in my six-inch stilettos. From that night on, I Vogued at all of her parties, just as I’d done in the clubs and in the balls on so many nights before—only now, I was getting paid for it. For $300 a night, I’d get up onstage and serve body-ody-ody. I’d wear a bra, hot pants, and boots, and I’d snatch my long blond ponytail so high and so tight my eyebrows were on the back o
f my neck. Even though I’d be a glistening fool (divas don’t sweat, darlings, we glisten), I’d kill it all night long. I always brought my crew too. Out of my $300 take for the night, I’d pay Cesar, Jerome, Fidel, and Princess $50 each, plus free drink tickets. To be honest, these children cared waaaay more about the drink tickets than the cab fare home. Together, we worked all over town at Bentley’s, the Red Parrot, El Morocco, the Tunnel, the Copacabana, and also at the first Love Ball, in 1989, an AIDS fundraiser attended by everyone from Carolina Herrera to Keith Haring to Madonna.

  Because I kept my shit together, I was also able to notice the man who would eventually become one of the most important people in my life: RuPaul. And how could I not. He was a seven-foot-tall queen with an afro, dressed in a miniskirt, crazy earrings, and hooker heels. He’d dance through the audience, always smiling, always laughing. I was so enamored with Ru that I’d watch him all night long, as if we were the only two in the club. The joint could’ve burned down around us, and all I’d do was just stare at him. He had this aura about him, and thank God, I was clearheaded enough to zone in on it.

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  YOU SPEND HOURS PERFECTING THAT #SELFIE and hundreds, sometimes thousands on those clothes. So, when the time comes for you to walk the runway of life, don’t be so effed up you stumble. It’s not that the fabulous don’t ever fall. (When we do, we do it spectacularly.) It’s that if you’re going to fall flat on your face, you want it to be because you reached for the stars and missed, not because you reached for that tenth drink and got pissed. Keep it classy, kids. Remember there is a time and a place for everything. Use your head.