According to a recent profile in The New Yorker, RuPaul has joined other millionaires in building a fortified underground shelter to escape humanity’s “cycle of destruction.” Before you bring up the fracking thing, you should know that drag legend Lady Bunny is already on it.
Last week, The New Yorker published a profile of RuPaul written by journalist and two-time RuPaul’s Drag Race guest judge Ronan Farrow. Despite their established rapport—or maybe because of it—Farrow didn’t shy away from asking about the backlash to a 2020 NPR interview in which RuPaul revealed that he and his husband Georges have leased portions of their Wyoming ranch out to oil companies for fracking. In response, a “defiantly annoyed” RuPaul said, “Do you buy gas? Before you point the finger, smell it first, bitch … There’s no combination of words I can put together that would soothe the mob.”
RuPaul also told Farrow that, “fearing the absolute worst,” he’s building a fortified shelter on his property. “We are moments away from fucking civil war. All the signs are there,” he said. “Humans on this planet are in the cycle of destruction. I am plotting a safety net.” If you think that sounds hypocritical, you’re not alone. Fellow drag legend Lady Bunny clocked the cognitive dissonance in an Instagram post, calling out Ru’s hypocrisy in contributing to environmental destruction with one hand while building a shelter from it with the other:
“He’s making himself safe while destroying the planet,” Bunny wrote, “and he votes for and even writes song lyrics about the Clintons and the Obamas, who sold fracking just as Biden drilled for more fossil fuels than Trump had. Mama Ru fracks, Mother Nature dies.” Bunny went on to point out that Drag Race season 10 featured a “Climate Change Ball” to “raise awareness among viewers as to the dangers of the climate crisis,” which feels about as hypocritical as Nancy Pelosi’s recent appearance as a guest judge.
Ru’s attempt to deflect by suggesting that anyone who pays for gas is also complicit in the climate crisis is way off—there’s a huge difference between a working class person filling up their car at the gas station and a millionaire who, according to Gizmodo‘s reporting in 2020, has 35 oil and gas wells across 10,000 acres of a 66,000-acre property. One person is just trying to get to and from work in an oil-dependent capitalist society. The other is a wealthy celebrity with a massive platform who is actively contributing to and benefiting from oil dependence in a manner that is demonstrably harmful to the environment.
(featured image: Jerod Harris, WireImage)
