Caution: RuPaul Built A Bunker (just don't call it a bunker)

This is indeed where castles studies can lead. You start to think, say, that's not a bad idea and next thing you know you're pouring boiling pitch onto the swarming hordes at the base of the tower.

(machicolations baby)

From The New Yorker, March 1:

RuPaul Doesn’t See How That’s Any of Your Business

The drag star brought the form mainstream, and made an empire out of queer expression. Now he fears “the absolute worst"

Recently, the drag star RuPaul Andre Charles has taken to falling asleep while watching the documentary series “Secrets of Great British Castles.” He’s seen every episode, knows every turn in the bloody histories of landmarks like Dover Castle and the Tower of London. “The headline is: Humans have been horrible since the beginning of time,” RuPaul told me. “And the human ego can justify these terrible things that people do. You know, these kings, Henry VIII, and Edward II, and all these people who have just decimated hundreds of thousands of people because their feelings were hurt.”

RuPaul is braced for conflict. “I’m fearing the absolute worst,” he said. “We are moments away from fucking civil war. All the signs are there.” He continued, “Humans on this planet are in the cycle of destruction. I am plotting a safety net.” He was referring to a fortified compound being constructed on the sixty-thousand-acre ranch of his husband, Georges LeBar, in Wyoming. “I wouldn’t call it a bunker,” he said. But it is designed to withstand calamity. “It’s a lot of concrete and a lot of things. I keep thinking about these castles that I’m going to bed to.”

I met RuPaul at the end of January in Britain, at a rented cottage in Windsor and at Pinewood Studios, nearby, where movie franchises including James Bond and Harry Potter have been filmed. He was shooting “RuPaul’s Drag Race UK,” one of nineteen regional variations of his competition reality show, while promoting a memoir, which will be published this week, called “The House of Hidden Meanings.” (The title comes from a friend’s comment during an acid trip. “After the drugs wore off,” he writes, “I realized it was nonsense.”) RuPaul now hosts seven versions of “Drag Race,” a pastiche of competition reality-television tropes that follows participants, in and out of drag, through eclectic challenges including costume-making, lip-synching, and standup comedy (testing “charisma, uniqueness, nerve, and talent”—the resulting acronym is representative of the show’s bawdy sense of humor). He has taken an underground, subversive form and made it so mainstream that Nancy Pelosi has appeared as a guest on the show. The sixteenth season of the U.S. version, currently airing, has some of its highest ratings yet, and RuPaul recently won his fourteenth Emmy, making him the most decorated competition host and the most decorated person of color in the award’s history....

....MUCH MORE

If yous spend any amount of time with the likes of  The Castle Studies Group with their soothing words, words of welcome:

The Castle Studies Group warmly welcomes membership applications from individuals from

 all walks of life who are interested in the history, archaeology and architecture of castles 

and castellated houses of all places from the medieval to the early modern period....

 

You will soon enough find yourself find yourself questioning everything you know, or thought you knew, about anti-clockwise newel-post stairs.

And that way lies madness, Just ask RuPaul if you don't believe me.