Jun 12, 2009  |  By: Joey DiGuglielmo  | COMMENTS     

There’s nothing like a hit TV show to jumpstart a show business career and RuPaul — arguably the most famous celebrity drag queen of all time — is enjoying the wildly successful run of “RuPaul’s Drag Race,” which debuted in February on Logo and has returned the star to the pop culture front burner.

RuPaul never went away. There was always a project, like the 2007 movie and soundtrack to “Starrbooty,” a blaxploitation spoof that RuPaul wrote and starred in, to keep the creative juices flowing. But the extent to which those projects permeated mainstream — and sometimes even gay — culture, varied.

That changed radically with “Drag Race,” which Entertainment Weekly calls “incredibly addictive.” Logo isn’t rated by Nielsen, but “Drag Race” has been popular enough to land a rerun spot on VH-1 (like Logo, owned by MTV) and web traffic on the three-year-old Logo’s web site has been unprecedented. MTV President Brian Graden told Entertainment Weekly “Drag Race” is “the widest hit we’ve had to date.”

So RuPaul, hot again, is headlining this weekend’s Capital Pride festivities — at Town tonight and on the festival main stage Sunday sometime after 4 p.m. RuPaul, who splits his time between New York and Los Angeles, found a break before taping “Drag Race’s” second season to chat with the Blade about the show, life and death and why he shuns labels and categories.

Ru says the idea for a drag reality show had been around for years.

“I just wasn’t ready to do a reality television show,” he says. “I’ve never really been ready for reality personally in more ways than one, and so when I finally came around to it, my friends who I’ve worked with for 25 years said, ‘OK, let’s do it.’ They had the idea and we took it to Logo and they bought the show in the room, which just doesn’t happen when you go to pitch meetings.”

Some have speculated that the show’s success wouldn’t have happened even a year ago or anytime during the Bush years.

“The election is a result of a collective shift,” he says. “It’s not because of the election. I think the election and the results of the election are indicative of a collective consciousness, you know, because Bush was not responsible for the reign of fear we experienced over those last 10 years. He was a result of a collective thing, do you know what I’m saying? It’s not because of him. We’re all responsible for it. We’re all responsible for Obama.”

Ru’s early fame, of course, tapped into (and fueled) the early ’90s drag heyday. He’s high on the zeitgeist again with the competition-based reality show phenomenon that follows a long line of TV hits such as “America’s Next Top Model,” “Project Runway” and, most notably, “American Idol.”

“Human drama and the every day struggles that people have end up being more dynamic and having much more texture than a boy-meets-girl storyline,” Ru says. “There’s only one of us here on this planet. So for us to see ourselves as some other character on television, a reality character, it must really quench this thirst to see what we really look like. I could probably get really philosophical about this.”

World of Wonder, the gay-owned media production company Ru has worked with for years, is behind “Drag Race” and also produced Ru’s 1996 VH-1 talk show that ran two seasons and, though mostly just a blip on mainstream pop culture, was a legendary show in gay circles.

When reminded of several gay icons such as Tammy Faye Bakker-Messner, Bea Arthur and Esther Rolle who were on the show but who’ve since died, Ru turns sanguine.

“I have an unorthodox view of death and I think it’s actually a very healthy and a real mature view of death is that there are two things that are very certain. You get born into this world and part of that agreement of being born into this world is that you also die. You will die. In the material sense. You never really die. The body you’re in dies. … It’s not really the way in our culture we think of it. It’s much more beautiful. So when I hear that someone has made the transition, I say, well done kiddo. … Most people aren’t ready to hear this but … you know, we are energy and we are not these bodies. These bodies will die. They’re temporary but we live forever, the real us.”

Does Ru’s philosophical and intelligent nature ever clash with ...