Fans of “RuPaul’s Drag Race” are counting down the days to the popular series’ season 18 finale on MTV.
And while the show’s 6-foot-4-inch statuesque namesake, host and pop culture icon is internationally known and celebrated for bringing the world of drag queens to mainstream audiences, few may be aware of RuPaul’s deep Louisiana roots.
RuPaul Charles was born in San Diego, California. But his late father, Irving Andrew Charles, was born and raised in Mansfield, just outside of Shreveport. The drag star’s late mother, Ernestine “Toni” Fontenette, was born in the Acadiana town of St. Martinville.
Irving Charles, born on Jan. 20, 1929, was one of 14 siblings and attended school in DeSoto Parish, according to public records and Ancestry.com.
As a 17-year-old high school student in 1947, he was registered into the draft for World War II, as was required by law at that time for all male teens prior to their 18th birthday.
A 1948 clipping from The Mansfield Enterprise lists him among 78 high school students who were set to graduate from the DeSoto Parish Negro Training School.
1947 draft registration card for Irving Andrew Charles.
RuPaul highlights his parents’ origin stories as well as their turbulent marriage and his complicated relationships with them in his 2024 New York Times bestselling memoir, “The House of Hidden Meanings.”
Ironically, RuPaul’s parents didn’t meet in Louisiana, according to his memoir, but on a blind date in Beaumont, Texas, where Irving Charles was stationed in the Army and his mom worked as a secretary.
They married not long after that before eventually moving to San Diego as part of the Great Migration, the period between 1910 and 1970 when millions of Black Americans left the rural South to escape racial violence for better economic and educational opportunities in the North, Midwest and West.
RuPaul’s parents divorced when he was a young child and in his memoir he describes one time during his 20s traveling “thirty miles south of Shreveport, way out in the country” to visit his father in Mansfield.
Draft registration card for Irving Andrew Charles
“There was a main street with a few businesses — an auto supply store, maybe some branch of a bank, and a place to get ribs — and then farther away from Main Street was my father’s homestead, where he had grown up and where my grandfather had kept a general store and raised all fourteen of his children,” RuPaul wrote.
Irving Charles died at age 83 on June 9, 2012 in Shreveport, according to public records provided by Ancestry.com. A June 13, 2012 clipping from The Shreveport Times noted that his services were held at Wesley United Methodist Church in Mansfield and he was buried at Union Cemetery in Mansfield.
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.shreveportbossieradvocate.com ’
