Triggered gays force RuPaul to ban books

It was a commendable effort to test the limits of tolerance from his own side only to find out there’s very little.

The rainbow Stasi came for their most senior statesman last week when drag queen legend RuPaul found himself at the center of a free speech controversy.

The Emmy-winning TV host launched a new online book marketplace, called Allstora, that leftwing activists soon discovered sold titles by people they didn’t like, including books by Riley Gaines, Robby Starbuck, Kirk Cameron, and Libs of TikTok creator Chaya Raichik.

The Advocate, a transgender magazine funded by pharmaceutical companies, broke the story. After initially claiming to oppose censorship of any kind, RuPaul’s bookstore soon relented and pulled the offending titles from the shop.

By Saturday, it was full-on grovel mode for Eric Cervini, the CEO of Allstora, who wrote on the company’s website, “I want to take responsibility for our mistakes, and I want to apologize.”

He continued: “We decided to respond to the book bans with radical inclusivity... But therein lay my mistake. I wasn’t, in fact, building a library... Rather, I was building a platform to champion underserved authors and create community around their stories.”

Whatever that means.

For those unfamiliar, RuPaul has always been an aggressive capitalist. He cuts a libertine spirit, like many of his generation, one increasingly at odds with the fragile and piggish authoritarian temperament of the new activist class that has followed.  He even leases land to oil companies on his 60,000-acre Wyoming ranch, much to the annoyance of progressives, and is somewhat of a prepper--building a concrete bunker on that land in preparation for an impending civil war, he says.

“You know what? The world is not a safe space,” RuPaul told The New Yorker in a profile earlier this month. “You have to find the comfort. It’s mostly uncomfortable.”

It comes as no surprise, then, that with so-called “banned” LGBT books in the news, RuPaul would launch a bookstore to make some money off the hubbub. It also happens to coincide with the launch of his own memoir. And, equally expected, when the lefty boycott brigade had a gripe about which books people are allowed to read, RuPaul relented because he knows exactly who butters his bread—a small and increasingly delicate group of people who require submission and constant reassurance.  

The left’s “banned books” mythology has been a feeble gaslight from the start—a desperate attempt to, once again, play victim and pretend they don’t control all means of corporate entertainment and communication. Walk into any Barnes & Noble these days and you’re greeted by a display table with a large, glistening sign advertising stacks of “banned books” and scratch your head at the stupidity of the whole thing. The real story involved upset parents learning in recent years that sexually explicit books were in their public school libraries—all of which suspiciously happened to be of the homosexual or transgender variety—and demanded their removal. The left has attempted to use this news item as an opportunity to deflect from their own monstrous censorship apparatus and paint the other side as the real speech policers. It hasn’t worked.

One thing is clear: censorship offends RuPaul. This is, after all, someone who appeared in the 1995 film To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar dressed in a Confederate flag gown made of sequins as a character named Rachel Tension. RuPaul appears to value irreverence, grit, and free expression above all else, one reason I’ve always liked him, despite rumors that he’s nastier than Ellen DeGeneres off-camera. He’s self-made and wickedly smart. But, like any good capitalist, for Ru money trumps integrity when the outrage mob slithers forth.

This wasn’t the first time the myopic cannibals of the left came for RuPaul. Several years ago, his reality TV show RuPaul’s Drag Race featured a recurring segment called “You’ve got she-mail,” the joke being a feminization of the word “e-mail,” since the show is about men who dress up like women for entertainment purposes. Trans activists thought the pun was too like a term they find offensive, she-male, and pounced until RuPaul, disciple of the mighty dollar, removed the gag.

While it’s bad parenting for Mama Ru, as he’s known to fans, to give into the unreasonable demands of brats just so they’ll shut up, you can’t really blame him. The left’s collection of scalps is filled with paltry victories gained by simply being annoying and RuPaul was low hanging fruit.  

It was a commendable effort to test the scope of tolerance from his own side only to be reminded there’s very little. But did RuPaul really give in or merely capitalize on the publicity? While the handful of titles that activists seized upon have been removed from his bookstore, it’s not hard to find conservative authors there. A recent search revealed the site is still selling books from Tucker Carlson, Pat Robertson, Roger Stone, and Ann Coulter, to name only a few.