RuPaul Building Fortified Compound to Withstand "Cycle of Destruction"

"I am plotting a safety net."

Bunker Buster

Acclaimed drag performer RuPaul Andre Charles — of "RuPaul's Drag Race" fame, and known universally by his first name — has a new memoir out this week, titled "The House of Hidden Meanings," and to promote it he gave an extensive and fascinating interview to The New Yorker.

The resulting profile is a can't-miss meditation on fame, gender, entertainment and more. But probably the single wildest part comes toward the beginning, when RuPaul alludes to what the magazine describes as a "fortified compound" he's building with his husband in Wyoming.

"Humans on this planet are in the cycle of destruction," RuPaulsaid, enigmatically. "I am plotting a safety net."

"I wouldn’t call it a bunker," he continued, and then referenced documentaries about castles he's been watching before bed: "It’s a lot of concrete and a lot of things. I keep thinking about these castles that I’m going to bed to."

Compound Eyes

The wealthy — RuPaul's net worth is estimated to run well into the tens of millions — have developed an extraordinary penchant for doomsday compounds. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is one such aficionado, with a $100 million Hawaii hideaway with its own source of power, a blast door, and a commitment to secrecy so profound that it totally backfired, with the public becoming intensely fascinated by his efforts. Other billionaires have even reportedly been outfitting their apocalypse lairs with elaborate traps to foil would-be intruders.

Add it all up, and it's hard to escape the sense that the elite class feels the global order, or at least their place in it, to be at least somewhat tenuous. In part, maybe that's born of the fact that they're not widely liked; that's one of many themes that RuPaul's New Yorker interview explores, as the aging star reckons with the legacy of a once-radical sensibility that younger generations now often find to be bowdlerized, dated, or overly commercial.

Responding to those critiques toward the end of the piece, tellingly, RuPaul looped back to the not-bunker.

"Don’t take other people too serious," he advised. "If you have to, build a fucking compound somewhere, but stay ahead of their own self-destructive, ridiculous mentality."

More on doomsday bunkers: This Luxury Nuclear Apocalypse Bunker Has a Swimming Pool, Movie Theater and Sauna