Drag icon RuPaul announced his new partnership with a bookstore called Allstora to send a Rainbow Book Bus around the country to provide young readers with banned books.
Other figures behind the Rainbow Book Bus include actor and drag performer Adam Powell, and Eric Cervini, author of the Pulitzer Prize-nominated history book The Deviant’s War: The Homosexual vs. the United States of America, according to LGBTQ Nation. Cervini and Powell are partners and both can be found sharing the book bus’ tour throughout the country on their Instagram pages.
Books featuring topics and themes of sexuality, identity, race, and social power struggles have been banned all over America in recent years. Even some of history’s most famous volumes have been taken off the shelves of bookstores, libraries, and classrooms.
But RuPaul says “you cannot keep the imagination down.” Allstora plans to tour the country for one year from Los Angeles to Baton Rouge, Louisiana and Birmingham, Alabama to Tallahassee, Florida. At each stop, local LGBTQ+ organizations will join in on the book-giving fun.
Allstora is an LGBTQ+ friendly bookstore started by Cervini. On the book’s site you can search for titles according to genre, gender, and racial identity, as well as being agender, asexual, Lantinx, Middle Eastern and more. The site also includes a “Ru’s Book Club” tab where you can peruse through the titles that RuPaul recommends.
In an interview with The New York Times, RuPaul said he didn’t excel in school “but I read books and I watched television and those are the ways that I was able to find my way in this great big world.”
Though drag culture has been around for decades, “RuPaul’s Drag Race,” brought the art of drag into the homes of people all over the country and world. This year Drag Race began its sixteenth season.
The Rainbow Book Bus also rallies against drag bans throughout the country. Being piloted by multiple iconic drag queens, the book bus tour has seen drag story hours for children hosted in small communities.
Groups like Moms for Liberty have scrounged public libraries seeking books with LGBTQ+ themes to ban, but RuPaul said of the group “They have so much pain and it’s being projected outwardly.”
