RuPaul Discovers He's Cousins With Cory Booker on "Finding Your Roots"
RuPaul is going back to his roots.
Educator Henry Louis Gates Jr. has returned with new episodes of Finding Your Roots, and he has a surprise in store for the world's most famous drag queen. In the sixth season of his PBS series, Gates "continues his quest to get into the DNA of American culture" by examining celebrities' DNA and educating them about their ancestral histories.
Tonight's episode features fashion designers Diane von Furstenberg and Narciso Rodriguez and glamazon RuPaul, all of whom are treated to a deep-dive into their personal genetics. When analyzing Ru's admixture results, Gates and his team discover that he and Sen. Cory Booker are DNA cousins.
Booker was a guest on Finding Your Roots back in Season 1, so when analysts compared his DNA with RuPaul's, they found that they shared a "long stretch of identical DNA" from Ru's first chromosome.
"He looks like my kin!" Ru replies when showed a picture of Booker. "There's a sweetness about him that I've always loved, and an intellect that is undeniable. Every time I've ever seen him he reminds me of my cousin Yula."
But we didn't spot Booker at the Charles Family Backyard Ball! Maybe he can make it up by being a guest judge on next season of RuPaul's Drag Race.
Watch the clip from Finding Your Roots below.