American drag queen and porn director Chi Chi La Rue was BOTD in 1959. Born Larry Paciotti in Hibbing, Minnesota to a working-class Catholic family, he endured an unhappy childhoosd as a fat effeminate gay, developing an interest in straight porn at a cinema in a neighbouring town. He escaped to Minneapolis as a teenager, where he realised that “drag queens get more sex than fat boys”, he adopted the drag persona Chi Cha La Rue and began performing in local drag bars, forming the “hag drag” group The Weather Gals. He moved to Los Angeles in the 1980s, where his encyclopaedic knowledge of porn films gained him a job at porn studio Catalina. In 1988, he directed his first gay porn film for Falcon Studios, becoming the first drag queen to work as a director in the American porn industry. Happily directing straight, gay and bisexual sex scenes, his award-winning oeuvre included More of a Man, Songs in the Key of Sex, Valley of the Bi Dolls, Shop Boys, Lost in Vegas, Alley Boys, Deep South: The Big and the Easy and Wrong Side of the Tracks. He is credited with promoting the careers of porn actor Joey Stefano, with whom he had an on-off relationship until Stefano’s death from a drug overdose in 1994. As porn slowly moved into the cultural mainstream, La Rue appeared in the 2001 documentary Sex Becomes Her: The True Life Story of Chi Chi LaRue. In 2006, he became one of the first porn directors to insist on performers using condoms during sex scenes, in response to concern about the high transmission rates of HIV/AIDS within the porn industry. He returned to Minneapolis in 2015 to receive treatment for alcohol and drug addiction, eventually settling in the city. In 2020, he acquired and reopened Circus of Books, an historic gay pornography store in West Hollywood. Later that year, he was accused of sexual assault by porn performer Papi Suave, prompting porn studio Noir Male to suspend La Rue’s directing contract. La Rue continues to live in Minneapolis. His relationship status is unknown.