Bosco on 'Miss Gender' Tour, Magic: The Gathering and Why Queer People Will Always Ride for the Villain
Reclaiming the queer-coded baddie, 'Drag Race' star launches national tour
Bosco has never wanted to be the hero. Not on “RuPaul's Drag Race All Stars,” where the Seattle queen's razor-sharp instincts and unapologetically villainous aesthetic made her a clear favorite with Ru as well as one of the most talked about competitors in recent memory. And not in her drag performance either, which has always leaned dastardly — she’s a dark lady at heart.
She's not even aiming for heroic in "The Marvelous Miss Gender," her new touring one-woman show, which arrives in Metro Detroit on July 8 at the Royal Oak Music Theatre as the inaugural stop on a national tour built entirely around her reclaiming the queer-coded villain. The show intentionally incorporates art by real artists, including fully illustrated animated backdrops and signature numbers by trans women performers who shaped Bosco's drag education.
Away from the stage, Bosco cohosts “Spell Slayers," a Magic: The Gathering podcast with her podcast partner Irene the Alien that’s connecting with an audience well beyond the drag world. She spoke with Pride Source about making art without shortcuts, what it means to make RuPaul laugh and why queer people will always ride for the villain.
It’s Pride season! I could start with the obligatory, “What does Pride mean to you” question, but where’s the fun in that? What’s the most insufferable part of Pride, and why is it the twinks?
Twinks are pretty high up there. But Pride is for everybody under the queer umbrella, so I'll allow them this one. My main issue is it being such a physical sport that has to take place in the dead of summer. Drag is famously not a well-temperature-regulated art form.
I feel so bad for my fellow divas smothered in couch cushions and giant synthetic hair, melting in front of thousands of people, outside, in daylight, overhead-brow-highlighting-type lighting. If it were up to me, we would move Pride to the middle of winter.
You’ve talked about evolving from a spooky, vampy look to something more showgirl: more skin, more razzle dazzle. Watching you on “All Stars,” it felt completely natural. What’s the throughline that makes it still unmistakably Bosco, no matter what era?
It’s interesting to have an aesthetic that people get to watch in real time [to] kind of adjust and reformulate. And I do feel like I have to navigate very carefully, because sometimes you just pop out and you’re like, well, that doesn’t look like anything I would wear. And I found over the years what my style language is and what makes sense for me to be wearing.
I’m never a particularly girly dresser. I’m never particularly princess-y vibes. Everything’s always a little dastardly. Everything’s always a little bit villainous. Even if I’ve moved into a little bit more razzle dazzle type of aesthetic, it’s still very vampy, it’s still very dark lady, very noir. And that vibe will always be there, no matter what aesthetic that I’m mining. And I feel like having that compass that’s always pointing north, I’m able to find Bosco in any sort of situation.
So even if I wanted to do, like, a Western era, I know I could find Bosco in there because there could be vampy gothic bandito Bosco. There’s a way to channel villains in any sort of aesthetic.
The show, "Miss Gender," leans into the queer-coded villain, reclaiming that narrative. Queer audiences have always had a more complicated relationship with who the “villain” really is. Tonya Harding is a classic example. Who else comes to mind for you?
I think queer people always want to align themselves with the other. I feel like our lived experience does not give us a bunch of empathy for the main character, because for a lot of us who come from smaller towns, we didn’t really get to feel like a main character in a lot of these different spaces.
I feel like gay people will always ride for a woman who is being beaten down and portrayed incorrectly. The whole catalog of Disney villains [is] a very queer-coded catalog. I don’t know what gay was in the writer’s room, but he made sure that we were getting our people in. We have Ursula inspired by Divine. Jafar, super queer. Scar, super queer.
Cruella de Vil is based on Tallulah Bankhead, who’s a bisexual chain-smoking lady from the 1920s and ’30s who had famous quotes like, “My father warned me about men and booze, but he never said anything about women and cocaine.” There’s so many cool intricacies and nuances with the villains that you never get with the protagonist. The protagonist always has to be so boring.
I know most of Murray and Peter's shows kick off in Detroit — that was the case with the Christmas show, which we got to see you at. You were fantastic. I was just sad I wasn't in the splash zone for the drink number.
There’s gonna be another chance to be in the splash zone for this show, so don’t you worry.
What does the prep process look like for "Miss Gender," and has there been a moment yet where it's started to feel genuinely real?
Murray and Peter tours usually begin at their home base. That's where we do tech, formulate plans, load up the bus. For this show I'm going out a week early to hammer things down with so many moving pieces. The first time I'll see everything all in one place is going to be in Detroit, which is going to be a really special and terrifying moment.
Right now it's incremental. Every day I wake up to new pictures of set pieces being finished. Next week I'm heading to L.A. to get choreography nailed down. It's piece by piece, but that first week in Detroit is really going to make a difference.
Without spoiling anything: What is quintessentially Bosco in this show? Things a casual viewer might miss but a real fan would clock immediately?
Well, there’s a few numbers in the show that are either referencing some of my numbers that I do very often or numbers that are very influential to me. There are two professional performers from the ’90s, early 2000s that were trans women that — one of them has passed, but one of them is still around — that are really pivotal to the way that I view drag and the way that I like performing. One of them is Sierra Fox from Orlando, and the other is Monica Munro who was Ms. Continental in ’93. They both have signature numbers that a bunch of girls do their own spin on. They’re part of the drag standard — the jazz book, essentially, for drag.
And a few of those songs are going to be popping up in the show, and those feel very, very Bosco to me. I also have been working with an artist who is rendering backdrops that are fully illustrated. It’s very “Batman: The Animated Series.” And those are going to be like set pieces within this whole thing. There’s going to be rollboards that have these different scenes on it; there’s going to be videos of these different scenes. And I think having a very signature art style is going to make the show feel especially Bosco.
You’ve been vocal about keeping AI completely out of this show. What’s driving that for you?
As somebody who is partially a visual artist, my face and my likeness is run through AI all of the time. I see things that are generated of me that have never happened, that never existed. And it just feels soulless and dehumanizing. I don’t understand the need or the want to create computer programs that replace art.
Like, I want AI to be solving cancer. I want AI to be doing my taxes. I don’t want AI to be drawing pictures for me. That just feels so, so anti-climatic. It feels just so anti-human. I just don’t understand the appeal of taking that shortcut with art, where part of the process is suffering and sucking and being bad and learning how to do better. And I feel like AI will eventually take that away from us and make art less human.
So I’m very passionate about making sure that we are doing things that you can reach out and touch, that everything that you’re seeing is created by a human being. And that we’re trying our best to make sure that AI is not informing any part of this show, and it’s a really important part of the process for me.
Watching how Ru responded to you during your season, there are a lot of winners of the show but fewer queens that Ru seems genuinely exhilarated by. What does that feel like?
It feels really special. RuPaul sees hundreds upon hundreds of drag queens. To feel like I have some sort of connection with her in that moment really feels special.
I think it boils down to knowing and speaking the same language, having enough of a gay education to go back and forth with her. And there’s a similarity between the way that me and Ru approach drag. We take our jobs very seriously, but we don’t take ourselves very seriously. I work really, really hard at drag, but at the end of the day, I’m still like a lip-syncing gender party clown. Being glamorous, yet being stupid really speaks to that lady.
Are you following the current season of “Drag Race” at all?
Yeah, I have a few friends that are on this season. I did my original season with Jasmine Kennedie, so I’m excited to see what that maniac has in store for us. She was created in a lab to torture people on television, so I’m so excited to see her back in her element.
I’ve gotten pretty close with Crystal Methyd. We’ve toured together. So it is a very, very fun season. It’s a lot of girls that I’ve worked with and a lot of girls I’m excited to see back. Every single episode is kind of a twisty, turny little situation where I don’t know what’s going to happen.
Do you have any favorites?
Crystal and Silky are both incredible this season. I was crazy impressed with what Silky pulled in the last episode. I did not see it coming at all.
Oh, she was playing TV TV. I love a girl who’s good at drag, but I adore a girl who’s good at TV.
You’ve been hosting "Spell Slayers" with Irene. Are you planning to keep recording on the road?
We banked, like, 15 episodes at the beginning of the year, so we’re drawing upon that bank while we’re on the road. We can't do full game recordings on the road, but we might do some vlogs of us visiting local game stores or unveiling new sets as they drop. And we're going to bully everybody on the crew into being in a pod at the end of each show — a lot of people I tour with play Magic.
If Bosco was a character or card in Magic the Gathering, what would her ability be?
I think she would have some sort of sacrifice mechanic where I could sacrifice lesser drag queens to increase my own clout.
Basically what you did on “All Stars.”
Exactly.
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