Bosco: Separation Between Church and Drag
Transgender drag entertainer Bosco, who underwent facial feminization surgery, talks about her involvement in Las Vegas residency RuPaul’s Drag Race Live! and claps back against TERFs.
FALL / WINTER 2023
WORDS Myles E. Johnson
PHOTOGRAPHY Andrea Matarrese
You know a subculture is growing in the mainstream when it seemingly gains sentience and begins referencing itself, creating alternatives of itself, and mocking who it is. Like being caught peeking in on zoo animals, and then a lion or monkey looks you in the eyes, helping you realize how intelligent, real, and fierce they are—and how vulnerable you are. Bosco is a byproduct of such sentience as it pertains to mainstream drag. In full drag, she is astonishing, glamorous, dangerous, and alternative. Her persona is pinup girl with a pension for the occult.
But currently, against the warm background of her living room, she is free of makeup, hair messy, and covered in tattoos. “I have a residency in Vegas and I’m doing a show there for a little bit, until October, but I’m actually right now in Seattle for my days off because I wanted to see my cats.”
But it’s more than the idea that Bosco is a darker version of drag than we see in the mainstream; she is an alternative in the way she plays with humor, beauty, and aesthetic that makes outcasts, like me, instantly relate to her. Bosco is a dark, glamour-punk alternative to the stereotypical drag queen. I instantly connected to Bosco—in a similar way to how I felt a kinship in childhood with artists like Fiona Apple, Courtney Love, Kelis, and Janelle Monáe. She’s not like other girls; she’s different.
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Bosco flips her hair and begins speaking about her residency, RuPaul’s Drag Race Live!, held at Flamingo Las Vegas. “So, the residency itself is a show kind of set up in the format of a day [in the life] competing in RuPaul’s Drag Race,” she says. “There’s a rotating cast. My part is a very glamorous Las Vegas showgirl with a gothic or alt twist to her. It’s a very Elvira-does-Vegas situation.” Bosco has no makeup on and laughs nervously at the punch lines to her own jokes that reinforce what I always felt about Bosco: She’s doing this for herself first, not us.
There’s a quirky softness to Bosco that makes her easy to talk to and even easier to pry into without feeling offensive. She feels like an old, cool friend. “There’s a certain happiness, certain euphoria I was able to find through drag, and then chasing that feeling finally led me to figuring more about my gender as well,” the 30-year-old says. “It became very apparent that like, Oh no, that’s not sustainable to only get that feeling from work. I need that all the time if I’m going to continue to be on this planet.”
Bosco has a sharp understanding of the performance of the fantasy of a gender versus the living of the reality of a gender. “Drag, for me, I keep it very separate between church and state as far as me and my gender identity outside of drag,” she says. “I know a lot of trans girls [when doing drag] like to lean into an ultra-feminized and ultra glamourized version of themselves when they’re on stage, which I think is beautiful. But my drag has always been an expression of someone else.”
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The Montana native hypnotized audiences on RuPaul’s Drag Race season 14 in 2022, with her dark sultry looks that played with the erotic and macabre in a way that met the expectation of drag camp, but was also artful in a way that is decidedly Bosco. “It’s not necessarily who I am during the day. My drag has always been a vehicle for me to try out different ideas and aesthetics, and also gives me a uniform I can put on to give me the permission to be more outlandish, more excessive, and more grand than I am in my daily life,” she explains. She pauses and smirks, continuing, “So, I try to feel like I am still a clown when I’m getting in drag.”
When I logged onto Zoom, Bosco didn’t appear to be a dark glamour goddess but a normal woman who loves her tattoos and sardonic humor. “What’s that To Wong Foo quote where they say if a man has too much fashion for one gender, he does drag?” Bosco aims for a simple and humorous explanation that illustrates that journey from doing drag performance to identifying as a gender in daily life. It makes sense to us living the trans experience, but it may seem contradictory to the cisgender public that are still confused over ideas like gender versus sex, performance of a gender versus being that gender, and the thin rope that we all walk, regardless of transness.
It isn’t for much else but the fact that I saw Bosco before on television that I would have noticed that her face is different. “I do feel like parts of drag taught me more about what I wanted during the day and there were certain parts of my happiness that were linked to doing drag,” she says. “When COVID happened and we went into lockdowns here in Seattle, we were one of the first cities to shut down and the last to reopen, and I had to go without [being] Bosco for a year and a half. I didn’t realize until that moment just how deeply tied my happiness was to being able to express myself in those ways.”
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This was the catalyst that would start Bosco’s journey of transitioning medically with a surgical procedure called FFS, short for facial feminization surgery. The operation is one that some trans women and femmes undergo to change features in their face that are seen as stereotypically masculine. Bosco’s experience was also chronicled in the Drag Race docuseries spin-off Portrait of a Queen.
The arrival of the decision to affirm one’s gender through medical intervention is deeply personal, but in the case of Bosco, there are decisions to make as a trans entertainer that are deeply impersonal—and others that are just strategic. Every step a trans person in the public eye takes can be seen as fodder for hateful online groups.
“Whatever happens with the TERF community happens with the TERF community and it’s so insular that they kind of bounce their own bullshit back and forth on Twitter where it just becomes nasty, gross, vile hate,” Bosco remarks.
TERFs, short for trans-exclusionary radical feminists, are people, mostly online, that believe trans women are men, and through mental illness and their own misogyny, have made up the trans woman experience to further oppress cis women. The movement is something that Bosco seeks to combat with her role in the Vegas residency.
“The TERF phenomenon is so frightening and so simultaneously evil and stupid, it was definitely something that was on my mind,” she says. “Not necessarily with the show itself, because one thing I do feel about the show is I trust a lot of the story producers to handle something like gender expression and transness through a lens of empathy, and through a lens that can be approached by people who have never interacted with trans people before.” She pauses to gather her thoughts: “I don’t know where they get the energy to be such massive haters, but they surely have it. They need hobbies.”
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With hate groups like TERFs ever present, transitioning in public can be destabilizing in multiple ways—psychologically, socially, and economically. Yet, Bosco’s need to use her platforms to normalize trans experience and expand our understanding of gender is stronger than ever. “Drag fame is a very particular type of fame where I am more famous for a character than I am for being out of drag,” she says. “Another part of it is I had surgery, I dyed my hair so people who might recognize me from the television show don’t. I feel like being on Drag Race allows you to tap into a certain level of comfort and protection as a trans and queer person that a lot of trans and queer people that are just living their lives, and haven’t been on television or had any sort of gay fame, don’t have access to.”
To the trans person, it is peculiar that there is so much talk about transition, because it is obvious to us that everyone, everywhere, is in transition at all times. Most are simply in denial about it. “I can’t speak to the same type of exhaustion that a Black trans woman or Black queer nonbinary person would feel, but I could have empathy for an exhaustion of being a ‘tutorial transgender’ in a certain way,” Bosco says. “I feel like because of the situation I’m in, I’m constantly placed in social groups and settings where I’m the only transgender person these people have seen all month. Maybe all year...So I do feel a responsibility to show up, do well, and then also educate, just because where else are they going to learn it?”
The proliferation—and consumption—of the trans identity in the mainstream in the 21st century is all about making circus shows of trans folks, when in reality, we’re all shifting toward a mystery we’re too afraid to consider. Often, hyper-visible trans people are elected to be teachers and stewards of this shift to ensure it happens safely, but Bosco isn’t complaining.
“I know how lucky I am to be able to afford the surgeries I’ve been able to afford lately,” she says. “I do find that I have the responsibility as a trans person with any platform to be at least talking about the issues we’re facing, to at least be cognizant of what’s happening, at least provide a little bit of volume for people who don’t have volume themselves.”
Bosco seems new and bright in a way that’s beautiful to witness. It feels like there’s a new day, and this time around, there doesn’t need to be a stage. ❤
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PHOTOGRAPHY Andrea Matarrese, STYLIST Ashley Montague, NAILS & TEARDROP GLASSWORK Sibelle Yüksek, HAIR Samantha Lepre, PRODUCTION MANAGER Brenna Klingler, RETOUCHER Tanya Olifirenko, STYLING ASSISTANT Isabella Morris,
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