Bosco Believes Every Queer Education Needs A Janet Jackson Lesson

One year after her stellar turn on RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars Season 10, Bosco is setting out on a national tour with The Marvelous Miss Gender, named for her supervillain alter ego. “By day, we’re Bosco, and by night, we’re Miss Gender, who’s trying to take over the world by turning everybody trans,” Bosco says of the show, which she describes as a “really campy Adam West Batman schlock of a pseudo-musical” and which kicks off July 8 in Detroit. “I’m using every prop that I have in my storage unit,” she teases. “I don’t sing, but I can dance OK and take my clothes off, and I think that’s going to make up for the lack of singing.” And how does she wind down from a gig? Usually with a little Gay Guy Music Video Night — below, she shares the live performances and drag pageants that are always playing when she’s got the remote.

The dolls are the head of the ship when it comes Gay Guy Music Video Night. At the afters, there’s always some trans girl taking the remote control, like, “No, have you seen this one?” If we’re doing just music videos, Janet Jackson’s “All for You” has to be on the list. It’s so campy and delightful and aggressively Y2K. Everything’s taking place in a weird green-screen cartoon soundstage. The choreo is really cute, and she looks absolutely beautiful. It’s a bunch of close-ups on her face — I think Kevyn Aucoin did the makeup for that one. I just can’t help but smile every time I watch it. Janet’s one of my most formative divas; she’s usually in the Top 5 of my wrap-up each year, alongside Gaga, Whitney, Prince. Another video that’s kind of a sleeper hit is “Take Me Higher” by Diana Ross. It’s from her ’90s era, and it’s so joyful and gay and just a banger of a song. When it comes on, everybody’s like, “Wait a second!”

If we’re talking YouTube videos in general, I will most likely make you watch the ’92 Miss Continental gowns category, when Mimi Marks comes out in the Mugler replica and absolutely storms the girls. That’s a must. There’s this video of Amy Winehouse playing a stripped-down set in a record store right before she blows up. She’s got this beautiful blue guitar, and she’s just ripping “Stronger Than Me.” Everybody in the record store goes crazy because she’s so talented. And we have to play Patti LaBelle at the Kennedy Center Honors doing the most psychotic rendition of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” She has this insane sequin muumuu-frock situation and some very mysterious hair, which was very Patti LaBelle at the time. Right at the big note, she starts running around the stage and flapping and convulsing — it’s one of the fiercest things I’ve ever seen.

In my life, Gay Guy Music Video Night takes place after a gig. We’ve all worked all night, we’re kiki-ing, and the bar’s closing, but we’ve been off of work for an hour. So we go over to somebody’s house, and then out comes the witching hour. It’s a very sacred time. Everybody gets the floor and has to put on a video because it’s also a taste check for the room. What do you got in the archives? What informs you? And I think we should bring back booing when somebody puts on something that sucks.

I had a Gay Guy Music Video Night with Suzie Toot when I was on tour with her this year where literally everybody else vacated the room because we were having a bit too much to drink and putting on tap-dancing videos — we both love tap dance from the Old Hollywood era. There’s a great dance sequence of Debbie Reynolds dressed like a football and everybody else is a bunch of boys in football gear, just tossing her around, and it is so camp and hysterical.

I’m usually forcing everybody to watch some reference that’s burning within me. I have certain videos that have been on loop in my brain since I was 10. They’re holy scripture in my brain. So when I have the opportunity to show them to somebody else, it feels very special to me: “This is a really informative thing that I think about every day, and now you have it, too.”

Queer culture as a whole is bonding over shared experiences, and a lot of shared experiences come through shared interests. When you came out as gay, you were expected to go back and watch all these different films and have all these different references. Drag Race has honestly done a pretty good job of keeping that alive and keeping that in the zeitgeist, but there’s supposed to be a baseline of divas and camp that you’re supposed to know about. Now that’s transformed into Gay Guy Music Video Night — it’s a new way of sharing our culture, a new way of sharing interests, a new way of keeping everybody on the same page.