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Rowan Daly
“We will never be alive long enough for Black people to be free as long as we were enslaved.”
What if Harriet Tubman came back to modern-day America to make a hip-hop album in order to continue her work as an abolitionist? That’s exactly the world Bob the Drag Queen creates in their new novel Harriet Tubman: Live in Concert. “It is the most remarkable story in American history,” Bob says of Tubman’s life. She “sees how remarkable African American culture is, what it’s become, how hip-hop has saved the nation, saved the world and she wants to take part in it.” In addition to the physical book, the audio experience of the novel is just as enthralling, complete with original music. “A part of Harriet Tubman’s story is music. [She] did use music in her work as an abolitionist.” And the music included in the audiobook is “the best music I’ve ever written. Easily. I cry when I listen to this music.” And true to form, Bob, a past winner of RuPaul’s Drag Race, is creating a live show based on the book. It “really is about freedom and what freedom means to you. We get to define what our freedom is…and in this book, Harriet is trying to help people get free.”
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Editor’s Note: This conversation has been edited and condensed for publication.
We do need to talk about Harriet Tubman: Live in Concert. Why do you think this book is important now?
It’s really funny when people ask me, “Why is this important?” I’m like, it’s always been important. It’s never not been important. You know what I mean? And some things are more poignant to other people at certain times in their lives. But to me, first of all, I don’t know that this is a phrase, but I am a Harriet Tubman fan. I’ve just been obsessed with Harriet Tubman for a very, very long time. I really think she’s the first Black superhero. I say this all the time. The woman claimed to have superpowers, essentially. To do what she did with such limited resources like she had, it obviously shows the resilience of a Black woman. It shows the determination for freedom to have ownership over yourself and your body and your personage and your belongings and your things.
I interviewed Cynthia Erivo when she did Harriet, and the same wish that I had for that film I have for this book, that more people know who Harriet Tubman is.
They need to hear about it, too. It is the most remarkable story in American history. In my humble opinion, she truly is a superhero.
How did you come up with the idea for this book?
So I was in, I was doing Angels in America through Berkeley Repertory Theatre. I was actually asked to do it by Tony Kushner. Tony Kushner saw me on Drag Race and was like, “Would you please audition for Angels?” And I sent in the tape. I got cast, and when I was there doing this show, I came up [with] the idea for Harriet Tubman: Live in Concert as a play. Originally the play was going to be like, imagine Hedwig [and the Angry Inch] meets a Hamilton. And the show is going to be like, literally, you go to a concert, you’re seeing Harriet in concert. But then I got a book deal in 2020 when I was filming the Gettysburg episode of We’re Here, and they were like, “Do you want to write a memoir of your life, or stories and stuff?” And I said, “I gotta be honest, I wouldn’t read that book. I would not read my own memoir.” I don’t want to make something that I wouldn’t enjoy. Also, my life is more boring than people think it is. I don’t drink, I don’t do drugs, I just write jokes, write books, and I do podcasts, and then I go to sleep. Like I’m not doing anything crazy. So, I don’t want to write a book about me, because I wouldn’t read a book about me. But I do have this idea for this Harriet Tubman play that I think could be a great novel.
Courtesy of Gallery Books
I love the idea of these historical figures coming to modern-day because they have something to say. Tell me more about the story.
So in a world where historical figures have inextricably returned to life, Harriet Tubman has decided to continue her work as an abolitionist, and she wants to do it through the medium of music, and she wants to write a hip-hop album. Harriet Tubman sees how remarkable African American culture is, what it’s become, how hip-hop has saved the nation, saved the world, and she wants to take part in it. So she reaches out to a producer who has kind of been shunned from the business, and this is his return as well. So they both get to have a return. He’s alive already, but they both get to have a return.
In the book, you describe her as “she’s very comfortable with uncomfortable situations.” History tells us she was blunt, she was direct.
She was not particularly nice. She wouldn’t win Miss Congeniality, but she would win the pag[eant]. That’s a little bit of me in there. Like, I do kind of love awkward situations, yeah? And I certainly do not mind uncomfortable situations. Part of me is like, if I have to be uncomfortable, you have to be uncomfortable, too. That’s one of my things. If you’re gonna make me uncomfortable, b****, we’re all about to be uncomfortable today. Everyone in the room is gonna be uncomfortable on this day. And I can’t imagine how much of her life was not uncomfortable.
How did you find that balance between writing respectfully about her but also finding those moments for levity?
I just have a sense of humor with most things I’m talking about, so I’ll just be talking, and then I’ll realize something I’ve said ended up being fun, even though it’s a serious situation. I attack a lot of things with humor. It’s just how I get through life. It’s how I get through tragedies, how I get through joy. That’s just how I navigate life, through my sense of humor. And I do want to be clear to people who want to read or listen to this book, it’s not slapstick. This is not a [Saturday Night Live] sketch. It is funny, though. There are some very funny moments.
Chelsea Guglielmino/Getty Images
The audiobook for this is such a valuable listening experience because of the way you weave in music and performance throughout. You produced original music for it, right?
So I teamed up with some really remarkable writers. I’m gonna tell you right now. This is the best music I’ve ever written. Easily. I pride myself on being a great lyricist. This is the best music I have ever written in my life. I am so proud of this book. I cry when I listen to this music.
How do you think listening to the audiobook will enhance the experience of the book?
To be clear, a part of Harriet Tubman[‘s] story is music. Harriet Tubman did use music in her work as an abolitionist. So that’s why I think it actually makes sense for her to come back and continue this work through music. A lot of hymns and negro spirituals are communication. When we say, “Wade in the water,” we’re talking about, you go down by the water because it’s harder for the dogs to track your scent. The water’s running south, so you have to go north. You have to walk against the water. And this is stuff that people know now, but obviously enslaved people did not know that water ran south. How would they know that? How would they find this out? Knowledge was intentionally being shielded from enslaved people. So I just wanted to incorporate the music to give people a sense of how important music is.
There’s a quote in the book from a Nina Simone song, “I’ll tell you what freedom is to me, no fear. I mean, really no fear.” That one hit me. Why was it important to incorporate that?
The book really is about freedom and what freedom means to you. We get to define what our freedom is. I always talk about the quote, “None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.” [Johann Wolfgang von Goethe] Kris Kristofferson said, “Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose.” So many people have their concept of what freedom is and what freedom means to them, and in this book, Harriet is trying to help people get free. By the way, slave[ry] was actually never abolished. It was just conditionalized. Read the 14th Amendment, that’s a whole different story. But she talked about how we want to get free. And what are you not free from? Ask yourself, what are you enslaved to? What are you being? What are you? What are you a victim? How are you a victim of slavery as well?
And another historical figure the book incorporates is William Dorsey Swann. Could you tell me a little more about them?
William Dorsey Swann is credited with being America’s first drag queen, the “Queen of Drag.” William Dorsey Swan was a formerly enslaved person who was throwing these balls in the D.C. area, these cakewalks, where people would come and just dress up and explore their gender diversity in the 18[00s] and 1900s. Y’all, this is unheard of. This is crazy for someone to—by the way, William Dorsey Swann was constantly being arrested, but also just could not be stifled by the system itself. She was like, “I’m going to express myself.” And was applauded by people in the community.
Do you see parallels between what you’re doing with your art and what William Dorsey Swann did?
I wouldn’t be as bold as to claim to be as prolific and remarkable and as brave as William Dorsey Swann. It’s easy to be brave now than it was to be brave back then. And I mean, we all watched Wicked, and we all think we’d be Elphaba, but we all know we’re all Glinda. But they were like, “I would do this.” You would sit down. You would take Madame Morrible’s advice, and you would listen to Jeff Goldblum [the Wizard]. But it is important for me to get these characters out there, these people, these historical figures, a lot of people don’t know. Someone I found out about [while] doing my research was Benjamin Lay, who is depicted as DJ Quake. He’s a part of the producing team. But people don’t know that Quakers were really instrumental in abolition. So I have this, this famous Quaker named Benjamin Lay who was actually a little person and an abolitionist, and was pretty intense when he did some really wild stuff, which is in the book, I don’t want to ruin it for you all, but he had some really interesting ways to get his point across well.
What I love about your social media is that you use it to speak to an audience that could use your perspective. For example, during COVID you did a game with your partner where you had to guess Black female celebrities. And what that did was show that the legacy of segregation isn’t just a literal thing, sometimes it’s also seen in something small like our celebrity culture.
My cousin went to her high school’s first integrated prom in 2002 in Corinth, Mississippi. They had their first integrated prom in 2002. Some of y’all at home think that slavery was so long ago, baby, it wasn’t. I mean, it was like 160-something years ago. That’s a Betty White-and-a-half. That’s two old people back-to-back. It was not that long ago. We will never be alive long enough for Black people to be free as long as we were enslaved. We have another 200-some-odd years to even come close to being that. No one alive right now will have been alive long enough for Black people to be free as long as we were enslaved. So how do you shake that? Some people be like, “Why can’t you pull yourself up by the bootstraps?” B****, what boots? Not only are there not straps in the boot, there’s no boots at all. You’re competing with people who have a 600-year head start. And every time you try to run, they just keep knocking the ground out from under your feet. They’re running on gravel with tennis shoes, and you’re running on stainless steel, covered in oil, barefoot.
But in some respects, even though it’s fun, when you do something like that on social media, you are teaching in a way.
To be fair, we teach and we learn every day, right? We are constantly teaching. We are constantly learning. I’m not a teacher. I have a lot of respect for teachers. Actually, I went to school for theater education, dropped out, didn’t make it all the way through. But we teach and we learn every single day. And if you’re willing to listen and willing to reflect, you can get a lot out of the lesson. You can learn so much, but you have to be willing to step beside yourself and accept that there’s just stuff you don’t know. We’re all ignorant a little bit.
Rowan Daly
And when fans of yours watch, I think for many it makes them think about things in a different way. Like when they’re watching Friends, why couldn’t one of them be Black? Asking those questions has value.
How remarkable it is for Black people when we have these moments, like to see Kendrick Lamar at the Super Bowl meant so much to us. And there was someone, I can’t remember, one of those Republican news pundits, who was like, when’s the last time we ever saw a monochromatic [half-time show] he said, and then someone listed how many times there have been nothing but white people on the show. And then they were like, “Oh, I guess it actually has happened this many times for us.” It is really big to see our culture represented in the mainstream media, because we have contributed so much to it. There have been so many times where our culture has been presented without us. And it feels really nice to be able to at least not only be in the room when it’s happening, but be on the stage looking back at the audience.
Because of the internet and world right now, negativity is guaranteed. How do you maintain that authenticity amidst sometimes a lot of that negativity?
Well, being thrust into the international internet scene through RuPaul’s Drag Race nine years ago, I’ve developed a very thick skin. I don’t have a practice that I did to figure out how to navigate through people sharing really strong opinions about me. I just ended up having to find out how to do it because, I mean, I would just barrage the people’s thoughts about me, and sometimes I’m able to reflect on them and say, there’s stuff you could take from that. It’s not always. Every criticism isn’t necessarily bad. Sometimes you can actually learn from these things. And I’ve been lucky enough to learn from a lot of them. And sometimes they’re just sh** takes.
When you have a fan base as diverse as yours, one of them is bound to have different political beliefs than you. For example, someone who voted for Trump is likely to be one of your fans. So how do you find that balance and do you feel a need to speak to them?
I guess I never really thought about that. I’m pretty progressive. A lot of my work is about my queerness, my Blackness and my complete and utter lack of respect for the religious institutions. So I end up scaring a lot of those people away, you know what I mean? But if there’s some of y’all still sticking around, I guess I haven’t thought about what I would want to say to these people. But I would say this, this is a quote from Kinky Boots, “No matter how far down the wrong road you’ve gone, it’s never late to turn back.” You don’t have to be this. You don’t have to do this. You don’t have to be a monster. You don’t have to support a monster. They say vote like you’re gay, you’re trans, you’re Black, you’re disabled, you’re Indigenous. Vote like that. And now I think that a lot of these right-leaning people are really starting to see how these things are impacting them. Because they thought they were being protected by this administration. Now they’re realizing, “Oh, my God, they were never trying to protect me. They were only trying to exploit me.” One of the greatest tricks that the world ever played was these really, really rich white people convincing broke white people that they were better than Black people. So now I can get all these broke-ass white people to do all the dirty work so I don’t have to. They will yell at all the Black people, they’ll yell at the disabled people, the Asian people, they made them believe that this country was literally for them, made by them and with only them in mind, and then they get to just sit back and rake in all the money while you do all the dirty work.
What are your plans to tour with this book?
I am writing a musical, which is also a big deal for me. I’m doing a lot of firsts in my life. I guess I’m reaching an age, I’ll be 39 this year. I went to school for theater education, I’ve always loved theater, and I’ve always wanted to write a musical, and I finally found this subject matter that I’m really, really passionate about. I love hip-hop and I love Harriet Tubman. So I was like, I’m gonna go ahead and combine the two. So, maybe one day we’ll make it to Broadway, maybe one day we’ll go on a national tour.
Well, my last question for you, and this is the question that I know you get asked every single time you do any interview…
Can I guess it?
Sure.
I might be wrong, but I always get asked the question, would you go back and do an All Winners [Drag Race]?
Literally the question.
See, that’s literally the question. I would have done the last one if they had asked me.
Why do you think they didn’t ask you?
Well, to be fair, even if they did ask me, I would have been filming We’re Here. But I don’t know, how many big personalities can you have before it just gets too overwhelming? And can you really put me and Monét [X Change] in the same room and allow anyone else to speak?
We just want to see you and Monét compete against each other.
I don’t know that I’m in a position now to go back and do it. I think that Drag Race can be a great tool to boost your career. And I’m very lucky. I’m still going strong. For whatever reason, people are still buying tickets to my shows. They’re still enjoying my work. I’m very, very, very lucky. I’m very blessed. In a world where there are 600 Drag Race girls and over 200 here in the States, there are like 97 winners. I’m probably inflating that number. Still, I was on Drag Race almost 10 years ago and I’m still able to sell out shows. I feel very, very blessed, very, very lucky. I will say this though, if they make their prize handsome enough… I want a million dollars. Yeah, I deserve a million dollars.
I mean, Survivor and Drag Race are both part of Paramount, and Survivor does $1 million.
I want $1 million. I’ll come back and and slay the girls, eat the girls up, honey, and bring Monét as my assistant. [laughs]
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