Bob the Drag Queen is the multihyphenate to end all multihyphenates.
She may have “the Drag Queen” in her name, but Bob’s career has expanded far beyond its origins in New York City’s drag scene. Since winning RuPaul’s Drag Race and making a name for herself on the world’s biggest platform for drag artists, she’s led an HBO series, appeared on Broadway, starred in several comedy specials, hosted a podcast with thousands of listeners, launched a fashion brand, published a New York Times bestselling book, and founded her own production company, Purse First Studios.
According to Bob herself (who identifies as nonbinary and uses both she/her and he/him pronouns), she’s always known she was destined for greatness. At the Fast Company Innovation Festival, Bob shared that even in her audition for RuPaul’s Drag Race, she told the producers that the show would only be a footnote in her eventual career.
“I said, ‘Not only am I going to win RuPaul’s Drag Race, but it won’t even be the most interesting thing I do in my life,’” Bob told the crowd, speaking virtually from Los Angeles. “I’m nothing if not audacious.”
That unabashed confidence, she explained, is a byproduct of her “greatest gift as an artist, as a business, as a businessman”: not being a perfectionist.
“I would rather just do it and get it right the next time than try to be perfect. I am a doer,” Bob said. “When people brag about being a perfectionist, I think it’s probably a coping mechanism to excuse why you’re not doing what you need to be doing.”
Taking a cue from Top Gun
Along with letting go of perfection, Bob encouraged other creatives to recognize that putting art into the world means losing control of how it’s perceived.
“Once you make it, you got to let it go,” she said. “IP, it belongs to you, but once you make it and put it out, it is now public property.”
As an example, she recalled being at a movie theater to watch 2022’s The Batman. Before that movie, a trailer for Top Gun: Maverick played, sending Bob down a mental rabbit hole of the 30-year effort to bring the trailer to fruition. From the creative energy spent on the original Top Gun film in 1986 and its $15 million budget (a figure she looked up while telling this story), to the even bigger production mounted for its sequel decades later, Bob couldn’t help but wonder at the number of creative hands that had touched the property on its way to that cinema screen—only for the product to immediately fall flat.
“When the trailer was done, the guy next to me went, ‘Ugh, I’m not watching that,’” she said. “That’s crazy! I said to myself, ‘You know what, you gotta just make it and put it out there.’”
“Granted, I also didn’t watch it,” she admitted. “Granted, I ain’t ever seen Top Gun in my life.”
Offering her megaphone
Beyond her own creative endeavors, Bob has helped other creatives step into the spotlight through Purse First Studios. She highlighted Zach Noe Towers’s comedy special Twink Death and the podcast Quit Playin’, hosted by Amber Wallin and Jazmyn W., as examples of standout projects her production company has worked on since its founding in 2025.
“I’m like, someone needs to hear your voice, and I can use my megaphone,” Bob said. “You know, there are a lot of megaphones bigger than mine, but I have a loud voice.”
She compared her current platform to the experience of riding the New York City subway while in drag, something she regularly did early in her career. When other riders would turn and stare, she said she’d feel obligated to take advantage of the attention to “say something important.”
“I better do something with that attention that I have, because that might not happen forever,” she said—though she acknowledged that drag has never been more mainstream, thanks in no small part to RuPaul’s Drag Race. The flagship American series has seen more than 200 drag queens compete across its 18 seasons. Taking into account the franchise’s 15 international spinoffs, that number balloons to nearly 800.
Among those hundreds of drag artists, Bob counts herself “very lucky to be one of the ones that people listen to.”
“Am I number one? No,” she conceded. “Am I top five? Obviously.”