Bob the Drag Queen Would Start a Fight at the Bookstore Over His New Novel: ‘I Would Win’

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When Bob the Drag Queen scored a book deal several years ago, the original offer was for him to write a memoir. A less adventurous celebrity might have said yes and called it a day, but this is Bob the Drag Queen, erstwhile Traitor and Madonna opening act, and he’s nothing if not adventurous.

“I didn’t wanna write a memoir, because to be quite frank, I would not read my own memoir,” the RuPaul’s Drag Race season 8 champion, 38, exclusively told Us Weekly. “I wanted to write the kind of book that I would wanna read. Like, would I read a drag queen novel? Yeah, but it’s gotta be really f—ing good or really interesting or something. And if I saw this book on the shelf, if it was the last copy and me and someone grabbed it at the same time, baby, there would be a fight at the bookstore — and I would win.”

The book that resulted, Harriet Tubman: Live in Concert, is about as far from a memoir as you can get — and, as Bob wanted it to be, “really interesting.” Narrated by a closeted hip-hop producer named Darnell, the novel takes place in a world much like our own, with one major difference: Numerous historical figures have come back to life in an unexplained event known as “The Return.” One such icon is Harriet Tubman, who enlists Darnell to produce her debut album and a live show about her life.

“My brain is really nutty, right?” Bob joked, noting that the book’s premise originally came to him as an idea for a play. “It was actually inspired by several things all kind of rolled together. I was in Angels in America at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre, and there’s a monologue about a historical fiction book — which I love historical fiction, the concept you get to take things that actually happen and create your own narrative. … And then I had finished reading a historical fiction piece called The Good Lord Bird by James McBride. Like, I could not put that book down.”As for how he settled on writing about Tubman, Bob explained that he’d been fascinated by her since his childhood in Georgia.

“We take Black History Month really seriously in Georgia, especially in Atlanta. I don’t remember ever not having knowledge of who Martin Luther King Jr. and Harriet Tubman were, because we teach about it so much in Georgia,” the Traitors alum explained. “The first thing that really clicked in my head was when I heard that she was a suffragette. And I was like, ‘Oh, my God, she had another thing on top of being an abolitionist, that’s really interesting.’ And I started reading more and more about her. … Harriet Tubman’s life is beyond words. It is beyond words. You would have to write a thousand books to get close.”

It may be difficult for some readers to imagine Tubman recording a 2025-era hip-hop album, but according to Bob, it’s “really not far-fetched.” As his fictional Tubman notes in the book, enslaved people sent messages to each other via music all the time.

“When they sing ‘Wade in the Water,’ that means go down by the water because the dogs can’t track your scent as well there,” Bob explained. “And if [Harriet] was alive today and she was still wanting to continue her work, she might still use music. And what better way to reach African Americans than the music that we created ourselves called hip-hop and rap?”

While the book is fiction, elements of Bob’s personality are still present. Tubman’s rap cadence is really his own — he’s still planning to produce a stage version of the novel and the audiobook includes two original songs performed by him — and he says narrator Darnell is “a much kinder, much more polite version” of himself.

At one point, Darnell laments the idea that he should be seen as anyone’s role model as a Black queer man working in hip-hop, which is a sentiment Bob relates to very heavily.