Arts & Entertainment
Lady Bunny’s comedy special slays sacred COVID-19 cows
4 wigs, 12 costume changes and new song parodies

At a time where nothing seems certain, legendary drag queen Lady Bunny’s ignorance is our bliss.
“Oh, I’ve never seen it,” says Bunny, when the RuPaul Netflix vehicle “AJ and the Queen” came up as a topic during our interview.
Lack of first-hand knowledge didn’t stop the NYC-based DJ, actress, singer/songwriter, upcoming comedy special star, and creator of Wigstock from skewering “AJ” mercilessly, while co-hosting two recent Voss Events-presented digital drag benefits that raised funds for queens out of work because of COVID-19.
“Listen,” says Bunny, “I make jokes about ‘Drag Race,’ and I don’t watch that either. Honey, I don’t watch anything… I know Miss Vanjie said, ‘Miss Vanjie, Miss Vanjie, Miss Vanjie’ on her way out, in a way that was odd, but I don’t really know what else happened in that episode, or why she was eliminated, or why she said that.”
Bunny, whose television has not been hooked up for 10 months, admits, “Whenever you see me make a joke about pop culture, that is based on what I see other people talking about.” To compensate for this lack of firsthand information, “I will run it by friends who are more keyed into that kind of thing.”
With no boob tube at home and no burning desire to binge online (her flirtation with Netflix didn’t last past the free trial period), Bunny says she’s been spending her COVID-19 isolation period “trying to catch up on things I said I didn’t have time for before the quarantine, like filing taxes; and exercising, and dieting, so I don’t have that excuse, ‘Oh, I have to run here or run there.’ ”
Bunny is also devoting some of her spare time to long-planned personal projects, including a book she’s penning in partnership with her mother, and an autobiography. (“Just my life, before I forget it,” she says.)
And in a moment in time when there’s never been more spare time to sit around the house, hit a few keystrokes, press a button, and share your opinion on anything, everything, and often, nothing, with the world. That’s part of why Bunny says she’s “trying to stay off of social media a bit more, because I was hitting it hard during the first few months of COVID-19. But now, things seem to have turned sour, and it’s disconcerting.”
Known to those who follow her online as a steadfast supporter of Bernie Sanders (Bianca Del Rio often referred to Sanders as her “boyfriend” during the two Voss Events digital drag benefits they co-hosted), Bunny cited the trigger topics of social distancing and mask-wearing as among her reasons for dialing back on the sheer volume of postings and tweets. (She remains a presence on Facebook and Twitter—but these days, she’s just as likely to be writing about work from fellow artists as she is the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee.
“I realize people are scared, and I realize people are broke,” she says, of the COVID-19 tensions. “But I don’t understand the desire to lash out at people that aren’t observing the precautions that they decide to observe. It’s almost like they’re trying to prove they’re a better Democrat, because they dip their vegetables in Clorox water, and they wear masks everywhere. It’s just, like, I don’t understand what it is about a frightening, deadly pandemic that makes people want to scold others. If I walk down to the [NYC West Side] piers, as I do, almost every day, and I see people who don’t have masks on, and they’re coughing? Well then, I walk away from them. I don’t yell at them… At the end of the day, we are responsible for our own self-preservation. I mean, if someone who weighs 90 pounds and has a syringe sticking out of each eye tells me he wants to screw me without a condom, well, that situation may arise—but it’s up to me to say, ‘No,’ to protect myself.”
Asked how COVID-19 has impacted her creative output, Bunny noted, “All of my work involves dance floors and audiences—and we’re not gonna have either of those for many, many months. So basically, my paychecks have stopped, but my bills have not. So I’m in the same position that, you know, most drag queens or club employees are in.”
With little hope of audiences flocking to her bread and butter public gathering places any time soon, Bunny turned to what she does best: Parody songs, groovy dance segments, sketches, satire, insult humor, and raunchy jokes.
That brings us to the June 5 VossEvents.com debut of her downloadable ($9.99) comedy special, “C#ntagias,” in which, press materials note, “Demented drag diva Lady Bunny shamelessly interrupts your isolation in an attempt to give what may be your last laugh before the apocalypse.”
COVID-19-themed humor is front and center. Along with four signature sky-high wigs and 12 costume changes over the course of the 35-minute show, the press release further promises “brand new song parodies from artists as varied as Lizzo, Justin Bieber, and Madonna.” Gender-blending provocateur Christeene christeenemusic.com duets with Bunny on a pandemically updated version of Peggy Lee’s “Is That All There Is,” and Bunny will perform her timely parody of the RuPaul song, “Sissy That Walk.”
Currently available via Bunny’s YouTube channel, the video for “Sissy That Cough” finds our quarantined gal noting:
If I forget to use Lysol
I’ll end up in the hospital
I’m climbing up my fucking walls.
Those walls aren’t a problem, at least not in the video, which sees Bunny singing and dancing around an empty white space that is occasionally populated by, right on cue when the lyric comes in, bats she’s worried will:
Fly, fly, fly,
Uh-oh
From Wuhan Chi, Chi, Chi.
Bunny claims sole responsibility for crafting the lyrics to “Cough”—but overall writing credit for “C#ntagias” is shared with Beryl Mendelbaum, the Facebook drag persona of Bruce Jope, described by Bunny as “a fascinating character who hung out with everyone from Divine to Holly Woodlawn to Cher, back in the day.”
There’s a reason for that. Long before the character of Beryl burst onto the scene, Jope and his late partner, Francis Toohey founded the magazine Hit Parade (1978-1983, first based in Boston, then NYC). It chronicled, with gusto, the sort of culture and mind frame that drew people like RuPaul and Lady Bunny to NYC.
Mendelbaum, says Bunny, brings to their past collaborations (including stage shows “Clowns Syndrome” and “Trans-Jester!) an ability “to write as an older, Jewish retiree kleptomaniac, which is her online [Facebook] character. And I thought, if she can write in the voice of someone who she is not, maybe she can write for me, a potty-mouthed, southern, over-the-hill showgirl!”
Skits also play a part in “C#ntagias.” One of them, notes, Bunny, “was inspired by three emails I got claiming they had activated my computer’s camera when I was on a porn site, and I needed to send them $2,000 via Bitcoin or they were going to send this footage to all of my email contacts. So I started writing a reply, not that I even thought they were a real person, because I’m not the biggest porn fan, and so I came up with some stuff that was pretty funny. I sent it off to Beryl and we finished off the skit… She has a way of either pulling back or taking things in a different direction if I become too preachy, too vulgar, too whatever. She’s kind of like half writer, half director.”
For more information on Lady Bunny’s comedy special, available for digital download as of June 5, visit vossevents.com/digital. For Bunny and Beryl, see ladybunny.net and @BERYLMENDELBAUMFANS, respectively.
Arts & Entertainment
Sci-fi has long been at vanguard of LGBTQ representation
Story lines now criticized as ‘woke’ is weird
Since I was a teenager, I have liked sci-fi because of the depth with which it explores social issues. At the time, I didn’t know that I was autistic and queer, so I couldn’t see myself in other autistic and queer people. Instead, I saw myself in androids, mutants, telepaths, and sometimes aliens who were portrayed as minorities persecuted by the human majority. It was a universal language for talking about alienation, systemic discrimination, conversion therapy, segregation, and internalized self-hatred.
Now, when so many sci-fi stories are being criticized online as “woke,” it seems weird for me. This is especially true when we are talking about franchises, such as the British TV series “Doctor Who” and American franchise “Star Trek,” both of which have always been remarkably progressive by the standards of their own time.
Let’s take a closer look at “Doctor Who.”
In June 2026, the BBC cancelled the planned Christmas special, saying that viewers would have to wait longer for the next season after internal studio issues, and now the BBC is looking for new production partners. “Doctor Who” is the longest-running science fiction television series in the world, originally airing from 1963 to 1989 before returning in 2005. The future of the franchise is currently unclear, and many people online immediately began blaming “wokeness” for what had happened to their favorite show.
After all, the Doctor, an alien Time Lord who can regenerate and literally change faces, had traditionally been played by white men. But the last, Fifteenth Doctor was played by Ncuti Gatwa, a Black Scottish-Rwandan actor who has publicly identified as queer (and the doctor himself was first presented as queer character after a queer romantic episode where he kissed a man), while the Thirteenth Doctor was played for three seasons by Jodie Whittaker, the first woman to portray the Doctor. In 2023, the series also introduced Rose Noble, a trans feminine nonbinary teenager and supportive character played by transgender English actress Yasmin Finney.
But despite popular stereotypes online, “Doctor Who” did not suddenly “go woke.” The program has existed in two main eras: the classic series, which aired from 1963 to1989, and the modern revival, which has been broadcast on BBC One since 2005.
Even in the 1960s, one of the program’s earliest stories, “The Daleks” (1963–64), presented an obvious allegory for fascism, racial purity, bigotry and the horrors of war. Throughout the classic era, the Doctor frequently opposed militarism, authoritarian governments, and dictatorships. Many fans have also pointed to moments of queer coding and subtext throughout the classic series.
However, openly queer characters appeared as soon as the modern revival began.
The 2005 revival introduced Captain Jack Harkness, played by John Barrowman, one of the first openly queer recurring characters in the “Doctor Who” universe. He openly flirted with people regardless of their gender and later became the lead character of the spin-off series “Torchwood.” “Torchwood” went even further with LGBTQ representation, featuring multiple queer characters, including trans and nonbinary characters whose identities were treated as a normal part of the story.
“Doctor Who” has always been remarkably progressive for its time. The franchise doesn’t suddenly change its values, it’s always been “woke.”
The same happened with the American franchise “Star Trek.”
It is widely known as one of the most openly left-wing and progressive television franchises ever broadcast. The original series, which aired from 1966-1969, was created during the Cold War and featured the utopian United Federation of Planets, a society without poverty or money that can be characterised as socialist or even communist. It also featured Lt. Uhura, played by Nichelle Nichols, a Black woman serving as a highly respected bridge officer at a time when Black women weren’t portrayed in positions of authority on American television. The series also included one of the first interracial kisses in modern American television, between Capt. James T. Kirk (William Shatner) and Uhura in the 1968 episode “Plato’s Stepchildren,” a moment that had a significant cultural impact.
Gene Roddenberry, the creator of the franchise, said that he had wanted to include openly queer characters as well, but believed it would have been impossible to keep the show on the air because it had already pushed social boundaries in so many other ways.
Today, many viewers — including Elon Musk — claim that “Star Trek” has only recently become “woke.” In reality, I think it actually became less radical than the original series. Even queer characters are not a recent addition to the franchise. One of the earliest major queer characters appeared in “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine” (1993–1999): the Trill officer Jadzia Dax, played by Terry Farrell. In the 1995 episode “Rejoined,” she shared one of the first same-sex kisses in the history of the franchise.
However, for some reason, it was the openly gay couple Paul Stamets (Anthony Rapp) and Hugh Culber (Wilson Cruz) in “Star Trek: Discovery” (2017–2024), together with the trans Trill character Gray Tal, played by trans actor Ian Alexander, that triggered a major backlash among conservative parts of the fandom. That backlash reached another peak with “Star Trek: Starfleet Academy,” which features the canonically gay Klingon cadet Jay-Den Kraag. The actor has spoken about receiving abuse and threats because of the role, despite the fact that there was nothing especially ideological about his character. He was simply a gay character whose sexuality was only one aspect of who he was. In fact, considering the ideals of the original “Star Trek,” I was more surprised that the franchise still includes relatively few trans or polyamorous characters, and that they are not part of the lead cast. After all, the franchise was created to imagine a future that was ahead of its time.
So why do conservatives and anti-LGBTQ people continue to watch franchises that have always been deliberately progressive? And why do they keep claiming that these shows have only recently “gone woke”?
A more logical explanation is that parts of the audience have become less willing to accept the same kinds of progressive ideas that these franchises have embraced for decades. In other words, it is not the shows that fundamentally changed. Some long-time viewers have become more conservative than they were in their youth, while newer conservative audiences have joined them and begun criticizing franchises without knowing their real history.
In many ways, geeks have changed more than these shows have. Sci-fi hasn’t “gone woke.” Some of its fans have simply become less comfortable with the same progressive values these franchises have promoted for decades.
JR.’s Bar held a “RuPaul’s Drag Race: All Stars” watch party followed by a live drag show on Friday, July 17. The Vitamin C weekly drag show was hosted by Citrine with performers Brooke N Hyman and Rosie Beret.
(Washington Blade photos by Landon Shackelford)










The 2026 Rehoboth Beach Pride Festival was held at the Rehoboth Beach Convention Center on Saturday, July 18.
(Washington Blade photos by Daniel Truitt)













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