No stranger to the camera, Bosco is bringing a new type of reality to TV.
The star of “RuPaul’s Drag Race’s” 14th season documented her facial feminization surgery, a gender-reaffirming cosmetic procedure, in the 30-minute video. The Paramount+ documentary, dubbed “Face of Bosco,” is available exclusively on RuPaul’s Drag Race’s YouTube channel.
“I had facial feminization surgery in June of last year. I just hadn’t ever seen the inner workings of how that process works — how you acquire a surgeon, how the pre-ops go, and I was going through it, I thought it would be cool to demystify it for anyone else who wants to do this process in the future,” Bosco said. “Paramount+ got footage leading up to the surgery, there’s some footage of the surgery, and then I spent about a month recovering, culminating in a face reveal party in L.A.”
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Bosco said she went into the process eyes wide open and wanted to disseminate her learnings. “There’s a lot of nuances to the recovery itself that you don’t really see or hear,” she said. “For most girls, they disappear for three to four months, and they come back like a glorious swan emerging. This captures more of the nitty-gritty. For about a month, you look like you’ve been in a car wreck — very, very swollen. It wasn’t crazy painful for me, but it was uncomfortable.”
The procedure is not one-size-fits-all, and is determined by pre-operation conversations with surgeons as well as one’s own feminine beauty ideals. “I found a surgeon where I already agreed with their work, and I knew it was something I was comfortable getting for myself,” Bosco said. “It’s important to find a surgeon that you’re not asking to go out of their wheelhouse. They’re good at what they do. I found somebody whose results I liked a lot, and I let him take the wheel for the most part.”
Insurance coverage, as well as proximity — the surgeon had also operated on friends in Bosco’s network, and was just a five-minute drive away — also played a role in her choice.
She described the operation as “an à-la-carte of different facial procedures combined together,” and her own entailed having her forehead reshaped, pieces of her chin removed, and then redefining her facial structure with fat transfers “to round things out a bit.”
“[Gender] dysphoria in general dials you into certain different signifiers,” Bosco said. “Working as a drag queen for five years has me zeroed in on the illusion of femininity and what subconsciously reads as feminine. We’re conditioned from birth to expect certain features from certain genders, and your brain just internalizes all of that. But there’s also some very beautiful cis women who have masculine features that work well. Every face is different.”
So far, the FFS has only moderately impacted her makeup artistry. “A lot of the application, a lot of the products and a lot of the shapes are pretty much the same,” she said. “I just don’t have to work as hard to get the shapes that I want now, because a lot of them are already there. I had to renegotiate eye shapes, because they did shave my brow bone on the side, to figure out what looks like me the most. It’s just taken a few months to settle into this mug. And it’s working pretty well.”
The aim was a light surgical touch that wouldn’t render her unrecognizable, given that she built her career with her pre-operation face. “I love a girl who goes in full witness protection with it — you can’t see any of the formers. But that’s not what I was looking to do,” she said. “I’d already built a career and brand based on how I look; I just wanted to remix it a little bit. During daylight hours, when I’m not wearing all this makeup, I can more safely and comfortably navigate the world.”