Jeffrey Bowyer-Chapman on representation, toxicity and the hard lessons he learned from Drag Race

Queeries is a weekly column by CBC Arts producer Peter Knegt that queries LGBTQ art, culture and/or identity through a personal lens.

Over the past decade, Jeffrey Bowyer-Chapman has done something that would have made his younger self very proud: he's made a name as an out gay actor playing predominantly gay roles. Currently starring as a doctor on Disney Plus's Doogie Howser reboot, Doogie Kameāloha, M.D. (making him a rare example of a gay man playing a gay role in a Disney property), he rose to prominence in 2015 playing another queer character on UnREAL, the acclaimed drama series depicting the insanity that goes on behind the scenes of a reality show. And of course, in between those projects, art would imitate life to a degree when he was a main judge on the first season of Canada's Drag Race.

As a Black, queer boy growing up with an adopted white family in Rimbey, Alberta — a village of 2,500 people roughly 145km southwest of Edmonton — Bowyer-Chapman really could have used someone like, well, the person he's become.

"It was very obvious to me from the time that I was a kid that there wasn't people like me on TV," he tells me. "And I loved TV, even though I only had like three channels living rural Alberta and so few references for what was actually out there. I was adopted when I was a kid, so all my siblings were white and they could point to the TV and say, 'That's just like me, I want to be that.' And I couldn't do that — I didn't have that privilege."

"So I was aware that if I were to act or perform in some capacity as I grew older, it would be primarily, if not only, gay and queer characters that I would want to portray so that I could celebrate queerness and Blackness in a way that I just never saw."

With Doogie Kameāloha, M.D., Bowyer-Chapman continues to do just that, playing out doctor Charles Zeller, a colleague of the titular wunderkind (Peyton Elizabeth Lee) who, like Neil Patrick Harris's Doogie before her, graduated med school by the time she was 16 years old (they call her "Doogie" as an in-universe reference to the show its based on). 

"Signing on to the project was was a no-brainer," he says. "I mean, we were in the middle of a global pandemic and all of us were trapped in our houses and I had just experienced a really challenging chapter. So it just made sense to take the path of least resistance and go toward what felt good and to something we could be putting out there into the world that could potentially be really positively impactful for so many kids out there. I have no idea how, but I just know the potential impact that I could have experienced as a kid had I just simply seen someone who looks like me on TV and who was like me on TV."

He says that since the show is considerably family-friendly, it's never going to "get into the depths of [his character's] sexual nature."

"But I think that's important because it's not something that I was considering at seven, eight, nine years old," he says. "And my intention is always to be used for a purpose greater than myself. So to be invited onto a Disney show to play a queer character was an opportunity that I could not pass up."

The "challenging chapter" Bowyer-Chapman notes is obviously referencing his experience on Canada's Drag Race. Earlier this year, he was quite candid about that time in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, discussing both the racist attacks he endured online (that led him to quit Twitter at RuPaul's suggestion) and the toxic environment he says he faced on set.

"It's one of those things where I wouldn't wish the experience upon anyone, but I would wish the lessons I've gleaned from the experience on everyone," he says.

Bowyer-Chapman says that the greatest lesson he learned from coming through to the other side of that time in his life was "the importance of standing up and speaking truth to power and bringing sense to nonsense when no one else is willing to do it."

"It think that was the most disheartening and heartbreaking shock of that experience: the people who knew they had intentionally made some really poor and hurtful choices, and had the power to have made much better choices and didn't for their own personal and professional gains. When they saw everything rolling out and happening the way that it was, it was like an insane snowball effect that they may not have anticipated. But it doesn't matter what their intentions were — what truly matters is the impact of what actually occurred and the lack of accountability around that."

With Drag Race behind him, Bowyer-Chapman says he can now look at everything else in his life and say, "Oh, I survived that and I'm OK."

"I have a stronger sense of self and I have a stronger voice and I have a thicker skin," he says. "Although it wasn't an enjoyable process, growing that thicker skin, I know that I'm better for it. I don't ever want to experience it or anything like it again. I am much more mindful of paying attention to my intuition and speaking up when that red alarm is blaring, deafeningly in my internal mind."

As for the future of diverse representation on television, Bowyer-Chapman is cautiously optimistic.

"Of course, I'm hopeful," he says. "I think that obviously it's just easy to look at the landscape of television and film and see how expansive it's become in terms of LGBTQ representation, representation of people of colour and Blackness specifically. I think we're making incredible strides, but there's still a lot of work to be done."

And a lot of that work needs to happen behind the scenes, he says. 

"When it comes to representation of people like me in front of the camera, there needs to be far more behind the camera as well. Because as I've experienced and so many people of colour have experienced, when the people who are holding the keys to the castle are still white, cisgender people — even if they're gay — there's implicit bias and there's such limited points of reference. And white, cisgender people generally don't have a lot of friends who aren't other white, cisgender people."

With the reckoning Hollywood has had over the past few years when it comes to sexual abuse and harassment, Bowyer-Chapman thinks we need to be very mindful of who is stepping up to take their place.

"Just because somebody is queer, specifically white queer men running shows and running networks and getting multi-million dollar deals at Netflix, there can still be really toxic work environments under those leaders," he says. "And it's really insidious to the point that there's no real legal protection around it. There's hardly even a language or vocabulary around it."

"It's kind of easier to point to sexual abuse or harassment in the workplace than it is to racism or to emotional abuse or emotional manipulation. And it's really the formula that has allowed these people to get to the top. It's not talked about, and that's really messed up."

As hopeful as he is that progress is being made and we're evolving, he feels that attention very much needs to be paid to "all of the things that we don't want to pay attention to."

"There's still so much work that needs to be done on behalf of white people and on behalf of white gay men. And it's uncomfortable, and it's not necessarily something that people are going to be jumping at the opportunity to do — to recognize and acknowledge the errors of their ways. But it's truly the only way that we are going to come through this moment for the better. Sunlight is the best disinfectant, and if we continue to allow these things to fester in the dark, we're just going to have to experience like, a new Time's Up revolution aimed toward the monsters that are currently sitting with the keys of the castle."

You can watch Jeffrey Bowyer-Chapman on Doogie Kameāloha, M.D., currently streaming on Disney Plus.

For more stories about the experiences of Black Canadians — from anti-Black racism to success stories within the Black community — check out Being Black in Canada, a CBC project Black Canadians can be proud of. You can read more stories here.