Ms. Demure, creator and host of “Harper’s Bazzaroworld” on DATV and Community Access YS, celebrates the show’s 25th anniversary this month. (Video still)
25 years of Ms. Demure
- Published: December 9, 2025
Yellow Springers may know drag queen Ms. Demure (sometimes known as Darryl Bohannon) from her appearances at the annual YS Pride events: In 2024, she debuted “The Purple March” to highlight ongoing struggles for reproductive rights and diversity and inclusion. She’s also been a judge for YS Pride’s annual YS Pride Spirit Award.
But in the wider Miami Valley, Ms. Demure has been a name for a quarter of a century as the host of “Harper’s Bazzaroworld,” a program on Dayton’s public access station, DATV, since 2000, and purportedly the oldest LGBTQ+ public access variety talk show in the U.S.
This month, Ms. Demure will host a live holiday program on DATV featuring a number of guests — including Yellow Springs’ own Mayor Pam Conine — in celebration of the season, Ms. Demure’s 60th birthday, and 25 years on DATV’s airwaves.
DATV launched on March 1, 1978, the brainchild of media pioneer Roxie Cole, with a one-room studio and a shoestring budget. At a time when cable was still finding its footing, the public access channel offered a broadcast home for local voices and the conversations they wanted to have. In 2025, the nonprofit station — from the Dayton Leo Street studio where it moved in the 1980s — continues to offer the same freedom of expression to its members, who have access to recording and editing equipment to tell the stories of their community, in their own words.
Ms. Demure’s tenure with DATV spans more than half the station’s life. In an interview with the News at DATV’s headquarters this week, Ms. Demure said she started her drag career “kind of late” in her life — “I was 32 when I became a drag queen,” she said — and was inspired by on-screen presences like Elizabeth Montgomery of “Bewitched” and other women from classic film to create her drag persona.
“Those women from the 1930s and ’40s were tough, but they were very stylish, and then ‘Bewitched’ from the ’60s — all those women I took a little bit from, every last one of them,” she said. “And then Ms. Demure, she was born.”
It was only a few years after stepping into the drag community that DATV came onto Ms. Demure’s radar. It was the late 1990s, and she said there was a gap on television for drag personalities when VH1’s the “RuPaul Show” went off the air after two seasons. Flipping through channels one night, she said she landed on DATV and saw a colorful melange of filmed community festivals, off-the-cuff talk and neighborhood oddities — “All these crazy things,” she said — and recognized a place where drag and community issues might share the same frame.
“And what I learned about this channel is that it’s the original social media,” she said. “I mean, it’s like a handshake — everything is in person.”
It seemed like a natural fit; Ms. Demure had already put in time at Dayton’s International College of Broadcasting, studying radio and TV in an era when, as she put it, she “didn’t have the look” for commercial media. Public access, by contrast, didn’t ask her to fit a mold.
“I just like the freedom that you have down here,” she said of DATV’s studios. “You can be inspired by yourself and be inspired by the community.”
Darryl Bohannon, AKA Ms. Demure, leans on one of DATV’s robotic cameras in the studio space where “Harper’s Bazzaroworld” is filmed. (Photo by Lauren “Chuck” Shows)
“Harper’s Bazzaroworld” — named, Ms. Demure said, for the fashion magazine, Superman’s Bizarro World and the open-air bustle of a bazaar — debuted in 2000, and has maintained a variety-show style over the years, striving to be both camp and current. She’s followed pop culture and pride parades and politics, mixing sock puppets and green-screen musical numbers with long conversations about everything from film and TV and tai chi to voting rights and local organizing. Just this month, Ms. Demure interviewed a member of Dayton’s Black Panther Party, and the hour-long conversation covered police violence, racism, community initiatives and the ever-growing threat of ICE, among many other topics.
“These are all things I’m concerned about, and that we’re all concerned about in this moment,” she said. “And I just feel like I always want to be current — not so much about being trendy, but about life issues. I want to use my platform to help people.”
Behind the scenes, Ms. Demure edits every episode herself on DATV’s hardware, stitching together studio shoots, Zoom interviews and podcast segments. Often, she’ll incorporate brief “throwback” segments from her archive of past shows — an archive she said she’s still working to digitize from tape — layering in older dance numbers, program promos and bloopers.
“It’s very real,” she said of the work. “And I feel like I’m a real drag queen, because I’m authentic in that sense. And I wouldn’t change anything about my journey here; it’s probably been the best thing I’ve ever done in my life.”
Ms. Demure said that in its time on-air, “Harper’s Bazzaroworld” has picked up ripples of national attention — a “Talk Soup” clip of the week, festival appearances, a Manhattan cable slot — but it remains a program focused on Dayton and the Miami Valley, including Yellow Springs.
In years past, “Harper’s Bazzaroworld” had been part of the Community Access Yellow Springs line-up, but Ms. Demure said it disappeared in the late-aughts when Channel 5 was reorganized under Village government management. In 2023, she said Mayor Pam Conine put in a good word to help shepherd the show back onto Yellow Springs screens — and so it seemed natural to invite Conine to appear on the 25th-anniversary special. The show will be aired and streamed live — Ms. Demure’s first live show, she said, in more than a decade.
The special will air Thursday, Dec. 11, 7–8 p.m. Ms. Demure said the program’s set, hosted in DATV’s large studio, will feature an inflatable Christmas tree and a running gag in which each ring of the studio “doorbell” will signal another well-wisher entering frame to say “Merry Christmas,” “Happy 60th” or “Happy 25th anniversary.” She plans to wear her now-signature penguin costume, which she said was inspired by the current administration’s tariffs on uninhabited islands near Antarctica earlier this year, and which she has worn at marches and rallies as a tongue-in-cheek reference to what she considers the absurdity of the political moment.
The guest list for the special will be eclectic: Mayor Pam; Pastor Jeff Perkins, of Dorothy Lane American Baptist Church and his partner, Michael, to “bless” the broadcast; past guest Phoebe the goat, returning for some on-air goat yoga; singer-songwriter Rachel Rosen, with a “Joni Mitchell–style” number; and, if schedules align, a few fellow drag performers. There will be a large sheet cake decked in pink glitter, pink roses, a holiday tableau and sparklers for all three milestones — holiday season, birthday and anniversary.
“This special is just saying ‘thank you’ to my viewers, ‘thank you’ to DATV, just ‘thank you’ to everybody,” she said. “I want everyone to have such a good time watching this live show and feel like they’re included.”
Even as the internet and social media have reshaped how people watch and make TV during the life of “Harper’s Bazzaroworld,” Ms. Demure said she sees public access television and online platforms less as competitors and more as collaborators. Episodes stream on DATV’s website and on her YouTube and Vimeo channels; shorter podcast versions go out via Facebook. She and other DATV members can check out cameras, reserve podcast and video labs and book time in the same studio where “Harper’s Bazzaroworld” films.
“Oh, my God. I mean, this is such a great platform,” she said. “You have so much control here to create your own product, and it’s only $50 a year. And you have the power to change things.”
In its 47 years in Dayton, DATV has seen a number of changes, with its first studio tucked into United Theological Seminary on Salem Avenue, later moving to a Time Warner building before moving to its own autonomous station across the street. In the studio now, robotic cameras have replaced some of the older gear, and a new generation of staff and volunteers covers podcasts, churches and community meetings. But for Ms. Demure, the space still carries the muscle memory of her first day on set.
“Every time I come in here and film a show, to me, it’s like that first day I’m climbing up on the ladder and I’m doing the lights,” she said.
A quarter-century after that first climb, she said she’s still here because of what public access allows her — and anyone else who walks in the door — to do.
“I have so much freedom down here — it’s like my safe space,” she said. “I’ve been so lucky to be able to do this for 25 years. Isn’t that crazy? 25 years!”
“Harper’s Bazzaroworld Presents the Ms. Demure Show” will air its live anniversary program Thursday, Dec. 11, 7–8 p.m. Dayton viewers can catch it live on DATV’s Spectrum Channel 5; villagers can livestream the broadcast at http://www.DATV.org/watch, or catch it later during its typical Community Access Yellow Springs Channel 5 broadcast at 10 p.m. Saturday.
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