Miss Tony aka Big Tony
Anthony Boston aka Miss Tony and later Big Tony was born on May 6th, 1966.
From 1992 to 1994, Tony collaborated with DJ Frank Ski on several tracks that were instrumental in establishing Baltimore club like, “get ya gunz out,” how you wanna carry it,” “living in the alley,” and of course, “Tony’s bitch track.”
He worked with Underground Trak Team on his 1994 single, “whatz up? Whatz up?”
He quickly became a local celebrity and in 1994, he joined Baltimore’s 92Q radio station as a personality and DJ on Randy Dennis’ morning show. He was as bashful, provocative and gay on the radio as he was on his songs.
By 1996, Frank Ski was now also working at 92Q and him and Tony were able to turn their dynamic into part of the new morning show. “Miss Tony” was now more known than ever.
In 1998, he stopped doing drag, walked into a Baltimore church, renounced his drag persona and his homosexuality, and dubbed himself “Big Tony.” That same year, he started suffering from kidney failure and remained on dialysis until his death.
Before 92Q let Tony go in 1999, he briefly had the opportunity to host his own evening show, “Off the Hook.”
Tony died on April 11th, 2003 from complications tied to kidney failure. He was 36 years old.
Just Trying To Be Tony; He’s said goodbye to the dresses, the makeup, the wild living. But Baltimore DJ Tony Boston is still learning just where he and Miss Tony part company.
Baltimore Sun - 1/31/1999
When he decided, finally, that it was time to end the life of a woman he loved, Tony Boston knew the perfect place was church, in front of God and the whole congregation. It would be a gesture as big and dramatic as the woman herself.
After all, there was no hope of hiding his plan. Nearly everyone in Baltimore knew this woman, or at least had heard of her. She could walk into a room, all brassy, sassy 350-plus pounds of her, and bring you to your feet, singing, dancing, laughing. Or to your knees with a stabbing glare or an unkind word.
By night, she was a glitzy after-hours nightclub diva; by day, a raspy-voiced early-morning disc jockey for Baltimore’s most-listened-to radio station.
Her name was Miss Tony, and he had indulged her excesses, her man-chasing, her wild ways most every day of his adult life.
For 12 years, they’d been closer than brother and sister. But he’d had enough. So here he was, standing at the front of this narrow brick church in Northeast Baltimore, awash in sweat and triumphant in her death. At his feet lay a heaping pile of her sparkling gowns, mink coats and short skirts — a rumpled, glittering testament to Miss Tony’s demise. He’d snatched them from a bedroom closet just hours before, determined he’d exorcise all traces of her.
He felt he had to explain, but as he spoke, his raspy voice betrayed no regret, no remorse, no desire to ever again be the man who, until just that day, had worn these clothes proudly. As he looked out at his newfound brothers and sisters in Christ, there was only fire in his words.
“Never again!” Tony Boston cried out, and the congregation, moved by this remarkable afternoon of death and rebirth, erupted into shouts of praise and song.
Looking back on that afternoon last April, Tony Boston should have known that killing off Miss Tony was not going to be that simple.
During his 12 years in drag, Miss Tony had brought him so much he had cherished — fame, friends and a fair amount of money, things he likely never would have achieved without her. For a kid who’d grown up in Sandtown, this was the big time. As Miss Tony, people knew him, knew his name. He could say and be whatever he chose.
Miss Tony was about fun. Starting back in the late ’80s, Miss Tony would come alive several nights a week, meeting her fans in after-hours nightclubs like Club Fantasy, Odell’s and Paradox. Most likely you’d find her in the middle of the dance floor, vogueing, gyrating and singing amid flickering lights and bass-heavy, funky music.
Miss Tony danced like nobody else. She would fall on the floor and roll around. She loved to get dragged across the dance floor by anyone willing to be her stage prop, smiling and singing the whole time.
“It was almost like a circus act,” says Deborah Whitaker, an old friend of Boston’s who is an intake specialist for the Office of Public Defender. “Before I met him, people would say, ‘Girl, you have to see Miss Tony!’ I could never believe it until I saw it.”
“Miss Tony was like a character,” says Teddy Douglas, a dance music producer better known in Baltimore club circles as DJ Teddy D. “Everybody would come out and see Miss Tony, and he would be the life of the party. He had the outrageous outfits and hair.”
Those who talk about Miss Tony sometimes say “he,” sometimes “she.” Cathy Hughes, his boss at 92Q-FM (WERQ), once tried “shim,” combining “she” and “him.”
But make no mistake, says Tony Boston. Miss Tony was a man, and there was never any plan to change that fact. Miss Tony was an all-out, unrepentant drag queen, a man who admired women and their ways and strove to be a souped-up, extra-feminine version of them.
Miss Tony was gay, too. Always had been, long before he thought of putting on the hair, nails and makeup. At times, Tony Boston will tell you, Miss Tony had an unquenchable lust for men. She favored thuggish types, so-called “yo boys.” They were rough and tumble, sometimes on the wrong side of the law, and, by all appearances, straight. Miss Tony got a rush pursuing — and attaining — men who were not openly gay. It made her feel irresistible.
And friends and family say that more often than not, Miss Tony got her man.
“She was bold,” remembers Jason Gilmor, a Baltimore clubgoer who saw Miss Tony on the prowl. “She would walk up to a guy, circle around him like he was prey, and give him the eye.
“Her eyes said it all, man. You knew what she wanted and — I still don’t believe it to this day — the guys, big drug dealer-types, would be seen in the neighborhood with her later that week. … You knew what had happened between the two of them.”
It was at the clubs that Miss Tony also met Frank Ski, a popular radio DJ who made appearances on weekends. In 1991, Miss Tony would begin a collaboration with him, becoming his chief cheerleader and dancer. It gave her a stage to perform some of the club music she’d recorded, songs about relationships and urban life such as “What’s Up, What’s Up” and “Pull Your Guns Out.”
By 1994, Miss Tony had landed on the radio at Baltimore’s 92Q-FM as an entertainment reporter. Soon, the role was expanded and she became a morning show co-host, first with Randy Dennis, then with Ski before he left for Atlanta last year.
From the tender age of 25, Miss Tony was a Baltimore icon, the city’s most famous drag queen since Divine. Despite a voice peculiarly unsuited to radio, she had moved from the fringe world of clubs to the drive-time mainstream. She had earned Tony Boston the success, respect and adulation he had craved.
It should have made him happy. Somehow, it didn’t.
“Everyone thinks because I lived the life of Miss Tony, it was all glamorous,” says Tony Boston. “It wasn’t.”
On this particular morning, Boston is looking about as glamorous as a truck driver. It’s a few minutes after the end of his 6 a.m.-10 a.m. radio show, and his eyes are dark and sleepy. He’s wearing baggy pants and an untucked shirt, both black. He’s got a skullcap on his head, hiding short tufts of hair.
“Long night,” he says, explaining away his appearance with a shrug.
With no makeup, his skin is darker, rougher than Miss Tony ever would have allowed. There is a trail of hair running down each side of his face, meeting in a tangle of wisps beneath his fleshy chin. Still, he has a youthfulness about him that belies his 32 years.
In his sparse downtown office overlooking the back of the courthouse on St. Paul Street, he leans forward in his chair and twists his face into a grimace as he talks about life as Miss Tony. For all the wild times, for all the high moments, living the life of Miss Tony had been a burden, he says. Twelve long years of drinking, smoking dope and falling in and out of lust had made him feel empty, used up. At one point, he says, he considered suicide to get out from under her.
“I started to hate myself because I was gay,” Boston says. He’d had one too many bad relationships, heard one too many bad remarks about being a drag queen. One too many moments, he says, reflecting on how life might be if he turned to God for solace instead of Miss Tony. “I wanted to check out.”
For a moment, he seems shocked at his own candor, but then adds: “I’m not ashamed of my life. Let’s make it real.”
He’s more animated now. The talk seems to be lifting the morning doldrums. “Making it real,” he says, telling the truth whatever the cost, is how he wants to tell his story. Maybe it will help someone, he says, to know how far he has come.
Around his old West Baltimore stomping grounds, Tony Boston and Miss Tony are something of a local hero. Longtime residents love to talk about knowing both back when.
Boston’s family — nine brothers and sisters — was too large to live on one paycheck under one roof. Some of his siblings lived with their grandmother, he and others with his mother.
Boston was a mischievous kid who struggled with the hyper-masculinity of the streets. Over the years, he fashioned himself a street tough who could shoulder assaults on his feminine mannerisms with a brash, in-your-face attitude.
“I was a bad-ass,” Boston says matter-of-factly. “I used to curse teachers out. They would always have to call my mom.”
Donald J. Taylor remembers picking on Boston when they were both pre-teens outside Gilmor Elementary School.
“He was so funny. He hung around all the girls, [would] carry his books to his chest, and walk by you and roll his eyes. Back then, me and my friends had to [taunt] him,” says Taylor, who still lives on Gilmor Street. “He would curse you out and run away if you bothered him too much.”
No one can really remember exactly when Boston began dressing as Miss Tony. One day he just showed up on the streets in women’s clothing, and that was that. No one thought much of it, partly because he wasn’t exactly a trailblazer in his neighborhood.
“There was this old drag queen, named Jose, that walked around the neighborhood,” Boston says as he tools around the old neighborhood in his blue Chevy, the tape player blaring “Release Yourself,” a new song he’s recorded. “Ohhhh — he had long hair and wore short dresses. He was a legendary queen.”
Recalling such boldness, he chuckles.
“I was too young to know what he was,” he says. “I didn’t know what I was yet.”
He’s thumping his fingers to the music, listening to his voice strain to soar above the bass-heavy beat. “Release Yourself,” he says, is his personal anthem:
Tired of being under pressure with the way you live your life
People will always say you should live another life
Take time for yourself and listen to your own mind
Listen to your heart and be free with yourself.
The day Tony Boston first put on a dress and wig, he fell in love with himself.
He’d already accepted the fact that he was gay and was no longer closeted about it. But the clothes let him express his individuality, his comfort with living life as he saw fit, like never before.
He says a friend of his, a drag queen named TJ, got him into it. He remembers the details of that winter day 12 years ago as if it were yesterday.
“He said to me, ‘Child, you need to get in drag and do a show with me!’ So I did: white pantsuit with blue stirrups, gold blouse with sequins, makeup and wig.” After a few years, he was dressing in drag 24 hours a day.
Life as a queen did have its low moments. Old pal Deborah Whitaker remembers an incident at a McDonald’s on North Avenue. She and Miss Tony were eating there after leaving a dance club when a group of teen-age boys walked in. They started taunting Miss Tony, shouting out derogatory terms for gay men.
“It was bad,” says Whitaker. “They threw things at us.”
Miss Tony, never shy, put up a good front, threatening to go after the boys. “But he never would,” Whitaker says. “He would look hurt by what had happened.”
Friends and fans recall Boston drawing stares and laughter almost everywhere he went outside the clubs: in the mall, walking or driving down the street, even while working on the radio.
Randy Dennis, Miss Tony’s partner on 92Q before Frank Ski, recalls one particularly ugly incident a few years back. A well-known comedian had stopped by the station to promote his act. On the air, he began to make brutal fun of Miss Tony, describing her as the “Schlitz Malt Liquor Bull,” the huge, snorting, black bull on the drink’s label.
“Oh, my God, I thought Miss Tony was going to slap him,” says Dennis. “Miss Tony told him, ‘I will take these here nails off and whip your [butt].’ I told [the comedian] he was going to have to leave.”
Tony Boston tries to shrug off such memories. If those moments hurt him, he doesn’t like to show it. Instead, he gets quiet and, for a man who’s lived his life in a short skirt onstage, strangely shy. But he’ll admit, finally, that the taunts were one reason he decided that Miss Tony had to go.
Since that day last spring when Tony Boston marched into the Victory Center church to cast off Miss Tony, he has swathed himself in religion instead, looking to God as his deliverance from her wild life. Most of Sunday and evenings on Wednesdays he is in church. There, wearing a man’s suit and praising God, Boston says he feels at home.
It took him a while, though, to find a church to call home.
“A lot of churches I went to said they don’t want ‘faggots,’ ” he says.
Victory Center was different. Minister Tony Smith described the congregation on a recent Sunday this way: “We had homosexuals, six former lesbians, five major drug dealers and a pastor who said God changed them all.”
The church does not shy away from discussing Boston’s past. Smith himself brings it up from time to time to illustrate that Tony Boston is, in fact, a new man, one who has left behind the days when he didn’t “walk like a man.”
To some of his former friends, Boston is a traitor. He was a role model, they say, and he shouldn’t feel pressured into going straight.
But Boston says his decision was personal, not political. He says he has no religious agenda, doesn’t mean to pressure anyone else. In fact, he says, he has the same respect for the gay community as he has always had. It’s just no longer a life he wants to lead.
“I’m not saying the gay community is bad,” he says. “Those are the people who love me and remember me.”
And in or out of drag, Tony Boston wants you to remember him. While he has turned down the amps, he still loves the spotlight. One of his chief worries about putting Miss Tony to rest was what would happen to the recognition he’d enjoyed.
“In my mind, I was thinking, you are going to lose your fame and your fortune,” he says as he drives around Baltimore one afternoon. “[But] if people love me like they say they love me, then they will understand my change.”
It was never just about dressing up, he says; it was the attention it brought. The steady paycheck. The friends and respect. Most of all, it made people think about him, remember him. It didn’t matter if they loved or hated him, they knew about Miss Tony.
She may be gone now, but that craving is not.
As he wheels his car into the parking lot of the district courthouse on Wabash Avenue, Boston is seething. He’s in the middle of an identity crisis — this time not of his own making.
One of his brothers, already on the lam from the law, was stopped by a Baltimore police officer for running a red light. His name, he told the officer, was Tony Boston, and gave his brother’s old address. Court summonses began showing up there, but Boston knew nothing about the matter until his brother broke the news — two days before his license was to be revoked.
So here he is, forced to hash things out with the court clerks, who no doubt have heard every excuse in the book.
“I can’t believe the police didn’t know, as famous as I am,” Boston says, as a clerk looks over his case file. He looks off into the distance, not talking to anyone in particular, but wanting everyone within earshot to hear. “I can’t have people thinking that I am in court,” he complains. “It would be all over the news.”
He’s incredulous that a city cop couldn’t remember his name. “How many parties have I done and they have been there for security?”
Behind her glass partition, the clerk’s face begins to soften, and she nods her head in agreement. That’s all the confirmation Tony Boston needs. This woman knows who he is. If there was even a moment of doubt that she wouldn’t, he hadn’t shown it.
In short order, the problem is cleared up. Boston walks out smiling, happy to have the mix-up behind him.
“She asked me if I wanted to take out a warrant” on his brother, he says. “I told her to let it go.”
He pauses, then stands up straight, giddy with a sudden realization.
“Miss Tony,” he says, sounding just like her, full of attitude and dramatic flair, “would have escorted the police over to my brother’s house.”
At Victory Center, Tony Boston has gone from queen to king.
“I’m trying to encourage people to call him ‘King Tony,’ ” says Pastor Smith. “He has found his royalty and his place. He is king over himself.”
That’s what Boston keeps telling himself. But even with God, even with the Scriptures he can now quote, he knows that he alone has the power to stay the course. Every day, every hour, he has to choose to leave his old life behind.
Keeping Miss Tony bottled up is a struggle sometimes. It’s not so much the urge to dress as a woman again, he says. But men still catch his eye. His desire to be with them romantically hasn’t gone away, it’s simply lessened.
When he feels his resolve wane, he goes to his church, talks to his minister, gets away from the old crowd and prays for strength. And he says there’s even a woman he finds himself attracted to these days.
His rebirth has not come without other tests. Just last month, he suffered severe kidney failure, and now, three days a week for three-hour stints, he is on dialysis.
“As Miss Tony, I would have been depressed, but now I know that I have God and I don’t get down about it,” he says.
The bosses at 92Q are also testing his faith. Last April, Boston never told management at the radio station that he was retiring Miss Tony.
His contract was up for renewal earlier this month, yet no one at the station has talked to Boston about it. Consequently, he has been working without any security that his job at 92Q will be there in the morning.
Boston says that he is putting it all in God’s hands. Yet, it is clear that he is fed up with what he feels is disrespect for his talent by the bosses.
“This business is so shoddy and shady,” huffs Boston. “I’m the most popular person here. It will be their loss and my gain” if his contract is not renewed.
Boston points out proudly that the show is still No.1 in its slot, despite the departure of both Miss Tony and the popular Ski. (Since Miss Tony’s demise, listeners who call in and refer to him as her on the air are promptly and firmly corrected.) Station managers admit missing Miss Tony.
“I do miss her a little bit,” says 92Q program director Tom Calococci. “It’s hard to put a finger on it, but there definitely has been a difference.” As far as re-signing Boston, though, all Calococci will say is “it is still too early to tell.” says
Away from church, away from the studio, Boston doesn’t seem to have lost much of his fire, especially for music and dance. His Friday nights are still about after-hours clubs, singing, dancing and “getting the party started.” Just his act has changed, he says. No cursing or wild stuff, just good, clean fun. Get on his last nerve and he will still tell you what to do with yourself, just more politely than Miss Tony might have.
He will say, though, that to all the doubters out there — and there are many — to hell with you. This is the last reincarnation of Tony Boston. While he may struggle with his new life, he says, it’s less of a struggle to hold on to his sanity and his happiness than when he was Miss Tony 24 hours a day.
They are strong, confident words, the kind he spoke that day last April when he stood before the folks at Victory Center and declared Miss Tony had had her last dance.
But that was the public Tony Boston. Jermaine Boston, his 26-year-old brother and closest confidant, saw another Tony that day as he watched him sort through the dresses and skirts he was preparing to throw away.
Each outfit had a story to tell. That wild Halloween night. The evenings he would sit on the steps, smoke weed and then go to the Underground Club, where it was anything goes. The days he would go dressed to the nines to the courts on Greenmount Avenue to watch the guys play basketball.
Tony looked up at his brother. “I’ve done so many things in my life,” he told Jermaine. “I’m grateful I have a second chance.”
In another hour or so, he would be full of fire and flair, standing over the clothes in front of the cheering congregation. But now, in front of his brother, he was shaky, crying and mourning the loss of an old friend.
Anthony Boston, 36, ministry worker, DJ
Baltimore Sun - 4/16/2003
Anthony M. Boston, a former WERQ-FM disc jockey whose irreverent portrayal of the drag queen “Miss Tony” became a fixture in Baltimore nightclubs for more than a decade, died of kidney failure Friday at Maryland General Hospital. He was 36 and a longtime Woodlawn resident.
Mr. Boston – who abandoned the role late in his life and worked to help the needy – was born in Baltimore, raised in the Sandtown-Winchester neighborhood and a 1985 Harbor City Learning Center graduate.
“As a kid, he was singing and dancing all the time. He even took dancing lessons,” said a brother, Jermaine A. Boston of Baltimore.
In the mid-1980s, Mr. Boston, who acknowledged being gay, began dressing as Miss Tony.
“But make no mistake, says Tony Boston. Miss Tony was a man, and there was never any plan to change that fact,” according to an article on him in The Sun in 1999. “Miss Tony was an all-out, unrepentant drag queen, a man who admired women and their ways and strove to be a souped-up, extra-feminine version of them.”
With an over-the-top wardrobe and fancy coiffure, Miss Tony quickly became something of a cult figure and a favorite in city nightspots.
“Nearly everyone in Baltimore knew this woman, or at least had heard of her. She could walk into a room, all brassy, sassy 350-plus pounds of her, and bring you to your feet, singing, dancing, laughing. Or to your knees with a stabbing glare,” the article said.
Mr. Boston was working as a security guard for the city housing authority and as a master of ceremonies for parties when Frank Ski, a personality at the station known as 92-Q, heard him sing at the Shake and Bake Family Fun Center on Pennsylvania Avenue.
“He listened to her do a few songs and then hired her. That’s how it started,” Jermaine Boston said.
Hired as an entertainment reporter for WERQ in 1994, Mr. Boston later became half of the station’s morning team – first with Randy Dennis, and later alongside Mr. Ski.
“By night, she was a glitzy after-hours nightclub diva; by day, a raspy-voiced early-morning disc jockey for Baltimore’s most-listened-to radio station,” said The Sun article, published a few months before Mr. Boston was fired from the morning show. He continued working part time at the station, however, as host of the late-night show Off the Hook Radio.
However, the fast life – years of drinks and drugs, he told The Sun – was beginning to catch up with Mr. Boston. He suffered kidney failure in 1999, which required him to have dialysis treatments three times a week.
Despite all of the celebrity and fame that Miss Tony had brought him, Mr. Boston chose to shed the persona that had gripped his life for 12 years.
In 1998, he walked into Victory Center, a nondenominational Northeast Baltimore church. He was carrying several bags of shoes and dresses that he had worn as Miss Tony and had come to renounce the character before the church congregation.
“Miss Tony was a person he lived 24 hours a day,” Jermaine Boston said. “It’ll be five years ago this Easter Sunday that he stopped living as Miss Tony and became Anthony Boston again. It was a lifestyle that was over.”
Until his death, Mr. Boston worked in the church’s outreach ministry assisting the needy.
“The life he lived the last five years can’t compare with the previous 31. They were the most peaceful and rewarding of his life. He lived as a man for the remainder of his days,” his brother said.
A memorial service will be held at 7 p.m. Friday and the funeral at 10 a.m. Saturday, both at Higher Dimensions Christian Center at the Palladium, 2900 Liberty Heights Ave.
Mr. Boston also is survived by three other brothers, Philip Boston of California, and Reginald Little and Kevin Boston, both of Baltimore; three sisters, Shirl Boston, Roslyn Boston and Sharana Boston, all of Baltimore; and many nieces and nephews.
Miss Tony Stands Alone
By Brandon Soderbeg - 06/10/14
Gravel-voiced, with the thickest of Baltimore accents,
the six-foot-tall, 350-pound, dress-wearing, bouffant-sporting Miss Tony couldn’t help but stand out.
Radio personality Frank Ski recalls his first encounter with the club vocalist, local radio personality, frequent live performer, and man of God who passed away in 2003, then a young club kid named Tony Boston. It happened at famed Baltimore nightclub Odell’s in 1989 or 1990.
“I saw this guy kind of like strut and open up the dance floor and vogue down the middle of the dance floor,” says Ski, who would go on to work with Tony in clubs, on records, and on the radio. He still sounds a little shocked when he talks about it. “It was this big guy, who was gay at a hip-hop party. Understand what I’m saying?”
Between 1992 and 1994, Miss Tony recorded a handful of provocative club tracks, mostly under Ski’s wing, and boosted by the success of the Ski-produced 1991 single “Doo Doo Brown,” by 2 Hyped Brothers & A Dog. Two of these post-“Doo Doo” Tony songs, “Tony’s Bitch Track,” and “Get Ya Guns Out,” were ubiquitous local hits that helped birth the sound of Baltimore club.
“Frank and Tony started doing these tracks,” says Teddy Douglas of house heroes the Basement Boys, best known for Crystal Waters’ “100% Pure Love,” and a close friend of Tony’s. “That really started the whole thing—that Baltimore club sound.”
It is no surprise that Baltimore club, with its origins in house music is deeply tied to gay culture. But the extent to which Miss Tony put his stamp on the city’s dance scene is all-encompassing: He was there for the genesis of Bmore club, recording harder-edged house tracks that would dominate the club and the streets and hosting parties in most of those same clubs. By 1994, Tony was a personality on Baltimore’s 92Q (he would work there until 1999), disseminating mainstream hip-hop and R&B to the average, non-clubbing Baltimorean.
The first song Frank Ski and Miss Tony did together features
Tony at his most brash. “Tony’s Bitch Track” from 1992, contains bumping house synthesizers over which Tony unabashedly chants, “Bitch I’ll take your boyfriend, bitch I’ll take your man.” In between, “the infamous Miss Tony,” as he introduces himself, gives advice to dudes on the dance floor (they need to wash their sweaty balls if they plan on taking any women home), boasts that he has a “PhD in dickology,” and wanders into routines cribbed from his raucous, off-the-cuff emcee performances, including, “Ooh bitch that ain’t fair, give that horsey back his hair”—something he would yell out when he saw clubbers with questionable weaves.
It’s a riot, but there is also a seriousness to “Tony’s Bitch Track” that extends beyond Bmore club’s built-in ability to facilitate catharsis through dance. Late in the song, Tony huskily croons, “Understand, understand I’m a man.” He’s being boldly sincere here, parsing, for those who don’t understand, the complexities that exist between gender binaries (important because often, Tony was referred to as a transvestite or transgender, which is inaccurate) and then admits, “But sometimes I feel like a woman.” And because he’s also an entertainer, and arguably, even a comedian, Tony tags it with a hilarious dozens-style zinger, “And if you don’t believe me, ask your father.”
For Deco Records, Frank Ski’s label, “Tony’s Bitch Track” was an incredibly daring follow-up single to “Doo Doo Brown,” a minor national hit. Even more impressive is its lesser known 1993 sequel, “Bitch Track II – Yes!” Its hook goes, “Yes I am gay, no I’m not ashamed,” and in between, Tony explains that “the word gay in the ’90s doesn’t mean you’re happy and free, it means that you are exactly what you are.” Then, he laughs off the then fervid “Don’t ask, don’t tell” controversy about gays in the military by telling the military to “kiss [his] ass.”
“[“Bitch Track II – Yes!”] was probably going to be the biggest record I ever made,” Ski says, with a tinge of regret in his voice. There was interest from Luther Campbell of the then-controversy-stoking 2 Live Crew to put it out via Luke Records and there were even plans to shoot a video, but it never quite came together.
“[Tony] wanted that to be a big record,” says Diamond K, a producer and DJ who worked with Tony and Ski and was one of Tony’s closest friends, working with Tony on the last tracks he would record. “But it was too bold of a statement.”
Ultimately, “Bitch Track II – Yes!” was stuck on the third volume of a series of EPs called “Frank Ski’s Club Trax” which hosted a more nationally-oriented remix of Tony’s second recording, 1993’s “Get Ya Guns Out,” retitled “Pull Ya Gunz Out.”
The origins of “Get Ya Guns Out,” Tony’s most well-known track, reveal how Tony, an impulsive and improvisational performer put together a song. He created hooks by grabbing chants he’d heard, or used himself, in the club and bringing it into the studio. With “Guns,” the chant originated via a group of street dudes posted up at the nightclub Facade’s on Reisterstown Road chanting, “Pull your guns out, pow!” The chant caught Ski’s ear. “They were protecting their turf,” Ski explains, “It was part of the drug culture.” Ski and Tony decided to turn it into a single as soon as possible.
The result is a hopped-up track with Tony shouting out different neighborhoods (“Cherry Hill, get your guns out”) while Ski juggles electro sounds and hip-hop scratches, Tony screaming with ecstasy to each adjustment to the beat. When a gurgle of bass moves through the track, Tony playfully riffs on Stephanie Mills’ 1980 classic, “Never Knew Love Like This Before” and sings, “because I never felt bass like that before.”
There’s a scene in David Simon’s book
The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood
, that describes members of the Crenshaw Mafia Brothers gang (C.M.B) listening to “Get Ya Guns Out” on cassette. Simon calls Tony’s song “a rollicking seven minutes of audio dissonance with lyrics that amount to a listing of bad ass drugs corners and housing projects followed by a shouted one-line chorus,” and describes the C.M.B jumping around with excitement over the song. “Mount and Fayette, spoken like it was a place that mattered,” Simon bleakly observes.
Simon isn’t necessarily incorrect there, but “Get Ya Guns Out” speaks to the power and brilliance of Miss Tony’s neighborhood-nodding party music. Indeed, by howling out the names of these places on a track, he made them “matter.” Those shout-outs are on record forever. In the club however, Tony was less generous with shout-outs, according to Diamond K. To hear your friend or corner screamed out by Tony in the club, you had to pay him: “He wouldn’t do it unless you paid him. He would walk away with hundreds of dollars a night just from that!”
Another one of Tony’s biggest tracks, 1994’s “Whatzup? Whatzup?,” produced by the Underground Trak Team—the duo of Scottie B and Shawn Caesar)—also helped immortalize local flavor. On the track, over a skeletal, shuffling beat, you hear Tony ordering Scottie and Shawn to add and remove sounds to the production, collectively referring to the two as “Unruly.”
“He just started saying ‘Unruly’ like it was a person or a group,” Scottie B remembers proudly. “Unruly was already our name but not in that context, so Tony put it out there and it got radio play.” And so, it was Miss Tony who assisted in branding Scottie and Shawn’s Unruly Records, the label that would become the most significant in Baltimore club history—the Def Jam of Bmore club. It’s but one more way that Tony’s influence on Baltimore club history extends beyond his recordings.
Scottie B also pulls back the curtain on Tony’s unpredictable style of recording: “You know, everything’s mathematical [when you’re recording], in fours and eights and sixteens. And you would try to teach him, but he would just say whatever.” Saying whatever, of course, was what made Tony’s personality so compelling. His disregard for rules and expectations continued even when he started operating within the fairly mainstream world of radio.
In 1994, Miss Tony joined Randy Dennis’ morning show on 92Q, arriving “in full drag every day.” Dennis goes back to one specific moment on the show that involved goading callers to reveal secrets on the air. Dennis, a consummate professional, baited the audience by contriving something or other about being “afraid of the dark.” When it was Tony’s turn to reveal a secret, he dropped a truth bomb, live on the air: “I can’t believe I let those twins ride me like they did,” he confessed. “Tony was raw,” Dennis says with a laugh.
“Tony would add a level of ghetto to the show that was hilarious,” declares Ski, who came over to 92Q from V103 in 1996, turning the recording duo into part of the new morning show. Ski’s show increased Tony’s profile significantly. This gay underground personality was suddenly as well-known to Baltimoreans driving to work in the morning as he was to those who frequented spots like Odell’s, Club Fantasy, the Paradox, and Hammerjack’s in the early ’90s.
A few other tracks were recorded during the years surrounding Tony’s radio tenure: “E-A E-A,” “East Side, West Side,” and additional vocals on “Get the Fuck Out” all with Kenny B from 1993; and house-tinged anthem “Release Yourself (Tired of Being Under Pressure)” from 1996, and “Do You Wanna Dance?,” from 1998 according to local music encyclopedia
Baltimore Sounds
, both with Ernesto Hines of gospel house crew, Mass Order.
But radio and live MCing dominated Tony’s time for the rest of the ’90s. When Ski left 92Q in 1998 to go to Atlanta, Tony had no interest in leaving Baltimore. He stuck around on 92Q’s new morning show, and for a little while, hosted an evening show, “Off the Hook.”
In April 1999, after a year or so of significant turmoil, 92Q let Tony go. The previous year, Tony Boston renounced the Miss Tony character at Victory Center church in Northeast Baltimore, dubbed himself Big Tony, and became saved. In December of 1998, he suffered kidney failure, which left him on dialysis for the rest of his life. Around this time, his mother passed away as well.
“Big Tony wasn’t as much fun as Miss Tony,” Teddy Douglas quips. “The bouffant and all that was gone, and the character was still there, but it was watered down.” Tony didn’t talk explicitly about being gay anymore, even in private, and stopped dressing like a woman altogether. And although Tony would publicly renounce the Miss Tony character and his homosexuality, Diamond K makes it clear that though Tony was indeed saved and attended church heavily, he remained a gay man.
“I’m gonna speak truth and everybody doesn’t like truth,” Diamond K admits, “He didn’t stop being gay. You can’t pray the gay away. What he did do was he stopped being a gay character.”
In part, Tony’s removal from 92Q was the result of shifts in formatting, but the increased corporatization of urban radio thanks to the massive mainstream success of hip-hop by the late ’90s surely made it harder for Tony to have a career and maintain the Miss Tony character.
However, a 1999
Baltimore Sun
article that details the Big Tony switch—and reads more like a press release announcing the arrival of Big Tony than a proper piece of journalism—quotes Tom Calococci, 92Q’s program director at the time, who expressed his slight disappointment with Tony’s change (apparently, Tony didn’t inform his radio employers about his plans to retire Miss Tony). “I do miss [Miss Tony] a little bit,” Calococci told
Sun
reporter Robert Guy Matthews.
And therein lies a devastating paradox for a bold public personality like Tony: By being himself, he was able to attain stature and success, and yet at the same time, by bucking the mainstream, that self intimidated the powers the be. He had to change but when he did change, people weren’t interested in him anymore.
Tony’s close friends maintain that the stigma of Miss Tony was a primary motivating factor in creating Big Tony. “It was totally obvious that you’d get a lot further if you weren’t Miss Tony,” Teddy Douglas says matter-of-factly. “The radio did play a bit in that,” Diamond K concurs, “[Miss Tony] was too much for radio.”
In Tony’s final years, he recorded a few songs with Diamond K that were released on 2002’s
Master of Ceremonies
, packaged with Tony’s early ’90s hits. “Living In The Alley” became a local hit, and other
Master of Ceremonies
songs, such as the pentecostal “Scream & Shout” and pulsing, declarative, “I Stand Alone,” afford Tony’s work a more defiant and spiritual element.
On these later tracks, Tony’s voice is a little worse for wear, and the knowledge that he would pass just one year after these recordings were released gives them a devastating quality. But they also make clear that Tony knew how to merge spiritual sentimentality with the visceral immediacy of club music, delivering on the passionate promise of self-help hooks of “Bitch Track II – Yes!” and “Release Yourself (Tired of Being Under Pressure).”
“I listened to [
Master of Ceremonies
] a thousand fuckin’ times,” exclaims gay rap-club fusionist Abdu Ali, who cites Tony as a major influence. Like most kids in Baltimore, Abdu grew up hearing Tony at teen-oriented club parties and on the radio, but he returned to Tony’s music when he began rapping and realized the “artistry” behind Tony’s records. They showed Abdu a way to be profound without indulging the preachy “conscious” side of hip-hop. “
At 2012’s Baltimore Gay Pride Festival, rapper DDm, who came out of the closet in 2011, more than half-a-decade into his career, performed an extended tribute to Tony based around “Tony’s Bitch Track” and “Get Ya Guns Out,” and his own song, “Fake Girls” (also produced by Schwarz). DDm paired his Tony tribute with a homage to the Notorious B.I.G., moving Tony’s influence beyond being an empowering queer role model and towards positive body image as well. Like Biggie, Tony is an inspiration “when you’re plus-sized,” DDm says, “and not conventionally handsome, so to speak.”
Last year, composer Ruby Fulton’s “The Way of the Mob,” a jazzy, classically-orienated investigation of the Baltimore Bank Riots of 1835 based its percussive elements on Tony’s music, connecting Miss Tony’s revolutionary spirit to a significant moment in Baltimore’s history when the marginalized stood up and fought their oppressors.
Miss Tony’s curious resurrection extends beyond musical homage, as well. Throughout 2012 and 2013, street artist Sorta created and wheatpasted images of Miss Tony with the text: “Miss Tony said, ‘How you wanna carry it? What’s up, what’s up” (the hook to 1994’s “Whatzup? Whatzup?”), on walls and abandoned buildings, answering Baltimore’s urban blight with Tony’s big smile and brash personality. “There’s so many people out there who feel a certain way about the lifestyle [Tony] lived,” Sorta writes via Facebook. “So I wanted to put it in their face.”
Tony’s expansive influence would have been remarkable for anybody, let alone a gay, cross-dressing man performing during the 1990s. He was there for the inception of club music, became one of its key players, and on top of that, helped brand Unruly Records. On the radio, he delivered rap and R&B hits,
and as David Simon’s
The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood
illustrates, soundtracked the daily lives of some of the city’s most dangerous criminals.
“Tony was just being himself,” Teddy Douglas says. “His influence was necessary for the next generation, but he wasn’t thinking ‘I’m ahead of my time.’ That was just him, 24-7.”¿