“I take my anger and I turn it into jokes, and I take my sadness and I turn it into music, and that’s how I survive.”
It’s an empowering declaration from “RuPaul’s Drag Queen” alum and Broadway star Jinkx Monsoon.
Monsoon and BenDeLaCreme are on the road for “The Jinkx and DeLa Holiday Show.” The pair have just checked into their Durham, N.C. hotel. This is the third night of the show which will take them through the Southern states before heading up North and over to the West Coast.
Opening night was Nov. 7, and there were a lot of tears and a 13-hour tech check, but the show still had to go on. BenDeLaCreme found solace performing in front of an audience. “That night, to be able to hear every gasp and every mouth being clutched because they’re seeing what they’re feeling on stage. It was a hugely rewarding experience,” BenDeLaCreme says.
Monsoon and BenDeLaCreme are sitting in their hotel room, speaking over Zoom. Says Monsoon, “I don’t know what the anger and the sadness would be doing to me right now if I didn’t have somewhere to channel it into and turn it into something that could have a positive effect.”
The two also spoke about the importance of queer art in these times and share details on their new holiday show.
It’s been a few days since the results, how are you feeling?
JINKX MONSOON: A little all over the place. My closest community members held me and I sobbed. That’s something I had because I’m a part of a supportive community. So I’ve been trying to focus on the positive aspects of things, and the fact that half the country does think we have the right to exist. It’s really disheartening thing to see that half of the country that you live in, or more than half voted for someone who stands for everything that we were taught is the opposite of American values. I was raised on this American cowboy idea that, even though America is flawed, our fundamental values are standing up for the little guy and and to try to help, and get our hands dirty. We’ve been fed this ideal image of what patriotism in America is, and what we witnessed was everyone saying racism, misogyny and phobia are more important to uphold. How do you wrap your mind around that?
According to AdImpact, the Republican Party spent close to $215 million on anti-trans network TV ads. What goes through your mind when you hear that amount?
MONSOON: Every time I hear this, I just think about the fact that this is exactly what Hitler and the Nazis did. They started with queer people in the 1930s in Germany. The queer artistic community was the test to see if this would work in taking power, and it did for them. And now, for these Nazis, they’re in our country, and they just took power, and they’re fascists, and that is terrifying.
BENDELACREME: It feels so cheap, and I feel so sad and angry that the American people can be that — this fear or this lack of understanding, or whatever it is. This hatred can be leveraged to distract from everything else. That it can be the cornerstone of a campaign is staggering. I think I’m going to have a lot more anger when I feel a little less exhausted, but I am seeing so many comments and things on social media about “queer people being so dramatic,” “nothing’s going to happen to you” or “the campaign doesn’t hate you. Trump doesn’t hate you. This is about the economy.” And sure, I also get that there are impoverished people who are worried about whether they can afford things, and that has been at the forefront of their minds, but the fact that somehow that can be so much the focus, that you can truly hear the number that you just talked being spent specifically to promote this ideology, and then you can be like, “But it’s not about that, it’s about this other stuff. You’re going to be fine. I voted for Trump, but I still love and support you.”
MONSOON: That number, how many people would that have helped? But no, it’s spent on ads to hurt people, and that’s just despicable. Like the one debate that happened, he didn’t even give any plans or policies. He just rambled about nothing. So honestly everyone who voted for him voted for him on these brand promises of the rich getting richer, and he’s going to fix the economy with no plan in place. He just shrugs and says, “I’m going to do it.” Ultimately, you use the Trojan horse of transphobia, misogyny and control over people’s lives as the way to get in there. That’s how you wanted to win, and that’s how the people who voted for him, they were okay with this?
I saw something that said not every person who votes for Trump is racist. I would like to say to every person who voted for Trump, you might not feel like a racist or a transphobe, but you said to everyone you share a world with that those things are not deal breakers for you. So now, when you look back on history and you look at the Nazis and those who supported them and those who did nothing if you voted for Trump, you can just know that you are one of those people. You did that to yourself. You in my book — and I’m not religious — those people are damned for eternity.
What would you say to Trans youth who are trying to find themselves in these times ahead?
BENDELACREME: What I often say to people and myself is that this is actually where the queer community has flourished. Queer folks, as artists and as community builders, have always actually blossomed the most under this type of duress.
Drag came out of necessity to create beauty and joy in spaces where people were not experiencing that. To create a sense of power and celebration, to make people who were never allowed to be themselves or express themselves, who lived in constant threat of violence. Drag queens were the people on stage speaking these truths. There’s this cultural importance to the way that drag queens would openly speak about sexual topics in these public spaces where it could not be spoken anywhere else, and it would give queer people who were afraid to give a voice to that, it would give them the ability to say, “Oh wow, I’m not alone in this.”
So there are these microcosm examples of the ways that drag queens have historically not been afraid to say something that is considered unsayable, and I feel like that is a really strong history to be a part of. That is a legacy I am honored to be a part of. I have a responsibility to get on stage and continue to say the things that we are being told not to say in other places. That is the power of artistry. This is our strength in these times.
I walked down the street the day after the election, and I found myself wanting to make eye contact with strangers on the street in solidarity of “Oh, this day is so dark,” and realizing I am afraid to make eye contact because I don’t know who’s who. But when we are in a theater space or performance space, we know that we can look everyone there in the eye because we are all on the same team. We are going to have fewer spaces like that where we know that we are all in solidarity. And so I think whether you’re in the audience or on stage, that is a very powerful thing.
MONSOON: With them in power, be ready for everything to be a lie, but art made by true artists can still be the truth, and art is how we survived in the past, and art is how we’ll survive it now. It’s how we’ll keep our community alive and carry on a legacy to tell the next community because they think that queerness is something that can be isolated and removed. It’s just a part of life. It’s just a part of humanity. You get rid of this generation of queer people, your kids are going to be queer, and then what are you going to do? Kill your kids? Jesus Christ. What a fucking dark world they’ve created.
It’s horrifying, the dystopian futures we’ve been warned about in our art, it’s happening. I don’t care if I sound dramatic, people who think I sound dramatic have never walked down the street afraid that someone might just attack them because of how they look. Someone who thinks we are being dramatic has never left their house thinking I might not come home today because someone doesn’t like me, and now there’s a president who tells them it’s OK not to like me.
BENDELACREME: Our country refuses to even acknowledge that what they’re doing to us is having this kind of effect on us, making people with common sense feel crazy, making bigots feel proud. Anyway, we have a holiday show, and I wouldn’t say that these topics are spoken of directly, but it’s just a part of life now. So it’s a part of our art, and our art is still very funny and still very entertaining and still very Christmassy and stupid, but it’s real, it’s truthful and it’s from our heart for your heart.
Opening night was two days ago. Talk about being in that space and, as you said, feeling the love. What was that like?
MONSOON: There is no more satisfying moment than to know that your jokes are landing, that the plot points are hitting, and they are going on every step of the journey with you. But on that night, to be able to hear every gasp and every mouth being clutched because they’re seeing what they’re feeling on stage. It was a hugely rewarding experience as an artist.
BENDELACREME: We speak very strongly in allegory, and we really worked hard this year to write a show. We knew that people were not going to want to talk about this. We need to give them the option to be distracted, to have a great time, to laugh, and we also need to give them the opportunity to feel some catharsis. We knew that either way, whatever world we were living in, the through-line message would still be true. We have had a very difficult time recently, and we have fought very, very hard, and there is still more fight, and we also have to take pride in the fight that we have fought, because that is how you continue. You have to stop and take stock of what you’ve accomplished and what you’ve done, whether you have, “failed or succeeded” because the fight is something to be proud of, and if you don’t reflect on it, if you don’t honor each other, and the fact that you see each other, you see that you have fought for me, I’ve been fighting for you, then what incentive is there to keep going if you don’t take that beat.
The morning of, we sat down, we wrote the new ending scene. We knew what it had to say, and we performed it for the audience that night, and it was so immediate. I feel so proud of us for being so truthful in that moment, and really just being like, this is what this is today, and this is how we are feeling. When we first revealed where we were going with this scene, we felt the audience dial in with us so tightly, and it was like it was it was incredible.
MONSOON: You could hear a pin drop. It’s so hard to get everyone in a room to focus on one thing,and just to know that, like in this one solitary moment, we were all just together in synchronicity. It was really beautiful.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
