When an interview starts with cabernet sauvignon and ends next to the toilet, it can only be a Friday night with RuPaul’s Drag Race season 5 champion, Jinkx Monsoon. Between her two improv cabaret performances at New York City’s Laurie Beechman Theatre, the tireless queen spared a few minutes for a sit-down with GayCalgary to discuss the RPDR Battle of the Seasons 2016 Extravaganza Tour, with comments on body shaming, Joan Rivers, and which drag queens should be shot.
"We never knew when we started doing drag that one day we’d be performing in huge concert venues and completely packing the place," says Monsoon of Battle of the Seasons, the epic drag variety show, and its unexpected success over the past three years. "Each year it gets a little bit bigger, and the audiences come out in droves to see each of us perform our specific talents. It is really amazing for us!"
It’s a golden age for drag queens, who have found themselves exploding onto the mainstream entertainment scene due, in no small part, to the reality TV contest that Monsoon won in 2013. However, like all queens who aren’t new to the game, Monsoon remembers a time when drag love wasn’t the norm.
"People are really starting to respect the art form of drag in a way they haven’t before, and that goes particularly for our gay audience, too. I have been doing drag for 14 years and, when I started, there was definitely a negative stigma around being a drag queen that I don’t think exists in the same capacity today. Now even the butchest, most straight acting guy will watch Drag Race and snap his fingers at the TV, you know?!"
With success comes demand, especially for a queen crowned ‘America’s next drag superstar’ and, even four years after filming, Monsoon is not wasting the opportunities that are presented to her.
"Drag Race took what I used to do one day a week for a little extra cash and turned it into my career, and that’s what I’m so thankful for. I still do legitimate acting in plays and stuff, but whenever I don’t have a big-time project to worry about I get to create my own work, and slap a wig and a dress on, and bring new material anywhere that’ll take me. Or old material to be rehashed in new places!"
On top of touring the world with Battle of the Seasons, guest appearances as an RPDR winner, performing her one-woman cabaret, and building her YouTube channel, Monsoon performs as her other, lesser-known characters when she can squeeze them in.
"I love being busy and I love creating new work, and I got into drag to do exactly what I’m doing. The Vaudevillians features my character Kitty Witless, who only exists in that show. I also have a Southern medium character (I haven’t done her in awhile), and every year in Provincetown I do these shows as Aunt Cassiopeia. She’s Jinkx’s great aunt and she’s basically my rip-off of Bette Davis – but with orange hair."
She is mega busy – as a star should be – but she has felt the price of fame very personally.
"The higher they put you on that pedestal, the more people there are watching to see how you’ll fall," she lamented during her performance earlier that night.
When I asked her to elaborate afterward, and why, specifically, she fires back so regularly on Twitter about her weight (even Michelle Visage recently tweeted, in support, "WHY THE HELL DO YOU FEEL THE NEED TO DO THIS, JINKXY? YOU ARE PERFECTION") she explained:
"It’s something that I didn’t used to do. I feel a certain freedom now that I’m not the current reigning drag race superstar. If people have the right to give their stupid horrible opinions, then I absolutely have the right to answer them. I try not to get in fights with anyone, and there have been plenty of times where I had a little back and forth argument with people, but it always ended with both of us at least agreeing to disagree. But lately there have been a lot of comments about me gaining weight. In the drag community, there is absolutely no room for body shaming. The whole point of drag is taking whatever you are – whatever you have going on – and creating the most fully glamorized, fully realized version of it.
"We celebrate plus-size drag queens, but we demonize skinny queens who put on weight, which is not okay. If you’re gonna celebrate plus-size drag queens, you have to celebrate all queens of all weights; whether they are skinny, plus-size, or skinny and become plus-size. It happened to Joslyn Fox, it happened to Adore Delano, it happened to me. It’s absolutely 100 per cent unacceptable. Body shaming has no place in the world of drag."
Taking on another hot button issue in the drag universe, Monsoon is equally outspoken about the relationship between drag and the trans community, and does not personally identify as cisgender herself (I refer to her in this article with the female pronouns in reference to her drag character).
"I think it was about two years ago that there were a lot of publicized issues around the word ‘tranny’, and drag queens using the word specifically. There was a lot of hate toward drag queens because there was this assumption that every drag queen is cisgender when out of drag. People were saying drag queens don’t get to have an opinion on trans issues because they’re not trans.
"They are assuming every drag queen is cisgender out of drag, and that’s just not true. There are lots of trans women who still participate in the drag world. Even though they have transitioned, they have roots in drag, and they have every right to remain drag queens if they want to. There are plenty of drag queens that don’t identify as cisgender, or male, out of drag. There’s no reason to believe that we don’t get an opinion.
"To be a drag queen you have to have one foot in the world of being trans. No drag queen is completely ignorant to trans issues, and if she is she might as well be tied up and shot to death. Because then it’s just her own fault and her own ignorance."
The icy fans are a very small minority in Jinkx’s world, where it’s perennially Monsoon season. A quick glance around her audience showed just how wide-ranging Monsoon’s reach is. In front of me, a hot-pink-wigged 14-year-old superfan whose Twitter is dedicated to the drag superstar (@femaleJinkx). Next to me, a gaggle of finger-snapping lesbians, and beyond them a gentleman too ‘overwhelmed’ by Monsoon’s starpower to "name any musical" during a moment of audience (non)participation. It’s no wonder her audience is a cross-section of society: her comedy crosses an almost paradoxical span of generations and tastes, as does her cabaret repertoire.
"I like musicals and rock. And especially rock musicals!".
Monsoon’s insane schedule is packed to the minute, and this night was no different. Just after ordering orecchiette to eat between her own shows, we quickly had to clear the theater for a different show to begin. Impossible to fluster, the queen famous for her self-assuring catchphrase, "water off a duck’s back", shrugged off the eviction, grabbed her glass of wine, and suggested we continue elsewhere.
"Let’s just finish this in the back on the toilet like we said we wouldn’t!" As we entered what amounted to a small closet with, indeed, a toilet in one corner, not unlike a miniature jail cell, Monsoon quipped, "welcome to my glamorous dressing room!" It was here that she revealed what she considered to be one of the coolest experiences she has had as a drag queen, and recalled a very special fan.
"When I first starting working at the Laurie Beechman, Joan Rivers’s show would start at 7pm on Tuesdays, and my show would start at 9:30, so that meant there was a half hour between her show and mine where I just got to say, ‘Hey Joan, how you doin’? How’d your show go tonight?’ And she’d be like ‘Oh, it was wonderful. But you know, I hate all the horrible people. You’re very funny so you keep working at it and someday you’ll hate everyone, too.’ That was amazing. She was such a legend and I got to share a theatre with her shortly before she passed.
"She watched my show one night and there was definitely a joke in there about her, because she was the earlier show and everyone knew she was doing it there weekly, so we could use that. The characters that we do in that show (The Vaudevillians) are characters that were frozen alive in the 1920s and just recently thawed out, so we had this joke, like ‘Oh, and we’re performing in such a prestigious venue with the likes of Joan Rivers! It’s so nice to see her again!’ When she came, I was so nervous about doing that joke, but I went through with it and she loved it. She was the first one to stand and clap the night she came to see it. I have gotten to meet so many people like that – people I never in my lifetime thought I would get to meet – and now I know them. That is really surreal to me."
Hosted by Michelle Visage and featuring queens from across the years, Battle of the Seasons tours worldwide and sashays through Calgary on June 17th.
