Jinkx & DeLa take on the billionaire Scrooges trying to erase queer joy: “You can’t break us!”

This month, Jinkx Monsoon and BenDeLaCreme kick off the latest version of The Jinkx & DeLa Holiday Show tour, our favorite seasonal tradition that, for nine years now, has helped make our yuletide extra gay.

And these drag icons know well that a good tradition is hard to come by. For many queer people, being “home for the holidays” isn’t always the holly-jolliest of options, so they created the show as a means of carving out a safe space for us to come together in community and laugh our honey-baked hams off.

This year’s sparkling spectacle takes aim at the increasing corporatization of nearly everything around us, with even The Jinkx & DeLa Holiday Show falling into the hands of big business—namely of CEO Ebenezer Scrooge who will point to the The Christmas Carol as proof that he’s a reformed do-gooder even as he slyly attempts to sap the queer joy from the very production.

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For Jinkx & DeLa, satirizing the billionaire class was a no-brainer, especially as the entertainment industry itself becomes consolidated under the purview of a handful of ultra-wealthy white guys who, even when they pretend to care about diversity & inclusion, are often only focused on making themselves even richer. Their hope is that they’ve once again created a show that doesn’t ignore the dark realities of our world today while providing the light we need to guide us into the year ahead with queer cheer.

After previews last week, the show begins its official run today, so we called up Jinkx & DeLa to tease what’s in store and so much more. In our conversation, the dynamic duo discusses how DeLa adapted their madcap magic to the page for their fist-ever book How The Queens Made Christmas, what Jinkx has learned from playing two iconic cabaret stars on stage (Judy Garland and Mary Todd-Lincoln, naturally!), and what inspires them both to keep fighting the good fight.

You can watch our conversation with the Jinkx Monsoon & BenDeLaCreme above, or read our interview below.

QUEERTY: It’s such a gift to have a gift The Jinkx & Dela Holiday Show back, and it reminds me what a gift it is to be able to have tradition in general! I think, as the world becomes a scarier place, especially as our community has seen continued attacks on our rights, the mere idea that we can rely on something like this show, year after year, to bring us joy is… well, it’s a Christmas miracle!

JINKX MONSOON: Queer people have always made traditions, we’ve just often had to do it in the shadows. It’s been this renaissance where we’ve stepped into the light as queer performers and as drag performers. And we’ve always had this cautious anxiety of, “When is the backlash going to happen?” And, you know what? It’s been happening, and yet here we are—because you can’t re-cork champagne; it goes bad! I’m sorry, I’ve tried!

BENDELACREME: The sort of mission to create this tradition has always been in there, to a degree, but when we started this project, we didn’t know what it was going to be. We didn’t know how people were going to respond. The first year was an experiment—it wasn’t the necessarily the beginning of something. It was like, “Will this work?” And it did, and it’s grown into a tradition. Yes, we’re the ones on stage, but it’s grown into a tradition because people have made it their tradition to return over and over again.

There’s a lot of major themes to this year’s show, but one of them is coming back around to us all remembering and reconnecting with the fact that we do all actually have the power to create this. It’s actually not Jinkx and I at the helm—it’s actually something that exists everywhere, and at any point somebody can can create community and tradition in whatever way. These are all things that we do to connect and to remind ourselves that we are all here together, which is increasingly hard in a world that wants to divide us through technology very intentionally. So it’s really been an honor for Jinkx and I to sort of be the figureheads of something that is much larger than either of us.

In that train of thinking, you two are conduits of holiday magic, of this queer festive spirit that we do all possess, but which can feel a little difficult to tap into at times. So thank you so much for doing this again for nine years running! I don’t want to spoil that magic for anyone, but can you tease a little bit of what’s in store for the show this year? What’s inspired you this time around?

DELA: Every year the show is very reflective of the world that we’re living in, and every year that can be more difficult to find an irreverent approach to. But one of the things that we really value is that our mission is always for people to come out of it feeling a sense of catharsis—we’ve given them a little relief, a moment of respite, while also acknowledging that stuff is hard.

We’ve had to tackle politics and AI and all these other things in past years. And this year, it is very much about the billionaire class, it’s about corporatization; The Jinkx & DeLa Holiday Show is being taken over by a corporation this year, and Jink & DeLa have to figure out how to navigate that. But, of course, because we always have to put it through our holiday meat grinder, this particular corporation, Ebenezer Scrooge is the CEO, and we discover that The Christmas Carol was an entire PR stunt—he’s not reformed at all. And so Jinkx & DeLa have to figure out how to continue to bring the authenticity and the queerness to the stage while fending off this overlord.

So we get to find fun ways to touch on the dark stuff, but we also get to honor sad things that have happened, and beautiful lives. This year we lost many people, but particularly two queer icons very close to each other, so this year we get to celebrate Dolly Parton and Tim Curry through our musical choices. So it’s a wonderful catharsis and a chance to like find the joy in all of it.

JINKX: It’s not that the fan base influences what goes into the show—but it is satisfying when we bring something into the show that we know that the audience has been clamoring for. And, some years ago, I performed a now-famous rendition of “Santa Baby” with ridiculously filthy lyrics and choreography. It was called “Krampus Daddy”, and it started an internet cult obsession with the Jinkx & Dela sexy Krampus.

So… I’m not spoiling anything other than saying that if you come expecting Sexy Krampus, you shall not be disappointed! And it was one of my ideas that I brought up year after year—finding a way to incorporate Sexy Krampus. But it was never necessary. So it’s always nice when Krampus makes a return to the Jinkx & Dela Holiday Tour.

And this year, the show arrives in tandem with your new book, DeLa—your first book!—How The Queens Made Christmas. Tell me about where the idea for the book came from?

DELA: Someone at Chronicle Books actually approached and was like, “some sort of Jinkx & DeLa project would be interesting,” and I immediately was like, “I want to do a picture book. I want it to look like a illustrated book for kids, but I want it to be for adults.” I mean, this is already the Jinkx & DeLa brand: we look colorful & crazy like a Hanna-Barbera cartoon, but really it’s wall-to-wall d*ck jokes, because that’s how we roll! And sentiment, of course.

So that was kind of the impetus. I have loved this form for a long time—my mom illustrated children’s books! And Jinkx, of course, has been taking the world’s stages by storm, so she really trusted me to to write the text of this book. But it was so easy to know how Jinkx & DeLa would navigate this because she and I have created a duo that is so distinct—we’ve been writing for each other for so long—that I know these gals inside & out.

JINKX: It’s akin to The Muppets or the MCU! [Laughs.] The universe is there, she has downloaded the Jinkx-ography. It’s kind of special that I get to be a character in a book that DeLa wrote because this is the only way I’d ever have it unless I was writing it myself. She’s literally the only other person I’d ever trust with “the Jinkx PI,” you know what I mean? [Laughs.] So it’s fun we’ve created this world together, and that she gets to express her filthy side through the Jinkx Monsoon avatar, because that’s what I created her for!

DELA: It did get me thinking back again to, “Why does Jinkx & DeLa’s world look like this?” I love it, but what’s it about at its root? And, in exploring that, it reconnected to me to things that I had known in the past, but had to come back around to.

The dedication of the book is actually to several kids—three who I knew when I was young, one who I never got to meet, who is my mom’s brother—who all took their own lives early because they were struggling with queer identity. And getting to reconnect with that, and reconnect with why we do the kind of work that we do—which is very much about queer people not getting to experience childhood in the same way that a lot of other people do. Some of us don’t make it out, but even those of us who do still deserve to get to experience that joy and that whimsy, and the silliness—the things that we just didn’t get to have without the weight of a lot of other stuff in the way.

So this book really became a fun, irreverent, colorful, joyous homage to our childhoods that we maybe only are getting to experience in adulthood. And to the childhoods that that never progress beyond that point, but who are part of our history and should be remembered.

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That’s so beautiful, and I’m so glad the book can live on as its own tradition now, too. A moment ago you mentioned how Jinkx has been storming the world’s stages, and it’s true that in the past year you’ve played two of the most iconic women of all time, Mary Todd-Lincoln in Oh, Mary! and Judy Garland in End Of The Rainbow. What would you say you’ve learned from the experience of playing them?

JINKX: I am so much a queer person, first and foremost. I feel like my queerness enters the room before I do. I’ve never had a choice but to be queer. No one’s ever seen me as anything else, you know? And so I’ve always been so focused on the queerness of it all that lately, as an actress, I’m really understanding differently that everything starts at the inequality between men and women and the genders at large.

Like, we are able to enforce homophobia because we still have such strict governances around how we express our gender. A big part of what keeps men acting the way that they do is the threat that they’ll be seen as gay. And then we equate feminine attributes with being gay, and there you’re enforcing gender politics as well as sexual identity norms—it’s all interwoven.

And every female role that I’ve played—either hypothetical or real—she’s dealt with limited agency. She’s dealt with trying to survive in a world that doesn’t give her a fair shot. And I find that that’s something that I can relate to as a queer person and as a trans woman. So I’ve gotten to play a wide breadth of characters by focusing on what’s true for all of us, and what’s true for all of us is we live in a world that was set up for very few people to succeed.

And, actually, with the corporate takeover of The Jinkx & DeLa Holiday Show, I think we’re looking at something that is not just a United States issue, but a global issue. And that is economic inequality. And something happening where billionaires want us to believe that they’re protecting our future by investing in AI—I mean, people have already crunched the numbers. People have already figured out that a couple of billionaires could fix all of the world’s issues without even scratching the surface of their wealth, so to speak.

And instead of any type of philanthropy, they’re pushing this agenda that we need to invest in their companies to protect our future when they have no interest in our present! So, how are we supposed to trust that they have any interest in our collective future? They have no interest in our collective present.

Right, and speaking of AI, there’s all this consolidation we’re seeing in the industry, which brings contraction, and with that, inevitably, some of the first things on the chopping block are those coming from queer voices. We’re invited in, then we’re the first ones tossed aside when suddenly it’s inconvenient. I mean, the fact that the BBC isn’t going to air Drag Race UK anymore comes to mind—

JINKX: We’ve seen it displayed in a lot of different ways. Think of how many black-centered holidays were taken off the federal holiday calendar, you know? I think the ease at which they are able to cast people aside should prove to us that we have to have each other’s interests in mind, because no one at the top has ours in mind—and they’re not even hiding it anymore. It’s pretty blatant! I think it sucks that people have to experience it for themselves before they’re able to get on board with change, and that’s sadly why this is ongoing. But the thing is: if you wait long enough, it will arrive at your front doorstep. And the longer you wait, the harder it’s going to be for us all to fight it.

I think queer people, women, people of color—we’re all shouting the same thing. And it’s going to take absolutely everyone getting on board and realizing that it’s not about us against each other; it’s about all of us versus the billionaires who could be solving world crises and choose not to—and at the same time ask us to trust that they will eventually. They’re adults, you know? If you have made it to this point in your life without learning empathy and compassion—unless three ghosts visit you on Christmas Eve—I don’t know what’s going to change your mind at this point. [Laughs.]

And thank you for tying it back into Christmas—

JINKX: Well, of course! That’s what I do mama hunty! [Laughs.]

DeLa, I’d love to hear how that resonates with you, but I guess I’m also curious what gives you hope right now, especially as you’re about to hit the road again with this show and connect with so many people?

DELA: So many of our current distractions are pointed at queer and trans folks, but obviously we are not the only communities currently on the chopping block. But I think the reasoning that these communities are come for first—and very publicly—is that we are meant to be the example. Because we are the ones who stick to our guns—to our identities, to our communities—the most unapologetically, the most visibly.

So the attacks on us are meant to show everyone else what happens if you step out of line, if you go against the cultural norms, if you break the rules. So we are meant to scare other people into conforming. But guess what? It always backfires! Because they’ve tried to do this a lot, and we’ve never gone away. So, what’s the lesson they’re actually going to teach? It’s that you can’t break us!

They only have the power that we believe they have based on their storytelling. And I think that the world is learning that more and more. I think we’re believing it more and more. I think we’re seeing the way in which rallying together and creating actual in-person community—rather than the fictional digital community that they’ve slowly and insidiously tried to progress us into thinking it’s there so that we are more separate.

They threw a lot of stuff at us very quickly, they are continuing to, but we are figuring it out as we go. Even if we maybe fall for some of it for a second, we move through that quickly because we are not stupid. None of us are! They are trying to target these communities as the examples of why not to do this, but we are actually the examples of why this doesn’t work.

The Jinkx & Dela Holiday Show is now touring across the country—you find find dates, tickets & more information right here.

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