My friend's in pain
and she's also being [beep] obnoxious. [laughs]
Hi, I'm Jinkx Monsoon,
and today we'll be looking back on some moments
that have shaped my career and my identity.
This is Becoming Jinkx Monsoon.
[Jinkx vocalizes]
This is me and my music partner, Major Scales,
and we're performing at the Balagan Theater
in a basem*nt under a cupcake shop.
And this was like our first gig right out of college.
We had been working on these characters in like,
nightlife and cabaret gigs and stuff,
and so this was like the first iteration
of what would later become a show of the same title,
but, you know, really just the tight version of that show,
which we ran for four months at the Laurie Beechman Theater
off Broadway in New York. [laughs]
So the idea for the show evolved
outta something we just used to do to make ourselves laugh.
We came up with the idea
of how to play young people from the 1920s, but today,
and the idea was, through a co*ke-fueled Antarctic mishap,
they were frozen alive.
Oh, they're absolutely queer-coded.
What's playing underneath
is that he's a repressed hom*osexual
and she's a very, very independent woman
who is being repressed by her husband,
and then eventually she gets fed up and she leaves him,
and then they kind of realize
that they love each other anyway,
and that they really do like what they do together
and they come back together,
and this is all over the top schmacting stupid,
like vaudeville, like, Oh, you came back to me, Kitty!
[Roxxxy] You got it. I'm so happy for you.
Oh, gosh. [laughs]
Oh gosh, oh gosh, oh gosh.
It was a really, really hard time.
Overnight notoriety is hard to trust.
Five years before this, I was already working up to this,
but at the time I was like,
it just felt like it was all happening overnight
all of a sudden.
And then my friend's in pain
and she's also being f*ckin' obnoxious. [laughs]
But I f*cking love her for it.
I actually loved her so much for doing that
because it took all the attention off of me
for a little bit.
And I was like really grateful for it at that moment,
and I was just like, I don't know what's going on,
boop-a-doop-a-doo, blah-blah-blah.
Sometimes I look at that moment,
I'm like, Bitch, you know? [laughs]
And she's actually, we've talked a lot about this moment.
She actually reached out to be like,
I'm so sorry I did this the night we found out you won.
And I'm like, I thought it was hilarious, one,
because earlier in the day,
she basically told me she was gonna do this.
She told me earlier in the day that she's like,
Jinkx, I love you, but I'm a really sore loser,
so when you win tonight,
I'm going to throw a temper tantrum,
but it has nothing to do with you.
So I knew it was coming, I wasn't surprised.
And later she's storming around the courtyard of this hotel
and everyone's kind of following her around
and trying to calm her down.
And she screams for the door of her hotel room to be opened
and I'm standing right next to it and I'm like, Oh, sh*t.
And she walks past me and right before she enters her room,
she looks at me and goes...
And then she goes in and the door shuts.
So this moment is a lot. It's a lot of things.
She's one of my best friends,
she was one of my best friends in that moment,
she was one of one of my best friends during.
Roxxxy's one of my best friends today, during, after,
before the three of us went through something
that only the three of us went through with each other.
Let's watch more clips.
Did you really think
I wasn't going to be able to track my own ship?
It was just such a cool thing.
It felt like such a moment of community.
Rebecca meets me and somewhere in the day,
tells me that they basically knew my love of the show
and my interest in voice acting for them from day one.
Rebecca essentially said that the thought had come
years before the invitation
just to keep it secret and special.
And they were waiting for a character for me to voice.
So I already felt very welcomed and very trusted.
Rebecca told me, There are no bad gems,
just gems that haven't learned how to be good yet.
Oh, my God, I can't start crying again.
That that stayed with me.
Okay.
My journey getting to this point
was a lot of thinking about it.
And for me, it involved therapy and psychiatry
and I had a close inner circle who were still there with me.
You know, even after the harder years.
And they weren't even telling me,
We think you should quit drinking,
things were going pretty all right.
There was just a thought in my head where I was like,
You got things going well again,
I had a great new show with Major,
I had a great new show with BenDeLaCreme,
the holiday show, which still exists,
and it was like, If you wanna get serious,
let's remove the obstacles and get serious,
and this was a big obstacle.
My deal with myself was, I wasn't gonna post about it
until I had hit a year.
Because I had tried a couple times before
and I just knew when I quit this time
that this was the time.
The app was such a helpful tool.
The app is called I Am Sober
and it's just been keeping track for me.
It's been so helpful because it's like building up points
in a video game.
If I have a drink, I lose all my points [laughs]
and I like my points.
Let's move on down to Judy Garland.
Chris Hemsworth-
Chris Hemsworth.
His blank is bigger. We're looking for hammer.
Broom, I don't know if I'm-
Broom!
I don't think I'm-
That was me doing Judy Garland on the Snatch game.
My hugest thank you
goes to Thirsty Burlington in Provincetown.
I wouldn't say that we do the same Judy Garland,
but she taught me what was cool
about a Judy Garland impression.
She showed me what would be fun to do about Judy.
And from that moment on, I like,
was developing a Judy impersonation for years
just kind of by myself
in the dressing room with friends and-
By myself with friends.
I knew that it was gonna be good, right?
I didn't know people were gonna respond to it
the way they did.
On the day on set, I was feeling like,
This is going really well, right?
And I used my, Just in case it's going well,
I'm gonna do these jokes, jokes.
So I was feeling good about it,
but you never know with anything, really.
Tips for impersonating someone is zero in
on what you love about that person
and what you can see other people love about that person
and that's what we wanna see in your impersonation.
It's like, yes, we want it to be funny,
but that has to start with like what's authentic.
♪ Reciprocity ♪
There's nothing I could say
that you couldn't probably guess.
I'm playing Mama Morton in Chicago on Broadway.
It's not only
that I get to be in Chicago on Broadway,
which is a show that I love,
doing something I always wanted to do,
but I get to play Mama Morton,
who is definitely queer-coded.
And it was like from the audition on,
I knew I wanted to bring queer coding
to my performance of her.
I don't often feel like leaving an audition
where I'm like...
But that was one of those auditions. I really-
I left there feeling like, This might happen.
And I auditioned with that character.
It's a developed and informed version
of what I auditioned with,
but that's essentially what I auditioned with.
I mean, it took me how long?
I probably knew I wanted to transition my whole life.
I think I knew my whole life,
it just took until I felt ready
and until I knew the way I was gonna do it.
And once I knew, then I was like, Okay, let's do this.
I feel so fortunate that it's been a positive experience.
It's like something that everyone close to me
has just always known about me.
I've been very slow and methodical
about how I wanna go about pursuing my truth.
Now, in retrospect, some of it's like,
I had the most supportive family,
I grew up in a place where it was possible
to transition from an early age.
It takes a while to figure out
how to arrive where you always...
Saw yourself?
And so it's taken this long to really know
exactly what to do to be me
and I'm feel really lucky
that it's happening at a point in my life
where I feel really grounded
and like I'm taking good care of myself.
I'm fully aware
that I am a very, very lucky, fortunate person,
but I hear from people every day that like,
being outspoken about who I am and how I arrived here
helps them because they just know there's a path to take,
there's a route to take.
Even though I haven't talked about it as much
because it wasn't like the first,
but it's very much a full circle moment
with Little Shop of Horrors, as well.
It's like the musical everyone in my family loves,
and now I'm playing Audrey
in this really, really incredible production of it.
It's at the West Side Theater on 43rd, if you're-
I am sure it's still running whenever you're watching this,
even if I'm not in it, go see it.
It's just the best.
It feels amazing because I'm playing a female lead
and I don't-
I never thought, you know,
a big production would ever call me
and offer me the female lead in anything,
let alone one of my favorite shows,
so it's been very fun.
This is Me as Maestro in Doctor Who.
Russell T Davies had this character conceived already
then came to see me in my show, Together Again, Again,
which is a show I do with Major Scales.
All these years later, we still put on shows together.
Russell came to see us on our UK tour in Manchester
and saw me portraying myself my eighties
and said, I think there's something about Jinkx
and this Maestro character, and then from that point on
was imagining me playing this role.
Again, on set with these incredible people
in this wonderful production,
I knew we were creating something really special
and something really magical.
I love the show Doctor Who,
I don't know if I'm contractually allowed to say this,
but yes, this is the queerest season of Doctor Who.
I've watched many seasons, I'm such a fan of Russell,
I'm such a fan of Ncuti, Millie,
they were so wonderful to work with.
Ben, the director.
I'm such a fan of the show Chicago,
I'm such a fan of the show Little Shop of Horrors.
I love these things
so I feel responsible to do a good job by them.
I always feel responsible
to do a good job by my audience, you know?
'Cause it's absolutely my connection with my audience
that is why I'm here right now, you know?
I started being very honest and very open
and in return, my audience shows up
and are excited when I get things like this.
Thank you so much for hanging out with me
and taking a little walk down memory lane,
watching me cry a little.
This has been Becoming Jinkx Monsoon.
[gentle orchestra music]
