BenDeLaCreme on the politics & perspectives of The Jinkx & DeLa Holiday Show

"Frankly, I don't know yet, because we still have a few months of a wild rollercoaster ride between now and then," DeLa tells Out. "But it would be naive to decide now what we're putting on stage then. I think of this episode of The Brady Bunchall the time where it's like a soccer game, or something, and they have two cakes in the fridge: one says, 'Congratulations!' and the other cake says, 'Sorry you lost.' So, in terms of the election, I'm like, 'How do we have two cakes in the fridge?'"

"But regardless of the outcome," she continues, "there are realities about our collective fear as a community. There's also our collective hope, which sometimes can be very hard to hold onto, and very hard to even see the importance of. Historically, for drag queens and performers, that is our job: to preserve the sense of hope."

DeLa often finds herself reflecting on the purpose of a performer, a writer, and a director in all of this. She's one to know, obviously, given that she's worn all sorts of hats (and no, we don't mean wigs!) behind the scenes. Besides starring in these jolly joint tours with Jinkx, DeLa has been directing, writing, and producing those shows since 2018.

Last year, DeLa also directed Monét X Change's one-woman show Life Be Lifin' when it premiered at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Next year, she's set to direct and co-write Jinkx Monsoon's debut show at Carnegie Hall for Valentine's Day.

DeLa doesn't pretend to have found the ultimate solution. "It's an ongoing struggle," she says, "and you have to constantly rediscover the purpose and the importance of some sense, and hope, and perseverance, even when it feels impossible. Our community has been through the impossible before, and we only rose out of such dark times by holding onto a sense of hope."

She adds, "As daunting as it feels, Jinkx and I personally feel like we've always found it. We've always found what the thing is that needs to be said and put on stage, and what's going to resonate with people. We do it through honesty, and authenticity, and willingness to address hard things, and a lot of hard work."

Our conversation reminds DeLa of a very specific moment that followed the 2016 election results. "I was running a solo show called Inferno A-Go-Go, and it was my retelling of Dante Alighieri's Inferno. That show had my regular brand of comedy, but I was also exploring questions of objective morality, right and wrong, and all the themes that Dante dealt with… which I actually think he got wrong, and I was correcting him."

She continues, "I had to go on stage with it in San Francisco right after the 2016 election, and I had been — possibly naively — really holding onto having one outcome. But we had the other. I woke up that morning crying, and I called Peaches Christ, my good friend from San Francisco who's also a performer and producer. I was like, 'I don't know how to do this. I don't know how to go on tonight. I don't know how to do this show.' Peaches is only a little bit older than me, but she was already established enough to have been in the game in a way that I admire."

"And I'm paraphrasing," DeLa notes, "but Peaches said: 'Your feelings right now are valid. But, ultimately, they're not what matter. This is what you are here to do. This is the pinnacle of what a queen does: you're going to go out there, and you're going to give what you have to give — regardless of whether you feel like it's enough.'"

Another notable evolution throughout seven years of doing The Jinkx & DeLa Holiday Show is that the two titular characters originally had a more adversarial dynamic between them. In recent iterations, those characters are definitely still different, but they're much kinder to each other and more open to learning new things as a pair.

"Even the decision to move in that direction, actually, wasn't not political," DeLa remarks. "I came in a few years ago to the writing process and I was just like, 'Jinkx, I don't want our characters at odds anymore.' And she was like, 'Yes. I'm down. Let's do it.'"

She goes on, "A big part of that was me reacting to the way that drag culture and drag fans have gotten into the habit of pitting queens against each other… even innocently, without noticing it. And it's like, whatever, you can have your personal tastes, but we're all out here. There's no reason to cause conflict within it. And then, by the nature of drag's visibility largely coming through a competition reality show, there is a real thing of pitting queens against each other."

"And we were like, 'You know what? Let's lead this conversation in a different direction,' and I do think that's a political conversation," DeLa adds. "I do think that the divisiveness and the pettiness that can happen within the queer community is a great example of how we need to zoom out and see that we actually are on the same side of this. The nitty-gritty of what's happening in between is distracting us from the direction that we really need to be moving into. And that can happen in a smaller, interpersonal way that seems like not a big deal, but it does trickle down and affects how we move through the world."

In the Doctor Who episode featuring Jinkx as the villainous Maestro, there seems to be an adorable connection to the work she's done with DeLa surrounding these holiday tours — a little nuance that fans probably didn't even notice. In a particularly tense scene where Maestro seems to be getting their way, the character is stopped on their tracks by hearing the sound of a Christmas song playing from inside Ruby Sunday (Millie Gibson).

"That hadn't even occurred to me," DeLa says when asked about that scene. "But Russell T Davies has been a big fan of our show. He has come to it many years in the UK, which has been awesome. I honestly wouldn't be shocked if that were a little Easter egg for him. Because of the things I thought was so incredible about that episode was that he clearly understood who Jinkx is as a performer inside and out. I thought that was so beautiful to see… so I wouldn't be surprised if that scene was actually thoughtful."

Looking ahead at the 2024 tour of The Jinkx & DeLa Holiday Show, we ask DeLa to spill some tea about the new production.

"The show just keeps growing every year in this way that I can't even believe… but I also can believe, because we've poured so much into it. We started this in 2018, and it's grown exponentially, but my working relationship with Jinkx started in 2008 or something. So, in many ways, this show is the culmination of everything we've done together, both personally and professionally."

DeLa still wants to surprise audiences with the specifics of the production, but she does get us excited enough to start looking at tour dates and get ourselves some tickets.

"The things we're able to put on stage, in terms of growth, gets more and more bombastic every year. And the content itself, we fully rewrite every single year. When you're writing a new two-hour show every year, you have to get pretty unhinged at some point, because you really cover the basics of Christmas pretty early on. So we've gone into a Back to the Future, time-travel, A Christmas Carol mashup [direction]."

"We have done multidimensional stuff," she recalls. "Last year, we did a meta thing where we were trapped in our own stage version of the show [laughs], so it just keeps getting wilder and crazier. We keep learning from audiences that they're willing to go on whatever that journey is. This year, there's obviously new depths that we keep discovering, and I think that will push what we put on stage even further."

But it's not all seriousness and heavy topics, DeLa says, highlighting that "this is also the most fun that I have all year. It is so fun to be in a room with an audience cheering and laughing collectively for that long. I'm proud of the joy that we represent as a group of queer performers who are singing, and dancing, and wearing insane costumes. I'm so proud of what we're able to do on stage."

To learn more and buy tickets for the 2024 edition of The Jinkx & DeLa Holiday Show, you can visit JinkxAndDeLa.com!