Queer comedy is a tool for survival. Especially during the holidays.
“Comedy helps people access our right to joy,” BenDeLaCreme (DeLa for short) says. She believes laughing breaks down the walls people build to protect their hearts from a hostile world from which “The Jinkx & DeLa Holiday Show,” her annual extravaganza with best friend Jinkx Monsoon, provides a reprieve for performers and fans alike. Laughter was what DeLa desperately needed as a young college student who had to create a gig to avoid going home for the holidays, a conundrum many queer fans can relate to.
“I disliked the holidays so much,” DeLa says, explaining the challenging family dynamics she’d escaped by moving to Seattle from Litchfield, Conn., to study fine art in the late aughts. Inspired by “Pee-wee’s Playhouse Christmas Special,” she learned she could connect with her community and chosen family through performing outrageous drag numbers that revered and ridiculed the season. Her old show, “Homo for the Holidays,” ran for nearly a decade at West Hall in Seattle, becoming a holiday tradition for the Capitol Hill community of artists and queer kids who needed a space for joy and connection.
Now drag superstars of “RuPaul’s Drag Race” fame, DeLa and Jinkx are a chosen family who cultivated their “cosmic” friendship years before breaking through. They met at a free afternoon drag show in a Seattle Starbucks when Jinkx performed with her musical partners the Vaudevillians to a room of friends seated on metal folding chairs, where she had to use a code-protected public bathroom as a dressing room. DeLa remembers this as “one of the best drag performances” she’s ever seen, but admits she was initially intimidated by Jinkx. “I was scared of myself. When you’re a queer kid who’s weird, and some people see you as special for those weird reasons, even though most people don’t, what gets you through feeling like a freak is the idea that you are special and unique. To meet somebody like you is a little threatening. Then you realize, ‘Oh! I’m not alone.’”
DeLa and Jinkx are a chosen family who cultivated their “cosmic” friendship years before breaking through.
(Dutch Doscher / For The Times)
“I like to say it’s like if Bette Davis and Joan Crawford had decided to be friends rather than enemies,” Jinkx jokes. “We could have had the Joan Crawford and Bette Davis holiday happy hour, but we had to wait until Jinkx and DeLa took it on.”
In 2018, Gus Lanza (now co-producer at BenDeLaCreme Presents who plays Hunky the Elf) encouraged DeLa to invite Jinkx to co-create a new holiday revue since their co-hosted “RuPaul’s Drag Race” viewing parties were so successful; the show did help launch both of their careers. “It all started with the idea of just sticking DeLa and I on stage with two microphones and the topic of Christmas and letting us go wild,” Jinkx laughs. The plan for an improvisational, conversational, easy, breezy holiday cabaret lasted about two weeks before morphing into what Jinkx describes as a “two-act variety show, musicale, theatrical spectacular.” The first “Jinkx & DeLa Holiday Show” sold out Seattle’s historic Neptune Theatre and has steadily grown, becoming a major tour, a television special, and Jinkx and DeLa’s baby.
Over the last eight years, Jinkx and DeLa have made fans laugh at the best and worst things the yuletide brings. They’ve been seduced by Krampus in a version of “Santa Baby” fit for the Folsom Street Fair, shimmied and line danced with sexy elves to muscle up enough Christmas spirit to revive cowboy Santa, and gossiped with the sentient Egg Nog before breaking into their original song, “A Passive Aggressive Christmas.” “The Jinkx & DeLa Holiday Show” promises to combat the world’s devastation with campy magic and mirth that only a queer interpretation of Christmas can provide.
“I have never believed more in comedy and its divine purpose than I do now,” Jinkx says as her small orange kitten fights for her attention, shielded by the sculptural ruffle neck of her emerald top. For Jinkx and DeLa, comedy — from Ren and Stimpy to Sonny and Cher to Shakespeare — is a sacred art to be taken just as seriously as drama.
Jinkx and DeLa have been unstoppable forces in comedy and drag this year. Jinkx’s clapback to J.K. Rowling (“Who is he?”) in her interview with Ziwe Fumudoh went viral for calling out the hypocrisy of the TERF movement in the shortest punchline known to YouTube. She’s broken box office records with roles in Broadway shows like “Chicago,” “Little Shop of Horrors,” “Pirates! The Penzance Musical” and, most recently, Cole Escola’s absurdist historical comedy “Oh, Mary,” where for two sold-out months she twirled and stomped across the Lyceum stage, playing a version of Mary Todd Lincoln that can only be described as Lucille Ball meets the Tasmanian Devil, two of her biggest inspirations.
After her success, Jinkx announced a limited return to her role as Mary, starting Jan. 8. This year, DeLa has directed Monét X Change’s one-woman show “Life Be Lifin’” and Jinkx’s sold-out Valentine’s Day show at Carnegie Hall, and has stepped up as head writer and director for “The Jinkx & DeLa Holiday Show.” She just announced a European tour with Dita Von Teese set to start immediately after the holiday season. As in-demand solo artists, Jinkx and DeLa love to come home to “The Jinkx & Dela Holiday Show” each year; it was what helped them both forge the careers they have today.
“I do think it’s a sign of progress that younger drag queens don’t all have to crawl on their hands and knees through the dive bar experience. However, DeLa and I learned so much of what we use today with large audiences by honing those skills,” Jinkx Monsoon says.
(Dutch Doscher / For The Times)
DeLa and Jinkx credit their DIY roots to the success of their show. The queens cut their teeth performing in bars, burlesque theaters, punk venues and even a circus, where they learned to entertain by pulling together subversive and mainstream references. “We come from the underground. But so did any drag queen old enough to have started before there was a TV show dedicated to it,” Jinkx says, emphasizing how in the early 2000s drag queens were almost always underdogs and rarely financially successful. Embracing her authentic freakiness and outsider qualities made her happy and a successful performer many relate to because of her honesty.
“I do think it’s a sign of progress that younger drag queens don’t all have to crawl on their hands and knees through the dive bar experience. However, DeLa and I learned so much of what we use today with large audiences by honing those skills with itty-bitty audiences locally. We’ve just trained ourselves to turn the dial up.”
On Dec. 14, the pair will turn the dial way up at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood, a 2,000-seat venue famous for hosting the Oscars. They’re amping up the laughs, incorporating sci-fi, horror and even a Freaky Friday act where Jinkx and DeLa find themselves body-swapped, something Jinkx has begged to do for years. The pair will incorporate references from “The Simpsons Treehouse of Horror,” “Twilight Zone” and “Tales From the Crypt,” along with new over-the-top drag holiday content that fans love and have come to expect. Produced and directed by DeLa and co-written by DeLa and Jinkx, the show can make them feel they “have to go wild with crazy ideas,” because “how do you continue to have a new take on Santa Claus?” As Jinkx says, “Drag is just taking everything you love and putting it into human form.”
Jinkx jokes that DeLa “writes like a scientist,” working scripts down to individual word choices like equations. They meticulously plan, but sometimes things change. Like last year, when their most traditionally structured show had to pivot on election night. “We thought long and hard about whether we wanted to address what was going on in the world or if we wanted to just give people a break,” DeLa told me, proud of how the team found a way to do both by creating “the stupidest allegory possible.” To mirror the real world, the Land of Sweets was not spared from an evil nutcracker tyrant. The crew wrote a new scene on the spot to provide a way forward for fans. “We always knew that no matter what, the sentiment had to be the same,” DeLa says. “It is about the fight, and the fact that the fight is never over. We’re all here, we’re doing this and we’re not going anywhere. As a community, we keep moving forward with the power of each other.”
“We always knew that no matter what, the sentiment had to be the same,” DeLa says of the holiday show. “It is about the fight, and the fact that the fight is never over.”
(Dutch Doscher / For The Times)
Despite the contemporary mass appeal of queer artists and the immense success of shows like “The Jinkx & DeLa Holiday Show” and “RuPaul’s Drag Race,” there are still few roles for avant-garde transgender and gender transgressive performers in major productions, with opportunities dwindling. Last week, Deadline and GLAAD reported that 41% of LGBTQ+ characters will not return to television shows in 2026, a devastating blow that researchers argue is due to hateful and largely unchecked rhetoric from politicians and the media. This has serious repercussions for queer and trans actors, as well as the public. GLAAD’s research suggests that audiences have become more accepting over the last 20 years due to watching diverse casts and stories.
“The Jinkx and DeLa Holiday Show” has been a way to write queer and trans characters and actors onto stages that they otherwise wouldn’t have been on, as DeLa said, “because nobody else is going to do this for us.” Live shows are an important part of queer performance history, and one of the most important ways drag queens have historically fought back against oppressive conditions and helped queer communities make sense of their lives through humor. “The Jinkx and DeLa Holiday Show” builds on this history and refuses to be pushed into the shadows.
“We don’t have to try to force ourselves into things that don’t feel happy or good for us,” DeLa says. “I still get to have a holiday with my family and a sense of homecoming, but we get to define family. We get to define home, we get to create our own traditions and they get to be as valid as a tradition that was passed on to us.”
Despite 2025’s challenges, Jinkx and DeLa maintain joy and hope, some of the most important lessons the holiday season can teach everyone. If you’re wondering what’s included in their letters to Santa this year, Jinkx is asking for the dismantling of the patriarchy, the rise of feminine rule and unabashed freedom for androgynous people. DeLa wants a candy cane.
