Drag icon and Orlando native Ginger Minj is a queen of many talents. Minj — whose real name is Josh Eads — is a drag performer, a comedian, an actor, a singer-songwriter and a podcaster, all of which she has managed to showcase in 2021.
Minj gave an award-winning performance at Orlando Fringe this year as the Queen of the Fairies in the show “Arden,” she can be heard each week — alongside Trinity the Tuck — on the “Werkin’ Girls” podcast and she released her second album “Gummy Bear” earlier this summer.
She also made her third showing as a competitor on the massively popular reality series, “RuPaul’s Drag Race,” appearing in “All Stars 6” on the Paramount+ streaming service. She is now beginning a new path in her career as a country western music star.
Minj’s third album, a country music record called “Double Wide Diva,” is out Sept. 17. The album’s first single, “Walk Tall,” is a song she wrote with Brandon Stansell and Jeffrey James and is about being who you are, living authentically and walking tall no matter who says you shouldn’t.
Minj spoke with Watermark by phone a week before the “RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars 6” finale about how the season went for her and about her latest career move as she boot scootin’ boogies her way into country music.
What were your first thoughts when they approached you for another season of “All Stars” and why did you want to return?
Well, it’s not the first time that I had been asked if I would be interested. I knew that I didn’t want “All-Stars 2” to be the end of my journey because it was kind of a traumatic experience for me. So I knew that when I went back it had to feel right in my heart — win, lose, it’s all whatever — it just had to feel right in the universe.
Then, of course in the middle of the pandemic, you get a phone call and you’re like, “You know I haven’t been doing anything except online digital shows for months and months and I really kind of feel like this is an opportunity.” I also felt like I learned so much more about myself, my drag and how to do things for myself during quarantine. I felt a little more well rounded so I said “OK, I think I can do this now. I think I’m ready to go back.”
You mention “All Stars 2” was a traumatic season to shoot, how did being on “All Stars 2” prepare you for coming into “All Stars 6”?
I knew what not to do. I went into “All Stars 2” and my whole life was kind of a mess at that point. I just lost [“RuPaul’s Drag Race”] season 7, my grandfather who raised me had just passed away, I was in an 11-year relationship that ended and I was out there in the world famous for the first time. I had no clue how to handle that or deal with it.
So I went into “All Stars 2” with this whole headspace of “OK, you gotta be nice this time. You can’t be a bitch, you can’t be real, you can’t be this, you can’t be that. You just gotta give the fans what they want so you won’t get the hate that you got before,” and I realized that it wasn’t fun for me and people hated me even more because it was not authentic. So I knew going into “All Stars 6,” I just wanted to be myself.
This season, you voted on each girl’s track record whereas in past seasons, some girls have voted out their biggest competition. Were you tempted to play the game in any other way?
Listen, I want to win but I want to be the best of the best. I think in order to be the best of the best you have to beat the best of the best. First of all I didn’t want to be shady. Second, I didn’t want to get rid of somebody who deserved to be there, someone who worked hard to be there. And third, nobody wants to be the best of what’s left, you know? So I felt like if I voted with integrity, I would be able to go to sleep at night and be OK with that decision. Also, if and when I win, I think the rest of the world would be like “Oh my gosh she won on the best season ever, it was the best competition and those girls really gave her a run for her money.”
Week after week you keep hearing that with the reviews, that this is the best season across the board of “Drag Race” period. With such a great season, who was the hardest person for you to send home?
They were all difficult to send home and that’s not even just being politically correct or nice. Every week people have asked me: Who do you get the closest with? Honestly, the answer is everybody. But every single week you’re paired up with different people and your relationships with them grow and you feel like your loyalty grows as well. Eventually, as the weeks go by, you’ve worked with everybody and you feel loyal to all of them, so it doesn’t make it any easier to do it to anybody.
For me personally, I felt like the least emotionally damaging way to send people home, for myself, was to simply look at the track record. Just like with Scarlet [Envy], Scarlet was great in the competition but she had been safe every week. Whereas Jan [Sport], though she had been on the bottom, she had won the week before and Kylie [Sonique Love] hadn’t won anything but she had been in the top. So to me, I just took all the emotion and the personal feelings out of it and said, “OK, well this is clearly just the slightly weaker track record and that’s the decision to make.”
Talk to me a little about how you decided on your different looks for this season. Was there a running thread on how you decided to pick them?
No. People need to understand that we put this thing together at the height of a pandemic. What that means, there’s a lot of drag that comes from overseas. A lot of drag comes from China, including our fabric, wigs, shoes, all of that. I didn’t realize just how difficult it was gonna be to pull together one single look much less 20 looks to take with me.
Gidget Galore and myself, we did everything together because we spent all of quarantine together doing digital shows and all that. She was teaching me how to sew and I was teaching her how to do certain things and I said, “Alright if we’re gonna do this then we’re gonna do it.” We raided literally every corner of every costume shop we could to find fabric.
We spent a week dyeing the black lace for my goth look because the only lace we could find was blue. We dyed it once and it turned red, we dyed it again and it turned green, so it was a bunch of trial and error of trying to get everything together.
For my Pop Art look, we made that out of iron-on transfers. It was fun and creative and it felt like guerilla theater. It felt like, “here is literally nothing, create something.”
You’ve portrayed several celebrities throughout your drag career. I was watching again this morning the clip of you as Adele, which cracked me up. Obviously, with TVLand Live here in Orlando you’ve played Blanche, you’ve played Roseanne. Who’s your favorite celebrity to embody?
I know it’s the obvious choice, Blanche in “The Golden Girls.” I feel like I know her the best. I feel like I relate to her more than any of the other characters. She wears caftans and low-slung heels and insults people all day, like that really is just all me.
You put an album out this summer, “Gummy Bear,” and it has a different sound than your first album, “Sweet T” in 2016. What was your inspiration in developing “Gummy Bear”?
When I did “Sweet T,” it was like therapy for me. It was my Adele album. I poured my heart, soul and emotions into it. I released it and it was great, people liked it, and then I got into the nightclub and realized I can’t do any of these songs. I can’t perform these because nobody wants to sit there after dancing all night and watch me sing a sad song as I cry to myself on stage at 2 o’clock in the morning. So I needed to do songs that were unique to me and very much my style but more fun and dancier. So that’s how “Gummy Bear” came to be. I recorded a majority of that album a couple years ago and I just kept hanging onto it because I just knew it wasn’t the right time yet. So we released that and it went well and I actually just released at midnight last night [Sept. 2] the first single off of my next album that drops in a couple of weeks and it’s a country album.
So you’re just hitting all the genres.
Yeah, I think country is the one I’m gonna stick with because it’s what I always wanted to do, it’s what I knew the best growing up and it’s what I think my voice is more suited toward. I just knew that I had to ease into country. I think the country fans have an immediate reaction toward drag and the drag fans have an immediate reaction toward country, so I have to kind of ease both sides of that in. But I think they’re ready.
Who are some of your country inspirations and why is it Dolly Parton?
[Laughs] Well, who doesn’t love Dolly? I’ve never met a single person in the world who has a negative thing to say about Dolly Parton and having met her several times and worked with her, she’s just gets nicer as she gets older. The more you know her, the more she just wants to hug you and love you and give you everything in the world. So I think everybody should do it like Dolly. I also love Garth Brooks, I love Tanya Tucker and I love Shania Twain, of course. I mean she really kind of merged more into pop. My whole reference point for country music — outside of country-western, old-school stuff my grandparents listened to — is all ’90s. So my album is really going back to that type of sound, Wynonna Judd and all that. I’m doing a cover of “Friends in Low Places” on the album.
I saw a video online of you performing that live on stage recently?
I’m in Provincetown right now for six weeks, I’m in my third week now, and I’ve been closing my show with “Friends in Low Places” every night. It’s a song that everybody seems to know the words to, even if you’ve only heard it once, so we all end the show singing it together.
The finale for “All Stars” is next week and you have a lot of online tributes out there for you. Have you had any chance to read any of them?
I have and they literally take my breath away. They’re so beautiful, it makes it feel like I’ve died. It’s something so personal that is now being shared with the entire world. So there’s mixed emotions going into it, but it’s nice to see the world see you through other people’s eyes, if that makes any sense. I can go out there, I can talk myself up all day long and nobody’s going to give a shit. I’m too close to the source material. But then you get other people who have had these experiences and share them and I think it makes people stop and take notice of who I really am as a person outside of “Drag Race.”
The finale is a week away but when we publish this it’ll be after the finale has aired. So since I’m not able to get a reaction from you to the finale, I was wondering if you could right now give me a response to the finale, first if you won and a second if you were a runner-up.
If I were to win, this moment means more to me than anything in the world and I think that’s because it’s not just about winning the crown and winning the title. I feel like it’s a full-circle journey for me, particularly with the community of Orlando. They were there for me at the beginning of this eight years ago and I’ve received nothing but love and support from that community. So to be able to bring that title home it’s like a huge celebration for us. Orlando’s been through so much drama and bullshit, I think it’s time that we celebrate something really exciting for all of us.
If I don’t win, well I guess I’ll be back in another five years. If I don’t win I don’t want people to feel bad for me. I learned from season 7, you don’t have to get the crown to be the winner and I feel like the title and the check and all that, as nice as it would be, it doesn’t continue to push you in your career, getting out there, hustling and making connections does. Really appreciating the people and the work is what really pays off. I’ve always done that and I’m never gonna stop.
