It’s a rare day off between shows for Jinkx Monsoon.

“I think we’re just going out for dinner and then sitting in our rooms crying!” she jokes. Monsoon and her drag sisters have been dominating the globe on the RuPaul’s Drag Race tour, Battle Of The Seasons, sashaying and shantaying across international stages with their witty and zealous drag personas.

In 2013, Monsoon was the season five winner of RuPaul’s Drag Race, an American reality series that searches for the nation’s next drag star. Mentored and hosted by the iconic ’80s drag superstar RuPaul, it now has eight seasons under its belt and has paved the careers of some of today’s most popular drag performers. Monsoon – a narcoleptic and theatre graduate – is best known for her zany, heavily Broadway-influenced character who combines a cocktail of mannerisms from Bette Midler, Lucille Ball and the mother-and-daughter duo from Grey Gardens.

“I love when women are super hyper-feminine,” says Monsoon, “but also very kind of crude and in-your-face and they use their femininity as a tool and as a weapon. I always loved it when someone is just a gorgeous woman with the foulest mouth.”

Carrying her wicked combination to the stage, Monsoon is one of several stars bringing the Battle Of The Seasons tour to Australia for the first time. “It’s very exciting because this is one of our highest-produced, highest-curated shows where we really get to bring the best of our talents and abilities forward,” she says.

Described broadly as a ‘drag vaudeville’ show, the tour features a hilarious drag-off between past season winners and favourites including Violet Chachki, Alaska Thunderfuck 5000, Adore and Sharon Needles. Even if you’ve never seen the television show, Monsoon says no context is needed – audience members need only bring their enthusiasm.

“I was actually talking to someone last night – a couple of people won tickets to our show and had never seen Drag Race,” she says. “They were just fans of drag queens and they were just fans of drag shows. So they had no context of who we all were or anything like that, and then they told me at the end that it was one of the most amazing drag shows they’d ever seen. We bring so many other production elements that wouldn’t even fit into your average gay bar, so it’s not just a drag show – it’s like a drag rock concert.”

The tour has proved to be a unifying experience for this year’s performers, as they recently took to the stage on the same night of the Orlando shooting. “Not one of us was feeling like getting into make-up and going out onstage and being clowns and trying to make people laugh,” Monsoon says. “We were all very… it was so heavy on all of us.

“Every girl on the tour had someone they knew at the club that was hurt, or close to being hurt, or who had passed away. A lot of us were friends with someone whose name was the first name released when they started listing the casualties.”

That wasn’t the first time the tour intersected with politics, with the girls also confronting North Carolina’s controversial ‘bathroom bill’ that excludes trans people from entering bathrooms that aren’t assigned to their birth gender.

“We will always stand up and continue to fight, and that’s what our community has always done,” says Monsoon. “As drag queen celebrities with this huge platform, with this huge fan base, it is our privilege and responsibility to be a beacon of hope and continue to bring love and joy and laughter.

“We’re all doing our best to use our voice to motivate the community that continues to unify, that continues to speak up, that continues to fight for what we know is just and right in this country and in this world.”

RuPaul’s Drag Race: Battle Of The Seasons takes place at the Big Top Sydney, Luna Park on Saturday July 2.

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