Blanche

You turn 30 and they're just like, hey, have you considered grandmother roles? And, you know, it's a really hard transition for a lot of women to make because there just isn't an interest in people that...

you know, you're the ingenue or you're like the Blanche Dubois and they don't want anything in between.

But

yeah,

I even talked about golden showers in a book later on.

He was floridly gay, and he said, Blanche Dubois is me.

I read his biography many years ago.

So, hypergamy used to be limited by aim high, but don't aim too high, because if you aim too high, you get less.

My teachers, my...

I, I, I had what is, uh, Blanche DuBois, "I've always depended on the kindness of strangers." Uh, I, uh, choose to believe, 'cause I can't prove it, but I don't have to, I choose to believe that for some reason, uh, God, the universe, my people beyond their, this world, beyond their bodies, have conspired since the very beginning to get me my daily bread so I can get on about whatever business I'm here to do.

My guest today is writer Casey Gerald.

His new book is called The Great Refusal: A New Vision of Resistance.

Now cut to the end of the season, she's having a one-on-one lunch with RuPaul, they're sharing a tic-tac, and RuPaul says something that at the time, as a naive younger version of myself, I never quite understood, because Jinx had been hysterically funny as all of these zany characters... throughout her time on the show.

And RuPaul said, I could see you as Blanche DuBois.

And I had enough insight into Streetcar Named Desire at that point in my life to realize that that was not a comic character.

And that didn't really resonate with everything else that she'd been doing.

And she performed in many of her own shows or alongside collaborator Ben de la Creme, giving these sort of theatricalized cabaret performances.

But it would be some time before she would arrive on Broadway.

Now, I want you to remember that Blanche Dubois comment because we're going to come back to it.

And Jinx had won Drag Race Season 5 in 2013, but it wasn't until 10 years later in January 2023 that she made her Broadway debut as Matron Mama Morton in Chicago, a performance that I had the opportunity to see because in March of that year, I traveled to New York for the very first time.

I was really feeling everything she was doing.

And I think that Miss Havisham is such a fun character and like very much to me has the, it's like, you know, a Blanche Dubois type of character where like I'm into any interpretation because it's this like over the top character.

southern gothic obviously dickens was not writing southern gothic but like we're pulling from that here and also like lynch dubois is like not actually as old as she's played in the movies i think in the book she's like mid 30s when you first meet her so you know which i guess is like an old hag um definitely and she was like yeah Yeah, so, you know, but obviously Anne Bancroft is quite a bit older.

And this is an Anne Bancroft-Gwyneth reunion.

I mean, I'll always be able to do my Luke Skywalker, but I was going to go to Hitachi Station and pick up some power converters.

I mean, for long-time fans of the show, going right back to the start, really, early 2000s, I've had my Blanche Dubois tucked up my sleeve.

I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.

I mean, that's just, you know, stuff like that never goes away.