mattbaume
patreon
You Don't Want to See Minnie Mouse Take Her Head Off (Ep. 63 - Ben DeLaCreme)
🕑 Added 2016-06-02 14:33:45 +0000 UTC Listener Alert! The Sewers of Paris is up for a Podcast Award, hooray! But I need your help to win. Please go vote for the show in the GLBT category at PodcastAwards.com. You can vote once every day until June 12, so vote early and often! Thanks!This week's guest specializes in breaking boundaries, upending order, and causing mischief. You probably know Ben DeLaCreme best from those couple of months when you were rooting for him to win Season 6 of Drag Race, or maybe from his live shows that tour the country. As it happens, can catch him onstage in his new show, "Inferno A-Go-Go," a delightful romp based on Dante's Inferno -- I'll have details at the end of this episode, or follow him on twitter @bendelacreme.
I'm so grateful to Ben for sitting down with me to talk about how Bugs Bunny and Jessica Rabbit made him the man and woman he is today, the strategy that he devised for making the most of Drag Race, and why the producers of that show hated him.
Highlights of this week's episode: Ben's early forays into showmanship and drag, starting with news reports he'd stage as a child about what was happening around the house. Later, he appeared onstage in his boxers, and as Tina Angst in Chicago -- an angry punk-rock drag girl with pink and black dreadlocks. "I had such a crazy temper then," he said.
Anger was his weapon of choice at first, but then he stumbled across something far better: the devastating power of well-aimed niceness.
He resisted Drag Race for years, but when the time finally came, he crafted an unusual strategy: when in drag, he'd never break character. "I wanted to represent myself in a way that I felt good about," he said.
That proved exhausting, not just for him but for the producers who desperately wanted him to engage with the other contestants as a cutting bitchy gay man. "They hated it," he said. "They wanted me to stop so badly."
And though it might've come off as a little strange, there was a method to Ben DeLaCreme's madness.
