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Ginger Minj memoir arrives Nov. 7, 2023.
Her first stand-up special, Bless Your Heart, arrives on May 30.
Ginger is part of The Golden Gals Live! with tickets available here.
Ginger Minj‘s memoir wasn’t going to be just a memoir. In a short amount of time, Ginger (she/her/they/them) has lived multiple lives on this journey: she’s a world-famous drag performer, having competed on RuPaul’s Drag Race and two seasons of Drag Race All-Stars; she’s a pageant winner, claiming Miss Gay United States 2013, among other titles; she’s a singer with three studio albums, the most recent being 2021’s Double Wide Diva; and she’s an actress, living her full Winnie Sanderson fantasy in Hocus Pocus 2. She’s lived so big and so much, her upcoming memoir — Southern Fried Sass: A Queen’s Guide to Cooking, Decorating and Living Just A Little Extra – could have been more than one book…which, Ginger tells HollywoodLife, was initially the plan.
“I was initially approached about doing two separate books, a cookbook, and a memoir,” says the Florida native. “And I felt like the two parts of my life were so intertwined because food is obviously my love language. I feel like you can learn more about somebody from the food that they share with you than you can in 20 hours of conversation. So I went to the publishers and said, ‘I want to put both together and make it one big cohesive thing.’ And they said, ‘I don’t know how that’s going to work, but it sounds so interesting. We want to take a chance on it.’ And we did.”
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The result is Southern Fried Sass, the upcoming book from Simon and Schuster. Like a good Southern Sunday dinner, it took a while to cook before it was ready. “It took us two years to really figure out all the nuances of the book and how to make it all fit together,” Ginger tells HL. “But it’s really beautiful. The book itself is absolutely gorgeous. And the way that the story is told, I think, flows naturally from recipe to advice to life story to juicy gossip. I’m very proud of it.”
Southern Fried Sass may reach readers’ hearts and minds more intimately by providing an immersive experience. The recipes Ginger provides weave a story of her upbringing, allowing those bold enough to experience the emotional weight of her story through the food she’s paired to each section of the book. “I mean, it’s called soul food for a reason,” she says. “It’s stuff that when you eat it, it makes you feel a certain way. And by telling my life story — the little tidbits here and there, the good, the bad, the ugly, and everything in between — you can go on that same journey with me by making the recipes and eating it along and realizing this is why I choose to eat this when I feel this way because this is how it makes me feel.”
Much like how your palate shifts and changes over time – how one might hate onions as a child, only to enjoy them as an adult – Ginger’s recollection of the past also shifted when writing the book. “It was like being on an episode of RuPaul’s Drag Race,” she says. “When you’re in the werkroom, you have one experience, and then when you watch it all edited together, it’s a totally different viewpoint from what you had.”
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“So the things that you thought were most important in that scenario really were trivial to the overall story,” continues Ginger. “And going back and digging through all the old family photos and letters and scrapbooks and stories and talking to every individual family member — family members I haven’t talked to in years for one reason or another (and those reasons are all very well documented in the book) — but talking to them and getting their viewpoint, it really colors the story in a very different way. I learned a lot more about my family. I learned a lot more about their recipes. I learned a lot more about the reasons that I have conflicts with some of them. And maybe, I could take a little more responsibility for the rift between us.”
Writing Southern Fried Sass was “a journey of self-discovery,” says Ginger, “even though I started out just going, ‘I’m just going to tell my story from my viewpoint, the way it happened, so people know why I am the way I am and why I act the way that I do.’ And throughout the process, and I think you’ll understand this when you read the book, you can see me discovering things along the way.”
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“I have a line in the book that it’s so true: ‘Nobody is a hero, and nobody is a villain. Everybody’s just human.’ And even the people that, when you’re reading the book from my viewpoint, you go, ‘Oh my gosh, I hate them. They’re awful.’ But, by the end of the book, I feel like even if you’re not rooting for them, you understand them a little bit more. It was very eye-opening and very cathartic for me and also very humbling.”
Ginger’s resolution was partly due to the wisdom she’s earned through her travels and partly due to compiling her story for the book. ” I will say going on a competition on television like RuPaul’s Drag Race, you can either do two things,” she says. “You can either continue being who you are unapologetically, or you can start to listen to and believe the things that everybody says about you, even if they’ve never met you and they’re just judging you based on what they’ve seen on television.
“Their opinions are really loud and directed at you,” she says. “And when somebody tells you something, even if you know that it’s not true if they tell it to you loud enough and long enough, you can let yourself believe that. ‘Well, maybe I am the problem, maybe I shouldn’t have done this or said that.’”
“And then in the process of doing the book, I really discovered. ‘no, every choice that I have made, good or bad, has led me to where I am right now.’ And I love who I am right now. I’m happy with what I have,” she shares. “So, if I had to go through that and make those mistakes, I’m happy to have done that. And anything that anybody else has to say about me negatively is really more of a projection and a reflection on who they are and not me.”
A lack of humility and empathy seems to surround the drag community at the moment, with an alarming number of reported attacks on drag events in the country and an increasing number of legislation targeted at restricting and banning drag performers in public (with many critics saying the bills are “inviting further law enforcement and public harassment of drag performers and trans people more broadly.”)
“I just want to say, what isn’t a difficult time for our community?” Ginger acts. “I mean, even in our greatest triumphs, it feels like there’s always some underlying hatred and bigotry. There are always people that are rooting against us.”
“I do feel like life is such a pendulum, it swings one way, and it swings the next, and eventually, it’ll settle down in the center,” she explains. “When I first started drag, my very first drag booking ever was at this little bar called Attitudes in Leesburg [Florida]. It lasted for a year. It was the only gay bar that’s ever been there in Lake County. And we had to park in the ditch across the street and run across the highway to the bar for the gig while good old boys and pickup trucks were screaming obscenities at us and throwing beer bottles and rocks. And this was all for $25 and two free drink tickets!”
“It wasn’t a get-rich-quick scheme, it was literally just to find like-minded people,” Ginger continues, “to have a safe space. It was such a testament to how much that meant to all of us to go through that every single time we worked there. Park, dodge the bricks and the words and run into the building and end up spending more money than we made.”
“And I feel like going from that all the way to Drag Race, where that’s taken us, we’re pop culture superstars now, we’re known around the world. And eventually, that would have people pulling on that pendulum to bring it back this way,” she says with wisdom beyond her years. “But I’m very hopeful because drag queens are always the ones at the front of all these big revolutions. We’re always the ones that are throwing the first brick, leading the marches, and raising the money for all of the foundations.”
Despite right-wing forces stoking fears and hatred of the LGBTQ+ community, Ginger thinks that eventually, the pendulum will settle in the middle, where “we can live our lives, and people can live theirs.”
From there, Ginger references The Golden Gals Live! – the live stage experience celebrating the cultural landmark that is The Golden Girls. The award-winning show features Ginger as Blanche, Divine Grace as Dorothy, Gidget Galore as Rose, and Mr Ms Adrien as Sophia. The production blends original material with classic Golden Girls moments, creating an experience that any fan of the show can’t miss.
“After we did our six-week run in Chicago this year, we did a one-week tour of retirement villages in South Florida,” says Ginger. And it was great. We had a wonderful time and great audiences. We had a thousand people a night, older people who knew the show and really got the references. And the very last day was our best performance — big thunderous standing ovation and lots of laughter! And at the very end, we’ve taken our bow, and we’re ready to walk off stage; this woman just stands up and shouts out, ‘Don’t ever come back. We don’t want f—–s like you in our community.’”
Face crack. “And,” says Ginger, “it would’ve been very easy to allow that to taint the rest of the experience. But we looked around and saw 999 other people screaming and cheering turn to this woman and tell her to get out.”
“And so whenever you think that you don’t have people in your corner, they come from unexpected places,” she says. “I go through that with my book as well. It’s like whenever you think all the chips are down and you don’t have anybody to turn to, that support can come from the people you don’t expect it to come from. But you also have to be open and loving and willing to accept that support from whoever gives it to you.”
It’s a reminder that humility and empathy must be employed on both sides of the argument. As Patterson Hood of Drive-By Truckers said on Southern Rock Opera, “Racism is a worldwide problem, and it’s been like that since the beginning of recorded history, and it ain’t just white and black, but … it’s always a little more convenient to play it with a Southern accent.”
“I’m not always proud of the South, but the whole reason that I am such an advocate for those of us who were raised there is that there is a lot of good underneath all of that bad,” says Ginger. “And I only know that because I’ve been through it. I’ve been through the worst of the worst here in the South. I’ve been beaten up. I’ve been called every name. I’ve been attacked. I’m attacked all the time. I’m from Orlando — Pulse was the first nightclub I ever worked at that gave me a chance to be a hostess. And I’ve been through all these things and realized that when you go through those bad things, the good comes out.”
“Everything can be decimated, and through the little cracks in the pavement, these beautiful little flowers of love and acceptance will grow. And I’ve learned that,” she says. “And that’s why I’m proud to be from the South. What I’m really celebrating in this book is even when the things around you seem to be really, really bad, there are those really beautiful people and moments and experiences that make the South somewhere worthy to live and someplace worthy to love.”
Racism and bigotry are “not just exclusive” below the Mason-Dixon line. “I have been called a f—-t by people all over the world. Hated comes in very different forms. And that’s another thing that I think people really need to understand. You should always be aware of your surroundings and aware of the support that you have and the support that you maybe don’t have as well.”
To help support the LGBTQ+, Ginger has put out a call to action, and many have jumped on board with the plan: buy a copy of Southern Fried Sass for yourself and one for someone “who would probably never think to put the book on their own,” says Ginger.
“I’m going to send a copy to Ron DeSantis,” says Florida voter Ginger Minj, “and all these other people leading this charge against us who think that we’re awful people and the things that we do are innately perverse or harmful to anybody. Just so they can get that story in their hands and realize there’s more we have in common than we don’t. There’s a lot more humanity there than they want to afford us. And our stories and voices are just as valid – they’re just twice as loud and covered in glitter, so you can’t ignore them. So read the book, understand us a little more, and then go talk to your mama with your bigotry.”
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