“My grandma used to always say, ‘Throw everything against the wall to see what sticks,’” Ginger Minj says.
And quite a lot has stuck.
Over the last decade, the Orlando drag performer has jumped between drag, television, film, music, books and cabaret, picking up a RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars crown along the way. This year alone has brought Stop! That! Train!, a turn as Edna Turnblad in Hairspray and Licked: For Gay, her Wicked parody with Jujubee.
Minj describes her career as built on being a “jack-of-all-trades.” These days, though, she’s thinking more about the things that were there from the beginning.
“As I’ve gotten older, I have really learned that I have to hone in on the things that have always been there and have always been a part of me, because those are the things that bring you joy,” Minj tells Orlando Weekly.
“I came tap-dancing out of the womb. I’ve been in theater since I was six months old. I found Ginger through musical theater. This is the biggest part of me.”
Now, Minj is putting that part front and center with The Broad’s Way, her six-song mini-album out Nov. 6. The record pulls from musicals including Sister Act, Man of La Mancha, Wicked, Company, Annie Get Your Gun and La Cage aux Folles.
“I always wanted to be a Broadway star,” Minj says. “It’s so interesting to me that my career started onstage and I got into drag through musical theater, but my career after getting on television took me in every other direction. I’ve written books, I’ve been in movies, been a recording artist, a cabaret act, sold out shows across the world, but the one thing that has eluded me is Broadway.”
“Broadway is gay heaven,” she adds. “This album is my stepping stone to really making that final dream come true.”
The first taste of The Broad’s Way comes through “The Ladies Who Lunch,” Stephen Sondheim’s acid-tongued showstopper from Company. For Minj, choosing it as the record’s first single came with no hesitation.
“Why wouldn’t I?” she says. “It’s fabulous, it’s big, it’s belty, it’s brassy. It’s one of those that I think every drag queen, and I think every gay man, has had a couple cocktails deep at the bar and sat there and just looked around the room and read everybody for filth.”
For Minj, musical theater is about as honest as it gets. It is not simply another genre she has decided to explore. It is where Ginger Minj began.
Years ago, she auditioned for an original Fringe Festival production called Boys, Boys, Boys. The casting breakdown called for eight men willing to go completely naked and two drag queens.
“Oh my god, I’ve never done drag, but I know I’m not comfortable enough with my body to be completely naked, so maybe I’ll try drag,” Minj remembers thinking.
So she went to Big Lots (R.I.P.) and bought makeup.
“I looked like a cracked-out Carnie Wilson who had been holding on for three more days,” she says. “It just happened. There are certain moments in life where everything sort of clicks at the right time. And it clicked.”
From there came more live performances around Orlando, including shows at Parliament House and Pulse. Fringe eventually led Minj to Sleuths Mystery Dinner Shows, where she spent 12 years and where an experiment in drag began looking much more like a career.
“Between Orlando Fringe and Sleuths Mystery Dinner Shows, Ginger Minj was born,” she says, “and the rest is herstory.”
For a while, Ginger and the person beneath the wig occupied two separate worlds.
“It was really fun for me before Drag Race because Joshua and Ginger were separate people,” Minj says. “Ginger has always given me the ability to put on a mask, put on the wig and just be the life of the party.”
Eventually, Minj stopped trying to control that relationship.
“The public persona people think they know belongs to them,” she tells Orlando Weekly. “I’m happy that they got their joy, their amusement and sometimes their anger out of that because it’s art, and all good art should spark some kind of conversation.”
Learning to separate other people’s idea of Ginger from her own sense of self has also meant reconsidering how much value to place on outside validation. And, fittingly for someone whose story is so rooted in Orlando, one of the characters Minj returns to when talking about that lesson comes from Disney.
She grew up during a Disney animation renaissance, with The Little Mermaid among her earliest moviegoing memories. Ursula was an immediate obsession, but when it comes to Disney princesses, Belle wins.
“She was so groundbreaking to me as a princess because she was somebody who knew who she was and what she wanted and wasn’t willing to sacrifice herself for the sake of anyone else,” Minj says. “I’ve felt that my entire life I’ve been seeking — well, I was for many years — that outside validation.”
Now, she keeps circling back to the things that have always felt most like her — theater.
That includes another turn on an Orlando stage. Minj brings The Big Gay Halloween Cabaret to Anthem for two Orlando performances Oct. 7 and Oct. 12, reworking a show she previously performed to two sold-out crowds during Orlando Fringe’s OutFest. This time, Hocus Pocus’ Winifred Sanderson takes over the storytelling, with live singing and a choose-your-own-adventure element that lets the audience help decide how the night ends.
For all the places her career has taken her, Minj still speaks about Orlando as something more than the city where it started. “This is my home. This is where my roots are, where my family and chosen family is. Where my career started and always ends up.”
7 p.m. Wednesday, Oct. 7, and 7 p.m. Monday, Oct. 12; Anthem Orlando, 100 N. Orange Ave., anthemorlando.com, $24-$47.
Related Stories
Photos: Nirosta Steel enchants Orlando at rare Will’s Pub show
Ginger Minj brings some Halloween hocus-pocus home
Uthmeier alleges Pfizer misled Florida about its COVID vaccine’s safety
This article appears in Oct. 7-13, 2026.