Victoria Jimbo becomes the first Canadian to win RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars

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Victoria Jimbo-based drag artist is the winner, baby.

The 40-year-old performer has become the first Canadian and International Queen to win an American season of the reality show franchise juggernaut, RuPaul’s Drag Race, which has won more than two dozen Emmys and created spinoffs around the world.

Jimbo took the crown and cash prize of US $ 200,000 on Friday, when he was announced as the winner of the eighth season of RuPaul’s Drag Race All The Stars, a spinoff that brings in well-known competitors from previous seasons.

Listening host RuPaul announced that his name in the finale was something Jimbo says he had dreamed about his entire adult life.

“I was just inundated with this release overcome all this anticipation, all this joy. It feels like all my hard work paid off and I’m just over the moon,” Jimbo told The Globe and Mail in an interview on Monday. (He spoke with Globe out of drag, a time in which he uses the pronouns he/him.)

This was Jimbo’s third appearance in France. He made his debut in the first season of the Canadian edition of the franchise, The Drag Race in Canadain the year 2020. He finished fourth overall, but reached the wider global fan base, becoming an instant favorite.

In the first episode of that show, The Canadian queens were challenged to a windy photo shoot on top of a fake Rocky Mountain. While many of his competitors did their best to pose and blast through powerful blasts of snow, Jimbo – dressed in black-and-white clown makeup, his big fake chest and platform boots up to his thigh-screamed in ridiculous terror as they mingled on a small platform.

It was an example of Jimbo’s unique drag style, which is rooted in the clown.

“The Clown is a performance method that is basically this feedback loop. It’s a conversation through an audience and a performer where the performer is a channel for the audience,” Jimbo said. “You basically listen to an audience and don’t guess yourself. You take your worst idea and just go with it.”

As a child, Jimbo said he always loved feminine things, but in the eighties and nineties, this wasn’t necessarily a time he embraced homosexuality or explored traits that weren’t compatible with the given gender. Jimbo said he used his clown to explore this side of himself and celebrate all the things that others in his life had framed as wrong or bad.

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Competing in Drag Race franchise in three countries, Jimbo has had a chance to reflect on different styles. He said Canada’s geographic size and its smaller population would likely affect how performers in the country approach the art form.

“Canada is filled with all sorts of lovable oddities in their different countries. “America has this amazing network of cities and clubs and a much greater amount of venues to perform and really showcase the appeal,” he said. “I feel like Canada, we have to find venues and make spaces to perform and that gives this cool DIY atmosphere.”

Lemon-a drag artist who competed against Jimbo in the first season of The Drag Race in Canada how and RuPaul’s Drag Race: United Kingdom against the world in 2022-said Jimbo is so attractive because it is unique, although not everyone gets it right away.

Lemon remembered United Kingdom against the world the episode of the talent show when Jimbo appeared on stage in a shiny white ghost suit with a conical head and swollen belly and back. Jimbo then proceeded to give birth to pieces of bologna and threw pieces into the crowd, famously asking, “Mama, you hungry?”To RuPaul, who gladly accepted.

“I’ve been there for so many times when Jimbo starts something. At first, everyone is looking and everyone, ‘Oh, this is going to go terribly.”But believe Jimbo has the vision,” Lemon told The Globe. “Then you see the genius come.”

(Jimbo’s Ghost character also made an appearance in the last All The Stars the season during a lip sync competition, which helped Jimbo win that particular showdown.)

Priyanka, the winner of the first season The Drag Race in Canada, says that the first time he met Jimbo, he did not get it. It was until Priyanka saw Jimbo’s impression of Joan Rivers in the Episode “Snatch Game” – a fan favorite challenge for comedy improvisation-that things clicked.

“I was like,’ Oh my god. Oh, my god. That’s great.”I felt lucky to be in a Snatch Game that Jimbo was in,” Priyanka, who spoke to the Globe from Tennessee, told The Globe.

Earlier this year, that country became the first in the US to explicitly ban drag shows in public spaces. Last month, a federal judge ruled the law an “unconstitutional restriction on freedom of speech.”

Priyanka said the current attacks on drag, especially from the religious right who are using it as a way to incite division, are disappointing. He said the antidote is to come together and continue to celebrate the joy drag creates – something Jimbo does without effort.

“What Jimbo does is why drag is so popular. It makes everyone save, ” Priyanka said. “There is no one like Jimbo. She’s like another queen.”