PEPPERMINT
“Performing comes naturally to me,” Peppermint says. Growing up in Delaware, the RuPaul’s Drag Race runner-up, actress and recording artist performed in youth theater and was a high school cheerleader. Making a career out of her passion was challenging, but Peppermint found work—and refuge—as a drag performer. “Doing drag at all of the small clubs and bars is what really allowed me to grow into a career of being a professional performer,” she recalls. In 2017, While other trans contestants came out during or after Drag Race, Peppermint was the first performer to start the competition as an out trans woman (and earned the nickname “Lip Sync Assassin” for her fierce interpretations of Madonna and the Village People). She continued breaking ground in the 2018 musical Head Over Heels—a gender-bending reimagining of Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia set to The Go-Go’s greatest hits—as the first trans woman to originate a principal role on Broadway. Says Peppermint of her career, which has now expanded to TV guest spots, music videos and pop albums, “I get to take real life issues and turn them into entertainment, make jokes [and] life lessons of them, [and] touching stories.” After years of not being able to include her Black trans female identity in her work, Peppermint says, the story has changed: “more and more people are finally engaging in the type of deep conversations that make room for identities like mine…It feels great to now be included and loved.” A surprising fact about Peppermint? “I’m a Trekkie and I’m in a secret society of Dungeons & Dragons players.”
