Welcome back to part two of our lovely chat with Drag Race, the UK winner,

Ginger Johnson. Really lovely.

You mentioned that you had sort of stopped contacting your family for periods of your life and did that

was that useful I'm so interested in that part of your life?

Um it wasn't it wasn't that I made a choice to do that. It was that after I'd moved to

London I finished my studies and I moved to London and I went through this kind of second reckoning with myself

where I realized that I maybe wasn't gay and was in fact queer and that there was a much broader spectrum of

LGBT QIA plus life that I did not understand and had not engaged with at all, including the politics of it especially, and the culture and

art that surrounds all of that.

I was also in clubs all the time at that point and falling into the trappings of being in nightclubs.

Yeah, and it was in a real shame spiral which you know I had quite a serious mental health break. Right and it was the

shame of that situation that made me not want to speak to my family because I was I didn't know how to talk to them about it.

I couldn't process it myself. I didn't know how to explain it to them and I didn't know

what if anything I wanted back from them in that situation because I felt so lost.

Yeah. And it is a regret. It's a big regret in my life that I wasted that time with them. I have a great relationship with them now and after we kind of after I got back in touch with them and we we've found a way now of talking about that kind of stuff that means that I'm not going to reach that

threshold again. So I wouldn't say it was helpful, it was painful, it was really painful and how you know I think talking about stuff in family is the hardest thing

How do you now have that framework with in I talked small time that was the thing that I was doing wrong I was kind of waiting for

waiting for good news to give them yeah you know, waiting to be able to say,

wow, look at my, I moved to London, look at my accomplishments,

I'm a success, and I wasn't, that's the reality.

Especially, you know, most people don't make it as a success moving to

London to become an international transvestite, you know, like it's madness, it's

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