Culture & Media
Honey LaBronx, The Vegan Drag Queen, on Intersectional Veganism and Touring Fundraiser Shows Nationwide | Ep 017 | SoFlo Vegans Podcast
Honey LaBronx, the vegan drag queen, joins SoFlo Vegans co-host Alba Mendez ahead of a Fort Lauderdale performance to talk about growing up in a famous Wisconsin cheesecake and dairy family, quitting a waiting job with $1,700 to his name to become a touring vegan and LGBTQ fundraiser performer, and his framework for what he calls pro-intersectional veganism.
Topics Covered
- Growing up in Wisconsin dairy country as the son of a locally famous cheesecake business owner, and the family reaction to coming out as gay, then as a drag performer, then as vegan
- Reading The Face on Your Plate by Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson and transitioning from vegetarian to fully vegan nine years before this episode, after realizing dairy and eggs cause more animal suffering than meat by some measures
- Starting a YouTube cooking channel in drag to make from-scratch vegan staples like seitan accessible to people without access to specialty grocery stores
- Spending his last $1,700 on plane tickets to speak at the Reykjavik VegFest and Berlin Vegan Summer Festival, and receiving an unexpected $2,000 donation from comedian Leslie Jones toward the trip
- Building a nationwide touring fundraiser-show business that paired animal rights and LGBTQ organizations at the same events, raising over $27,000 largely for animal causes across 55 shows in 46 cities and 4 countries by the end of the tour's first year
- His concept of pro-intersectional veganism: refusing to treat animal suffering and human social justice causes, including racism, sexism, and homophobia, as competing priorities
- Drag family lineage explained -- his drag mother Bob the Drag Queen (RuPaul's Drag Race Season 8 winner), drag sister Ms. Cracker, and drag grandmother Peaches Christ, tracing back to Elvira
- Practical event-organizing advice for nonprofits and venues: use Instagram tagging, pre-written press materials, and a public survey-driven map of venues and hosts to fill shows and route tours efficiently
About the Guest
Honey LaBronx (Ben Strothmann) is a touring vegan drag performer, YouTube cooking host, and LGBTQ and animal rights fundraiser known for a national tour of benefit shows and a speech on pro-intersectional veganism.