On Saturday night, I went to see Kate Clinton [1] at the Somerville Theater on her "It's Come to This! 25th Anniversary Tour [2]." I want you to think about that; while many people know her as a columnist for The Progressive [3], Kate Clinton has been making a living as a lesbian comic since 1981. Along with people like Marga Gomez and Lea DeLaria, Kate Clinton has been a queer political cultural pioneer. Here's her own diddy from the program notes:
It's come to this: for twenty five years, I have thanked you for coming out--out of the closet, out of your homes, out of your daily routines--to come to my shows. You have shown up through snowstorms, earthquakes, bomb scares, picket lines, transit strkes, orange alerts, breakups, epidemics, recessions, weddings, child care emergencies, juntas, peace time and war time. you have screamed, shouted, cried, cruised, smeared mascara, gotten hoarse, groaned, pounded your friends, gone quiet, been offended, moaned, whooped, lost bodily fluids, talked back.
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By showing up and laughing, we have put our bodies on the line. It has been good practice. It has come to this. We have made community. We have changed history. It has been a blast. Thank you for celebrating with me tonight!
I first saw Kate Clinton at the 1994 NGLTF Creating Change conference in Dallas. It was also the first time I experienced one of Fred Phelps's protests up close. His family was protesting the hotel we were holding the conference at. (A friend and I were going to try to get pictures with Fred, but by the time we got up to our hotel rooms to get our cameras and then made it back to the street, Fred was gone...no pictures.)
A couple years later, when I was living in Mankato, MN, the student group at the local university brought a lesbian comic (I can't even remember who--it wasn't one of the bigger names) to campus. We had to empty the union that night, a couple times, because of pulled fire alarms and bomb threats. I watched the galvanization of, and served as a mentor to, a new cohort of queer campus activists.
The central conflict in both those cases can be seen as queer claims to public space. Queer comedy has been more than a simple minority group telling in-jokes. It's been about community building and cultural production. Because it comes from a culture which questions normative assumptions about gender and sex, it's been inherently political. It's also about making claims to space; in the early days, it was about defending and using gay spaces to engage in this community building work. It has been transformed, just as queer politics has been, in that it has moved out of queer communities to make claims to public spaces. Queer comedy has become more mainstream as queer people have moved into the polity, as queer people.
Queer community building has been intimately linked to both queer cultural production and political activity. Because so much of quer community building has been historically tied to political mobilization (for instance, in defending bars against police harrassment or buiding AIDS service organizations or women's community centers), queer cultural production has also tended to be tied to politics. The political aspect of this can also be seen in who's sponsoring Clinton's tour. The National Center for Lesbian Rights [4] is the primary sponsor. Good folks. I'd encourage you to take a look and support them if you can.
Back in the early 1990s, when I was living in central Iowa, my first trip to see a queer commedian was life changing. I went to a gay bar in Des Moines (there were three at the time), a bar with no signage and blacked out windows, to see the show. Here was a culture that was mine. The in-jokes were as much about saying, "we've all been there" as they were about laughing. It was also a way of building an "us," of feeling connected. We built community by laughing about sex, about homophobia, about families, about death..about anything. We laughed. At that first show, I never thought I'd see queer comedy in mainstream venues. We have come a long way in the 15 years since I came out and became an activist. It's good to remember that, and to remember how we got here.
So, thanks to Kate Clinton and the other pioneers of queer culture. Yes, we did put our bodies on the line. And a lot of us are still here to laugh about it.
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