While mainstream visibility is still limited, LGBT comics are moving past cliches and homophobic roadblocks to take their place in the US comedy scene

Twenty-five years ago, Lea DeLaria became the first openly gay comic to appear on American television when she performed on The Arsenio Hall Show. “It’s the 1990s,” she announced with characteristic gusto. “It’s hip to be queer, and I’m a bi-i-i-i-ig dyke!” At a time when homophobia was rampant, forcing queer comics to traffic in innuendo when discussing their sexualities onstage, DeLaria and other out standups like Kate Clinton and Scott Thompson were radically candid and brazenly political, sometimes at their own expense. On Arsenio, where she was invited back twice more that year, DeLaria, who now plays Carrie “Big Boo” Black on Netflix’s Orange is the New Black, uttered the words dyke, fag and queer 47 times in four minutes. “I didn’t just open the closet door,” she recalls to the Guardian. “I fucking blew that door off with a blowtorch.”

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Just a few years earlier, in the thick of the Aids crisis, Jaffe Cohen of groundbreaking comedy trio Funny Gay Males, who frequently appeared on the Joan Rivers Show, liked to open his sets by outing himself as “half-Jewish and half-gay”, or a “shlomo-sexual”, as the gag went. But when he delivered the line at a comedy club in Queens, the emcee wiped off his microphone, as though gay men were contagious. “It was horrible,” Cohen remembers. “The audience laughed at that.”

But today’s generation of queer comics, having stormed through the doors left ajar by DeLaria and company, are no longer the butt of the joke. And standup comedy, for so long the preserve of straight white men, is being refashioned in their image.

“My generation is the first that’s able to talk about our lives in a way that’s normative but also accessible,” says Cameron Esposito, a standup whose first special, Rape Jokes, debuts later this month. “Ten years ago when I was starting I was always able to be out, but only because a bunch of folks did it before I got there.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Lea DeLaria performing in 2001. Photograph: David Levene/The Guardian

Those “folks”, like DeLaria, Clinton, Scott Thompson and Karen Williams, were performing in hotbeds of queer comedy like Providence and San Francisco as early as the 1980s. Their contemporaries, such as Ellen DeGeneres and Wanda Sykes, stayed closeted for longer, until they’d experienced success in the mainstream. Even then, though, as DeGeneres came out on the cover of Time magazine, queer comics were often coy or euphemistic in their approach to sex, forced to circumnavigate the discomfort of their straight audiences. They’d adopt personas – like Scott Thompson’s character Buddy Cole from the Canadian sketch comedy show Kids in the Hall – under the guise of which they could be more audacious. And lesbian standups like Donna McPhail and Rhona Cameron would ingratiate themselves with audiences first, dropping the “L-word” midway through their sets.

At the same time, homophobic jokes were catnip for straight comedians like Andrew Dice Clay, Sam Kinison and Eddie Murphy, who in his 1983 standup special Delirious told “faggots” in the audience not to look at his ass onstage. If, today, gay people are less frequently targeted in mainstream comedy, gay sex is still regularly ridiculed, as when Jimmy Kimmel mocked Sean Hannity for being Donald Trump’s “bottom” and Stephen Colbert called the president’s mouth Vladimir Putin’s “cock holster”. Besides being reductive and not terribly funny, the “jokes” prove that lazy, anti-gay material is still low-hanging fruit for plenty of straight comics. Standup, DeLaria believes, “is the last bastion of homophobia and sexism”, a sphere where openly declaring one’s prejudices is received with laughs instead of derision.

“There was a desire to market an image that’s attractive to straight people, and what’s attractive to straight people is simplicity,” says Cohen, whose fellow Funny Gay Male Bob Smith became the first gay comic on The Tonight Show in 1994. “You could either be RuPaul, a 6ft 3in drag queen, something people can comprehend. Or you can be Bob Smith, who had no gay affect. But straight society in the 90s wasn’t all that interested in knowing who we really are.”

Without much of a precedent for an openly gay, mainstream comic working in the confessional style that mushroomed with the rise of alt-comedy, today’s queer standups represent something of an insurrection against comedy’s overwhelming straightness and its purity complex, too. In clubs and bars, the crucible of live comedy, lineups still regularly feature a handful of straight white comics, plus a token minority. Accordingly, many queer comedians have forged a different path, peppering their standup with song and dance, sketch comedy, character work, trivia and parody in ways that emphasize a certain queer sensibility often muted by standup’s hallowed tropes.

“When I started, I was reacting to this Marc Maron podcast moment of comedians talking very seriously about their craft in this confessional, truth-based, poignant and vulnerable way, which was seen as the highest form of the medium,” says John Early, who’s been doing standup for six years and currently stars on the hipster noir sitcom Search Party.

“I felt angry because my influences and heroes traffic in more of a queer, campy mode, but the ways to get on stage were through straight shows, even if they were considered alternative by virtue of the fact that they were in bars,” he adds.

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Ana Fabrega, a New York City-based comic, believes that a broadening notion of what standup can be has allowed gay comics to hone their craft in other ways. “A lot of us LGBTQ performers are not doing traditional standup, so we’re not in those places to begin with,” she said.

If the titans of alt-comedy, pioneered in places like the Upright Citizens Brigade, LA’s Largo at the Coronet or New York’s now-defunct Luna Lounge, include Maron, Janeane Garofalo, Bob Odenkirk and Patton Oswalt, queer comics have assembled their own Mount Everest of standups, a small coterie of comedians who dared to speak to gay audiences when mainstream comedy still pretended such an audience didn’t exist. “When I watched Joan Rivers for the first time,” says Matteo Lane, a Brooklyn-based standup, “I felt like I was being spoken to. Or when Kathy Griffin said: ‘I watch the award shows with my gays,’ I couldn’t believe someone was speaking about us and we weren’t just part of the joke.”

“I realized recently that queer comedians never aspired to be Louis [CK],” says Early, who laments the idea that the only “noble” way to make it in comedy is by roughing it in front of hostile crowds in the heartlands. “Our models of success have always been smaller, more boutique comedians. I worship Margaret Cho, her career seems absolutely huge to me. But I don’t know any queer comics who are, like, ‘I’m going to be the gay Dane Cook.’”

Slightly older comics like James Adomian, known for his uncanny political impressions, and Sampson McCormick, whose documentary A Tough Act to Follow chronicles his experiences as a black, openly gay standup, witnessed the comedy climate become incrementally more hospitable to queer performers in the last several years. “You can’t go into some audiences talking about dick and ass, so I had to play chess in a lot of ways,” says McCormick. “After Obama said, ‘Get over it, gay people love each other,’ I saw the climate change a little bit, whereas five years ago I had to warm them up.”

Our models of success have always been smaller, more boutique comedians John Early

“The resistance to us is soft and malleable,” adds Adomian. “I’ve had jokes that were pushing boundaries that became less dangerous over time because the opinions of the country shifted.”

As a result, the pressure queer comics once felt to pander to straight audiences has, for the most part, dissipated. Early, a skillful practitioner of the kind of scatological comedy that was once verboten, wistfully remembers whispering the word “faggot” in the ears of straight classmates as an early instance of comic affirmation. And when Irene Tu, a lesbian standup in San Francisco, first began performing live seven years ago, she opted for observational humor in the vein of DeGeneres, feeling like there was no blueprint for queer, autobiographical comedy. “I started in Chicago and met Cameron Esposito, who wasn’t famous then,” Tu remembers. “She talked about being gay and I was like, ‘Wait, I have to do this.’ Super observational comedy wasn’t for me. It was like putting a square peg in a round hole.”

But at a recent show at the Bell House in Brooklyn, where the lineup featured three queer comics, one gets a sense of the sea change that’s been under way for at least a quarter century. Lane, who begins his set with: “So, I’m gay …”, does an inventive gag about being called a “faggot” recently in Indiana, whipping the microphone across his face to approximate the rising-then-falling invective from a drive-by heckler. The joke calls to mind a tactic of DeLaria’s, who inverts and repurposes much of the slander directed at the LGBTQ community as part of her comic lexicon. “Accessing your rage,” she says, “is a way of accepting that this happens to you.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Kate McKinnon accepts the award for outstanding supporting actress in a comedy series at the Emmy awards in 2016. Photograph: Mike Blake/Reuters

What kills in front of a live audience, though, can be dicey on television, where, according to the 2017-2018 Glaad report, 6% of characters on broadcast programming identify as gay, lesbian, bisexual or trans. Even decades after DeLaria’s seismic appearance on Arsenio, Bob Smith’s set on Jay Leno, the Puppy episode of Ellen and Terry Sweeney’s year-long stint on Saturday Night Live (Kate McKinnon became just the second openly gay cast member in 2012) queer comedians are often met with trepidation and a hackneyed brand of codespeak when making the leap to the screen. Adomian, who believes television is afflicted with the “residual inertia” of old biases, distinguishes between an “over-culture”, the domain of Netflix specials and television shows, and an “under-culture”, where queer standups are thriving and well-represented. “The difference between the two is a sign that things have changed faster than a lot of powerful people wanted.”

Dewayne Perkins, a standup out of Chicago who wrote for Michelle Wolf’s provocative routine at this year’s White House correspondents’ dinner, says he’s been told by studios to both “tone down the gayness” and play it up to the point of caricature. “Compromising myself to fit somebody’s idea of blackness and gayness is anti-everything I am,” he says. “I want to be mainstream, but I want to do it in a way that doesn’t feel gross.”

Lane, who describes the homophobia he’s experienced in comedy as “quiet”, believes a double standard persists even as LGBTQ visiblity in pop culture appears to flourish. “A straight guy can do a five-minute late-night set on marriage, yet when I did a late-night set, and I’m not going to say who, they wouldn’t air it after I filmed it because the host of the show said it’s too gay,” says Lane, who was told the show would have him back to “talk about being gay once, and then not bring it up for the rest of the show”.

“When I did Seth Meyers and Colbert,” he adds, “they were wonderful to me.”

Early, arguably the most successful of this new wave of millennial gay male comics, was met with similar resistance when he and Kate Berlant, a darling of the alt-alt-comedy world, pitched a number of networks on a John Waters-inspired sitcom in which the two played a pair of “inseparable best friends”. At no point, Early explained, did they resort to the straight-girl-and-her-gay-best-friend tropes often parroted on television.

But networks, keen on mass-producing what Early calls “woke, arguably didactic comedy”, responded to the show with confusion, as though broad, social behavior sitcoms had no precedent. “When there is queerness on-screen, people need it oversimplified, like woke Mic.com explainer content, or deeply cartoonish and offensive,” Early says. “People kept asking us, ‘What’s the premise?’ We were like, ‘What’s the premise of Seinfeld, bitch? Curb Your Enthusiasm? Louie?’ It literally could not be more simple.”

When he was told the show was “too niche” or “rarefied”, Early believed the networks wanted a show that let audiences make fun of women and gay men. “No matter how evolved we think we are, people still need those characters to humiliate themselves or apologize for themselves.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Tig Notaro. Photograph: Netflix

In this changing climate, where streaming behemoths like Netflix have emerged as the chief purveyors of live comedy, the hour-long standup special remains for many comics a career capstone, for the exposure as much as the money. In this sphere, queer comics have made inroads – the wickedly funny Tig Notaro recently released her first Netflix special, and others by Billy Eichner, Aussie standup Hannah Gadsby and DeGeneres are in development. Trans comic Ian Harvie, who for years opened for Margaret Cho and later appeared on Transparent, had his own special in 2016 on the now-shuttered streaming service Seeso. But they still contend with a glass ceiling, one some attribute to discrimination and others, like DeLaria, to oversaturation.

“Your kneejerk reaction can’t always be homophobia,” DeLaria says. “I’m a huge, favorite character on their #1 show, which is watched by more people than every other show on Netflix combined, and I can’t get a comedy special on Netflix. They say they’re going to get bigger names. I’m like, ‘What do you mean bigger names?’ They’re like, ‘We’re going to do Seinfeld first.’ How do I argue with that?”

“The world of comedy has changed,” she adds. “For all the comics saying they can’t get a special, get in line behind me.”

Given that she was the first to break the “late-night barrier”, it’s only fair that DeLaria leads the queue. But the line behind her, filled with a generation of comics who’ve managed to cross-fertilize standup and with a contemporary, queer sensibility, is growing rapidly, and comedy’s evolving apparatus can barely keep pace. It’s a group not content to play the zany, zinger-flicking gay best friend, or the token butch, or the social justice pedagogue, one that’s come of age in a world inching towards equity but hampered by orthodoxy. As Early put it: “Queer audiences are ready for some goddamn nuance.”