MUSIC FOR THE SOUL
~ by joel martens ~
This self-proclaimed “butch dyke,” is without a doubt a force to be reckoned with. All you need do is take a look at her lengthy résumé to see that this powerhouse comedian, actress, and gifted jazz musician is a skilled and sage performer. Lea DeLaria pulls no punches, but she does throw out endless punchlines, especially when it comes to executing her razor-sharp humor and endless jibes.
Best known for her role as Carrie “Big Boo” Black on the Netflix series, Orange is the New Black, DeLaria started her stand-up journey in San Francisco’s Mission District in 1982. Her work has always been edgy for sure, with some referring to it as “raunchy.” For the most part it’s a moniker that is rooted in her fearlessness, and her taking on topics that most wouldn’t go near. As she so eloquently said, “This is who I am when I’m up there. This is it. I’m a big butch dyke. That’s who I am and I’m a friendly one. I’m a big butch dyke with a smile on my face.”
She also holds the distinction of being the first openly gay comic to appear on any late-night talk show. Her moment on the Arsenio Hall Show wasn’t without some notoriety however, as she opened with, “Hello everybody, my name is Lea DeLaria, and it’s great to be here, because it’s the 1990s! It’s hip to be queer! I’m a big dyke.” Willfully embracing her queerness when queer still wasn’t cool—she blazed a trail with her unapologetic humor—distinguishing her as a one-of-a-kind humorist and savvy performer.
Something else many don’t know about DeLaria, is she is a gifted jazz musician as well, and that fact is something she’s very proud of. Side-splitting comedy, adroit political commentary and fantastic music round out the trifecta that are her live performances, work that any self-respecting LGBTQ human being should make the time to see and hear.
She’s a firebrand for sure and we didn’t stop laughing for almost the entirety of the interview she so graciously agreed to do.
I read we’re about the same age, children of the ’60s. Did you ever think you’re going to survive this long?
NEVER. I mean in an article I did where I was just riffing with the guy who was writing it, and it was so funny, Right? I said I thought in my 20’s I thought I’d be shot by some crazy, you know, guy who freaked out about me being so openly gay! In my 30’s I thought I’d drink and drug myself to death and in my 40’s I thought I’d be shot by a jealous chorus girl! (Laughs) I went on this thing and it was just really funny. I never thought I’d get here. I thought that I’d be dead a long time ago.
Let’s talk a little bit first about you and your music. Was that what you wanted to do first off as a kid?
I wanted to do music first, but I fell in love with acting in high school and then I found in musical theater I could do both. I went to college for a minute as a drama major who was going to concentrate on musical theater, but I found that I’m not the kind of person who does well in structured education. I’m just not that person, because I get bored really easily. I could tell you stories about my grade school, high school and college situation around all of that, but let’s just say I realized that I just couldn’t be in education.
So, I left college halfway through my freshman year. I just packed my bags and left and I immediately started doing improv. I joined a little improv group that toured around the Midwest and when I moved out to San Francisco I discovered stand-up comedy. I found I could do that, and it was just like acting for me. I was still doing music too, which is basically what I do on stage now, I’ve never done just one thing. If you go to see my show it’s not going to be a show of just me talking—you’ll see an hour and a half show with a trio of musicians on stage with me and I’ll do music from my latest album of David Bowie remixes—but with comedy as well. I generally tend to close my shows with “The Ballad of Sweeney Todd” cause that is my other big hit.
What prompted you to move to San Francisco in the first place? Was it after you came out?
Well yeah honey, I was gay and I lived in fucking St. Louis! (Laughs) It was 1980, so I chose San Francisco because at that time it was actually cheaper than New York. It was a mecca for standup at that time and was the school of comedy… basically, improvisational comedy came out of San Francisco. I also went there because of the radical queer political movement that was going on and because of the kind of lesbian feminist artistic movement happening there.
We all did that pilgrimage to our own Meccas.
Well, it was for sure a Mecca for stand up at that time. It was the school of comedy—basically improvisational comedy came out of San Francisco—Robin Tyler being probably the most famous through all of that at the time. I went there also, because of the radical queer political movement that was going on. And, because of the lesbian feminist kind of artistic movement happening there. I went thinking I was going to write plays and perform in them and start a theater company. In fact, I did start at a theater company called lesbian terrorist. We had buttons made that said, “Lesbian Terrorist.” Some of them have survived, I’ve seen people who have them and people have sent me pictures of theirs
Is that where you did Dos Lesbos? (DeLaria starred in Dos Lesbos, a musical comedy about two lesbians dealing with the issues of living together.)
Dos Lesbos happened there, but that was a little bit later in 1986.
I ran across a photo of you and Kelly Edwards on amazon.com. You’re holding her and she’s leaning back with her arms out. It’s for sale you should check it out, it’s hysterical.
Do I have a big mohawk? (Laughs) Oh my God, I know the picture. I was wild in the ‘80’s my friend… Heck, I’m still wild.
Is there something in particular that stands out for you from those early days in San Francisco, or in that world?
There are a couple things: one was the Valencia Rose. It was this fabulous cultural center that gave birth to queer comedy. I got my start there, Whoopi Goldberg got her start there, Marga Gomez got her start there and Danny Williams he got his start too… I could go on and on and on and on. I shared a dressing room with Whoopi Goldberg in 1984 when she was doing her Moms Mabley Show and I was doing a show called DeLaria Raging Bull.
That’s how long Whoopi and I have known each other, and we talk about it whenever I’m on The View. She shamed me the last time I was on, because she put up pictures of me crying that Jesse Tyler Ferguson had sent her. She was like, “I’ve known you a long time, girl and I’ve seen you cry in public!” (Laughs) It was pretty funny and I was like, “You’re shaming me, you asshole!” Jesse texted me later and said, “My work is done.” (Laughs)
Anyway, there was also all the political movements that came out at that time because of AIDS. So many were dying… I stopped counting at 87. So many of my friends died—we’re talking about in a two-year period—I just stopped counting. There were many, many more, it’s well over a hundred and they were important people who meant a lot to me… I’m sure you know what I mean.
Yeah, I do. I was just discussing this with someone recently. I don’t think many truly understand what it was like and it’s really hard to explain it to people. It felt like warfare, because every time I turned around someone was sick or dying.
You know it. I remember frying an egg for somebody, a grown man who weighed 80 pounds and couldn’t turn himself over… that kind of thing really sticks with you. Even right now, I’m tearing up about it, it’s like it was just a few years ago.
It was life or death, actually then it was mostly death. I was a young butch lesbian and of course I was rageful and angry—I was living in a society where it was illegal to be me in every State of the Union—my friends were dying around me, and the President of the United States was doing nothing.
He was making it worse, actually. I still remember how he refused to even acknowledge it until 1987, long after thousands had already died.
Yes, and everyone else was slut shaming and blaming us like it was our fault. Friends would go to a hospital and if they said they were gay they would put on rubber gloves and masks, it was just horrifying. I will never forget it.
Nor should we allow the memory of it to fade.
Agreed. My comedy has always been politically-motivated, but really, I am mostly grateful for that. When I first started doing comedy, one of my goals was to get gay men and lesbians in a room together. You grew up in the Midwest, so you know what I’m talking about when I say, “I went to a small gay bar.” (Laughs) We all partied together back then and I was basically raised by drag queens, which is why my sense of humor is like it is. I’ve always said inside this big bull dyke body, beats the heart of a vicious queen! (Laughs) That’s why a vast majority of my friends are gay men… and bitchy ones at that. I’m just saying we’re all the same.
Absolutely, we are all the same and on the same team… or at least we should be.
It’s a really big part of what I tried to do in the beginning of my career. The way I did it was by viewing lesbian politics, with a drag queen sensibility, if you know what I mean. Gay men were screaming with laughter at me, in fact gay men liked me better than lesbians back then. Lesbians were so involved in political correctness in the ‘80s and that was part of my act. I just made fun of them, but felt it was for their own fucking good. (Laughs) I was making fun to point out how stupid it is to worry about how to spell “woman” without using the word man. Especially when one is being raped around the corner… Let’s get our priorities straight.
Your career kills me. I mean, One Life to Live… what? I remember watching it with my grandmother in black and white with a Hammond organ playing the music in the background.
I know, right. One Life to Live, they’re my favorite fans. They don’t even recognize me, I’d shoot this fucking show at 6 in the morning and I was the comic relief character. What they would tend to do with me and Peter Bartlett, who was the other comic relief character on the show, they’d call us in and then shoot ten episodes in one day. I would be there from like 6 o’clock in the morning until like until 7 or 8 at night, then I’d go “Fuck this” and I’d go out and party, and I’d be on the subway going home at about 3 in the morning looking like me and and some guy would go, “Are you Madame Delphina?” I’d be like “How would you fucking know? I’m like this monster butch dyke, how do I look Madame Delphina? It’s interesting because they always say one of two, if not both things, “It’s your eyes and your voice.” (Laughs)
Talking with you and reading about you, the thing I adore about your sensibility is how pragmatic you are about your humor. You don’t pull any punches and just speak the truth. It is just so refreshing.
What the fuck is the point of being here if you’re not going to speak your truth? Not doing so is the reason we don’t have our rights yet. If we spent half the time screaming at the powers-that-be that we spend screaming at each other, we’d already be there. Personally, I blame the alphabet soup situation. I’m queer and that includes everybody. We are a queer community and have used that word for a long time to say who we are. When we use that alphabet soup label, all we do is point out our differences and not our similarities, our differences instead of our shared oppression. That’s why we’re a community together, because we are treated like second class citizens by this society. We get murdered, we lose our jobs, do you have any idea of the statistics on how many Butch dykes get raped? We are targeted by men because the mere sight of us, sends them into some crazy rageful emotion.
I’ve said this before, many men, thankfully not all, are so used to being in control or having absolute control. When they’re faced with someone who challenges it, they haven’t been taught the skills on how to deal with it. So often, their immediate responses to attack or to destroy.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, when you have privilege equality feels like oppression. It’s that simple. When you’re a person who has privilege your whole life, when we talk about equality you feel like you’re being oppressed and that’s fucking bullshit. You know who you are… the status quo. No honey, that’s privilege.
Some Evangelical Christians come to mind, perhaps?
Born Again Christians are my bread and butter, I eat that for supper. (Laughs) Honestly, they’re so stupid. Check out the video of me taking on a Born-Again preacher on the subway: Just search on YouTube, “Lea DeLaria subway preacher.” It happened right after Orange is the New Black became a huge hit. We’re talking about four years ago five years ago, maybe less and I was on my way to work memorizing my lines. I was sitting on my subway very early in the morning and a preacher comes in and in New York you sort of get used to this shit, but, I was a little annoyed with him and heard him say The Bible says “Women should be subservient to men.”
Right? I stood right up and challenged him respectfully, by talking directly to what he was saying And as soon as I did of course every camera went up, like 20 people with phones, if not more. It wasn’t a crowded subway train, because it was really early in the morning, but they were there were there and I had just a second to decide whether or not I was going to sit down or continue. Because I was on OITNB, I knew that it might go viral or get on the air or whatever, but what was I going to do?
I realized I couldn’t just sit on a fuckin’ train and listen to some guy. Then he said something about gay people, because he was trying to shut me up. When I heard that, I was like. Okay, done” and I go at him. (Laughs) I’m walking behind him as he’s trying to preach the Bible and every time he misquotes or says something wrong I pointed it out, saying “I went to Catholic school for for 12 years, baby, so if you’re going to quote the Bible then quote it correctly, because I know every page!” (Laughs)
I wasn’t using foul language, I was incredibly polite and referred to him as “sir,” the entire time. My favorite moment is when he turns to me and I say, “If you’re still talking, I’m still talking, sir. I’m not going to shut up as long as you’re talking. I’m not going to let you use the name of Jesus to preach hate.” There’s a moment too, where I get the whole car to sing “Ninety nine bottles of beer on the wall…” just to drown him out.
He finally he knew he couldn’t take me and he got off and as he was getting off the train I went, “Thank God he’s gone” and people on the car stood up and applauded and gave me a standing ovation. Everybody came up to me and said, “This is my favorite commute ever.” (Laughs) I chased him off the train, and of course it immediately went viral.
Where do you think you learned your sense of self? It’s so refreshing to hear you talk so honestly about the situations you’ve been in and how you’ve handled it all.
Well thank you very much. I think I’ve been validated my whole Hollywood life as a performer and I think that helps. I have to give it up to my parents who taught us to always, always speak our minds. Believe me though, they were terribly unhappy when they taught me to speak my mind at first. It took them a minute to accept my mind, but they did actually “accept me” if you know what I mean.
I was lucky and I know that some people aren’t. I had two incredibly intelligent parents who listened to me when I spoke, and I listened to them. I accepted that they could only think from where they were. I could have been one of those people that said, “Fuck you I’m never gonna talk to you again.” Instead, we had a conversation and we were able to meet in the middle. This was long before Orange is the New Black. I think also it changed them a little bit when they saw me on television with Andy Griffith on Matlock, someone from their generation. My parents accepted me and loved me until the day they died and were incredibly proud of me.
Lea DeLaria will be at the McCallum Theatre, 73000 Fred Waring Drive, Palm Desert on Thursday, November 8.
For tickets and more information, call 760.340.2787 or go to mccallumtheatre.com.