Five Lesbian Comics You Might Not Know but Should

by Dara Nai, Contributing Writer
September 17, 2007


Sabrina Matthews has a casual, laid-back delivery that borders on the deadpan. Her honest and insightful wit earned her a spot on this season's Last Comic Standing. She made her acting debut on America's Most Wanted playing a lesbian comic, then further stretched her acting chops by playing the role of "Suburban Dyke" in Margaret Cho's Bam Bam and Celeste. Most recently, she played a lesbian used-car dealer on The Minor Accomplishments of Jackie Woodman.

AfterEllen.com: What was it like being on Last Comic Standing?
Sabrina Matthews: It was actually a lot of fun, getting to work with all those comics and getting to meet some new comics. [But] the show itself is an art competition — I'm not sure how well those two things interact. The best thing you can do is compete with yourself.

AE: Did you make your set less gay because you were going to be on mainstream television?
SM: I changed my set eight hundred and four times, but I never changed it to make it less gay. My set is never really entirely gay. and my set is absolutely never devoid of gayness. I was really glad the network kept the out jokes in my sets because I wanted my fans who were watching to [know] I would [never] chicken out just because it's national television. And I wanted new people to get a sampling of all of me. I think more than anything, I wanted to represent.

AE: When you said, "Do we have to have a special moment where I announce I'm gay?" it got a huge laugh.
SM: Some of your best jokes are jokes that you never knew were funny. That [line] was something I said one night on stage when I realized I was 15 minutes into my set [and] I hadn't said anything about it. I thought I'd better get something in about this — better get to that stuff because I want [it] in there. And it got this huge laugh, so it stayed. I don't actually usually do that line, just where it sort of comes up organically.

AE: What do you think are some of your best bits?
SM: There's a line, I think it may have even made it onto Last Comic Standing: "You know what I hate about lesbian stereotypes? They all apply to me." But I said that and I didn't mean it to be funny. It was about a year before I figured out why it was funny.

AE: Self-deprecating humor is disarming, too.
SM: I have a really strong belief that changes are made in two ways; either huge things happen and people try to recover from them as best they can, or small, little advances are made and then people change [the way they think].

Being an openly gay comic … has been a type of activism. I'm going in and getting straight people who think they don't know about gay people, and laughing with a gay person — me. I have people come up to me after shows and say, "I never met a gay person before."

And I say, "Yeah, you did, you just didn't know it." Those people begin to see gay people as human … [and] have some empathy for them.

AE: Have you ever not used gay material in your act?
SM: I never didn't do it. Actually, that's not true. I tried not being out once, and it wasn't because I was worried about the room. I tried it to try it. It was severely creepy. I had no idea how to feel about it. I hated everything about it. I just wanted to get back on stage and say, "Wait! Wait! Wait!"

Truly, the best comedy shows will have a woman on the bill, a person of color on the bill, a gay person on the bill, maybe someone who talks about being Muslim on the bill. You know what I mean? The more different realities that come to the bill, the better it is. People all have things in common, and that's where comedy comes from — being inside someone else's head. You can't laugh at something you don't understand.

AE: What do you have coming up?
SM: I'm leaving for an RSVP cruise to Alaska in a few days, and then I'll be doing two shows for Hampton Roads Pride in the Virginia Beach, Norfolk area. In October, I've got shows in Provincetown. In November, I'm headlining at the Houston Laff Stop.

AE: The last time I was in P-town, it looked like it was taken over by straight people. Have you noticed this?
SM: It's fun to scare the s--- out of the straight people. One year, this guy was wandering around and he was pointing at the gay people in a derisive way. He was with his wife and his two kids; one of them happened to be a daughter. While he was waiting to cross the street, I came up behind him, leaned up to his ear and said, [ominously] "How much for the girl?"

original article located at http://www.afterellen.com/people/2007/9/lesbiancomics?page=0%2C3

After fifteen years on the road I’ve figured out the difference between a good hotel, an okay hotel, and a lousy one. A good hotel heats their hallways, an okay one doesn’t, and lousy hotel doesn’t have hallways. Plus the maid leaves cigarette butts in the ashtray and steals your luggage.

A nice hotel can be so peculiar as to be frightening. Last week, I traveled to Roanoke, VA, for their 17th annual Gay and Lesbian Pride Celebration, where I stayed at my strangest hotel yet. I shared the Governors Suite of the Patrick Henry Hotel with singer songwriter Gregory Douglass and his "roadie" Glen. Now there are times that one might not want to share a room with another performer, but these guys are super-sweet, and besides, we kept getting so disoriented in our digs we could barely find each other. It was like a monastery library: turning left over and over would lead you to the kitchen, repeatedly turning right would take you to the living room. At one point we lost each other, but I happened upon the foyer: after tying a loose bit of yarn to the front door I began alternating turns, calling to my new friends while unraveling the arm of a sweater. I found the master bath, with a blue sunken tub and purple paisley wallpaper. The bathroom, while hilarious, was marred only by the selection of some fine smelling oatmeal soap. There is nothing fancy about oatmeal, soap made from which may be lovely for your skin, but it's full of brown flecks, flecks that adhere to your washcloth. When I bathe, I consider the removal of brown flecks to be an important criterion for success.

After examining the soap, I opened what I thought was the linen closet and nearly gave Glen heart failure where he stood trying to repair the broken sauna, which was big enough for a health club. At the end of one hall was a bed-chamber (arcane wording totally appropriate, here) with a bed that had a curtain that lowered to the neck area of the sleepers; creepy, but Gregory and Glen took that one. (Who says gay guys are wimps?) I took the master bedroom, which had several nooks with wires that went nowhere, a cushioned headboard bolted to the wall (oh, those revolutionary prostitutes), and ceilings high enough to accommodate a basketball match. I feared my sleep would be plagued by nightmares set in asylums, but I was blissfully spared by the echoes of my upstairs neighbors. They were having sex constantly, which was fine. And I could hear them, which was also fine-- it saved me the $4.99. But they had the worst fucking rhythm I have ever witnessed. I finally started throwing things at the ceiling in 2/4 time-- I just wanted to bust in to their room with a metronome; "Here, screw to this! I've got to get up in two hours and tell jokes"... Finally, I went to sleep in the tub. I love baths. I'm all butch until there's hot water in the tub: then it's tea lights and back-to-back Enya on the cd changer.

The worst hotel I ever stayed at was the Sagamore Motor Lodge in Oak Park, MI. Now, you may not know this particular motel, but every town has one at the ass end of the city limits, that two-story residential-hotel high-school-prom-night-fuck-palace that rents by the day, week or hour. (I once tried to rent one of these rooms for an hour, by myself: I had been driving and just wanted a nap, so I needed the room for only an hour or so. You have no idea how difficult it is to maintain your self-respect while renting a room for an hour by yourself.
"Will that be overnight?"
"No, I only need it for an hour."
"Two occupants?"
"No, I'm by myself. Well, I do have my dog with me"
"Excuse me?"
"I'll take it overnight: here's your forty bucks.")

The room smelled of feet. No matter how much incense I burned or how much takeout Chinese food I ate, there was still the malingering smell of feet as you walked in the door. Each of the rooms in these hotels is alike, with a bed that has candy wrappers and empty cigarette packs underneath, a television that gets local cable, and a hot plate with an other-worldly film over it that makes it impossible to contemplate cooking. Likely decorated by a charter member of the Society for the Preservation of Beige, the pattern on the bedspreads was identical to the prints framed and hanging above the bed. In an upscale hotel, that might pass for trendy coordination, but at the Sag it just meant that at some point a bedspread would receive so many cigarette burns that it would be cut into eighteen by twenty-four inch rectangles and used to replace the pictures of puppies and flowers that had been removed by the previous occupants.

Just so you know that my life is not without some glamour, I once stayed in a Chicago hotel that provided guests with their own goldfish upon request. As luck would have it, this sparked a two-day rivalry between my date and me over whether the goldfish should be named Claudine or Bertram (which was totally stupid-- Bertram is clearly the better fish name).