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“I spent my whole childhood going, 'Oh my God... All right, fine. I may be attracted to women, but I can't be a lesbian. I like Laura Ashley polished cottons! And I throw like a girl! And I cry for no apparent reason all the time! Oh my God, I'm a gay man!'”
— Lesbian comic Vickie Shaw
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Vickie Shaw is throwing a big party, and we'd all be invited if it weren't already sold out.
On May 19th, Shaw celebrates her 50th birthday with a Texas-style barbeque and beer bash in her hometown, Rockford, Illinois. “We're going to have over 600 people, so every lesbian in the Midwest is going to be here.” she adds with a laugh, “I didn't even know there were that many here!” Also performing will be out lesbian entertainers Suede, Lisa Koch and Roxanna Ward. Shaw plans to record the event and sell copies to raise funds for her next comedy DVD.
If Vickie Shaw's name isn't familiar to you, it soon will be. She's featured in Logo's Wisecracks comedy series, Comedy Central's Premium Blend, and was profiled in a recent We network special, The Secret Lives of Women: Late in Life Lesbians. She'll soon be seen, along with comedians Sabrina Matthews, René Hicks and Elvira Kurt, in Andrea Meyerson's new film Laughing Matters... More!
Shaw's jokes about coming out to her kids, how she met her partner and “husbian” Lori (aka “Sgt. Patch”), and explaining lesbianism to a bar full of rednecks have entertained straight and gay audiences alike. But it's not the life her family imagined for her, or one she ever could have imagined for herself.
Vickie Shaw was brought up in a devout Southern Baptist family in Beaumont, Texas and says she never knew that lesbianism was an option. “My life was already planned out. I was to marry the perfect man and have the perfect children and do the things I was raised to do. And even in retrospect, the only time I was ever sexually attracted to anybody it was always women, but I didn't even associate it with homosexuality. I just thought that's how you feel for your best friend!”
Shaw was married for 18 years and had three children, managing to hold it all together until she began doing stand-up comedy. It was the beginning of the end of her conventional married life.
Shaw says, “Comedy comes from pain, not necessarily horrible pain, but it's all about emotion. I didn't have any emotion before I came out, everything was shut down. So when I started doing comedy I had to go to that place of emotion for the first time in my life. And you can't pick and choose what emotions come up. So in the course of that, all of those repressed feelings that I'd never dealt with came up.”
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