AE:
You opened for her, is that right?
KC:
Yes, I did, which was really fun. It was certainly an opportunity
to be seen by more people, and you know I think it’s a great
combination, with…stand-up comedy words and then some music,
so it was really fun.
AE:
I’m assuming that her audience was mostly gay and lesbian,
although maybe not?
KC:
It really was surprising…. After I did my set I would just
kind of go through the screaming crowds, and…there was this
one couple…a man and a woman…they were both very white-haired
and they were standing, singing the words as well, and they had
to be in their seventies. It was just so cool; it was very mixed.
It was certainly predominantly I would say lesbian, but not political
lesbian, more like…oh I don’t know. I know there were
people who knew me and had seen me as well but there were other
people who just are not in that kind of…they’re sort
of in the WNBA kind of…you know what I mean?
AE:
Yeah (laughing). Do you watch the WNBA?
KC:
Oh, yeah. There’s—you know we have the New York Liberty.
It’s really quite amazing…how we’ve created
spaces that lesbians go to that are not necessarily political
spaces, like WNBA games, Melissa Etheridge shows…When I
was coming up—I sound like the oldest living lesbian now—it
was really very often about women’s music, and there was
a message and it was about community, and it seems more diffuse
now and just reaching more and more and larger audiences.
AE:
Do you feel like there’s a difference in your performance
or in your material when you’re performing for a mostly
straight audience versus a gay or lesbian audience?
KC:
Here’s the weird thing that I’ve noticed. It was really
in the last…very long presidential election, thirty days
of an election. I was doing a show at a theater in Palm Beach
and it was the height of Florida and they were still counting
and screaming. And it was a subscription series, so it was a lot
of, you know, New York blue hairs and early-bird special people
and lesbians and gay people who came to this show, and I really
felt that people were very comfortable during the gay material
but got really nervous during the political material.
AE:
That’s interesting.
KC:
No kidding, I mean I walked away and thought, wow. Because it
used to be the exact opposite: you could talk about politics and
everybody would, you know, laugh and carry on and then…in
a mixed crowd, certainly, if you did gay material you could feel
people getting really uptight. But I really feel that in many
ways we’ve gone past what Paul Monette used to call homo-ignorance.
I mean, people know that there are gay people in the world now.
AE:
(laughing) Yeah, they do!
KC:
We’d rather not have that be the case, but…(laughing).
AE:
Do you think that the discomfort with the political humor was
mostly due to the election at that time or have you experienced
that since 2000?
KC:
I think it was very much their uncertainty about what we were
living through and nervousness about that, but I also feel that
there is that kind of partisanship that we’re experiencing
in general in the country. You know, the red and the blue mentality,
but it’s so-called. You know I travel and I’m very
often performing in red states, and they’re just—they
want to hear it. But I think that is also the function of humor…[in
a] great compliment to me somebody came up to me and said, “Well
I’m a Republican but I laughed.”
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