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"Oldest Living Lesbian Comdian" Wows All Kate Clinton bills herself as a "feminist humorist"

      Kate Clinton wowed the audience at the Barre Opera house in the early 1980s. It was straight stand-up – except that it wasn’t straight at all – and that was what really rocked the audience.
      I suppose her material that night was as witty, up-front and impudent as it remains to this day, but the lasting impact of that night on those of us in our late 20s to late 30s was her seemingly assured daring in throwing over her high school English teacher career to come out and play – literally and figuratively – in the tight-knit, hot-house world of the stand-up comedians.
      I tried to imagine the life she had led before she hit the road in 1981. I concocted a Clark Kent/Superman scenario: mild-mannered Macbeth pusher by day, and gay gadabout by night, the kind of hilarious, irreverent cut-up whose friends were always saying, “Gee, Kate, you oughta go into show business ...”
      I imagined – and who could doubt it, hearing her marvelous, mobile voice and trying to keep up with her quicksilver, articulate command of language – that she loved the English teacher part of herself. So maybe it wasn’t just fear of failing (and perhaps being crucified into the bargain) that made leaving teaching a hard choice.
      And she must have wondered who would be her audience. If the classroom sometimes felt like the confines of a ghetto, wouldn’t unending gigs in front of another “subset” – the “Birkenstock Brigades” as the cynical sneerers used to say – begin to wear out pretty quickly and leave the promise of Clinton’s intellect and wit hemmed in, even stunted?
       After all, THEN wasn’t NOW for the out front gay performer. Enough said.
      In her book Don’t Get Me Started (Ballantine, 1998) Clinton remarks that Ellen DeGeneres’s coming out made some of Clinton’s friends, – “jaded hohumasexuals” – very impatient, while the event brought back her own coming out (in the late 㥎s): “My closet was huge, had a foyer, a turnstile, a few locks, dead bolts, a burglar alarm that needed deactivating before I could even go for the door handle. And then there was a storm door. My televised coming out would have been a Ken Burns 92-part series. Talk about cliffhangers.”
      And at the same time, she chose to kick over the traces and go, come what may.
      There weren’t buckets of bawdy girl-comics – let alone gay girl-comics – out there in those days. And Clinton billed herself as a feminist humorist from which, she says, she got “lots of interviews ’cause nobody could believe the two went together.” So when talk-show guys called her up for an interview they were primed to nail her, assuming she would be what they expected – “humorless and horrible.” But the interviews were “a blast.” Quickly, she attracted serious media attention and her following grew.
      Early on, she covered mostly gay issues and current events. She met Urvashi Vaid, then the director of the policy institute of the Gay and Lesbian Task Force in Washington, D.C., and their meeting 14 years ago prompted Clinton to incorporate politics into her routines. And certainly the AIDS crisis in the 1980s made it all the more imperative for her comedic reach to encompass all institutions in America that had a crucial bearing on the quality and dignity of individuals’ lives – especially those individuals who could be, shall we say, shunted aside by all manner of “suits.”
      A quick check on Clinton’s biographical and career stats reveal she’s enjoyed a varied, ever-widening experience and today she wears many hats, from comic, writer, commentator, activist, actress (apparently she was outstanding in The Vagina Monologues), host and performer. Just last week I read her column “Unplugged” in The Progressive (September, 2002).
      Apparently all restraint on the part of society’s gadflies and jokesters after 9/11 is long over. If Jay Leno is zinging GWB with “dumb jokes,” I wasn’t really surprised to find Kate “I miss June Jordan” Clinton positively excoriating the Repubs as well as “that eyebrowless Dick Gephart” and all Dems of his ilk (just about all of them, I guess) in her essay “Hormoneland Security.” It was a delight, as always, to follow her every word and savor the revealing snapshots of her skewered targets. To get a flavor of Kate today, check it out.
      Her recent comic disc Read These Lips came out in fairly early 2001. I listened to it a few days ago, certain I’d love it. But my first reaction was flat. I played it again, but still felt a nervous let-down and wondered how I was going to write favorably about this woman of renown, this trailblazer on so many fronts who even now is having a documentary of her life and times go into final stages of production. And she’s coming to our neighborhood – SOON!
      Maybe it’s because I had to attend cotillion class (don’t ask) in the 1950’s, but I feel, when reviewing the work of a legitimate artist, one should at least be positive and appreciative if not madly enthusiastic.
      So, I backed off for a few days and tried to get a handle on my lukewarm response to Read These Lips. Glad I did. I think I’ve figured it out: other, admittedly younger, comediennes have been turning my head these days with well-produced video or film.
      I missed Margaret Cho’s comedy film Notorious C.H.O. when it was around a few days ago, but I saw I’m the One That I Want, courtesy of the local video rental. Her reckless abandon in the baring of her life’s most intimate secrets, coupled with her manic physicality and brilliant mimicry knocked me out. And that this self-proclaimed “fag hag” loudly trumpets a fair shake for all – regardless – and not just Korean-Americans such as herself, ices the cake. She has a boldness that enlivens audiences of today just the way Clinton did when she burst into the scene, I remembered.
      Also on video is Julia Sweeney’s adaptation of her play God Said Ha. Her monologue, delivered on a set stage in front of an audience, told of a time in the 1990’s when her family crowded into her tiny Hollywood bungalow to give support to her 31-year-old brother who was dying of cancer. Great comedic set up? Hardly, one would think. But as she took us through the ordeal – which came to include her own battle with cervical-and-beyond cancer, concurrent with her brother’s terminal phase – she infused the event with a kind of fastidious humor without ever once demeaning the experience. It was admirable, and although some might remember her as Pat, the androgynous-voiced lump on Saturday Night Live, I’ll always remember her moving exactingly, dressed tastefully (much as Clinton), relating her life to us, in a way, I realized, like Kate Clinton did.
      And Nia Vardalos made good use of her Greek-American bits (developed when she was with Second City in Chicago) in the film My Big Fat Greek Wedding. It was entertaining and the supporting cast shone – if a bit over the top, yes? And Vardalos is so real and so easy in her bones. The easy, familiar approaches to the confusion of clashing cultures made the film like a breather. I mean, it certainly didn’t rattle your brain or require real focus. Kate Clinton always does and, it was dawning on me, she could summon an easy familiar approach when she sensed the audience needed a breather.
      And I realized something else when I thought back to my initial disappointment: because I always find film and video so involving, it’s easy for me to forget how just looking or just listening – not the both together – offers another way of knowing that’s as real as the alluring mix of sight and sound. And thinking of this, I put Kate Clinton’s album on again, and I stopped doing my usual three things at the same time. I just listened. After all, she was coming to me in voice only, and I would really have to see her in my mind’s eye.
      I did. She was great this time. And all the accolades currently flowing her way – well, sure.
       It was all there. Bush lampooned. Viagra-Bob Dole sent up royally, so to speak. A wicked take on the Supreme Court, and Giuliani gets his. There’s Kate’s trip down Annette Benning’s birth canal (on her back) and the “ex-gay” folks get quite a good going over. When “the Rapture” never came for the evangelicals, Kate was there to comment. And I heard about the Pope (Kate was, after all, a good Catholic girl), Capri pants, her troubles in a Dot Com world, godless global capitalism, evolution, Bush fatigue (?), Vermont’s civil union, and gays that have become too nice – and more!
       It’s not that she’s better than any of the young women I’ve mentioned. They are powerful performers, reaching beyond the stylized stand-up style polished by Clinton. Often these women (and so many others) don’t include words like “feminism” or “transgender” in their performances – or if they do, it’s not the whole deal. After all, they have grown up after Friedan, after Erica Jong’s “zipless fuck” and all that encompassed feminism’s “second wave.” Whatever benefits have come down to women are taken in stride, unnoticed by most young women today. And that’s a good thing, I think, for the most part, that they step into their chosen arena unfettered by the restraints that had to be broken by those who came before.
      But it’s nice to read that a young woman – Jennifer Baumgardner – and others like her want to bring back the classic books of the women’s movement for today’s young women so that they’ll know their history, thereby possessing the perspective and reassurance that knowing one’s place in the stretch of time can provide.
      But Kate Clinton as a Mother Figure or an historical icon is no reason to go to Dartmouth on October 5, 2002, to hear and see her.
      I’m hoping to go to see Kate Clinton and watch her strut her stuff because she’s wonderfully entertaining and provides a good intellectual workout. Who knows what trajectories her scintillating rants will take? But it’ll be fun and she’ll have an audience composed of everyone because that’s the way it is for performers today, thanks in no small part to women like her.

Kristin Pettit is a retired English and drama teacher with no immediate plans to go onstage. She lives with her partner in Underhill.