Awareness Must Be Raised

The New York Times alerts us to an overlooked crisis:

Gay Male Comics Await the Spotlight
By JASON ZINOMAN 

COULD James Adomian become the first man to break through as an openly gay stand-up star? 

The thought popped into my head as he performed last month in front of an almost entirely male audience at the Rockbar, on Christopher Street. In a hat, with a confident, wry smile and a thin mustache, Mr. Adomian, whose debut album “Low Hangin Fruit” (Earwolf) was released on Monday, is a casually handsome ...

and so forth and so on. 

Yet, there have long been out gay male comedians -- collecting stereotypes for my 1994 National Review article "Why Lesbians Aren't Gay" was helped along by watching gay stand-ups on TV. A retired gay male comedian named Bob Smith writes in to point out: Hey, I was a star back in the day!

It would have been nice if the reporter did a little research. The NY Times gave a rave review to my HBO special on July 14, 1994. I appeared on The Tonight Show, The Late Late Show, Politically Incorrect and Tom Snyder. There is a whole group of out gay male comics who were out in the 80's. My HBO special is still played on HBO. I have ALS and had to stop performing in 2010. This article is shockingly uninformed.

In fact, I remember Smith's HBO special. I liked his melonballer joke. From the NYT:

TELEVISION REVIEW; How Many Gay Comics Does It Take to Do 2 Shows?
By JOHN J. O'CONNOR
Published: July 14, 1994 

Gay and lesbian standup comics are not exactly new to prime time. ... Mr. Smith is no doubt more accessible to general audiences. As an amiable, sort of boy-next-door type, he chats easily about growing up in Buffalo, in a very conservative Roman Catholic family. He plays with stereotypes that, of course, are molded from truth. He says that he knew early on that he was a gay kid, slyly confiding that "my treehouse had a breakfast nook." Even as a Boy Scout, he swears, his Swiss Army knife had a melon baller and a garlic press.

Likewise, the omnipresent Ellen Degeneres is, obviously, a lesbian, and Eddie Izzard, a major stand-up star, is a transvestite. And a famous stand-up once got arrested with a transvestite hooker in his car, but maybe he just forgot to wear his glasses. 

But, if you draw a Venn Diagram of superduperstarness, homosexuality, maleness, and outness, you evidently don't find anybody in the intersection of those four circles, so Awareness Must Be Raised. 

Granted, stand-up comedy is a brutally competitive field requiring a notoriously thick skin and constant low-budget travel. If there aren't a lot of extremely funny gay male stand-ups, maybe it's because it's easier for a gay male to get ahead in more attractive careers, such as acting. Maybe what stand-up comedy needs to stop being so discriminatory against gays is more casting couches.

One unasked question is whether gays are losing their competitive edge because they have become such a sacred cow in contemporary America that they are getting soft from lack of criticism. For example, the tone of this article sounds like it's written about competitors in the Special Olympics rather than about competitors in one of the most unforgiving fields in entertainment.

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer