Theatre: What’s So Gay About Kathy Griffin
As a naturally skeptical person, nothing raises my “uh oh” sensors more than a professed gay icon. In the last year alone, the grim spectres of Adam Lambert, Lady Gaga and The Real Housewives remind me that a person can be embraced by our community for being gay, over the top, or just horrifically trashy and still have no relation to my life. On the same principle, fire-crotched comedian Kathy Griffin has hovered around the edges of my gay awareness for years without ever really stopping to land. I know that she has a popular TV show and that my sister, whose tastes I trust, loves it, but after that I was quick to dismiss her as just another woman with a potty mouth and a satellite cable subscription, who would probably just annoy me if I gave her the time of day.
However, I also like to see things for myself. I should’ve been a Missouri resident for how often I say “show me” (and I’m not just referring to Saturday night at Cobalt.) So when I got the opportunity to see Kathy Griffin live at DC’s DAR Constitution Hall I took it. At best, I would be pleasantly surprised and at worst I could validate my severe distrust of all things gay-approved.
And gay-approved it was. The Will Call line looked like a 3 am sidewalk sale, as all ages, genders and races of queer people kibbitzed in the January cold about the show they were going to see, what they were doing afterwards and why it was taking so goddamn long to get their tickets already. Inside the venue was the same, and I got to experience the particular thrill of seeing a giant mixed-use venue stuffed to the gills with inverts, homofiles, two-spirits and whatever other antiquated terms the world at large might apply to us when we end up where we don’t usually belong.
Not belonging, it turns out, is what Kathy Griffin is all about. Though the framework of her show “My Life on the D List” deals with TV, celebrity culture and the stupider elements of American culture, she observes it all from the standpoint of an outsider looking in. She is less outside than most of us – few people in this world could pull off jokes about hanging out with Liza Minelli and Gloria Vanderbilt, or dropping an F bomb in front of Anderson Cooper — but her general attitude is one of “how the hell did I end up in this life?” From her determination to piss off CNN with the aforementioned F-bomb, to surprisingly keen observations about DC political culture to a deceptively bittersweet ending bit about having to crash a women’s journalism conference that Maria Shriver wouldn’t allow her into, Griffin exudes the experiences of someone who feels different. And that feeling has done more to shape the modern gay experience than any one specific cultural or political figure.
Of course, none of this would matter much if she was boring. Though the show did go on about 30 minutes longer than it should’ve, and a person like me could get lost if they didn’t have an encyclopedic knowledge of reality TV, the funny parts were so pants-shittingly funny that I didn’t care. The far-and-away highlight of the show was a bit on Oprah and Gayle attending a Texas Cattle Festival in attire that, I paraphrase, “Made Suze Orman say ‘whoah, that’s pretty dikey.” Griffin made it clear that said attire included Oprah wearing pants so tight that “you know she had a yeast infection” and “they had to do triage on her pussy.”
Which leads me to my final point: Griffin, despite being a straight woman, seems to have a lot of empathy for her gay fans. Though she jokes around with and about us, it takes a pretty true ally to have the kind of knowledge she does about the way our world works. That includes such things as sex culture and occasional vapidity, but Griffin also made enough Prop 8 mentions and potshots at right wing politicians to suggest that she also knows how hard queer life can be. Though I don’t watch as much TV as Kathy Griffin does, and I don’t have an Irish Catholic mother, I am always happy to support someone that seems to genuinely be on our side.
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She sure has a nasty, trashy mouth.She’s funny but she does it at others expense.Some of it is too raunchy for me.
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