Today, comedian Corinne Grant posted an article entitled ‘Should gay men make sexist jokes?‘ on the website Daily Life. Essentially, it asks whether audiences give gay male comedians carte blanche to tell sexist jokes, thereby reinforcing misogynist attitudes. 

Corinne approached me a little while ago via email for comment in regards to the issue and, with my permission, has quoted me in her piece.

As an opinionated gay male comedian (WHO JUST SO HAPPENS TO HAVE TICKETS ON SALE NOW), I just want to make my position clear on this stuff and to take issue with one or two things Corinne has argued.

A few points at the outset:

• I like Corinne Grant. I think she’s funny and nice. I genuinely admire the no-bullshit-taking kind of attitude she and other great female comics (like Felicity Ward, Sarah Kendall and Judith Lucy) apply to issues surrounding feminism and sexism through their comedy.

• I think there is a clear and obvious issue of gay male misogyny. Obviously not all gay men are misogynist, and even those who are aren’t misogynist all the time, but I reckon there’s definitely an argument to be made that some gay men hold dismissive or sexist attitudes when it comes to women. This issue gets a bit complicated if we admit that gay men hold a very different social relationship to women than straight men (which I think they clearly do and I think that’s a relevant and important difference when it comes to talking about jokes and defining what is and isn’t “appropriate” humour), but that’s all proper actual psychology/sociology stuff that I’m definitely not qualified to get into. Nevertheless, I fully support anything that contributes to an honest conversation around those ideas.

• I’m not opposed to political correctness in principle, unlike some of my colleagues in the comedy fraternity. I think there are plenty of instances that compel us to think about the impact of our words and question, “Who is the victim of this joke?”, “Am I relying on a stereotype here?”, etc. But I value truth even more than that, and sometimes PC is bullshit and should be sidestepped for the sake of good comedy.

I think my issue with Corinne’s article is that it tars all gay male comics with the same brush. It doesn’t name names, it just refers to some general examples that Corinne presumes constitute generally-agreed-upon evidence of misogyny, without a real acknowledgement of comedy’s role in breaking taboos, exploring uncomfortable truths and challenging the status quo.

To me, the article seems to suggest that gay male comedians who do jokes about any negative feelings they honestly hold towards the opposite sex are committing sexism.

Here’s where Corinne takes issue with my view:

[Author of The Changing World of Gay Men] Dr. Peter Robinson believes that “men who came of age during the height of feminism are sensitive to issues of sexism. But younger cohorts don’t have the benefit of women’s liberation to help them unpick their ideas.  I know that’s a bit controversial, because feminism still exists, but maybe that’s a contributing factor.”

When I asked Tom Ballard his thoughts on why gay male comics can get away with misogyny (for example, doing jokes about how revolting they find vaginas) he replied, “…I wouldn’t say that someone saying that they’re disgusted by vaginas is necessarily misogynist; it could just be them being brutally honest.”

I know Tom and I know he cares about women; his routines often point out the hypocrisy of discrimination against them. However, this may be an example of what Peter is talking about—it’s not deliberate sexism, it’s simply not always recognising it for what it is.

Honesty does not cancel out misogyny.  Finding vaginas revolting is hating something that is exclusively female. We would be horrified by a straight man saying such a thing and yet  we exempt gay males from the same scrutiny. That doesn’t do either us or gay men any favours and it excludes them from the mainstream debate.

To me, comedy is about exposing truth, regardless of how uncomfortable that truth may be. So if a gay male comedian happens to find vaginas disgusting (I don’t, for the record, but please don’t send me any pics), I can’t see why that uncomfortable and politically incorrect truth should be off-limits for comedy. One doesn’t choose to find something disgusting; one just does. And to find a certain part of the human body objectionable aesthetically is hardly equal to a hatred or dismissal of the rest of the person attached to that body part, or of everyone and anyone who owns such a part.

I’ve heard comedians do material about how disgusting they find human feet, but I don’t think they could be charged with despising all feet-bearers. And there’s certainly a long proud history of mocking male genitalia – by men and women, gay and straight – so why the double standard when it comes to vaginas? Should all genitalia be taken off the table? Will lesbian comedians have to drop all their “penises are gross” material?

I certainly hope not, as a lot of that is damn good gear (please see the work of the brilliant Hannah Gadsby).

A comedian isn’t required to be a bastion of moral goodness onstage. Comedians expose the dark, sticky truths that infest our consciences. People like Louis CK and Patrice O’Neal and Fiona O’Loughlin make us laugh gutturally, with recognition, because they show us how, in some respects, we’re shitty people. They don’t necessarily endorse the views they’re exploring; they just say what they think and the ultimate judgement rests with the audience.

I’ve seen plenty of routines by straight male comics about how disgusting they find the notion of gay sex. I’m not offended by these routines and I wouldn’t class them as homophobic; they just strike me as an honest exploration of how that comedian feels, deep down. Being disgusted by gay sex doesn’t mean one can’t support civil liberties and the idea of minding one’s own business and privacy and notions of equality; similarly, being disgusted by the physical appearance and machinations of  a vagina does not mean that one hates women as people.

To be frank, I’d love to see a straight male comic do material on things he doesn’t like about vaginas. What a fascinating dilemma that would be!

Furthermore, Corinne’s piece feels somewhat undercooked without an acknowledgement of the obvious, positive relationship between gay male comedians and female comics. In a world where some douchebags still seem to cling to the bizarre notion that “women aren’t funny”, gay men have to be some of the most passionate supporters of women in comedy, and many of those gay men are comedians themselves. Joel Creasey wanted to become a comic because of Fiona O’Loughlin. He is directing her 2012 festival show. My friend Rhys Nicholson loves Maria Bamford more than life itself. Kathy Griffin, Margaret Cho, Joan Rivers, Denise Scott, Judith Lucy, Wanda Sykes, Ellen DeGeneres – all these extremely successful stand-ups regularly perform empowering material on sexism and misogyny and they all have significant gay male fan bases.

Please, Corinne, don’t patronize me; though I didn’t live through the 70s and 80s, I still love and respect women, I understand the legacy and importance of feminism and I put a lot of thought into my jokes and my opinions on what is and isn’t acceptable when it comes to comedy.

Of course gay men shouldn’t make sexist jokes; no one should. But I’m troubled by your definition of sexism, particularly as it relates to the subtleties of comedy, and I feel that your article gives an inaccurate picture of the work of myself and many of my friends.

Right – back to writing my jokes. JOKES WHICH WILL APPEAR IN MY SHOW WHICH JUST SO HAPPENS TO BE ON SALE NOW. 

Cheers,

Tom    

(and Tim Key)

Came across this on the YouTube. Apologies if it’s not around anymore by the time you get to it. It’s great.

Presented by Alan Yentob.

I gotta admit: this is pretty funny.

Sydney’s Mic In Hand has to be one of my favourite rooms in the country and they very kindly let me headline there in the week just gone.

It was jolly fun, but some crazy shit went down and I happened to be recording it on my phone so I thought I’d share it with you.

My friend and superstar comedian Wil Anderson closed the second bracket trying out some new stuff and he had a cracking set. The only weird bit was when he was discussing the idea of a comedian’s ironic death and he brought up changing a light bulb. He meant to say “…and I’d fall off the ladder…”, but he accidentally said “…and I’d fall off the lightbulb…” and then the crowd didn’t really laugh as much as he expected and he (funnily) berated them for that.

So I mentioned that when I first got up and Wil heckled me back from the crowd and it was fun. You’ll also hear a weird heckler up the back of the room and my pouncing on a young girl in the front who was texting during the show.

Apologies for the audio quality, too. But hey, it’s free. So shuddup. Macaroons for all!

LISTEN HERE

I’m very proud to be an ambassador for minus18 in 2012. They’re Australia’s largest organisation for same sex-attracted and gender diverse young people and they’ve just launched OMG I’m Queer, a street magazine/resource guide for GLBTIQ youth in Victoria.

You can listen to an interview I did on Joy FM about the magazine here.

They asked me to write a few word thingies for the first edition of the magazine about growing up gay in Warrnambool and coming out and such. It’s reproduced below. I hope you like it.

=============

It’s pretty amazing how good you can become at fooling yourself, after a while.

You hear someone talking once about how everyone goes through a phase of thinking about people of the same sex. It’s just normal and it happens to everyone. That’s puberty for you; your balls are so keen to get involved in SOMETHING, they don’t know WHAT they’re doing.

Sure, I found myself becoming emotionally and sexually attracted to some of my best friends and tried desperately to perceive their platonic friendship as something more and sure, I was masturbating on a regular basis over the idea of having sex with guys and I had little to no interest in girly lady girls…but surely I wasn’t gay???

Only gay people were gay.

I think it was around Year 10 when I really started to notice it. I was a pretty chubby kid, very academic, hopeless at sport and, perhaps unsurprisingly, never been kissed. Pretty much all of my mates went along to discos and music gigs and had “pashed” or “picked up” or, in some racier circumstances, “fingered” the females of their choice, proudly bragging after the fact around school about their prowess.

I convinced myself that I was better than these callous thugs. I just hadn’t met the right girl. When I had my first kiss, I wanted it to be special, just like in the movies, with heaps good emotions and Dashboard Confessional playing in the background and stuff.

In the meantime, I took the time to admire my fellow young men in the school change-rooms and to listen intently at sleepovers when we all talked about jacking off and to fantasize about a handsome prince riding into Warrnambool on the back of a mighty steed to take me away from it all, so that we may live together happily in some magical, mystical, faraway place like Melbourne.

I secretly researched everything I could about what it meant to be gay and famous gay people and good and bad gay people and slowly but surely tried to put together in my mind a hypothetical world in which I (potentially) might not be 100% heterosexual and where maybe that was okay perhaps maybe a little bit perhaps.

Growing up in a regional, footy-loving place like Warrnambool, I was pretty regularly given the message that gay = bad. Heck, just being a little bit different in any way was often frowned upon. Goths, emos, theatre enthusiasts, fat kids, ugly kids, poor kids – they all had a hard time trying to get by in the patriarchal monoculture that is high school. But at least they were acknowledged as existing. I clearly remember that the very idea of being anything but straight being seen as ridiculous, really. The word “gay” became synonymous with “shit”, and every time I heard one of my best friends casually spit out the word to describe a test or a song or a piece of clothing, or call one another “poofta” or “faggot” as if it was the worst possible insult, I winced, and the pressure inside me just went up a notch or two.

I felt alone for quite a long time. I was supposed to be the smart, busy guy who did lots of things and did them pretty well and wasn’t any trouble. I’d always been fine, I took care of myself, I couldn’t really picture me asking anyone for help. Plus I’d had so many conversations with people about the girls I, er…“liked”. How could I go back on that? Did I want to be a gay liar, is THAT what I wanted????

Finally, it all just became too much and it was evident to me that this was my lot. I was a homosexual, a poofta, a faggot, a queermo, a woolly woofter, a shirtlifter, a fudge-packer (though I didn’t actually know what that involved, exactly). I was gay. At the end of my Year 12 year, I wrote a letter to my cousin Lucy and poured my heart out to her. I remember crying as I wrote the words down, overwhelmed with fear and sadness and relief.

It was one of the toughest things I’ve ever had to do.

Luckily, Lucy was lovely. She told me that she didn’t love me for my sexuality, she just loved me for the person I am. As did my mum and my dad and my brother Gavin and my best friends Jeremy and Daniel and Caleb and Zacc and Liam and David and Luke and Michael and Alex and everyone else, and my other cousins and my aunties and uncles, all of them coming to the table and accepting me for who I am: a big ol’ fairy.

I’ve been extremely lucky. But perhaps my story is a testament to the way things are changing for people who are GLBTIQ. The world is getting better and there are amazing role models out there and there is no reason – absolutely no reason – why being something other than heterosexual should stop you doing anything you want to do, as Oscar Wilde and Graham Chapman and kd Lang and John Gielgud and Bob Brown and Elton John and Missy Higgins and David Marr and Freddie Mercury and Simon Amstell and Harvey Milk and so many others have proved.

I love my life as an openly proud, gay man. I get to talk on the radio and do comedy and travel the country and the world and go on TV sometimes and make people laugh. I’m not a gay comedian; I’m just a comedian who happens to be gay. If I make someone laugh, they don’t give a shit if I fancy penises or vajim-jams; they just like me the way I am.

And honestly, if someone judges you or dismisses you or belittles you because of your sexual orientation or gender identity, they are, quite simply, not worth knowing. They are on the wrong side of history and if you ask me, you don’t need ’em.

Whether you think you might be gay, lesbian, straight, bi, transgender, intersex or just queer in some way, you are beautiful and you are important and, best of all, you are alive. And that is a stupendous thing that needs to be celebrated, every single day.

Coming out was tough for me. For some people it’s a lot tougher, for others it’s easier, for some people it’s a non-event. I wouldn’t change who I am or what I went through for the world, because it is all fundamental to the guy I am today. And, while that guy should eat less cheese and be nicer to some people and read more books and not steal his housemates’ milk all the time, he is, I think, on the whole, a pretty good person.

Even if he is a bender.

Ok.

So we had the brilliant Matt Corby on our radio show for Like A Version and it was very very good and you can listen to it here if you so wish.

You really should. It was killer.

After all the chatting/music business, as is tradition, Matt, Alex and myself took a photo together to mark the lovely occasion. I noticed that Matt had brought his sunglasses into the studio. Simply for a bit of colour and movement, for a bit of amusement, for a bit of joy de vivre, for a bit of zAnY KOH-medy, I incorporated said sunglasses into said photo.

Normally I look super hot and buff and cute and funny in these photos, but in this instance, positioned only a few centimetres from one of the most handsome and talented people we’ve ever had on the show, I appear to be an amateur magic enthusiast from the 90s who has been photoshopped into a photo with two nice people smiling normally.

Upon seeing this photo and my cringe-inducing pose, triple j lunch presenter and Cronulla resident Lewi McKirdy remarked:

“Wow, Ballard; looking pretty kewl!”

Then he made this:

and this:

and this (from the red carpet of The Kewl Awards):

Then shit got real. Other triple j employees – WHO GET PAID WITH YOUR TAXES TO GET SOME FUCKING WORK DONE – had their respective cracks:

(Courtesy of Max Lavergne, in tribute to the Super Mario Bros. movie)

(Courtesy of Lindsay “The Doctor” McDougall, whose punk band was very popular in the 90s, which is really quite a while ago now)

(Both courtesy of Nina Las Vegas, who should be concentrating on mixing other people’s songs into other people’s songs)

Then some genius opened it up to the triple j listeners via Facebook.

Here are some of my favourites:

You can check out all the submission in this album on the triple j FB page. There are heaps.

Stay kewl, everyone.