Out Lesbian Comic

Suzanne Westenhoefer is a very funny lesbian, Right?

An Interview with Lesbian Comedian Suzanne Westenhoefer
By Kathy Belge
Suzanne Westenhoefer is a groundbreaker. She is the first open lesbian to be on Comedy Central, Evening at the Improv., Caroline’s Comedy Hour, to have her own HBO special and to be on David Letterman.
She is really funny; probably the funniest I’ve ever seen. But somehow, our interview turned to some pretty deep, heavy topics. I called up Suzanne Westenhoefer the day after her 42nd birthday. We talked about gay bashing, abortion, the war and David Letterman.
KB: Let’s talk about Letterman. Tell me all about it.
SW: It was amazing… It was more work to do that five-minute stint than it is to do four months of shows.
KB: How so?
SW: I do a 90-minute show.

And I’ve probably done seven different ones over the course of about 10 years. I had to go through all that material and try to find sort of a mainstreamy lesbian… I was allowed to be out. I wasn’t going to be on if I wasn’t allowed to be out.
KB: I was wondering, out of all your material, how you picked what you did.
SW: The hardest part was, how are we going to start? We went round and round. Because you can’t come out and say, “I’m a lesbian. My dog…” So it was really tricky. Finally, the guy who hires the comics, he and I just came upon it. If you’ve ever seen me, you know that a whole lot of what I do is about Annie and I. So why not just go out as if I were a girl in a 10 and a half year relationship, which I am, and talk like I would at any show? We had a lot of stuff like, is she going to say dyke. But in the end, the Letterman people let me do it and I’m just really excited because, no matter what, we’re not going to go back now. That’s one little door broken down and that’s all that matters.
KB: You were the first out lesbian on Letterman.
SW: They never had a gay guy either… KB: So, were you disappointed that Dave wasn’t there? (Dave was out with shingles.)
SW: Interestingly enough, my girlfriend and I were talking afterward and for me it was better because I never had to focus on him. I didn’t have to worry, “What was Dave thinking?” Because he’s notorious for being stand-offish. So maybe for us it worked.
KB: I’ve heard you say before that your dream job would be to have Letterman’s job. So he wasn’t there, how tempting was it to…
SW: I did it! I sat in the chair… I sat in the chair and was like, “Meryl Streep, so, your latest movie…” I would bring Martina on all week. I would also have Candice Bergen on…

KB: Has it opened any new doors?
SW: I don’t know if it’s opened any new doors. It’s kind of hard to gage that. And of course, we went to war right after, 24 hours later. It’s hard to be all excited. What’s interesting is the first big thing that ever happened to me, I had only been doing stand up about five or six months, and I got asked to be on the Sally Jesse Raphael Show in January of 1991. “Lesbians Who Don’t Look Like Lesbians…”
KB: Did you do stand up?
SW: No, but she introduced me as a lesbian stand-up comedian… They started contacting her to find me. It was just like off the charts. And literally, we went to war with Saddam Hussein like 24 hours later. We attacked Iraq. Isn’t that bizarre? Two of the big milestones of my career and a Bush goes into Iraq and attacks.

There’s something creepy about it.
KB: You say you’re politically active, with what?
SW: I have always been an activist. I started out starting a gay group on my campus… God that was hard!
KB: When was that?
SW: 1982. Then AIDS came and I moved to New York and I marched with ACT-UP. I marched in the first Queer Nation march when they split up from ACT-UP. I’ve always been a very vocal and financial supporter of Planned Parenthood and other Pro-Choice organizations.
KB: Why Planned Parenthood, as a lesbian?
SW: The biggest reason is that I got pregnant when I was 16 and I aborted a child. I know what it feels like to be poor, pregnant and 16 and scared. Had I known about Planned Parenthood and gotten the pill, it wouldn’t have even had to happen. I also think the abortion issue is a class issue and a race issue because rich white women will always be able to get abortions… I really like an organization that’s so pro-woman, too. I’m a lesbian girl and I’m not going to get pregnant. I don’t even have a uterus anymore, but it’s such a female issue, to be able to control whether or not you want to bring children into the world.
KB: Are you out about having had an abortion?
SW: Oh, yeah. I don’t have any shame about it. It’s not a choice I would have liked to made, but it’s a choice I did make and I feel extremely fortunate that the choice was available… I would probably be in the cycle that half the girls in my hometown, which is a factory town, are in. Which is, pregnant at 16 or 17, married, divorced by the time they’re 20… And as we see, I would have turned out lesbian. I would have been a lesbian with children, in the 70s and early 80s, which is a hard, hard thing, in Lancaster County, PA. My children could have maybe been taken from me, put in the foster care system…
KB: OK, Let’s change the topic here.
SW: This is so funny isn’t it? We’re cutting into all these intense heavy topics. So much for the comedy interview.
KB: Do you still love your job?
SW: I love my job! You have no idea. I have the greatest job in the world… Look at what I get to do for a living. I go around, I make people laugh, I get paid. Yo!
KB: What do you do for fun when you’re not working?
SW: New York Times crossword puzzle in ink, including the Sunday, thank-you. It’s my obsession. I do yoga… And I annoy my girlfriend. Still, 10 1/2 years and I still annoy her.