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.
