Tampa International Gay & Lesbian Film Festival 2015
Special Event: Lea DeLaria
Sat., Oct. 3, 6 p.m. with opening act Scott & Patti. Palladium Theatre, 253 5th Ave. N., St. Petersburg. $35-$75. tiglff.com, facebook.com/tiglff.
Tampa International Gay & Lesbian Film Festival
Oct. 2-10, multiple venues on both sides of the bay
So Lea DeLaria and I are talking about conservatives and how they’re so obsessed with sex and she declares, “I promise you Mike Huckabee goes home and watches porn till 3. The only word he knows in German is scheize.”
Then her fiancée, the fashion blogger Chelsea Fairless, who’s with her in their Brooklyn apartment and listening while we chat on the phone, chimes in.
“I’m pretty sure Jeb is an adult baby,” she says, which makes Lea howl with laughter. “Now I can’t get that image out of my head — Jeb in a baby bonnet!
“Please make that the headline: ‘Lea DeLaria says Jeb Bush is an adult baby!’”
Which gives you an idea of what it’s like to have a conversation with Lea DeLaria — and what it’s going to be like to see her in person at the Palladium on Saturday night. She’s profane, political, brilliantly funny — and oh, in addition to all that, she is a crazy good singer.
If all you know of Lea DeLaria is what you’ve seen on Netflix’s smash hit Orange Is The New Black, then you don’t know Lea DeLaria.
Granted, Big Boo is a big reason people love OITNB. Her fuck-you attitude — or rather, her I’ll-fuck-her-and-then-her attitude — is bracing comic relief in a show once categorized by the Emmys as a comedy but now treated more accurately as a drama. As the character has grown, DeLaria has shown she can do subtle as well as brash, letting us see the cracks in Boo’s bravado.
The role has given her the kind of mainstream exposure that leads to red carpets and stints on The View. But she’s been a star in the LGBT firmament for decades, not least because she’s been out and proud — and proudly butch — for her entire 33-year career.
The first openly gay standup comic to appear on a late-night TV talk show (Arsenio Hall's in 1993), DeLaria, 57, says she’s been able to make it this far “without ever being in the closet once. Me and Harvey [Fierstein] are the only ones who can say that.”
Music has been a part of her life since she was a toddler growing up in a St. Louis suburb. Her father, a jazz musician, saw she was interested in singing, and by age 10, “he would take me on stage and I’d come out in my little dress and sing ‘Summertime.’”
In high school her interests shifted to acting, and she went on to a theater career that has included roles in material as varied as Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days, an episode of Friends, and Broadway revivals of The Rocky Horror Picture Show and On the Town, which should have won her a Tony, or at least a nomination.
But she’s best known for comedy, comedy so badass she sometimes gets into a bit of trouble. Like the time at the 1993 LGBT March on Washington when, on the White House steps, she said she liked the Clintons “because we finally have a first lady we could fuck.” Not only did conservatives erupt in predictable outrage, she also drew the wrath of “earnest lesbians.”
“A chick came up to me in Provincetown and started lecturing me, the way earnest lesbians do, [that] because I’m a woman doesn’t mean I can’t be a sexist. She probably said the words ‘sexist’ and ‘misogynist,’ I don’t know, a thousand times.”
DeLaria’s retort: “You know, you’d look so much prettier if you just wore a little makeup.” The crowd that gathered around them burst out laughing. Or at least the gay men did.
Talking openly about the fuckability of other women is not just sassy DeLaria shtick: it’s a political stance. “When I make a statement like [the Hillary joke], it’s a revolutionary act as a lesbian. For women to fucking talk about sex at all is a revolutionary feminist act.”
In that sense, OITNB has also been revolutionary, in its candid treatment of lesbian sexuality. But what’s more ground-breaking is the show's plethora of women roles, played by actors so authentic that viewers can be forgiven for assuming those haunted eyes in the opening credits belong to them. They're faces of actual inmates, but DeLaria still has to tell people, “No, I’m not the fourth eyes in.”
She concedes that the credits run a little long — “we have a lot of cast members” — but when I tell her my husband makes me fast-forward through them so he doesn’t have to listen to Regina Spektor singing the theme song, “You’ve Got Time,” she’s with him: “I don’t have enough time to listen to this whole fucking song!”
She had to love one recent rendition, though: When she spoke at her old high school last month, the assembled student body sang it with adorable exuberance (catch it on Instagram).
Being in a show so popular that even teenagers know the theme song is still a little mind-boggling — including the fact that some of those teens watch the show with their families.
“Our show … is watched by all generations, people from the age of 12 to the age of 100. I was just in the Midwest and couldn’t walk down the fucking street in a little farm town …” That cross-generational, cross-country appeal holds a message for the entertainment industry, she says: “It’s time for us to redefine what the audience wants — and use Orange as the key.”
Meanwhile, she’s enjoying a level of celebrity that’s heady even for someone used to being in the public eye. Her Facebook page is a whirlwind of magazine covers, TV appearances, awards shows and infotainment alerts about who’s going to sing at her wedding (Uzo “Crazy Eyes” Aduba). But it’s interesting to note that the page's subhead is “Musician/Band,” an indication of how central music has been to her career. Her newest CD pays homage to one of her rock gods: House of David is a collection of jazz covers of David Bowie hits, including “Let’s Dance,” “Suffragette City” and “Fame.”
At the Palladium, you can expect her to sing jazz, rant about Republicans, and leave the audience helpless with laughter. It’s what she’s always done — only now she’s a bigger celesbian than ever.
“That was all training wheels,” she says of her pre-OITNB career. “Now I’m riding the bike fully and the wheels are off.”
This article appears in Sep 24-30, 2015.