Photo by Jim McCambridge
Latina lesbian comedy sensation Marga Gomez is in New York City with her new solo show, Swimming With Lesbians. We chatted about the show, her time as a standup in San Francisco in the ‘80s, and her illustrious career as a solo performer.
Hi Marga! Tell me about Swimming With Lesbians.
Swimming With Lesbians is a comedy that takes place on a lesbian cruise ship in a parallel universe. There are numerous lesbians on a cruise ship heading to the Island of Lesbos. The piece is performed as a memoir—sort of like Moby Dyke.The narrator is a lacrosse player who is on her first lesbian cruise ship. She hasn’t had a lesbian affair, but she’s a lacrosse player, so (shrugs knowingly) very close. And she tells the story of this fateful cruise aboard a ship called The Celesbian. Several of the passengers and crew members are involved in clandestine love affairs, pool games, bingo, lesbian karaoke or “lesbioke,” and the ship emcee is in hiding from a long-ago schoolyard bully. The story is about how this cruise emcee finds her butch groove.
Now, I know that you started in standup. Can you talk about the early days of your career? How did you get started?
My father was a comedian. He was so sweet and I had such a good relationship with him. I looked up to him. I wanted to have his life. I wanted to have his tuxedos. (Laughing) I wanted to have his moustache. I kind of do a little bit, but I (gestures hair removal). And then as I got older I gave up that dream a little bit, but it was always in the back of my mind. When my parents found out I was a lesbian, I left New York. I was like 20? Just barely 20? I wound up in San Francisco where everybody was a performer of some sort, and the comedy boom was just starting in the ‘80s. I was performing at places that were cafes in the daytime and comedy clubs at night. Robin Williams was coming up. Ellen DeGeneres was coming up. I started doing the open mics in the ‘80s in San Francisco. I wasn’t doing very well, because there was no queer comedy scene. The queer comics, like Ellen for instance, were all in the closet. So, I couldn’t really freely learn.
You were out.
I was in the closet when I was doing these comedy clubs. I was bombing. I think it was around ‘83-84, a gay comedy club opened. They had flyers on telephone poles, and I saw that and I went to their open mic, and it was a whole different scene. This was before—might have been ‘82-83—this was before people understood what was happening with AIDS. People were getting sick, but nobody knew what was causing it. The gay community was still very organized, very political. ACTUP was starting, and then we found out about AIDS and people were mobilizing. We were in the Reagan administration. So, I started doing comedy at this club that was also about what was happening now, about being queer, about Jerry Falwell, about all the very unmistakable homophobia that was falling down on us queer people. And then I was also doing stuff about, you know, getting laid and lesbian sex. I grew up Catholic—I was doing jokes about Catholicism. And there was an audience that packed this club. This club used to be a funeral parlor on Valencia Street. Now I think it’s a $5,000 bicycle repair shop. But the audiences were hungry, because in the ‘80s especially, the only time that gay people were in the comedy scene was as jokes. There were just all these horrible, hateful jokes—jokes about AIDS—it was out of control. So, there was an audience, I mean everybody loves comedy, but when you’re the audience that was the target of comedy and suddenly we can laugh, and we can laugh at our bullies and we can laugh at the gatekeepers—it was amazing.
And then San Francisco’s comedy scene had to get responsible about the hatred they were doing. They couldn’t do jokes about Mexicans anymore, gay people, women. I mean, it was very slow in the ‘80s and I’m not saying that we’re free of it now, but at least there was a little bit of pressure to change. So, that’s basically how I did it. I started doing standup in the best possible situation for a lesbian. I started doing standup for my own community that had been marginalized. I did a lot of autobiographical stuff. Again, I was very, very horny, so I did a lot of horny material; I’m not gonna lie. And that was the ‘80s for me.
I love hearing that you happened upon this time when the gay comedy club was starting, because I assumed it must have been so horrible in many ways to be a woman, to be a Latina, to be a lesbian if you were trapped in that kind of white guy scene. I’m so glad that it’s not what it was for you. So, then you moved into solo shows. Talk about what you love about the solo form as opposed to standup.
It sort of dovetailed out of my standup. In the late ‘80s [my mother was] diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s. This was around ‘88-89, and I started to go through the grieving process that a person does. You grieve while your loved one is ill. And I was still doing standup. I was so split. This was my job to go up and make people laugh, and then my mother was dying. My father had also passed away in the ‘80s. They weren’t together, but he had passed away.
I ran into this guy through doing standup. Josh Kornbluth. And he was just, like, love. Because a lot of the guys in comedy didn’t talk to me. They didn’t talk to women. They couldn’t make fun of gay people, but they still of course totally made fun of women. Trashed women in their acts. But this was a guy who was a feminist, soft, he grew up in Washington Heights with communist parents, and he wanted to talk about his life. He didn’t feel like he wanted to do the one-liners they expect you to do in standup. And so, we were talking and he told me that he was starting to do a one-person show.
Now, this was a few years after Whoopi Goldberg got great acclaim from her one-person show. I mean, she’d never really done standup, but in San Francisco you could sort of play standup comedy clubs doing characters, which is what she did. And it turns out that Whoopi was starting to play at the gay comedy club I got started at, the Valencia Rose, because it was also a cabaret. Whoopi was friends with all of us. Whoopi was very aligned with the queer struggle, with ACTUP, the marches, and with the demand for AIDS research and support from the government. So, Whoopi was doing solo shows, and now a few years later I meet Josh Kornbluth who found a restaurant with a back room, and he started doing the show about his parents.
About this time, I got a call from a university that heard that I was a solo performance artist and they wanted me for this festival. I hadn’t done any solo performance, but I knew that I wanted to do a piece about my mother. I think it was sort of therapeutic for me to do this. So, I told the people on the phone that I was a solo performance artist and I had this show that I could do for them. I just made up a title called Memory Tricks. So, I was booked at this festival with Anna Deavere Smith! (Laughing) And so I started working with Josh Kornbluth’s director, David Ford. So, with this director, I came up with a series of events [about] my mother. And they were funny. I mean, they weren’t funny and they were funny. ‘Cause she was so extra. My mother was a showgirl and she was an incredible babe. She was so feminine and I was always a little boy. I remember my attraction to vests. We’d go to 14th Street, and I forget the name of the department store. Klein’s, I think it was called. I’d get to the vest section and these were for boys, not for me. I always wanted things that were for boys. And my mother, you know, she kind of knew what was up there. It was sort of disappointing, because she wanted a little Barbie doll like her. So, I started writing these anecdotes about her. She was a character that audiences loved, because she was someone you could easily make up, but she was real. She was my mom.
I had great success with that show in San Francisco. People had known me as a comedian, but they loved this show even though it was sad at the end because I talk about my mother’s illness. And then what happened, Tanya, this is all—my life is kind of very accidental, but I expected all these things. I had a good friend, Brian Freeman, who worked with a group called Pomo Afro Homos and also worked at the Valencia Rose. He recommended me to George C. Wolfe, who was not the artistic director [of The Public Theater] yet. He was curating—I think it was called—the New Voices Festival. [Freeman] told George Wolfe about Memory Tricks. And I got this video, but the video wasn’t even a VHS. It was, like, this giant thing. I don’t know. We had to go to a place to make it a video from the format that it was in. Then I took this video with me to New York, because George C. Wolfe wanted to see a video. I went to his apartment, and I’m sure he wasn’t playing poker, but it felt like he was (pretends to deal cards) with some guys at a table and they were playing poker, and I gave him the video. And he was charming and fun, you know, very energetic. Then I left and all my dreams were in that video. Then I didn’t hear back from him. I was in New York for a week and I had to pick up—I don’t know why I had to pick up the video. I guess in those days you could only make one video. But I wanted to pick up the video. I went up to his apartment, but he didn’t come to see me. It was his assistant and she gave me the video back, and she said “thank you.” She didn’t say anything else. And so, I went down the elevator. My heart sank. I go outside and I go, “well, I guess that’s it, you know, I’ll just have to work in a restaurant.” And then I heard this window crack open. He was up on a high floor, and he yells out the window at me. He goes, “I love it, but just do stuff about the momma!” Because the story was about my father and my mother. “Just the momma!” And it was like, “okay?” And so, I was in the festival.
I did that show in the Shiva Theater in The Public. It also got reviews from Variety, The New York Times, they all came to see the show and review the show. Gave it favorable reviews. And it’s weird, because I don’t think I was very good then, but my tits were really beautiful. A lot of things happened because of my breasts. I think I was wearing a bra then, but still you couldn’t hide the fact that these breasts were perfection. I mean, it didn’t work on George, of course. But I think it worked with the reviewers, because I remember I was wearing a knit shirt and it kind of hugged my breasts. I don’t know.
You are a babe, Marga. Like, when you said your mom was a babe, it’s like here’s the apple and I guess that’s the tree. A babe in a vest, Marga.
Aw, thank you. I think back then maybe I was all right looking. Okay, I was a babe. But now I’m okay. I don’t need to be a babe. When a person was a babe once, like when I was doing Tinder a few years ago before I got banned—
What?!
I did nothing wrong, but somebody must have hacked my account and I can’t get back in. It’s for my own good. I know I have to be age-appropriate, but my thing now is to—I can see now if a woman was a babe. I can tell if a woman was a babe at one time in her life no matter what she looks like now. You can see that fallen beauty, and that’s my type.
It’s like a palimpsest of babe. You can see all the layers of babe.
Uh-huh. There was a babe.
I’m gonna bring it back to the cruise. You worked as an entertainer on a lesbian cruise, as you said.
Wait, can I tell another story about solo stuff?
Of course!
So, this is my 14th one-person show. The next show, because the [first] show was about my mom, I didn’t talk very much about being gay. And the community then was the same is it is now. I got criticized because I didn’t say enough about being gay. So, my next show was called Pretty, Witty and Gay. San Francisco had these great showcases where if you were doing a one-person show, you could try chunks of it for an audience that would come to see developing work. And in that show I didn’t really know the lines. So, I had cheat-sheets strategically placed all through my playing area. So, Kate Bornstein was there. Lori E Seid brought her. And at one point, I don’t know what happened, I sneezed and I kicked all my cheat-sheets. And I had to crawl on the floor and find my lines. And they loved it so much that I got booked at the Whitney Biennial by Lori E Seid. Now. The cruises.
Yes. Oh my god. You’ve just told me a lot of legendary shit. So, this show is less autobiographical even though you worked on a lesbian cruise. This is more of a fictional show than your normal solo shows.
I tell people that it’s completely fictional. I’ve infused one of the fictional characters with my own experience. Although I had been on cruise ships a lot in the ‘90s, and even now a little bit, I just wanted to create a fiction. This is really my first show that I created after the lockdown. When I was in the lockdown, I was doing my 13th solo show, [which] dealt with sexual assault and it was partly a comedy, but it did have these issues in it. And it was a tough sell after, you know, as theaters were just opening up. “We’re gonna see this show that makes us feel bad?” So, I decided that my next show, for the audience and for me, was something that was gonna be similar to a clown show. I wanted every character to be ridiculous and heightened. And I really couldn’t even remember that much about the cruises that I worked on. I took my inspiration from watching Love Boat, Spongebob, and then some of the classic films, Titanic, Now Voyager, anything with a cruise ship or with a pirate ship or anything nautical. I also listened to the audible book of Moby Dick.
It sounds amazing and I think everyone should see it. Is there anything I didn’t ask you that you’d like to add?
I wanted to mention that I’m working with David Schweizer as my director. David was my director on Latin Standards that opened at Under the Radar, and he’s been my director on many of my shows since about 2002. But we have a kind of shorthand. I call him Maestro. Many people do. He just has a really high level of taste and whimsy. He never really tells me about my acting; it’s more about the mechanics of the script and about making a piece more efficient. You know, not indulgent. I guess that’s what I wanted to say. Unless you have anything else.
Well, I was going to ask you more about lesbian cruises. Does it get slutty on a lesbian cruise?
It used to. At least when I was on them. When I first was doing the cruise ships I had a girlfriend, which—it was tough, because if I was single I would try to sleep with everyone I could. But when I had a girlfriend I was very faithful. When I was single I liked to make other people cheat, which is really fucked up. But I started doing the cruises when I wasn’t with her, and then one of the tech people, she and I were each other’s wingman, or wing-lesbians. After that cruise, we tried with a couple of people, guests. We liked to think we were gigolos. And then after that cruise there was a rule in our contract that we could not flirt or fraternize with any of the guests. After that I made out with one of the comedians during a ping pong match, and then there was a new rule that we could also not hook up with the other staff. So, that’s why it’s good that I got banned from Tinder. I was just reckless. I just looked for validation is all it was. But definitely there was slutting. I heard stories about, like, sometimes there would be women on the cruise ship and they weren’t even gay. They just wanted to go on a cruise with women. And some of those women would hook up with them men on board. That’s what it should be. That’s what The Love Boat was about. Then you get to go to their quarters, which is not as good as a passenger’s quarters, but it’s like that scene in Dirty Dancing.
I was just going to say Dirty Dancing!
It’s like Dirty Dancing. That’s what I wanted. I wanted to hook up with one of the ladies, like a purser. I wanted a purser. And we were always throwing ourselves at the women. One of the cruises we had a female gynecologist, and she was really uncomfortable. She didn’t want to look at any of our pussies.
Well, she knew she couldn’t charge.
Oh, this show also got booked on a cruise ship, which is weird.
Very meta!
So, if the women think I’m making fun of them, which I do, it’s gonna be a very awkward cruise. (Laughing) I’ll have to walk the plank.
Swimming With Lesbians plays at La MaMa ETC from Friday, March 29nd through Sunday, April 7th, 2024. Tickets are available at https://www.lamama.org/shows/swimming-with-lesbians-2024.
