GAY PEOPLE'S CHRONICLE October 10, 2003

'Funny' as in 'queer'

Two videos show the lighter side of coming out

by Anthony Glassman

No road is more riddled with land mines than the path of coming out, the life event honored by National Coming Out Day this weekend, October 11.

Luckily, the marvelous world of entertainment loves being timely and appropriate, so there's always something being released to match the occasion, whatever it might be. In this case, two new video releases fit the bill. One, Coming Out Party, features seven openly gay or lesbian comedians recounting their coming-out stories.

The other, Absolutely Special, features the two Absolutely Fabulous television movies that accompanied the series, The Last Shout and Gay. For the purposes of this article, the latter movie is far more important, since the audience finally meets Edina's longlost son, Serge, played by Josh Hamilton of House of Yes.

Serge, as fans of the series will know, left home years before, escaping the suffocating embrace of his rather crazy mother. His halfsister Saffron always claimed that he was in some exotic location, studying arctic weather patterns or the migration of flying sheep in the Galapagos or some such activity in a remote, unreachable place.

In Absolutely Fabulous: Gay, however, the audience learns the truth: Serge is gay and living in New York. Edina is thrilled.

When she and her drug-addled best friend head to New York for Fashion Week, Edina decides to find her son. Along the way, she runs into Whoopi Goldberg, playing a counselor at a gay community center, queer British talk show host Graham Norton and a slew of fashion designers before finding her darling boy, who is so breathtakingly normal that she doesn't know quite what to do with him.

Coming Out Party, however, is filled with people whose ordinariness is completely relative.

The first comedian on stage is Renée Hicks, who ascends the stage wearing roller skates. Her reason for wearing them becomes clear later on, but her presence starting the show is welcome since, as she mentions, you can't have a big party without at least one black person.

The other six comedians in the film are female impersonator Jackie Beat-dressed as a boy, interestingly enough; Sabrina Matthews; Dan Renzi from The Real World on MTV, proving that you can be pretty and funny at the same time; John Riggi; Bob Smith; and Terry Sweeney, who became the first openly gay person to star in a network television show when he began appearing on Saturday Night Live in 1985.

Sweeney is the elder statesman of the bunch, kind of like when the government trots out Jimmy Carter to head up negotiations. He can talk about being a gay adult in the days before AIDS, unlike most of the others. Renzi, in fact, was six or seven when America first started dealing with the AIDS crisis.

Bob Smith's act was the most like his appearances on Comedy Central. Some of the jokes were identical, although some of the material was newer. Sabrina Matthews' bits were similar to her cable appearances, as well.

John Riggi, having written for The Larry Sanders Show, The Bernie Mac Show and Nathan Lane's short-lived Charlie Lawrence, has the most anecdotal performance, relying less on zingy punch lines than some of his compatriots.

Jackie Beat, with his twisted sense of humor and love of surprise endings, gave perhaps the best performance. Anyone who can use "Maybe I'll talk about breast cancer" as a punch line is someone to watch out for. For some people, coming out is a time fraught with challenges, when they face rejection from friends and family. For others, it is an uplifting, liberating experience. Watching these two videos, however, coming out is a very funny thing.

Dan Renzi

Rene Hicks

Terry Sweeney

Bob Smith

Jackie Beat

John Riggi

Sabrina Mathews