One of my brothers, he lives here in California. He’s older than me. He’s gay. It’s awesome nowadays. You get points if you have a gay relative.
He just recently really came out. Black people, you’ve got to make an official announcement. When my brother told me one day, I was at The Improv on Melrose. He came up to me. He was like, “You know, I keep it real like you, right?”
I’m like, “What?”
He said, “See that guy over there?”
I was like, “Yeah.”
“That’s your brother-in-law.”
I was in the middle of taking pictures and shit. It didn’t register. I didn’t think about it. Then I’m driving home. I’m like, “Oh, shit. My brother just introduced me to his baby daddy or somebody, right?”
I call my dad. My dad is old school. He uses the words “bitches, crackers.” I’m like, “Dad. Charles just told me he was gay.”
My father was like, “Yeah, man.”
I was like, “Yeah.”
He’s like, “Yeah.”
This is where I know the world has changed. My dad was like, “Man, you know I ain’t with that shit. But the dude he dating is a good dude.” He validated the relationship! He said it like tough. He threw the towel in on it. “The dude he’s with, he’s a good dude. He’s a good nigga, man.”
MELISSA ETHERIDGE
I obviously had this underground lesbian following. Everybody knew. It was all “don’t ask, don’t tell,” though. I finally did an interview before my third album for a music magazine and I did my talk where I would use no pronouns, my partner, whatever. The writer changed all my pronouns to “my boyfriend” or “he.” I lost my mind and I said, I have to come out because now everyone’s going to think I’m lying and that’s the last thing I want to do.
So I decided I was going to come out. I didn’t know how. I thought I was going to do it on Arsenio Hall. In the meantime, I’m doing work, political work with a lot of gay and lesbian groups that helped get Bill Clinton elected. They have this inauguration ball and it’s the most fun because it’s all the gay people, of course. Rock and roll was back in the White House. We were there. And us gays were being gays and we were allowed to be part of the party.
So I came out at the inaugural ball there with everyone.
K.D. Lang had said some things and there were a couple of other people there. She had just come out a few months before that. She introduced me, “Melissa Etheridge,” and I walk up. “Yay!” And everyone’s screaming and hollering because it’s one thing that I’m even just there supporting them and then I’m like, “Oh, I just want to say, I’m just so proud to be a lesbian.”
Over.
It was like a match lit. Now you’re on a journey, here you go.
IDENTITY
“Everybody Has a Community”
Identity is complex. On some level it defines who we are, but the choices we make around the possibilities of that identity are our own. We identify ourselves by so many things: religion, career, economics, sexual orientation, and in countless other ways. And one of the most complex sources of identity is race. It is a racial identity that cannot be hidden and it will precede you in terms of others making personal and cultural judgments just on your appearance.
On June 19, 2015, Barack Obama, the forty-fourth president of the United States of America, came to my house to talk with me in my garage. It would be a little weird if I had a conversation with the nation’s first black president and we didn’t talk about race. So we did. And when we did, the president said a word, a racial slur. I won’t say it here. You’ll read the president saying it in this chapter.
As a comic, it wasn’t that jarring to me when he said it. He said it to make a point about the use of it. It was a broader statement about racism in our society, the progress we’ve made and the divisions that still exist.
The reaction from the news media was sadly predictable. Most outlets reduced the president’s point to a grabby headline, and the talking heads shouted over each other arguing whether it was appropriate for the president to say that word. It felt dismissive, and it spoke to President Obama’s larger point about why it’s difficult to have these conversations about race and identity and our differences.
That’s why I’m glad I can still have these conversations on my show. I’ve talked to many different people about different facets of identity and the struggles with identity that are very personal. I talked to Kumail Nanjiani about the culture clash he experienced as a Pakistani immigrant meeting his wife’s southern family. I talked to Laura Jane Grace about accepting her identity as a transgender woman and why that allowed her to finally understand herself.
And because I have always struggled with my own identity, I can listen and learn. I am white. I am a Jew. I am a comic. I have struggled with what all of those labels really mean. I identify as a Jew but I am not that Jewish in practice. So, what does it really mean? As I write this it is 6:00 A.M. I am sitting at JFK airport. The sun is rising outside and an Orthodox Jew is davening in the sitting area in front of me. Hooded by his tallith, with tefillin on his forehead and a prayer book in his hand, he rocks back and forth. No one is looking at him but me. I know, as a Jew, we share an identity. I know that if I wanted to, I could pursue my identity to the extreme he is pursuing his. I also know I would have to change my entire life and depth of my belief system to do that. Seems like a lot of work. I don’t mind watching him while I drink my Dunkin’ Donuts coffee wondering about it. I’m okay with my Jewishness. I’ll keep it light.
ZACH GALIFIANAKIS—COMEDIAN, WRITER, ACTOR
When my dad was younger, he and his brothers had restaurants. They opened up an all-black café in Durham, North Carolina, called the Lincoln Café. They all cooked and worked there. It was in a black neighborhood.
Growing up in the South, my dad’s side of the family, they’re dark. You know, they’re Greek. My uncle Mike told me that in the 1950s, in the summer, he would get really tan, dark eyes, dark skin. One day he sat in the front of the bus in Durham, North Carolina, and the bus driver stops and says, “Hey, boy, you have to sit in the back.”
My uncle says, “Why?”
The driver says, “Because you’re a Negro, you have to sit in the back of the bus.”
My uncle says, “I’m not black.”
And the bus driver says, “Well, what are you?”
My uncle says, “I’m Greek.”
And the bus driver says, “You can’t ride the bus.”
RUSSELL PETERS—COMEDIAN
I was just a kid, trying to blend in. In Canada, there was a lot of racism toward Indian people, and so it was brought to your attention very early that “this is what you are, and you shall not try and hang out with these people or these people. You should probably be quiet and shut the fuck up in that corner over there.”
AHMED AHMED—COMEDIAN, ACTOR
We used to get death threats during Iran-Contra. People would call our house and say, “Go back to your country, stupid whatever.” And we’d be like, “Dude, we’re Egyptian. If you’re going to be racist, get it right.”