Doris Fish Comedy Triple Play

Monica Palacios

Stands up and out

by Laura Moreno

“Just comadres? I don’t think so,” is one of the many brilliant lines Monica Palacios has delivered onstage, commenting on Mexican women singing passionate mariachi songs together. Named one of the most influential Latinx performers ever, Monica Palacios was born to be a comedian. She was one of the first out Chicana lesbian comics to hit the stage in San Francisco in 1982.

Now, the renowned Chicana lesbian presents her solo show “San Francisco, Mi Amor!” about the start of her queer comedy career and activism in San Francisco in the 1980s.

It all started at the hot spot Valencia Rose Cabaret, which opened in 1982, the first gay comedy club in the nation, in the time of AIDS. The supportive, welcoming atmosphere there stood in stark contrast to the competitive, hostile edge at the straight comedy clubs.

In “San Francisco, Mi Amor!” she takes a bleak narrative and makes it triumphant, and reminisces about her first brushes with fame. At the time, she was waitressing at a funky Mexican restaurant at the tourist trap Pier 39 by day, birthing the comedy troupe Culture Clash by night. Throughout the play, projected images will be shown from this time period: funky first hand-made flyers, headshots, business cards, newspaper clippings and more.

Palacios discussed her work and life in a Bay Area Reporter interview.

Laura Moreno: The city of Los Angeles named Oct 12 Monica Palacios Day in 2012, like Selena Day in Texas which was her birthday, Easter 1995. What an incredible

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Sampson McCormick

by Cornelius Washington

With insight and his unique perspectives on politics, Black life and family, award-winning gay comic Sampson McCormick will have you laughing at truths laid bare. He’ll perform April 29 at the Oakland LGBTQ Community Center with local favorite Dhaya Lakshminarayanan.

One of best and brightest stars on the queer comedy circuit, with a career that spans decades, tastes and trends, along with his standup shows, he’s performed in nine independent films, including “BBoy Blues,” “Love the One You’re With” and the Oscar-nominated short film “I Live Here,” and written several more, including his filmed comedy shows.

And the accolades keep pouring in. During his phone interview with the Bay Area Reporter, he was contacted via email that the website Queerty had just named him one of the eight historymaking LGBTQ comedians who set the stage for modern queer comedy. Despite “getting his flowers,” as the saying goes, McCormick remains modest, shy and smooth, a rarity for such a unique talent.

Cornelius Washington: Let’s start of with the obvious. When did you realize you were funny beyond what one sees from Black queer men?

Sampson McCormick: When I was in Pre-Kindergarten, I would imitate the pastors at church and I would mock the awful lunches at school.

Zach Zimmerman

by David-Elijah Nahmod

Zach Zimmerman pulls no punches. In one of his YouTube videos, the openly queer comic talks about making a mold of his own penis for a boyfriend. After they break up, he takes the mold to his new apartment and, as he puts it, “I made sweet love to myself with myself, and I don’t kiss and tell, but I will say I’m a better top than a bottom.”

This kind of candor can be found throughout Zimmerman’s just published book of essays “Is It Hot in Here? Or Am I Suffering for all Eternity for the Sins I Committed on Earth?” The book chronicles Zimmerman’s journey through life with wit and good humor. Zimmerman opens up about his Christian fundamentalist family, his romantic life, his sex life, and other topics with an openness that lets the reader peak inside his soul and get to know who he is.

On April 26 Zimmerman will be appearing at the Swedish American Hall in San Francisco. The show is being put together in conjunction with Fabulosa Books, who will be selling copies of his book at the event.

In “Matchmaker, Matchmaker,” one of the essays in the book, Zimmerman recalls looking in his parents’ bedroom for a pair of scissors that he needed. What he found was quite a thrill to his young eyes: dozens of condoms and a pamphlet titled “69 Ways to Spice Up Your Sex Life.” He read spice #57, “Shaving Your Pussy.”

“Dan Savage told me when he shared his memoir with his mom, he redacted huge portions of it,” Zimmerman said in an interview with the Bay Area Reporter. “In hindsight, I should have done this.

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Doris was a star in the Sydney Gay Mardi Gras, as both a participant and a planner. Many stories from the event (including one about a Falwell-like preacher whose head they patterned a float after) are hilarious.

Doris’ San Francisco star was rising as well. Fish’s career here began at a 1976 Tubes talent show. He and Pearl E. Gates (soon to be New Wave singer Pearl Harbour) won and became fast friends. At the talent show he met Jane Dornacker and her manager Eddie Troia, who would go on to produce the show “Blonde Sin.”

In 1976, Doris also met Tippi and Miss X, and the Sluts A GoGo were born. Doris’ San Francisco career took off. In the 1980s came work on the film “Vegas In Space” and plays like “Naked Brunch.” I haven’t even mentioned Philip’s career as a sex worker or the line of Doris Fish greeting cards from West Graphics. But for those tales, you’re just going to have to read the book.

Seligman’s book is a quick read as it is so compelling: I tore through the first two hundred pages in two days. The last hundred pages took a bit longer. I just didn’t want to lose Doris again, although you do get to relive the community spirit that accompanied AIDS in that portion of the book. Fish’s enormous talent shines in this book. “Who Does That Bitch Think She Is? Doris Fish and the Rise of Drag” has done an amazing job of preserving both the life of an incred- ible performer and the transformation of our world to a more accepting place via the horror of an epidemic.

Timed with a new exhibit, “Doris Fish: Ego as Artform,” opening at the GLBT History Museum April 21, Seligman will discuss his book at the museum on April 28 at 6pm. I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to speak with Seligman regarding Doris’ world and the book.

Michael Flanagan: Doris moved to San Francisco because it was well known in the 1970s as a gay capital (perhaps the gay capital then). I’m wondering if he also didn’t move here because of hippie counterculture, and the reason I ask is because of his/her love of Grace Slick, affinity for Buddhism and diet.

Craig Seligman: Absolutely! Doris was drawn to both the hippie and the gay countercultures, and San Francisco suited him to a T. (Those were, incidentally, the same reasons I was drawn to San Francisco.) He wasn’t into drugs, though.

How much do you think that Doris was influenced by punk in the ’70s? You do mention that she shopped at Vivenne Westwood’s shop Sex in London.

Doris’s colleagues were influenced by punk and New Wave – or, rather, they influenced these movements themselves – but Doris was very much a child of the sixties, a flower child. He never stopped being a hippie in his outlook. While some of his looks could be punk (there were so many!), he was much more into old-fashioned glamour. And his musical tastes ran to Grace Slick and Joni Mitchell and Joan Baez rather than to Poly Styrene and the Slits. As far as stopping in at Sex, it was on the fashion map; it hardly made you punk to pay the shop a visit. Doris bought fishnets there, not ripped T-shirts.

How long did it take you to research the book?

I started back in 2005, but that’s a little misleading, because I had to earn a living while I was writing it. The people I needed to interview determined where my husband, Silvana Nova, and I vacationed – which wasn’t such a hardship, since those interviews took us to San Francisco, L.A., Phoenix, Paris, Sydney, and Melbourne, among other places. But it was a long process; and of course there was also a lot of library/archival research along the way.

I did my very last interview in 2019. Is there enough recorded performance of Doris/Philip’s work for a documentary?

Is there ever! Doris was one of the first people to own a home video camera, and practically all his shows in San Francisco were recorded. There’s a lot of footage (which he never tired of watching), and in fact a Portland filmmaker named Scott Braucht is currently working on a documentary about him called “Dear Doris” (www. deardorisfilm.com).

Since your earlier book was on Sontag and Kael and you discuss “Notes on Camp” in the book, I’m wondering how you think notions of camp had evolved from the ’60s when Sontag wrote about it to when Doris was performing. Do you think Doris had his own theories regarding camp or was he indifferent to theoretical approaches to his work?

When Sontag wrote her famous essay, camp was still an elite aesthetic shared by a coterie of in-the-know gay men. In the mid-sixties it made its way into popular culture, via vehicles like the TV series “Batman” and the Bond movies. There was nothing elite or elitist about it by the time Doris was performing. That said, Doris did think deeply about his own work, and in the book I quote, for example, his analysis of what makes “Valley of the Dolls” funnier every time you watch it.t

“Doris Fish: Ego as Artform,” opens at the GLBT History Museum April 21 (reception 7pm-9pm ($10/free for members) through fall 2023. Craig Seligman will discuss his book at the museum with curator Ms. Bob Davis on April 28 at 6pm ($5/free for members). 4127 18th St. www.glbthistory.org www.publicaffairsbooks.com honor. What did you do that day to celebrate?

Read the full interview, with video clips, at www.ebar.com.

Monica Palacios: The recognition from the City of Los Angeles was amazing! This honor coincided with my show, “Queer Chicana Soul,” a 30year retrospective of my performing career. I celebrated Monica Palacios Day by doing what I love: performing a show. Some members of my family were in the audience so after, we had a celebratory dinner.

Are comedic geniuses born or made?

I believe comedians are born funny humans. I was born into a family where everyone was funny. We loved laughing together. We actually had a family “gag” drawer where we kept a sample of fake dog poop, whoopie cushion, Dracula fangs, rubber masks, stick-on

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Who are your heroes in comedy?

Moms Mabley, Redd Foxx, George Carlin, Whoopi Goldberg, Paul Mooney; you know, the legends.

I recently wrote an article on him, which was an honor for me. He is a Black cultural icon.

I actually toured with Paul when he was going into the last years of his career before his Alzheimer’s became too bad. They would have me stretch out my routine when I opened for him. One night, they kept telling me to keep doing another five minutes, then another five, then another until it turned into 30 minutes. I saw his nurse out of the corner of my eye waving me down, then I actually could see Paul glaring at me. He got up out of his wheelchair, walked over to me and said, “I thought I was going to have to yank you offstage with my cane because you are not going to upstage me, you queen!” He talked to me like

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Mom said she read it, but I think she skimmed. She definitely skipped the threesome chapter. Dad hasn’t read it and I think I’d prefer if he didn’t. He’s more sensitive and spotlight averse.”

Some of the essays are quite insightful. In “Salad,” Zimmerman writes about his first Thanksgiving at home in four years in South Carolina with his conservative Christian family after a breakup with a boyfriend. He beautifully describes how awkward it can be for a gay man to share a table and break bread with people who do not approve of his life.

“Why don’t we all say something we’re thankful for?” suggests Zimmerman’s mom.

“Jesus Christ,” says his youngest niece.

In “French Kiss,” Zimmerman recalls taking a trip to Paris with a boyfriend. During the return flight, the boyfriend informs him that they will be breaking up when they get home.

“I thought about the most significant moments and insights from my life and found that the themes that emerged were religion, family, work and love,” Zimmerman said. “Also, from my stand-up, I know what themes interest me and resonate with people, so that helped me accelerate the writing process. My editor also brought her meat cleaver to tell me which essays, even if I loved them, didn’t quite fit.”

Zimmerman addressed what he was trying to convey when he put the book together.

“I was trying to capture some of mustaches, eye glasses with metal eyeballs attached to springs allowing the eyeballs to bug out: fun times! that the whole tour. He was great and I learned so much from one of the best! the tensions in my life, the insights I’ve gleaned, and package them in polished, mostly humorous essays,” he said. “I hope I capture a little of my spirit in it. A friend who read an early draft said it’s ‘very Zach,’ which I think is the ultimate compliment, to have gotten who I am into a book.”

Going to a private Catholic school did help my comedy chops because I had a smaller audience to entertain, and I was the only girl in my class who was an amateur comic. High school was even a better stand-up comedy prep because my parents made me go to Notre Dame, an all-girl Catholic high school in downtown San Jose.

Who would you like to open for next?

I would love a Patti LaBelle audience. I would also love to open for Lil Nas X.

Who would you like to have open for you when you headline a comedy tour?

Tevin Campbell, Rahsaan Patterson; Fantasia would be cool too.

Describe your flavor of comedy.

I make an audience feel like I am their best friend, family member or next door neighbor, because I’m able to connect on those levels that appeal to audiences that typically would not think that a queer Black man is able to do that. That is what comedy is; the ability to appeal to the hearts and minds of the masses in an amusing way.

Can you describe your YouTube series?

The author promises that those who attend his show at the Swedish American Hall are in for a real treat.

“It’ll be the best damn night of their lives,” he said. “Well, at least the top 1000 night of your life, ‘cause I don’t know what everyone’s lives look like. It will be a fun time; an evening of stand-up, some great local openers, I’ll talk about the book and sign everyone’s copies. I’m going on a San Francisco morning show that day, so expect me at my most caffeineinduced and alert by show time.”

And if you’re hesitant to check his book out, Zimmerman has a special message for you.

“Wow, you look great in that outfit,” he said.

“Truly, you look stunning. And I’m not saying that to get you to read my book. I’m not. I do think you’d enjoy it, this funny and heartfelt collection of essays, and humor pieces, the journey of a straight, meat-eating conservative becoming a queer vegetarian atheist, but mostly I’ve stopped you outside this Dave and Buster’s to let you know you look amazing.”t www.swedishamericanhall.com www.zach-zimmerman.com

Zach Zimmerman: ‘Is it Hot in Here’ tour. April 26, 8pm, Swedish American Hall, 2174 Market Street, $25, 21 and older only.

This was the 1970s, a time when stand-up comedy and comedy on television was at an all-time high. I continued to mimic what I saw on TV but I was also creating my own material. As I was doing so, my adoring fans – I mean my classmates – were telling me I should be a comedian. By my senior year, after performing sketches with friends, writing and performing in plays, doing stand-up, making students and teachers laugh on a regular basis, I knew I was going to try stand-up comedy.

Do you love mariachis?

Yes, I absolutely love mariachis. I grew up with a father who taught himself to play the guitar, piano. Actually, he could play any instrument. I referred to him as a pseudo-mariachi guy because he had the guitar but not the outfit. My father, Guadalupe, was always playing his guitar and singing rancheras, contemporary American songs, rock and roll; he was always singing.

I have a series called Profiles on Black Gay Love. It’s biweekly and I speak to Black gay couples and entertainers. We do very well with it. At its height, we’ve gotten up to 30,000 people watching. I also have a very popular series on Black and gay adult entertainment that gets 20,000 views per episode.

I’m very honored to be with you as you got the email about Queerty acknowledging your career. How do you feel in this moment?

To be a Black queer man getting standing ovations in a white, heterosexual, male-dominated field lets me know that I have power. It’s about the work and the craft. I work very hard and I do not complain a lot. I point to the architects like Little Richard. I saw the documentary on him and it was excellent. He opened doors and I want to do the same, but I will get my due credits while I am alive! (laughs) As Black people and as Black queer people, we have to learn to celebrate our victories in the moment of what we did right in-

He and my mom would entertain relatives and compadres at our house. My dad taught me to play the ukulele so I would join my parents and we would all sing and jam the night away in Spanish and English.

For my show, “Greetings From a Queer Señorita,” I dress as a mariachi but of course after five minutes, I have to remove my big ol’ sombrero otherwise I couldn’t do my performance. For my current solo show at Brava Theater, “San Francisco, Mi Amor!,” there will not be mariachis per se but fun mariachi music energy.

Was your family okay with you coming out?

My family was supportive of my coming out as a lesbian. Actually, my older sister came out first, so we have a Double Dyke Familia! I told my mom I was a lesbian too and she said, “You’re a lesbian tambien?! Is this contagious?!”

The most important thing that my sister and I showed our family was that we were happy about our lives and our queer friends were loving, supportive and respectful. What threw my mom for a loop was when I brought a girlfriend over to meet the family and she was stumped about us being vegetarians. My mom was a cool cat and a great cook. She said, “We can handle you being a lesbian but not eating carne asada tacos. That is a sin! But I can adapt. I will make you Enchiladas Lesbinitas.”t Monica Palacios’ ‘San Francisco, Mi Amor! The ’80s: Queer Comedy, Taquerias, The Castro, The Mission, Mullets & Shoulder Pads So Wide You Can Fly!’ $20. April 28 & 29. 7:30pm, at Brava’s Cabaret, 2773 24th St. www.brava.org www.monicapalacios.com stages at Pride events around the country. I’ve hosted the main stage for Oakland Pride a few times and I made it so spicy and risqué, the crowd ate it up.

Read the full interview on www.ebar.com.

You served Moms Mabley realness?

You know it! I really love her. She didn’t have any teeth, but with her comedy she would snatch your teeth, your breath, and your wig!

What would you tell your younger self about being Black and queer?

Trust yourself and your instincts, and give yourself everything you know you deserve because you are worth it!t stead of just focusing on the next goal. We really need to savor the moment.

Before we know it, LGBTQ Pride will be upon us. Do you have any plans?

I want more work hosting the main

Sampson McCormick, with Dhaya Lakshminarayanan, April 29, 6:30pm ($20) at the Oakland LGBTQ Community Center, 3207 Lakeshore Ave. www.sampsoncomedy.com www.oaklandlgbtqcenter.org youtube.com/@sampsonmccormick