“Hello everybody, my name is Lea DeLaria, and it’s great to be here, because it’s the 1990s! It’s hip to be queer and I’m a big dyke.” – Lea DeLaria (@realleadelaria), The Arsenio Hall Show, March 30, 1993. Picture by Trevor O’Shana. . Lea DeLaria started doing stand-up in San Francisco in April 1982, though she performed under a stage name for the first two years of her career. “I called myself the Fuckin’ Dyke,” DeLaria explained to BuzzFeed. “I wasn’t even Lea DeLaria…I was the Fuckin’ Dyke. It was like a persona. They’d say ‘Welcome to the stage, the Fuckin’ Dyke.’ In 1982, in San Francisco, I couldn’t walk down the street without someone yelling ‘fucking dyke’ at me. I thought, ‘if they’re gonna call me that, why not call myself that?’” . DeLaria quickly gained a reputation—and a following—for being an out, proud, rageful (“Let me be clear: I wasn’t angry, I was rageful”), and hilarious comic and actor. For over a decade, she was a mainstay at queer clubs and pride events, and she saw some success in mainstream venues. . On March 30, 1993, twenty-four years ago today, DeLaria made history as the first openly gay comic to perform a set on television when she appeared on The Arsenio Hall Show. “I said the word dyke or fag or queer 47 times in the nine minutes I was on the show,” she told Vulture. “That would be during the four and a half minutes of stand-up and five minutes on the couch.” . Before the performance, DeLaria thought, “‘This’ll be the one time I’m gonna fucking bomb.’ I’m gonna walk out and say ‘It’s hip to be queer and I’m a big dyke’ and there’s gonna be crickets...But instead, it was cheers. It was shocking to me because we hadn’t packed the audience, we hadn’t done anything, but we just got the right audience, and they screamed at everything I said…It was awesome.” . Months later, in a Los Angeles Times piece about her and Kate Clinton having “fought the homophobia of the comedy world and broken into the stand-up of mainstream,” DeLaria said, “When I walked out on ‘Arsenio’—this big, butch dyke—of course it was great for the gay community, because there was a visible, viable comedian.” #HavePrideInHistory #RefuseToBeInvisible #Resist
