COMEDY : Heard the One About Lesbian Comics? : Kate Clinton and Lea DeLaria have fought the homophobia of the comedy world and broken into the stand-up mainstream

Funny woman Kate Clinton sits in the neo-Victorian lobby of the famed Algonquin Hotel, the ghost of Dorothy Parker hovering nearby, and holds forth on Plumbing and Social Transformation.

“Every civil rights movement has a bathroom moment,” she says. “The women’s movement had its bathroom moment, when we couldn’t pass the Equal Rights Amendment because (people were afraid that) we’d have to have same-sex bathrooms. In the black civil rights movement, you couldn’t share drinking fountains. And with gays in the military, the initial coverage was about guys in showers. That was when I first thought that this is that bathroom moment: We are a civil rights movement now. Porcelain is always involved.”

A political humorist and cultural commentator, Clinton is best known as an openly lesbian stand-up comic. And lately, she’s been getting a lot of heat. Recently signed by ICM, with four albums to her credit and a book deal in the works, Clinton has kept up a demanding live performance schedule even as she’s branched out into other media.

She has hosted the PBS gay magazine series “In the Life” and appeared with other leading female comedians on HBO’s “Women Aloud” and the series “The World According to Us,” produced by Boston’s PBS outlet. Clinton has also shown up on the Cable News Network, “Entertainment Tonight,” “Nightline” and “Good Morning America.”

Yet Clinton isn’t the only lesbian comic making mainstream breakthroughs. Lea DeLaria, who has been featured on “20/20” and elsewhere, made news in March as the first openly gay comic to do gay material on “The Arsenio Hall Show.” She was such a hit that Hall had her back again in May, and she is set to be on the show a third time this fall.

And it isn’t just DeLaria and Clinton. There’s a wave of current pop culture attention that has been dubbed “lesbian chic,” and not just in comedy and live performance.

On TV, Sandra Bernhard’s openly lesbian character on “Roseanne” has become an integral part of that popular show. Last season, the series “Picket Fences” featured a story about the teen-age daughter exploring the possibility of her own lesbianism.

On the same July day that Clinton was holding forth in the Algonquin lobby, Geraldo Rivera’s topic du jour was “Shattering Lesbian Stereotypes.” And the controversial cover of the new issue of Vanity Fair, sporting singer k.d. lang and model Cindy Crawford acting out a half-drag fantasy tableaux, had just hit the stands.

The inroads made by lesbian comedians, though, have a special significance. Stand-up has long been considered a hotbed of homophobia and misogyny, symbolized by the rise of such figures as Andrew Dice Clay and the sexist atmosphere of many mainstream clubs. But there are signs of a shake-up in the works.

And the change led by DeLaria, Clinton, Suzanne Westenhoefer (who does gay material in straight clubs)--not to mention those such as Bernhard who have moved beyond their comedy roots--and others may portend even more. “There’s been an enormous sea change of interest in the last six months. It’s from 25 years of organizing since Stonewall,” Clinton says, referring to the landmark incident widely cited as the beginning of the contemporary gay rights movement. “But it’s also that we have an administration that can say the words gay and lesbian without spitting up.”

In contrast with past chapters in the contemporary gay rights movement that have focused on men, this time it’s the women’s turn. “In a really shocking way, it’s very lesbian,” says Clinton, who opens a two-week run of her show “Out Is In” at Highways performance space in Santa Monica Wednesday. “I think it’s part of the year of the woman--squared--even while we’re in the context of a pandemic war on women.”

Yet cheered as Clinton may be by the encouraging signs, she is still cautious. “I’ve been skeptical about the lesbian ‘moment,’ ” she says. “I was skeptical about the year of the woman, which they told us about in June, too. It can end, like a fad.”

Chalk that wariness up to her Catholic education. Clinton attended schools in Syracuse, N.Y., and went on to teach high school English. On a leave of absence from teaching, she went away to a writing program, got hooked and didn’t look back. She began telling her stories out loud and got such a good response that one of her friends booked Clinton into a Syracuse club, and the rest, as they say, is herstory.

Unlike many gay and lesbian performers who stay in the closet in order to work in the mainstream, Clinton has been out from the day that she started performing, 12 years ago. It may not have always been the path of least resistance--”Ooooooo, great career move,” as she is wont to quip--but she has no regrets.

“I’ve always performed out because that was what I was doing--coming out--when I started to perform,” Clinton says. “If I’d been in accounting school, I would have been doing accounting jokes.”

The then-lively women’s alternative music scene and a network of Midwest coffeehouses gave Clinton key early support. There were also people who warned Clinton that a career as a feminist comic wouldn’t be easy. “When I called myself a feminist humorist--the words ran together and became ‘fumerist’--people said, ‘You’ll lose audience,’ ” she says.

Gradually, Clinton expanded her circle. “When I first came out I was very much in the lesbian community,” Clinton says. “With Reagan and the atomization of the women’s movement, my work changed so that it was not so much about the lesbian community but about being a lesbian in the world.”

A trip to the 1987 march on Washington gave Clinton new focus. “I went there thinking it was sort of a parade,” she says. “I realized it was a march and it politicized me. I went to the (AIDS) quilt and it changed me completely. I was afraid of being really angry before that.”

Clinton’s material has in fact come a long way from her coffeehouse days. Approximately 80% of her routines now focus on current issues. The catch, though, is that mainstream producers want her to do more material specifically about being a lesbian.

“If it were 12 years ago, (the material that I was doing back then) would be the material they want now,” Clinton says. “But then I was at (point) ‘A’ and now I’m at ‘P’--and I have to keep going back to ‘A’? I want to talk about global warming. (The mainstream attention) is a double-edged sword. There is still a bit of ‘Get me a lesbian,’ but there has been some opening up and there is an opportunity.”

One of Clinton’s best-known TV gigs so far has been her stint as the initial host of the PBS series “In the Life.” A magazine show that began as an hourlong monthly but had to scale back to a half-hour due to minimal funding resources, its gay and lesbian emphasis was the focus of Republican wrath on the Senate floor before it even made its June, 1992, premiere. Reviewing the pilot in the New York Times, John J. O’Connor called Clinton “a sharply observant but hardly threatening host.”

Her success has led to a spate of recent offers to do guest commentary spots, including on “Good Morning America.” Yet Clinton doesn’t feel that these opportunities--even combined with advances on the fiction side of TV programming--are enough.

“There’s less homophobia on the part of people in the business who are themselves gay,” says Clinton. “I’m happy to see the Morgan Fairchild-Sandra Bernhard characters on ‘Roseanne,’ but I’m also interested in (for instance) a talk show that talks about issues of sex without exploiting. I’d like to see the whole continuum of gay and lesbian life represented, including the middle ground of annoyingly normal gay people who are in the world.”

Times are changing even in the belly of the beast. Since January, for instance, L.A.’s Comedy Store has devoted Wednesday nights (and for a while, Fridays too) in the Belly Room to gay and lesbian comedians. Hosted by comic Barry Steiger, the showcase is meant to offer a safe haven in which these artists can develop--much in the way this same room provided a stage of one’s own for women comedians 15 years ago.

According to a Comedy Store spokesperson, the venue is the first mainstream club to have a gay and lesbian comedy night as part of its regular lineup. (Others have special nights outside of their weekly programming.)

But some such as DeLaria see these hothouse setups as counter-productive segregation. “If gays are making it into the mainstream, don’t put them upstairs in their little room,” she says. “We don’t need gay comedy nights now. There are a lot of clubs that are trying to cash in on the hipness of being queer, but I don’t really see any of them going out of their way to hire gay comics.”

And despite her own success, DeLaria says the state of affairs isn’t much better on the late-night circuit. “They let me on ‘Arsenio’ and that’s as much as I’ve seen,” she says. “I don’t see any other late-night talk show banging down lesbians’ doors.”

DeLaria--who prefers to be called a “dyke comic” rather than a lesbian stand-up--grew up in an Italian Catholic family in Belleville, Ill., and has been profiled on CNN and cited in Newsweek and Rolling Stone. She has been performing live for a decade now and last year won a Boston Emmy for her work on “The World According to Us.”

She doesn’t lend much credence to the idea of a lesbian breakthrough, although she does acknowledge the symbolic value of her own triumphs. “We’ve had years of fighting, one or two of us have crawled through and I have slammed that door open,” says DeLaria, who will move to Los Angeles from her Boston home this winter. “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.

“I don’t think I got on ‘Arsenio’ because I’m a lesbian,” DeLaria continues. “I got on in spite of being a lesbian. And if I did get it because I’m a lesbian, fine, but I was able to back that up. If we are getting mainstream attention, we have to be able to back it up or we’re going to lose it. Is there a change going on? Yes. And it’s up to us to make that a viable change.”

Yet lesbian and gay comics differ about how best to take advantage of the window of opportunity. Some performers, for instance, have long made a practice of having one batch of material for straight crowds and other material for gay and lesbian audiences.

DeLaria has no use for such tactics. “I hate that,” she says. “It’s duplicitous and it comes from people saying they want to be straight (in one place) and queer (in another). It’s totally stabbing my community in the back.”

Clinton has been out as long as she’s been performing, but she sometimes feels a need to contextualize her humor. “If it’s a straighter crowd, I will establish commonality and trust, give background information and go from there--as I would with teaching,” she says. “It’s always clear that I’m a lesbian, even if I’m not talking about being a lesbian or coming out.”

Then, too, artists differ over the merits of separatism. Most agree that all-lesbian arenas served a purpose back in the ‘70s and even into the ‘80s, although many now argue against such establishments and events.

Monica Palacios, a former stand-up who is now best known for her solo shows, including “Latin Lezbo Comic,” found a refuge in gay and lesbian venues. “I was unable to be my full lesbian self in front of a straight crowd in straight clubs and I was also dealing with racism,” says the L.A.-based Palacios. “Even when I first started out, I had to be true to myself onstage. And I couldn’t do it in the mainstream comedy clubs.”

All-lesbian stand-up, though, isn’t the answer for Palacios. “The last time I did a stand-up format it was all lesbian,” says the artist, who now typically performs in theaters and performance spaces. “I felt the audience wanted to hear your typical lesbian jokes, and that limits me. With performance, I can do whatever I want, including stand-up.”

“Lesbian chic now is in a lot of ways what lesbian separatism was, but with better PR,” says Clinton. “There’s a solidarity that I find interesting there. But there’s also support of lesbians from straight women that I find interesting. There’s also a real underestimation of the support of the straight community for gay issues. There’s a heterophobia among gay people that would be good to get over.”

Is stand-up’s flirtation with lesbian comics just another one-liner? Not according to Clinton. “It will be a genre of comedy,” she predicts. “We all go through the struggle of maintaining our identity and being part of the stream. Gay and lesbian people have a sense of exile. There’s a way of maintaining that that feeds the art, then there’s a part of us that does want recognition from the mainstream. It’s not a particularly gay and lesbian issue; it’s the issue of all art.”

The reason these issues have come to the fore in comedy, though, has to do with the medium’s connection to social change. “When people are laughing they’re vulnerable and they’ll hear things they wouldn’t ordinarily hear,” says Clinton. “We make connections and, in that way, it’s profoundly (about) civil rights, recognizing things we have in common.”

Clinton has seen such opening up even within her own family. “I talked to my father who is 82 years old the other day and he said the word lesbian without a hesitation: He was comfortable,” says Clinton. “I called my sister and she said, ‘I know, he said it to me too!’ There’s a possibility of dialogue that wasn’t there when I was growing up.”

At the moment, however, the process is still partially blocked. “There’s a mental thing that happens with an audience, where I say I’m a lesbian and they hear it through a sexual prism,” says Clinton. “I would like that to be gotten over, so it doesn’t make other things impossible to hear.”

For others such as Palacios, who works with the lesbian and gay Latino artists organization known as VIVA, there are other hefty barriers also still in place. “I hear from white gay and lesbian comedians that the clubs are changing, but I always felt there was this racial thing happening as well and I’m skeptical,” she says. “That environment is just not going to work for what I want to do.

“It was incredible that Lea got on ‘Arsenio,’ that this ‘big dyke,’ as she calls herself, was on TV,” Palacios continues. “That was a breakthrough and I applaud her for that. We still have a long way to go, though. You can still walk into any mainstream club and they’re talking about ‘fag this’ and ‘fag that.’ There’s still a lot of bashing that we take.”

“It’s going to take a lot of time, talk and visibility and maybe a few Molotov cocktails,” adds DeLaria. “In order for people to forget the fact that I’m a lesbian, they have to first accept that I am.”