Jill Soloway Explains It all for You

“Ladies and gentlemen…is an outdated phrase we don’t need to use anymore!” was the gleeful introduction to Tuesday night’s event at Temple de Hirsch Sinai, as Town Hall gathered five feminist/queer-positive artists for an entertainingly scattershot evening of comedy and talk. Out first was Australian comedian Hannah Gadsby, whose recent Netflix special Nanette shattered everyone who saw it: jokes morphing into a de profundis soliloquy about the traumas (emotional, mental, physical) of growing up lesbian in right-wing Tasmania, and the inadequacy of traditional stand-up tropes to address them. She hasn’t given up on the art form, though, giving her giddy audience both snappy one-liners (observing that her home island is “the same shape as the pubic-hair region on a woman’s body”) and a hilarious, beautifully unspooled story about adolescent mishaps at a water park.

Jill Soloway, who based their acclaimed Amazon series Transparent on their own parent’s coming-out, brought their sister Faith to help promote She Wants It, the memoir of Jill’s “evolution from straight, married mother of two to identifying as queer and nonbinary.” Faith, an inventive keyboardist and songwriter, provided comic incidental music and parodies throughout the evening, starting with a sharp Joni Mitchell satire; the two also revealed that the upcoming fifth and final season of Transparent will include a musical episode. 

With Gadsby remaining behind the stage curtain, microphone in hand, to pop up with invisible asides, the “feminist tent-revival gender-fucked love party” became complete with NYC poet/editor Morgan Parker and Portland cartoonist Nicole Georges (and her dog in a carrier). After reading an excerpt from She Wants It fantasizing what it would be like if women arguing were as popular, culturally dominant and well-remunerated as men playing sports, Jill set up just such a competition, posing three debate questions to Parker and Georges:

• “Is the world too much of a disaster zone to bother making art that isn’t explicitly political?”

• “Can we end transphobia and misogyny without taking down capitalism?”

• “What should we do?”

The ensuing discussions were really too wide-ranging and nuanced to summarize, but essentially: no, go for it; possibly (at this point Gadsby helpfully reminded us there were books and CDs on sale in the lobby); and goodness knows. An event that in more hospitable times might have left itself open to complaints of preaching to the choir instead became—given the psychopathy of the current political climate, especially for sexual nonconformists of all kinds—a circle-the-wagons evening of warm mutual support, shared laughter, and a touch of grievance-airing, all of which proved greatly salubrious.