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KATHI WOLFE
Friday, October 29, 2004
DISABILITY. HOMOPHOBIA. DIFFERENCE.
To many, this would be the perfect recipe for a pity party. But not to 34-year-old
performance artist and comedian Greg Walloch, who is gay and was born with cerebral
palsy. Walloch, whose work is frequently compared to Lily Tomlin and Garrison
Keillor, turns potentially bitter and preachy topics into funny, insightful,
refreshingly non-PC art.
He demonstrated this during a stop in D.C., on Oct. 12, when he performed his
one-man show, “An Evening with Greg Walloch,” at George Washington
University’s Dorothy Betts Marvin Theatre.
Walloch, who grew up in southern California and moved to New York in 1992,
uses crutches. One day, he told the college crowd at the Marvin Theatre, he
found himself becoming annoyed when he almost missed having lunch with a friend
because the bus he was on stopped to pick up a passenger in a wheelchair.
His luncheon companion was a woman, who Walloch says asked him, “is the
reason that you’re gay due to the fact that you’re crippled and
can’t get lucky with women, so you had no other choice but to sleep with
men for sex?”
From there, he launched into a bitingly funny riff on societal attitudes toward
being disabled and being gay. “I’m actually a heterosexual man,
but because of my unfortunate, grotesque disfigurement I was … forced
into the depravity of the underground world of man-to-man sex,” Walloch
joked.
Once, he was in a southern Baptist televangelist church in Georgia. The minister,
he says, tried to heal him. “He started rubbing my legs. He said, ‘I
want you to get the devil out of your legs,’” Walloch says. At that
point, he got an erection, he says, “I’m here in church and I’m
thinking … I’m certainly going to hell now.”
Despite the edginess of some of his subject matter, the audience was drawn
to Walloch by his charm and sometimes self-deprecating, though never cruel,
wit.
HE HAS BEEN performing since he was 16. The venues have included the Vancouver
Comedy Festival and Joe’s Pub at the Public Theater in New York. “F**K
the Disabled,” a documentary film, which he co-produced and stars in,
is out on DVD.
“[He] tackles and disrupts politically correct notions of queer crip
humor,” says John R. Killacky, co-editor of “Queer Crips: Disabled
Gay Men and Their Stories,” in an e-mail.
Walloch is “smart, sassy and sexy as all get out,” Killacky says.
Two of Walloch’s monologues appear in the “Queer Crips” book.
Telling stories (based in part on his life) came naturally to him from his
youth, Walloch says in a telephone interview. “I had things to say from
a different point of view,” he says, “it just evolved.”
Early on, he knew that he was perceived as being different. “I feel different
because I’m a man with a disability, because I’m gay and because
I’m an artist,” he says.
Each one of these “different levels” is connected to the other.
“For me, they are three different, very powerful parts of the whole person,”
he says.
Sometimes, people are uncomfortable with his disability or his being gay and
don’t see him for who he really is, Walloch says. “But, on my best
day, instead of being victimized by these scenarios, I’m telling stories,”
he says. “I’m taking potentially painful situations and using alchemies
to turn them into art.”
He hopes that one day people will think of him as a comedian/performance artist
rather than as a gay, disabled performer, Walloch says. “Now people don’t
say, ‘we’re going to see Margaret Cho, the Korean-American comedian,’
they just say ‘Margaret Cho,’” he says.
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