Oct 29, 2004  |  By: KATHI WOLFE  | COMMENTS     

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.