Kristin Key’s lesbian army: ‘I’d always been told by male club owners, ‘don’t be too gay’

“I had just started to get more lesbians to come to my show,” Key tells Beat ahead of the tour’s arrival in Australia. “Then one time I was on stage and I looked out and I was like, ‘Oh my god, I’ve assembled an army of lesbians.’”

The Australian leg of the Lesbian Army tour begins later this month, with Key to perform at the Comic’s Lounge on Thursday 24 October and play gigs in Sydney, Brisbane and Perth.

Kristin Key Australian tour

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Now based in Los Angeles, Key grew up in the US’s socially conservative Bible Belt. She started performing stand-up comedy in the late 1990s but didn’t begin writing material centred on her sexuality until recently.

“I grew up in a very rural, very conservative state and had not the best time coming out and life was very difficult,” Key says. “I’d been in the closet twice in my life and I came out for real-real when I was 35. And so since then, I’ve been figuring out how to be gay as a comedian.” 

Prior to this, Key had been cautioned against speaking about her experiences as a gay woman. “I’d always been told by male club owners, ‘Don’t be too gay,’” she says. “So I’ve been really trying to watch how gay I was for so long.”

But once her self-censorship began to lift, Key realised that putting her sexuality at the centre of her comedy was not only liberating but also made the material more enjoyable.

“I never realised how much censoring myself in my sexuality also censored everything else,” Key says. “It’s like, my jokes weren’t real, I wasn’t able to be personal about anything because I was always trying to hide that part of me. It made everything inauthentic.”

This element of inauthenticity erected a wall between Key and her audience, she says. But these days, the wall has well and truly been torn down.

“Instead of, like, ‘I’m performing for you and you have to show up and laugh for me,’ now it’s like, ‘We’re creating a moment together because you’re sharing in my life and we’re finding humour in relating about something that’s a little dark underneath.’”

Key adds, “Part of the gay experience sometimes is dark and finding ways to laugh through that and share in each other’s darkness is what makes our community so much fun and so important.” 

Contrary to the warnings of the aforementioned male club owners, once Key started speaking openly about her lesbianism – and writing songs such as the viral Lesbian National Anthem – her career started to flourish. 

“I’d always been told it would close doors, and instead it opened a whole new world with a whole new fanbase,” Key says. 

Quantifiable evidence of Key’s expanded audience can be found online, where the comedian has amassed nearly 300k Instagram followers and attracted 3.1 million likes on TikTok. But it’s also evident in Key’s unrelenting tour schedule.

“My favourite part of being on tour is getting to connect with so many different people from so many different places,” she says.

Case in point is a video on Key’s Instagram titled My Favourite City, which shows Key performing in various regional US locations – such as Spokane, Syracuse, Louisville and Albany – that queer comedians mightn’t ordinarily visit.

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A post shared by Kristin Key (@thekristinkey)

“This Lesbian Army tour has really opened my eyes to how important it is to have visibility,” Key says in the video, reaffirming her commitment to performing in small towns. “It’s neat to get to see the community come together because we get to support each other. And really, the gay community saved my life when I was having a hard time.”

The prospect of deepening this mutually beneficial exchange with her audience fills Key with excitement for the forthcoming Australian tour.

“More than anything I’m excited to meet the Australian lesbians,” Key says. “All I can picture is cargo shorts. And I know that probably they’re just like everywhere else where they’re very diversified, but I’m just like, Oh, they’re all going to be in forest ranger outfits.”

Get tickets to see Kristin Key here.