So you’re proooobably wondering how I got into this situation, huh?
I was three-years-old the first time I watched the 2001 Chicago movie.
My Mom showed it to me because… I was three, she wanted to watch it, she thought that I wouldn’t really pay attention, and that I was “too young” to know what was going on, but… that plan backfired. I was OBSESSED! I sang the songs to, from, and AT preschool and probably said something like “Hi my name is Hannah, my favorite color is yellow, and THEY HAD IT COMING” at circle time.
While nowadays I don’t typically write about murdering abusers (I mean Chicago already did it perfectly), all of my writing, from my original musical theatre pieces to my creative nonfiction essays, depicts queer individuals surviving unrealistic, impossibly campy, and zany situations.
I tell larger these larger than life stories where gender and sexual identity is not the main focus
, because when I was a kid the media I watched made it seem like the only story about queer people worth telling were centered on their queer identities. I’ll be the first to state the importance of coming of age queer films, but in my writing I wanted to show little me that queer people can ride dinosaurs, fall into a distracting love triangle, and stress about taxes the same as an other straight character. Everyone faces their own sorts of impossible odd and in my writing I show people overcoming life’s challenges by coming together and that is the same for queer people too.
Great comedy writing connects people over the simplest universal truths about being human… we humans can be really stupid sometimes and that is something that we can all laugh at.
So, I use comedy strategically to help mainstream audiences bond with all kinds of characters! Ones that are trans, gay, or even just weirdos into fringe internet comedians and D&D, in order to help audiences see the humanity in the many other beautiful cultures, communities, and people that exist in our world.
At my core, I believe that every person is doing their best with this crazy, impossible to write about, world that we’re stuck in.
