Vickie Shaw is a talented comedian whose performances have spanned across the country as well as TV on Comedy Central and Logo. She and her life partner Sergeant Patch moved back to Vickie’s home state of Texas over a year ago.

Tanya Sapula: You can correct me if I’m wrong, but did you recently move back to Texas?

Vickie Shaw:: We did, a year ago in June.

Tanya Sapula: So what was it like living outside of Texas and then coming back?

Vickie Shaw: When you’re in Texas, of course it’s a unique place anyways, people talk to you all the time. You could be in the middle of nowhere, and they will tell you their life story in five minutes. I mean you know stuff about people when you’re here in Texas that you didn’t really want to know, but I never noticed it because I was raised here. So I remember when I first moved to Rockford [Illinois], Lori said, “Why do you talk to everybody? And I said, “I don’t talk to everybody!” I never even noticed, but when we moved back, I did notice. People really do talk to you all the time

Tanya Sapula: How do people react to you?

Vickie Shaw: I’m completely out. Whether I’m doing business or when I take care of my home or if I’m buying furniture. I say, “my partner,” I’ve always done that. And I’ve always noticed there’s never a negative response. Many times they’ll think, “What is she talking about?” You know, they don’t hear that very often, “my partner.” But then I’ll say “my partner...SHE...,” and they get it pretty quick. You will accept me for who I am, or we have nothing to discuss.

Tanya Sapula: I recently moved to a conservative state, and I’ve been surprised with how accepting everyone is overall. I think it’s a generational thing.

Vickie Shaw: And I think that’s it. The older generation has been given these truths and think, “If I question one truth, does that mean everything thing else I’ve learned is not true?” Whereas the younger generation thinks, “I don’t have to question it, I see it every day.” They know there are gay people, and they’re good people. And there are gay people that are bad people. And there are Republicans that are good, and Republicans that are bad. It’s not what you are or who you are. It’s the content of your character. It is your basic human nature. It doesn’t matter if you’re gay, straight, Republican, Democrat, black, white, old, young. It really doesn’t matter. It does matter what your character is.

Tanya Sapula: Your daughter Haley had said that she would love to have a relationship similar to yours and your partners. As a parent, that must feel good.

Vickie Shaw: That’s it. It’s not about whether it’s a woman and a woman or a man and a woman or a man and a man, it’s about relationships and how you treat each other and how you respect each other. To teach your children more to live life with character and integrity as opposed to not. To think and use their mind and be intelligent and make friends and judge people on good qualities and bad qualities, that’s the job of a parent. And the fact that I’m a gay parent, I mean, it’s not my job to make my children gay. It’s my job to teach them to be wonderful human beings, and I think I’ve done a good job. And now, I’m working on the third generation. I have two perfect grandbabies – we’re making them gay though. We are going to make them gay whether they want to or not. So they are going to be our little test babies, ha!

Tanya Sapula: I love it! What are your thoughts on gay marriage? Have you had any type of commitment ceremony?

Vickie Shaw: My partner actually asked me to marry her, and I said, “NO!” And I screamed at her, and I realized I probably shouldn’t have yelled that loud or said it that fast because that was mean, and I kind of hurt her feelings. It’s not that I don’t want to marry her, that’s not it at all. The beauty of it is that my ex-husband lives in California, and he is Republican, and he is a fundamentalist. When I turn 65, because I can’t marry my partner, I get to collect HIS social security. And he’s gonna be really pissed. I think that’s where the California people went wrong when they were fighting before it got turned over. They had all these ads on television with little children saying, “Please let me and my gay moms be a family.” What they should have had were a bunch of white, Republican, fundamentalist, men saying, “Because my ex-wife came out as a lesbian and can’t marry her partner, when she turns 65, she gets my social security. Vote for gay marriage.” That’s where they went wrong.

Tanya Sapula: What was it like coming out at 38? What was it like being single in the lesbian community?

Vickie Shaw:: It was scary! You know – because I was not what I considered to “lesbian.” I don’t mean women loving women, but all the lesbians I knew were very athletic, very sporty, very masculine, and I wasn’t like that. I have to be honest. I thought as I was coming out, honest to god, one of my biggest fears was not only do I not fit in, in the straight world where I had lived my whole life – something was always not right. But when I come out as a lesbian, the lesbians are not going to accept me because I’m not like them. And I was really afraid I wasn’t going to fit in anywhere. Little did I know, I would fit in just fine. I didn’t know any gay people when I came out, absolutely none. There were no women in my life. It wasn’t like I came out because I fell in love with someone. It was just accepting what I always knew.

Tanya Sapula: When you kind of look back at your childhood and teenage years, were they any red flags or indicators that you might be gay?

Vickie Shaw: Ha! Since I was in pre-school, I was a lesbian. But I didn’t know that’s what that was. I just assumed everyone was like that. I tell this story: when I was in pre-school, it wasn’t even kindergarten, I was in pre-school. I remember being little, and I would tell all the girls in the pre-school they had to go to the playhouse, and we had to have a panty check. I would sit on the floor of the play house, and all of the little girls would line up. I don’t even know how I had this power. They would come, and I would pull their panties down and look at their little butts, and then I would put them back up and say, “Okay, your panties are fine!” Dear God! I was 4! When I was six I fell in love with a 4th grader. And when I was five in church, I would sit with a teenager named Dina every Sunday at church, and I was madly in love with her. And I asked her to marry me, and she said, “Girls don’t marry girls,” and I said, “Well that’s just stupid, why wouldn’t they?” So yes, I’ve been gay since I was at least four, maybe three. And I don’t think there was a choice there, it just was. I’ve been gay my whole life, but no one ever said first, it was okay, and second, that’s what it really was. In retrospect, it took me years.

Tanya Sapula: You've referred to comedy as "cheap therapy" and noted that you became out and a comedian at the same time. Did humor help the coming out process for you?

Vickie Shaw:: When something would bother me or I was having a problem or something was painful or whatever, whenever I got to a point I could laugh at it, then I was okay. I had worked through whatever the issue was. To me, comedy and laughing about something and being able to tell someone about it whether it was a little thing or a big thing was my acceptance. It is what it is, and life goes on. It doesn’t matter who you are or where you are in your life, there are things that are going to bother you, get on your nerves and make you mad. That’s normal.

It’s how you handle it after the fact and accept it sooner than later that makes it okay. So as soon as I could laugh about something, I could accept it. Once I am able to talk about something on stage, it was over with.

Tanya Sapula: What was it like for you when you finally started playing your gay jokes to a straight crowd, and do you notice a big difference between gay and straight venues?

Vickie Shaw:: No, I don’t. That was years ago, when I first started doing my gay stuff, and I thought, I can’t not do it because being gay is who I am. I mean, I have a partner, we have a life together. When I first started doing gay stuff on stage, that was big. I had divorced after eighteen years, and that was huge in my life. I couldn’t not talk about it, it just didn’t make sense. I began working on my gay stuff, and I did take a risk obviously to be out on a stage that is a very heterosexual world. Just regular standup. It’s very male dominated. And very heterosexual. And I thought, “Well, I may never make it, I may never have any big success, but I can’t lie, and I can’t pretend to do something I’m not.” When I made that decision and started doing gay humor in my act, what I began to notice to this day, I never had a negative response in an act, ever. If you’re making people laugh as a standup comic, it doesn’t matter if you’re gay or straight or black or white or young or old or male or female. Audiences like to laugh. I can watch a single young black male comedian do an act and be tickled. But that’s not my life. I’m not young or black or male or single, but I can understand his truths. I can laugh at another comedian’s truth.

That’s what comedy is: it’s the truth. It has to be truth. It has to be who that comedian is. And, as a lesbian other, single or dating or whatever – that was my truth. And if I could make you laugh about my life (which is what all comedians do), hen it’s comedy. If I make you laugh, it doesn't matter that I’m a lesbian or straight – it matters that you laugh. That’s my job. So by virtue of that, what I talk about is irrelevant. The only time a comedy club has a right to tell a comedian what they can or can’t talk about is if it’s dirty. I completely understand that. But I actually did have a club when I first started out that told me, “We don’t want you to do your gay humor because we’re here in the suburbs and you know, we have people here.” And I said, “Fine.” So I did my show the first night, and the two comedians I was working with were two straight male comics. Both comics had gay bashing jokes. Now they were very funny jokes, don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t offended by them, they weren’t offensive jokes. But when a straight person makes a joke about a gay person, in and of its essence, it’s a bash. They’re not gay.

Tanya Sapula: It’s like laughing at gay people versus laughing with gay people.

Vickie Shaw:: Yes exactly, laughing at. Because it’s an easy laugh. So the next day, I said, “Here’s the deal. If I can’t do gay jokes, they can’t do gay jokes. That’s just it.” The thing was that the club owner was gay, and that’s what was so dumb about it! I did the show that night, and he came up to me and said, you can do your gay stuff. And the beauty of that was once I did my gay stuff, then those guys who did their gay jokes – the audience was uncomfortable. I didn’t want them to be uncomfortable. But all of a sudden, gay had a face, and it was me. And they would look at me as if to ask, “Is that funny? Can we laugh at that?” The audience had a face now, and they liked the faces that they had.

Tanya Sapula: Is there anyone in particular that has inspired you, either personally or professionally?

Vickie Shaw:: As a comedian I’ve had many, many inspirations. When I was a teenager, at that time, we all bought albums, but I didn’t like music albums. I bought Richard Pryor, George Carlin and Bill Cosby. Because I loved comedy. But I never thought I’d do comedy, I never in my life dreamed I would be doing comedy. As I came out slowly and started doing the gay stuff and became involved in the community, I did get inspired. I have a lot of people who come up to me after shows or e-mail me about what a difference I made in their lives. These people come up to me and say, “Thank you for being out and thank you for doing what you do and letting us laugh for a minute about who we are and letting us laugh about ourselves.” That inspires me. You know I may not make tons of money, but I know that what I do is bigger than having a good time for an hour. It’s bigger than just laughing and having fun. Which is wonderful and important, and I love the aspect of that. But comedy has always been very important in our societies changing. On every level. Once comedians get a hold of something, comedy can put truth out where otherwise it might not have been heard. I am also a catalyst, and not only in our own community to give people in my audience encouragement, laughter, a sense of self esteem that you are perfect just as you are. But when I do it in front of a straight crowd, I’m telling them, this is who we are. We’re just like you. I have a partner who makes me crazy, I have kids, I have grandkids, I’m going through menopause. I have the same stuff you do. But I’m a lesbian. And that is a catalyst for change.

Tanya Sapula: So this is a bit off-topic, but are you by any chance an L Word fan?

Vickie Shaw: Yes! I’ve always liked it. It’s kind of goofy sometimes, but it doesn’t matter, it’s fun.

Tanya Sapula: Was there a character you related to at all?

Vickie Shaw: I always liked the little one played by...the blonde funny one.

Tanya Sapula: Alice.

Vickie Shaw: Yes! Alice Piezecki. I always liked her.

Tanya Sapula: She’s my favorite as well.

Vickie Shaw: She seemed more real than all of them.

Tanya Sapula: Do you have a favorite Celesbian?

Vickie Shaw: I have never met her, but I would love to be friends with Melissa Etheridge. I would like to know her. I’ve met Martina, she’s very sweet, but she eats that strange food, she’s vegan. So we couldn’t hang out together because we could never eat! I like her, she was fun. And I know both the Indigo Girls, and they’re both very sweet, I enjoy them.

But I would really like to meet Melissa Etheridge, and I’d like to meet Ellen DeGeneres, too. I’ve always been a fan of hers. I loved her act, I loved her comedy. I’ve been a fan of hers even before anybody...before I was out, before she was out.

Tanya Sapula: Ellen is one of my favorites. I was twelve when she came out on her show.

Vickie Shaw: You were a baby.

Tanya Sapula: I was absolutely horrified because I knew that I was gay but I was only twelve. So when she came out, I thought, “Oh god, do I have to do that?”

Vickie Shaw: Hahahaha!

Tanya Sapula: And, of course, now I’m a huge fan, but at the time, it was, “Oh my god.”

Vickie Shaw: Because you don’t know what to do with that, you know?

Tanya Sapula: You’re too young to process that information. Eventually you start meeting other gay people, and you hear their stories and you think, “Oh, okay...this is what I am.”

Tanya Sapula: Tell me what’s next for you.

Vickie Shaw: Well, I’m just on the road constantly which is a wonderful thing. I love being on the road. My partner and I are settling in here in Texas and raising these perfect grandbabies. Having so much fun with them. Actually my son and his wife and their two daughters live with us. And my daughter and her fiancé live with us. We call it, “The Compound,” we all live together. So we have a whole different dynamic than a lot of people. And I love it, I really do. This is where I’m supposed to be at this point in time. This is where we are. Just living our lives, playing with babies, changing diapers...life is good!