The joy of Gina
Gina Yashere didn’t talk about her sexuality onstage until she’d been doing stand-up for over a decade. “Starting out in England, I was fully aware I had a lot going against me,” she tells me on Zoom. “Black, woman, not looking a certain way, not fitting into the boxes. So I didn’t wanna give anybody anything else to use to squeeze me into an even smaller box.” It took crossing the pond and beginning again from scratch on the American open mic circuit for Gina to finally feel free enough to mine her “lesbianity” for material. When she did, it was life-changing. “The day I completely opened up and went, ‘I don’t give a fuck. I’ve got nothing to hide. This is who I am,’ I got twice as good as a comedian. Stuff started coming to me. I felt like the universe rewarded me for that.”
Today she’s at home in LA, wearing a faded blue t-shirt that shows off her sleeve tattoos. Talking to Gina is a joy. She’s an unstoppable force: emphatic, insightful and, as you’d expect, hysterical. She laughs and swears frequently and with relish. She’s fabulously candid. You see it in her stand-up, on her social media, in TV appearances and in her brand new memoir, Cack-Handed. As she puts it, “I’ve always been a person, good or bad, who’s said the truth.”
Her ability to say exactly what she thinks is an integral
