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Don’t be misled by the title of Ashley Gavin’s interview podcast, We’ve Having Gay Sex: In the 160+ episodes released to date, no one has ever actually had sex on mic. Gavin is far more invested in the jokes that emerge when gay people simply talk about shtupping in the frankest terms possible. With more than 5,400 paying subscribers on Patreon, about 368,000 subscribers to the weekly video version on YouTube, and a new one-hour special, she is clearly not alone.
When WHGS first launched in March 2020, it centered on Gavin’s attempts to stay sex-positive about her newly busy romantic life without losing the provocative streak she had honed as a motor-mouthed, backward-hatted stand-up in New York City. Gavin had spent the previous ten years as a “U-Haul lesbian,” as she described it in the pilot, and was ready to get out of old patterns and into her slut era. Her goal, she wrote, was to document “every gritty detail of her queer experiments,” no matter how embarrassing, traumatic, or disgusting. She even kept a few co-hosts — including fellow comics like Kate Sisk, Gara Lonning, and, more recently, Maddie Wiener — around to keep her from getting canceled for oversharing (or worse).
Undergirding that playfully explicit premise was a more cerebral mission, which Gavin, calling herself “Your Top,” has unveiled in fits and starts to her growing fan base of simps in “Bottom Nation”: to deconstruct the narrow-minded, oftentimes deleterious ideas “str8 ppl” have about what lesbian, gay, and bisexual sex really looks like without ever slipping into outrage. By Gavin’s design, the personal tales she and her queer guests share never sound like the quaint storybook romances written for them in cinema and literary fiction. Instead, the raw-dogging described on WHGS is clumsy, vanilla, painful, ridiculous, stressful, or otherwise ill-advised just as often as it is beautiful, compassionate, goofy, loving, or pleasurable.
As a result, while the podcast is no less horny now than it was in its first episode, in the past three years, it has morphed into a radically unpredictable experiment in comedy. One week, Gavin and influencer Mak Ingemi might bro down hard on the pseudo-religious bliss of three-hour foreplay. The next, Alli Bellairs might reveal her terrifying personal experiences with real-world domestic violence. Only two rules connect every episode: The host will ask her guest if they have had gay sex that week, and the more personal the guest’s response, the funnier the episode.
For proof of that concept, seek out episode 132, “Jessica Kirson Is Building a Gay Dynasty.” Gavin acknowledges that the episode is special up front, since her guest is both a stand-up legend and one of the most ferocious working advocates for women in comedy: “I would feel more comfortable asking Demi Lovato to do my podcast than you,” Gavin jokes. But Kirson is just as excited to be there, regaling Gavin with compliments before offering to do her weekly Sunday Sqool show at New York’s Sour Mouse. “I know we’ve never met,” Kirson tells Gavin, “but I’m proud of you. Isn’t that crazy?”
At first, this sends Gavin and her current co-host, self-proclaimed “gay virgin hall monitor” Maddie Wiener, into overwhelmed paralysis (“I’m fine!” Gavin screams). Kirson assures them she came here to be sincere. “You know, female comics don’t tell other female comics enough how they feel. They don’t support each other enough. But you deserve it.” That snaps Gavin out of her imposter syndrome — and none too soon, because almost 15 minutes pass without a single lesbian joke. Gavin can just picture the slobbering outrage in Bottom Nation: “The listeners right now are like, ‘Where’s the pussy?! Get to the fucking pussy!’”
Gavin announced that “since we have a MILF in the room today,” her gay-sex story of the week will be the end piece of a two-month-long “Brazilian MILF arc.” She and an unnamed polyamorous mother with highly graspable breasts had “incredible chemistry,” she humblebrags, but it was taking far too long to get to straight-up sex. Instead, they did so much heavy petting that it actually “broke my brain,” making Gavin feel like she had to close the door to any kind of deeper relationship. “I kept her at arm’s length. It was like a CDC thing: You have to be at least six inches away from the MILF.” Despondent, she turns to Wiener for support:
Gavin: “I don’t know if you’ve ever been in this situation — given that you’re a gay virgin and all that?”
Wiener (with an exaggerated Eeyore frown): “Um, is it kind of like when you want to eat a peanut butter and jelly but then you can’t eat it? I only have virgin references.”
Kirson: “She needs to come around again!”
Gavin: “I hope so. She seems like a wonderful mom.”
Wiener: “Yeah, that’s why you came. Because of her personality: ‘I came so hard I grabbed her sense of self!’”
Kirson: “‘I grabbed her knowledge of archaeology.’”
That riff takes the episode to its halfway mark. Then Gavin asks the big question: Has Kirson had gay sex that week? After all, she teases the stand-up, “You loooove eating box. You said that four or five or six times.” “And I’ll say it again!” Kirson snaps back. “I do, ’cause I’m an eater.” Nonetheless, and with a touch of disappointment, she has not done the deed in the past seven days (“that I know of — again, I disassociate, and I do feel tired”), because she has been on the road providing for her “four daughters and two baby mamas. It’s like I have my own Women’s March.” Gavin is stunned to hear that, especially when Kirson admits that she never planned on having kids in the first place. “So are you the Wilt Chamberlain of comics?” she asks. “No!” Kirson says, sounding wounded. “I’m Nick Cannon.”
Wiener and Gavin laugh, but Kirson indicates that her feelings on kids are no joke. “I never thought of having a child myself, because I feel very male in a lot of ways.” She reveals that coming out to her parents, one of whom responded “Is it my fault?” made her feel like “it would be insane” to have a baby. Still, as a lifelong co-dependent and lesbian, Kirson agreed to have kids despite working in an industry known “for causing depression, rejection, and loneliness.” Even the serious health difficulties experienced by her second daughter, Bella, who lives with congenital heart disease, haven’t dissuaded her that being a mom was the best choice she has ever made. “This is real. This is life. This is shit people deal with. And it’s made this comedy-career shit so not matter,” she says. “The thing is,” Gavin deadpans, “this is a gay-sex podcast. So I’m going to have to move away from this topic quickly.”
It takes a second, but when Kirson catches the joke, she explodes, resetting the room just long enough for Wiener to squeeze in their own wild story about nearly ripping an ex-boyfriend’s shaft off with their IUD (“My boyfriend’s trying to kill himself dick first!” they tell 911). That last blast of fresh laughter wraps things up after an hour and four minutes.
As she delivers her final plugs, Gavin looks satisfied, having gone fully toe to toe with her comedy hero and come out the other end with big laughs. Yet the final word comes from Kirson, who turns to the camera with a plea for listeners, fans, and comedy lovers of the world. If you want more lesbians in comedy, she says, you need to support them — onstage and off. Her advice speaks for any comic who has ever played a cold room: “We need to hear it, and we need to understand it,” she yells. “We’re not okay!”
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