I would like to bring out onto the stage America's favorite X noun skateboard riding, houseboat, dwelling, nurturing, sweet, adorable, thoughtful, thought provoking, anti racist comic, Miss Kelly Dunham.
From a Cocoa Punch and iHeartRadio. This is the Turning America.
Lance.
There are still four episodes left this season, but today we have a bonus for you. It's a little different.
So like most of you, I used to be a nun, very relatable. That's very relatable and stand up comedy to get up on starts to talk about how you used to be a nun and people, you know, like sometimes in straight clubs, people will be like, oh yeah, whatever system Mary Bulldyke. But I used to be Ann with the outfit and everything.
Uh So, you know Kelly Dunham. For previous episodes, she's a former sister who's missed. Told her she walked like her shoulders were angry. But there's so much more to Kelly's story, all these twists and turns.
All of my happiest childhood memories were learning words.
I remember asking my mom what does that bill?
I mean? She goes, well, when do you feel like you both love something and maybe you don't love it so much all I wants and I, oh, my god, that's exactly how I feel about you.
What does my mom had plants in here? You guys are oh.
One of our producers, Emily Foreman, talked with Kelly about her life before the Missionaries of Charity and after about her faith, about her comedy.
So I just want to go back, back, back, back, back back. Uh, what's the first joke you ever told?
But mostly about her complicated relationship with her mom.
So I'm the youngest of seven.
My mom had had six other kids with as many alcoholic husbands, which I think is really impressive to find that one or two, but a number of alcoholics. Sometimes you just have our types, which you know when you think about life. Okay, so what the thought process like? You know, my last five marriages to alcoholics ended in financial ruin. But I've got the right alcoholic. So I really I appreciate my mom's level of hope.
So that's a rural Wisconsin accent, and you hear in Kelly's voice she grew up there hard work and not talking about feelings with the family code. So was Dale Carnegie, the author of How to win friends and influence people. It was an incredibly popular book, and Kelly's dad made the books philosophy part of life at home.
Well, first, my dad would frequently mornings. He would come down. We had to be sitting at the table at six am, and he would slap his hand on the table and say, acting through the ass. Second, you'll be enthusiastic, and most people are just about as happy as they make up their mind they're gonna be, which she would attribute to Dale Carnegie and sometimes to Abraham Lincoln, although I've since
heard that it was Dale Carnegie quoting Abraham Lincoln. But it doesn't sound like Abraham Lincoln because Abraham Lincoln a clinical depression. I bet he did not say that most people are just about as happy as they make up their minds are going to be in the middle of the Civil War. You know, I have a feeling that's not true, but it's a good story anyway. Can imagine how.
Kelly says her dad would run Dale Carnegie days and if you weren't following the b positive ethos, you'd have to go to bed early. She says, there are a lot of rules like that. He was strict, but the first time Kelly made her dad laugh, she knew she'd found an important tool. You could say her comedy career started in that moment.
Being funny was like both a way to deflect things and a way to have positive attention.
So whose attention were you hoping to capture?
I mean maybe my mom's. Like hearing my mom laugh was really a nice, nice thing, you know. I mean also because my mom had a hard life. She had all these kids, she had like these useless husbands of varying degrees. You know, she had a hard life. So I wanted her to I don't know, I wanted her to be able to laugh.
You know when you were a kid, were you aware of life being hard for her? Then?
Only glimpses of it, especially when I was younger. I think her marriage to my dad also deteriorated as time passed, but she was I really don't think I saw her without her makeup till I was like in third or fourth grade. Like, she was always perfectly made up and perfectly put together. You know, she was a person who that was important to her, and she really maintained I don't know if it's a facade. She also didn't want us to be like frightened, and you know, she wanted
us to feel secure. I think so. I think that I didn't necessarily know it, maybe felt it somewhere because I was a very sensitive kid. So what my parents needed at that time, they needed like a cheerful, very midwestern kid, right, what they got was me, and I came into the world screaming as a fully formed, whining, coastal sensitive queer.
I was the kind of kid that when it rained, do.
You know why when I was missed the bus when it rained, because I would be picking up the worms off the pavement and putting the mac on the grass so they.
Wouldn't get running out for it, like in a city. That's like, Okay, did you believe.
In God as a little kid.
Yeah, very much so. In fact, I can remember there's this Bill Gaither song It's God Loves to talk to little boys while They're fishing. It's a very sweet song, and I can remember when my mom used to play it, and I was, you know, thought myself more as a little boy than a little girl. But I would go to like one of the ponds, you know, and like just take a stick with a string on it and like throw it in there, and I was like, Okay, now God's going to talk to me. Well, I guess
not out loud, okay. But I have this memory of my grandmother when we were staying with her. She and my grandpa built a cottage on towards Lake This this beautiful lake in northern Michigan that has like this crystal blue water, so it's spring fed anyway. So we'd go
and stay with them during parts of the summer. And one time I was sleeping in the room where my grandma's because you know, there's a lot of kids there, so we were all like kind of doubled up, and I was sleeping in the room with my grandma, and I guess she couldn't sleep, and so she was praying
aloud about all of us. And then I remember she came to me and I was like, oh, I gotta live really still, and you know, she was praying for me, like, oh, you know, help Kelly to know how much Kelly Sue, as my family calls me, help Kelly Sue to know how much you love her, and some other stuff too. I don't remember this, but I was like, whatever happens, my grandmother's really praying for me, so maybe I'll be okay. You know. I was like probably when I was eight
or not, were you worried you weren't going to be okay? Well, I think there was like obviously I didn't fit in with my family, right. I was like my parents really tried hard with the gender stuff, like I was so clearly like a little boy growing up, you know, and they tried really hard. But also like the world was against that. You know, even now the world is against that.
So doing better. But yeah, and also they were worried for me, Like I think they thought that the world was going to crush me, you know, but they just didn't know what to do. It was like who gave it? You know, it was like somebody gave them a wolverine to you know, to race. What do we need a wolverine? We don't know.
And so so you moved from Wisconsin to Florida, and at this time, what's what's your faith situation?
So my mom wasn't you know, when we were little, was not a Christian, but she became a born again Christian. And then when we moved to Florida, I went to my mom sent us to a Christian school, and everyone was like, oh, okay, like this is a queer kid in the making, Let's see what we can do. And I got actually really involved in my church, and you know, I would say that I was interested in what God
wanted for me in my life. And I felt like, oh, well, if there's a God, there must be some reason for me. You know, I don't really know what it is, but there must be, like some reason that I exist, and there's something I'm supposed to do. When I was in high school and most of my peers were drinking zeema it was the eighties and giving each other what I
now know to be was horrible blowjobs. I was attending church three times a week, wearing a no Surfing in Hell t shirt and asking complete strangers, excuse me, have you accepted Jesus Christ as your personal savior. I was a big bananas born again Christian and my mom was a big bananas born again Christian, so that made her really happy, except for I was also a big, huge, lifelong tomboy, and that made her very sad.
One day, Kelly came home and found a note from her mom. It said, this sounds like something you would love, and there was a glossy brochure for a missionary training program the Lord's boot Camp. Kelly looked at all the pictures of smiling teenagers and thought.
Oh my god, this looks like something I would love. When I arrived at the Lord's boot Camp, it was essentially an unimproved Florida wetlands and there was we washed our clothes by hand in sulfur water we pumped. And also the place that we were supposed to like wash up, they called it a God's bathtub, was just this little area of the swamp that was attached to another area of the swamp with this tiny little drainage ditch, and in the other area of the swamp were two alligators.
When we questioned our leaders about it, they were like, now, do you really think that an alligator? Those alligators are gonna eat five hundred teenagers? And I don't really think any of us thought they were gonna eat five hundred teenagers. But doesn't even one seem like a lot.
One of the main features of the camp was an obstacle course. They'd run it at five am every morning. There is a series of physical challenges based on biblical themes, all designed to help them become better disciples.
The last obstacle in the obstacle course was just called the wall, and it was a series of walls, and they each were painted with something we would have to get over in order to effectively serve Jesus.
It started.
With lust, and then pride and then gluttony, and the last wall was sexual confusion.
When they weren't running an obstacle course, they took classes in how to tie steel, lay bricks, run power tools, even mix concrete by hand, all in the service of learning how to build God's kingdom.
I was having a fantastic time. It was an entire summer of being a tomboy, and I returned home with this newfound zeal, also with a new haircut. I had a spiral perm and I had also attempted to bleach my hair surfer blonde with actual bleach, which meant by the end of the summer I couldn't even get a comb through it. So one of my fellow team members took a razor and off almost all the hair on the sides and a lot of the hair on top, which of course leaving me a rat tail in back.
And I looked fantastic when I walked onto my mom's front porch, dragging my stinky backpack. I said, Mom, don't I look like a new person in Christ And she said, you look a lot the same. So the teen Missions thing is like a general evangelical thing, but it was being used as like a de facto conversion camp, like my mom had hoped that I would come home, you know, changed. I mean, they had these classes on like from Grubby to Grace and God's Gentlemen, which now I realize were
like gender appropriateness classes. It was like, you know, just like the world's toughest summer camp. It was like it was like if the missionaries of charity around a fucking summer camp. That's what it was like.
So who did she want you to be?
I don't know, maybe her, you know, like I think she was worried. She never thought of me is like a mask on female. She thought of me as like an ugly female, right. And my mom was a very beautiful person. She was a very attractive person, and that helped her in life. She knew how to use it. She knew how to use that attractiveness and it was her kind of also, her kind of her stick, you know. And I can remember watching my mom put on her
makeup her whole life. Like I've watched her put out her makeup and talked to her while she put on her makeup. I mean, even the smell of makeup like makes me think of my mom, you know.
And so what were you searching for then in joining the MCS.
Like I, you know, I was looking for a life that made sense.
And what did your mom think of you joining?
I think, you know, she wanted me to have health insurance, you know, Like, so she was a little bit like, Okay, you know.
So you already know. Kelly joined the MCS and it didn't work out, But what did her life look like after she left? Kelly was incredibly impressed by the Missionaries of Charity when she first encountered them. She admired their hard work, and she thought she'd found her community. She converted to Catholicism, joined the order, but found she wasn't welcomed like other sisters. Maybe some of it was her sense of humor, maybe it was her appearance or her
angry shoulders. One sister described her as scary and in the end, not fitting in took a toll on her physically. She left flunked out as she puts it.
Yeah, I was so sad when I laugh, you know, because I was like, all right, well do you guys think this is working out? And they're like, let us think about it. No, you know what I mean, Like everyone else that left, they were like begging them to stay. Not me, they were like bye. And I remember or my mom was with my sister when she picked me up. She was like, you seem like you're grieving, like that
was the word she used. And I was like, well, first of all, it's like this big dramatic goodbye, I'm off.
To marry Jesus. Goodbye.
Oh hi, I'm back now, you know what I mean. Like, so first it was like kind of anti climactic, but it wasn't even just that. It was just like it just felt like it just felt like you're here, Oh here, Jesus, here is my life. I give it to you, and Jesus is like smack. Everybody watched your dumb gift of your dumb life, you know.
After she left the MCS, she started nursing school, joined a softball team, and spent time with the Catholic Worker Movement, a progressive faith based group, and she was talking to a friend there one day.
And she was like, Kelly, like, I know people who are trying to suppress their sexual orientation and I watched them not be able to love the people around them the way they should because that's where all their energy is going. And I was like, you know what, that's true, and I've seen that a lot, and that's not what I want. Like, if I really believe in love, if I think that love is something that changes lives and helps people, then I just have to be myself.
Okay.
So I was raised a strict evangelical Christian and when I came out to my mom, she ripped up my birth certificate and sent it to me.
Yeah, and I was complaining about it to my therapist.
So I'm like, oh, that was so passive aggressive, and she's like, no, killing that was aggressive, assive. So I took it to the countercler's office and he looked at me and then looked at the pieces and looked at me and then looked at the pieces and he thought for a minute, and he said, we get a lot of this from people who look like you, which tells you my mom was not as original as she thought she was. My mom would say that that is not
what happened. Different narrative. My mom was a dramatic person, you know. It was a very dramatic reaction, like okay. Also, even when she sent it to me, I was like, this doesn't You can send me my birth certificate all you want. It doesn't make me not your kid, you know what I mean? Like, that's not how that works, you know. And we didn't really have a relationship for a long time, Like I went long periods of time
without seeing her. I think it didn't really even become comedy early in my comedy career because it was still so unresolved. I think it was still to raw and me for other people to laugh at it.
Kelly met Heather at the Newark Airport Hotel during a queer conference. They both went to Christian high school. They both knew all of the words to the chorus of the Trumpet of Jesus, and that was that they started dating long distance. At the time, Heather wasn't remission from ovarian cancer. Within the first six months of their dating, it came back. Heather would call Kelly to get through the night, to keep her distracted with stories and jokes
until she could take her next dose. Of a heavy painkiller.
It became clear that she was going to die, you know, maybe not right away, but eventually. Like this wasn't a long term relationship, you know, and Heather struggled at first, like she was like, well, who starts a relationship when they're so late in life? You know, it just doesn't seem like it follows the rule book, like she you know, I think she didn't know if I was going to be able to stick it into the end. I knew I was going to be able to stick in to
the end. I knew what I'd been through, you know, But there was something really beautiful about being able to be the right person at the right time.
That was.
In the same way that like the mission of the charity just felt like, oh, I'm like, oh, this is what I'm supposed to be doing, this is this is I'm answering this call. I felt like I was answering the call. We kind of try to have sense of humor about it or in the house. I mean, I'm a standup comic and she was a total smart ass.
So it was the two of us, Like, for example, one day when she was really she had been on chemo for a long time, she wasn't feeling that well, and I called her from the supermarket and I said, is there anything okay ring you? And this is a long silence, and she said, yeah, how about.
A quarter pound of a Will to Live?
Oh god wine. So I was like, well, she's going there. I'm gonna go there too. And I was like, oh, honey, you know how it is. I'm gonna Trader Joe's and they only had organic and now they're all out.
To just write that. She came back. She's like hot, damn.
Kelly calls the Day How the Died Pudding Day, how they chose to end her life, surrounded by chosen family with a lethal dose of medication mixed into a pudding cup. All this time through the real relationship had There's Illness nursing school comedy sets, Kelly's relationship with her mom remained strained until her stepfather's dementia became worse and she flew home to help. He was a retired army colonel and everyone still called him the colonel, And so most people.
When they developed dementia, they forget.
The names of their kids or where they live, or you know, they're most fun childhood memories. That is not what happened to the colonel. The colonel forgot. He was a jerk, I think, because he forgot where the scotch was. So I went to my mom's home and helped her sent up hospice.
And the colonel was lovely Timmy.
It was like, oh color, I just I love your I love your haircut, soldier, I love the ultimate compliment, I.
Love your haircuts. Sold her. That's oh man, that's fantastic. Ah. And we thought that he might not make it until Christmas.
And he was really so you know, cognitively impaired at that point that he couldn't even follow a sigcom. So my mom loot the christ this tree and he asked her just to turn off the lights, and he just watched the tree, and every so often he would say, that's a heck of a tree.
Ads, that's a heck of a tree.
And so I would sit with my mom watch her as she would put on bakeup, and I wanted to tell her it was gonna be okay, but I knew it wasn't, and so.
I just sat with her.
I don't know something really changed that year. We just talked about our lives and you know, kind of what was important in life and what wasn't and not having any regrets, and it healed in a way that I had never thought was possible. So the colonel died a few days before Christmas, and when people came to drop off food and say, you know, send their condolence, says my Mom's response was, this is my daughter, Kelly.
She's also a widow. She lost her spouse as well.
What's a moment that happened that you would have never expected to.
Have had she came. She came to watch me perform at the Stonewall Inn in June.
The story of Kelly's mom at the historic Stonewall Inn in a moment.
All right, so my mom.
Nine years I've been performing, she has never seen me perform. You know where my mom wanted to come see me perform in the middle of June on the thirtieth anniversary of Stonewall at the Stonewall Inn. The gayest thing ever, right, is the gayest thing I've ever done. Guess who I was opening for? Lenny Breedlove. Lenny Breedlove Dude performance artists,
queer performance artist. Now you remember Lenny's last show where Lenny had a little stuffed animals like, Hi, I identify as an elephant, HI identify as a teddy bear?
Right, very cute, very tame. I thought that that's the show that Lenny would be doing.
No, oh, no, in the show my mom came to Lenny walked on the stage wearing nothing but a dick. And also, for no apparent reason that I could figure out, there was twenty minutes of Lenny peeing into.
A bucket on stage.
Now, if you've ever been upstairs at the Stone Wall, you know that the stage is maybe two or three feet from the front row where my mom was sitting. So I'm sitting in the audience thinking my mom and Lenny Breedlove are having a golden shower scene. And then I said the words I have not said before or since. I turned to her friend and I said, would you
please get my mom some more wine? So we got through that incident more or less okay, But oh the questions the next day at breakfast, so she's like trying to figure things out. Right, So she's like, so there was a woman, a man, no, a woman no, A woman dressed like a man sitting on the lap of the woman. The man.
No, the woman dressed like a man? Is that the way it always is?
By this time, Kelly had met her partner, Cheryl, a writer and a poet. Cheryl was at the Stonewall performance too, and Kelly introduced her to her mom.
She was like, she's beautiful and I was like, yeah, I know, she's beautiful.
Yeah.
She was like, Kelly, in your subculture? And I was like, I didn't even know she knew the word subculture. In your subculture, are you considered attractive? And I was like, yeah, mom, I'm actually in my subculture, I am considered attractive. There's like some women that want to date a mask on female and she was like, oh, I didn't have any idea, And that actually just made her so relieved, you know.
And I think she started thinking me as more her son than her daughter, and I think that helped too.
Wow.
Yeah, I was curious at that moment at Stonewall, at that performance, if like seeing your mom there and your friends there and your girlfriend there, like all hanging out having this time, does that sort of like I mean when I think back of like you as a teen having these questions about your purpose, you know that moment where you sort of done in your searching and did you have answers?
I felt happy for sure. I mean I think, you know, I don't know if anyone's ever done and they're searching. You know, it was a moment that it felt like a lot of people worked really hard to get to that moment helped me get to that moment, you know, like my mom's gay hairdresser. You know, my mom had been watching Ellen for a long time, you know, Lenny even who like when they saw my mom just gave my mom a big hug, like they'd been waiting their
whole lives to hug each other. You know, it seemed like there was some people who were interested in me and her being happy and me and her being friends, and that seemed really nice, you know. And also that she got to experience it, you know, she got to experience what it feels like to be to be loved by chosen family.
And then, unbelievably, Cheryl was diagnosed with Hodgkins lymphoma.
And how did your mom and Cheryl get along?
My mom loves Cheryl. Yeah, yeah, Like when Cheryl started chemo, my mom bought her bunny slippers and like fussed over her and like my mom tried really hard to like give Cheryl some mom energy, and Cheryl really appreciated that, and I appreciated it. And my sister was like, weren't
you jealous? And I was like no, In a way, that's like perfect because I get to observe that love towards somebody I love, and it's not complicated the way it would be between us, you know, So I actually really appreciate that.
Kelly says that whenever there's a tragedy in her life, she does a show. When Cheryl died, she booked a whole Southern comedy tour.
I don't know how people get through stuff without having an outlet of writing about it and performing about it and trying to make it funny. I don't really know. Yeah, it just seems like, wow, it seems brave. I love things being involved with somebody who has a serious illness, and I really feel like it gives you a perspective.
It definitely challenges the assumptions that the universe is a good place, right, definitely challenges those assumptions, like, you know, like those bumper stickers and say God is good.
All the time, I'm like, well, by the God is good? But I don't know about me all the time.
Part right, because some kids get leukemia and some kids get a poony.
Yeah, that's okay, you can laugh at it. My therapist totally does.
Kelly lives in Brooklyn in an apartment she affectionately calls Queer Study Hall. There's always a revolving door of friends coming through. She's a community school director, and she works part time as a nurse, and she's developing a new comedy tour fifty churches in fifty states. As for her faith, Kelly stopped going to church after her time in the Missionaries of Charity.
Actually, if you look at the world, it does seem like there is a God, but it seems like God hates us, Right, That's what it really looks like. You know, the Haiti earthquake and then a color epidemic, you know.
Like come on.
But after a while she discovered it was actually harder not to be involved in a spiritual practice than it was to do it. Why fight it? So she found a church in New York, a very open church. In fact, she says, the pastor once said that even atheists are welcome, And.
I was like, I think this is my church.
The church.
Really don't care what you believe in, but that almost in a sense doesn't matter. What matters is like the community and the connection and trying to find meaning. You know, the meaning is like for me, the meaning is the spirituality, like trying to find meaning in like whatever I experience, like try and convert whatever difficulty it is into something that can help other people. Did you talk about.
Your mom's death with her? Did you talk about death with her?
Oh? All the fucking time. That's like her favorite subject for the last five years.
Kelly's mom died at the end of April after a year an assisted living and then hospice. She had a form of blood cancer. Kelly flew to Florida to be with her. Her mom didn't ask her to come because, as Kelly says, she's not a complainer, but Kelly went anyway.
When we were kids, like I can remember her being like, don't put me on a machine, and we're like, Mom, we're just going through the McDonald's drive for right now, but okay, don't put on a machine. Got it? And she always said, I'm not afraid of dying. I'm afraid of I'm afraid of suffering, and I'm afraid of being alone. Every conversation for the last year, she said, they shoot horses, don't they. She really was like she's I think it made her really, you know, she had a very honest relationship,
I think with God. But she always said, like, I just keep asking why am I still here.
Kelly talked to the staff at Thesis said living facility, and they'd say things like I love your mom's laugh, and I just want to tell you this great thing your mom did for me. At one point, even the director of the facility was in tears talking about Kelly's mom. So Kelly had an answer to her mom's question.
I came back and I was like, Mom, like, I can't tell you why you were here, but I can tell you, like why God gave you this extra year that has been so difficult. But I can tell you that you made people's lives. People at a assisted living facility in Florida, in the middle of a pandemic, the epicenter, right, you made their lives easier in some of the like
the hardest times they will ever imagine. I was like, you changed, like you brought light in this like terrible difficult year, you know, And I was holding her hand when she died, so she got she got what she wanted, you know, so she wasn't and she wasn't suffering.
So do you think that your time with the missionaries of charity, all this sitting in silence with others, helped you be there for your mom?
I mean sure, you know, you spend years doing that, you develop that capacity, and you develop also that is not an uncomfortable thing, like we could be quiet, you know, even like one of the hospice doctors was like, yeah, usually when you come into a room, people are just like and there's an unconscious patient, people are just chattering at them or talking around them, you know, even though
we know that hearing is the last to go. And I was like, well, I don't there's not some secret I need to tell my mom now, Like we've known she was going to die for a long time and and she uh, like we've said what we needed to say, Like what else am I going to say now?
You know?
But I think like the comfort with silence is I guess the two things are like, you know, being a nun and also stand up comedy, because definitely stand up comedy, you know, you have to when you have to wait for the laugh. That silence feels like a really long time, but if you can hold the silence, you'll get a
bigger laugh. So I haven't thought about that, And so now people ask me where I am theologically, And I don't really worry so much about the afterlife, except for maybe that it just sounds exhausting like another life after this one. I only want that if I can sit on a couch and watch HBO documentaries. Otherwise I'm out. But uh, you know, there was an attraction of like, you know, baby butcher nuns and priests and drag and
groovy smelling incense. But also there was like the wonder of like thinking you knew all the answers then that if everyone thought like you, the world would just be fine. There was a lot of power in that. And sometimes even now, I'll uh, I'll hear like hymn being sung and Catholic church as I walk by, and I'll get kind of nostalgic, and I was like, oh, well, and then remember, you know, I was married to that guy and he was a little bit of a jerk. I'm Kelly Dunham, thank you.
This episode was written and produced by Emily Foreman. Our editor is Rob Rosenthal Andrea Asoahe is our digital producer. Special thanks to Amy Gaines, Sarah Olander, Bethan Macaluso, Travis Dunlap, and consulting producer Mary Johnson. Her memoir and Unquenchable Thirst provided inspiration for this series. Our executive producers are Jessica Alpert and John Parati at Rococo Punch and Katrina Norvel at iHeartRadio. For photos and more details on this series,
follow us on Instagram at Rococo Punch. You can reach out via email to the Turning at Rococoa Punch dot com I America Lance. Thanks for listening