If It’s Tuesday, It Must Be Trans & Hilarious
Trans performer, activist and filmmaker Tuesday Thomas has lived a tumultuous life and survived to tell about it. QV talks to her about her doc The Trash Goes Out on Tuesday and how her sense of humor has saved her.
By Robert Nesti
What a story! Everything but the bloodhounds snappin’ at her rear end,” wisecracks Thelma Ritter’s Birdie after hearing Eve Harrington’s tale of woe in All About Eve. The line comes to mind while watching The Trash Goes Out on Tuesday, the riveting documentary about trans performer, activist and filmmaker Tuesday Thomas. Her biography can sound less like a life than a Douglas Sirk melodrama without the Technicolor gloss: seeking refuge in a church only to be abused by a priest, being gang-raped on her birthday, watching a boyfriend shot at close range on the street, nearly dying from hepatitis C and enduring a frightening medical crisis involving breast implants. When she told her mother she was trans, Thomas recalls, her mother told her she wished she had AIDS.
And yet The Trash Goes Out on Tuesday is very funny. That is not an incidental achievement. Thomas, who co-produced and co-directed the film with Los Angeles filmmaker Jesse Orrall, was adamant that her life not be packaged as what she calls “trauma porn.” Instead of the solemn talking-head grammar of the conventional survivor documentary, the movie scrambles archival footage, reenactments, stand-up, animation by Dakota Freeman and vintage B-movie imagery into something closer to Thomas’s own comic sensibility: bruised, unruly and defiantly alive.
Those visual detours do more than keep the film moving. Freeman’s animation gives memory a deliberately heightened comic unreality, while the old horror and exploitation-film clips, including imagery that appears to come from Carnival of Souls, turn melodrama back on itself. The lurid images become an ironic counterpoint to experiences that could easily have been presented as an uninterrupted catalogue of suffering. Trauma is acknowledged, but Thomas refuses to let it dictate either the movie’s tone or her identity. Humor is not an escape hatch from the story. It is one of the ways she survived it, and one of the ways she takes possession of it.
Thomas has been doing that publicly for years. A veteran of the Los Angeles comedy scene who studied at the Groundlings, UCB and Second City, she created the all-trans comedy showcase Trans Hilarious, telling the Los Angeles Times that an all-trans bill should demonstrate the variety of trans voices rather than reduce performers to a single subject. Her work has also included Freak Show, the stand-up special Tuesday’s Trash and community-minded comedy events. The same instinct runs through them: being trans is part of the material, not the boundary around it.
In conversation, Thomas is as interested in other people as she is in herself. She describes herself as a people watcher, drawn to the peculiar things human beings do, and that curiosity keeps her looking forward. There are solo shows, a mockumentary pilot and an autobiography disguised as fiction in the works. After a life that has repeatedly supplied the sort of plot twists screenwriters are told to cut for being implausible, Tuesday Thomas is still here, still creating and, most importantly, still finding the joke.
QulturVultur: How did the documentary come about?
Tuesday Thomas: It was the beginning of the pandemic. Everybody was freaking out. We were locked in. I took my cell phone, my iPhone, and just started recording stories.
I thought maybe I could edit it together and run it through the short-film festival circuit, if the world lived and we came out of the pandemic. Then, before I knew it, I had thirty-some hours of stuff.
I sent it to a friend and said, “I don’t even know if this is any good. Who’s going to care about this? Do you think there’s anything worthwhile here?”
He’s a filmmaker, and he said, “Absolutely. Let’s get working on this.”
QulturVultur: You tell an amazing story, but the film ultimately has an uplifting message about helping people. Have people approached you after seeing it and told you that your story helped them?
Tuesday Thomas: Yes. First of all, I didn’t want it to be trauma porn. I made sure there was a lot of humor in it because that’s how I got through everything. I didn’t want people to watch it and just be like, “Oh my God, I’m so depressed.”
But I also specifically didn’t want it to be a niche film. I didn’t want it to be just a trans film. I wanted it to be a film about a trans person and the experiences a trans person goes through, but one that can translate to other people.
If I can get through all this madness and craziness, maybe that can show other people something.
I’ve gotten messages on social media from people who watched it on streaming and wrote things like, “Oh my gosh, you just helped me feel better about my circumstances and helped me get through tough times.”
I think that’s beautiful. I think it’s wonderful.
QulturVultur: How did the name Tuesday come about?
Tuesday Thomas: I remember growing up with Tuesday Weld, the actress. She was one of my mom’s favorites. Then I saw something in Tuesday Weld, and it just hit me: That’s who I am.
QulturVultur: You’re remarkably honest in the film, particularly about your relationship with your family. How did you reach the point where you could talk about that so openly?
Tuesday Thomas: I think the whole point was to be an open book about it.
That phone call did happen. But the reality of the situation was that I didn’t let her finish. I didn’t see where this was going, and I ended it. I didn’t talk to them for quite a while, and that could have been avoided.
What I learned from that was that I could tell people, “This is what’s happening to me. This is who I am. You have to accept it.”
But I’ve come to realize that I have to let other people process it and accept it. I have to hear their side of it.
We forget that we don’t live in vacuums and that there are people close to us who are going to be affected by our decisions. We have to hear them out.
With a parent, a lot of times in this situation, they have to mourn the child they knew before they realize they have a new child who is the same person. It’s just a much happier version of the same person.
Everybody has to go through steps to get wherever they’re going to be. You’ve got to learn from everything and move and grow.
QulturVultur: Has performing always been part of your life? Early in the film, you talk about imitating Cher and getting nickels and dimes from people. Did it begin there?
Tuesday Thomas: I think it was always innate in me. I always wanted to make people smile and laugh.
I had an aunt who everybody always said I was a lot like. She was my biological father’s sister, and she was always cracking jokes and laughing. I think the first joke I ever heard was from her.
They were big card players on that side of the family, and they’d sit around a big table playing cards. She told me this joke and told me to tell it to everyone: “How did Captain Hook die?”
The punchline was, “He wiped with the wrong hand.”
My aunt was so full of life. I think that’s where it stems from. I always got so much joy from making people laugh.
QulturVultur: What are you doing now? Are you still performing stand-up?
Tuesday Thomas: I am. I’ve written some solo shows that I perform that are just unhinged and crazy.
I’m also working on a pilot. It’s sort of an updated version of the people in Andy Warhol’s Factory crossed with Reno 911! It’s a mockumentary, fake-reality show with a lot of improv humor.
QulturVultur: What do you make of the politics surrounding trans people right now?
Tuesday Thomas: It’s insane. I come from a time when we did not exist, or people didn’t want us to exist.
There weren’t many of us visible, but we were out there. We’ve always been out there. In the 1920s, Magnus Hirschfeld established the Institute for Sexual Science, which documented queer and trans lives. When the Nazis took over, they destroyed it. There were documents about us, and they were burned.
That’s what I feel is happening right now. They need a scapegoat, and it’s trans women in sports.
QulturVultur: Are you surprised by how little many Americans seem to understand about trans people?
Tuesday Thomas: I’m not surprised by how ignorant Americans are. Period.
I’ve traveled. I’ve been in other countries. I also lived through the AIDS epidemic and Ronald Reagan.
It astounds me that there are so many women who have been in bathrooms with trans women before and never had a problem, and now they’re screaming about some big bearded man in a dress going into the bathroom.
If that were really happening all the time, don’t you think somebody would have taken a picture and posted it?
To me, it’s all serving a purpose. There’s a religious component to it. If trans people are allowed to exist and are simply left alone, it challenges the idea that we need this rigid patriarchy. Gender can be fluid. Men don’t have to conform to one idea of what men are supposed to be. That threatens what some people are trying to protect.
QulturVultur: What do you find funny today?
Tuesday Thomas: It’s all relative. I’m a people watcher. I do a lot of characters. I went to the Groundlings and other schools out here.
I find people innately funny, watching them do the things they do and wondering why they do the things they do.
And it’s not in a mocking way. It’s more in a “this is wonderful” way.
QulturVultur: Who do you admire right now?
Tuesday Thomas: That’s a hard one because people are flawed. I think there are people out there doing good work.
I’m kind of an optimist where the glass is half full. But I’m also a realist because I understand the glass is going to need to be refilled at some point. It’s not going to stay full.
QulturVultur: Where did you get the courage, and the personal understanding, to tell your story this honestly?
Tuesday Thomas: My mother gave me all the strength and realness that I have.
She had a horrible childhood. She had an alcoholic, abusive mother. This was back in the early 1950s in a small town in upstate New York. Her mother beat her and did all kinds of horrible things.
When my father left, my mother kept us together.
There’s something about her tenacity and her strength of character that everybody says I got from her. I’m grateful for that because she got through a lot of stuff, and it showed me that you just have to keep going.
QulturVultur: Have you thought about writing a book?
Tuesday Thomas: I’m in the process of it now. It’s more of an autobiography under the guise of fiction.
QulturVultur: Are you touring the country at all these days?
Tuesday Thomas: I did for a while, and then COVID hit and put that on hold. Then I had health problems and different things like that.
When I go back to New York City, I always do a show there. I’m not averse to doing it again, but I did it for quite a few years. As I’ve gotten older, it’s really a lot of work.
WATCH TUESDAY THOMAS
The Trash Goes Out on Tuesday
Thomas’s autobiographical documentary mixes stand-up, archival footage, animation and B-movie imagery as she recounts a life marked by trauma, transition, survival and a formidable sense of humor.
Tuesday Thomas: Tuesday’s Trash
Thomas takes the spotlight for a 48-minute stand-up special in which the lifelong outsider turns her experiences into unapologetically dark comedy.
Catastrophe Anthem
A short film written and performed by Thomas, available through her collection of official project links.
Find it via Tuesday Thomas’s official links
Peridot
Thomas appears as Eve in this 2022 queer indie drama.
More Tuesday Thomas
Films, performances, social media and other projects can be found through Thomas’s official page.
Explore Tuesday Thomas’s official links
About Tuesday Thomas
Tuesday Thomas is a comedian, actress, writer and filmmaker whose work includes Freak Show, Trans Hilarious, the stand-up special Tuesday’s Trash and the autobiographical documentary The Trash Goes Out on Tuesday, co-directed with Jesse Orrall and featuring animation by Dakota Freeman. She has studied at the Groundlings, UCB and Second City and has performed at venues including the Comedy Store, Laugh Factory and Punch Line.