How Hannah Gadsby’s Nanette Helped Me Embrace My Sensitivity — And My Rage

"Gadsby reminds us to resist, to keep pushing, but to also hold dear our hearts, our humanity, and our connection to each other."
Hannah Gadsby stands at a microphone wearing a navy suit.
BEN KING

When I was 14 and living in Sydney, Australia, I came out to my friend Alice as bisexual. I couldn’t be myself at home — it was less about my sexuality not being accepted and more that I existed to sedate my mother’s mental illnesses, but that’s another story. So at school, I came alive. I wrote poems about my teachers, about all the girls I dreamt of, doodling them in my notebooks and showing friends in amusement. I used my sexuality to paint myself as a freak, diffusing all tension that arose around who or what I desired.

Hannah Gadsby is an Australian lesbian comedian who has come to the attention of an international audience with her special, Nanette, on Netflix. As I watched it, I was reminded of my youth, especially the way Gadsby speaks about dissolving tension through comedy — which, she says, has its downfalls. “Comedy,” Gadsby says, “has suspended me in a perpetual state of adolescence.” Jokes, she explains, only have two parts, whereas real life has three — a beginning, a middle, and an end. This is a good thing for many of us, because it allows us to grow. The idea is that you evolve. “You learn from the part you focus on,” she says with resolution. This is why, I surmised, it’s important to focus on the healing aspect of things. It’s important to ask yourself why you feel certain things about who and what you are, or what you believe. But you have to continue to challenge yourself to eventually get there. This is why, Gadsby ends up admitting, she must quit comedy, because it’s suspending her in the perpetual motions of her traumas.

One of the major sources of her comedy is self-deprecation, believing that in order to be a comic, she had to belittle herself. “Do you understand what self-deprecation means when it comes from someone who already exists in the margins?” she asks. “It’s not humility. It’s humiliation.” I related so heavily, understanding that a lot of my life I had kept myself down, ensuring that I didn’t take up too much space. When I did take up space, I was awkward and self-humiliating, because then I wouldn’t have to really deal with all the baggage that I knew I had. Most of the time I felt deeply embarrassed by myself. Really, I just hated myself. A lot.

Gadsby takes us into her deepest feelings, speaking about how by the time she was able to accept that she was gay, she began to realize that she herself was homophobic, and by that time she was too far gone — she had become lost in her own self-hatred. Instead of confronting it, she buried herself in her traumas because it was easier, using comedy as a way to sift around it, which she declares, was deeply dangerous. She draws us into a story of a man thinking she was some bloke hitting on his girlfriend, and the profanities and the danger that ensued. When he realized she’s a woman he told her, “Oh I don’t hit women,” and walked away with his girlfriend, evidently his property, in tow. That’s where the comedy bit ends, but the story kept going. “I froze a moment in its trauma point.” For the first time ever, Gadsby explains what actually happens afterwards, and the denouement is devastating.

 

At 19, still denying myself my own desires, I told one of my best friends in response to her coming out to me, “I’ve had sex with women… It’s fine, you move on.” I thought this was true. I thought that I could move on, that my sexuality wasn’t necessarily a phase, but a lifestyle I didn’t need to live. I was still trying to be the Muslim girl I thought I needed to be. I told her this, despite the fact that I had been exclusively sleeping with women for months at that point, after a terrible abortion left me permanently distrusting of men.

Back then, I despised myself for all the things I wasn’t: white, straight, Christian — and I wanted to perpetuate that cycle of hatred. As in, I thought it was ok to tell my best friend who was coming out to me, at a vulnerable time in her life, that she should suppress herself for society’s sake. Because, that’s all I had ever known. It took me a few years to understand that I could be many things, that I could be Muslim and queer. But I had to unlearn so much to get there. I had to begin to really like myself, and all my qualities I’d been told to hate.

This feeling of suppression is also a vital aspect of Nanette. In a bit that rendered me speechless, Gadsby asks the audience, “Why is insensitivity to strive for? Why is sensitivity a particularly bad thing?” I have had to suppress my sensitivity, because I’ve been called too sensitive too many times to count: by friends, lovers, my mother, and all of my family. When I was being bullied and abused by my mother, and I would begin to cry, she would tell me that I was “disgustingly sensitive.” I began to fear my emotions, fear what might come out of me. It’s why to this day, I can’t cry in front of my family. I’ll usually burst into tears the minute they walk away, but being vulnerable has often come at a cost, which is why I tend to avoid it, preferring private moments of sadness, or even grand frustrating moments when I blurt it all out online. This is why I’ve always been good at hiding my pain when it’s actually happening. The fact that sensitivity is seen as such a shameful trait — as a character flaw — has always baffled me. With unmatched eloquence, Gadsby describes the gaslighting that occurs when people victim-blame others for being “oversensitive,” as opposed to analyzing or taking responsibility for their own hurtful actions and insensitivity.

But most of all, what Gadsby’s special teaches us, what it taught me, through unpacking her pain and fully embracing her sensitivity, is that using myself as the butt of a joke to diffuse tension is no longer necessary. She’s thrilling like a superhero, the way she’s able to master such comedy into tragedy, in a way that speaks directly to our time, locking into the zeitgeist in a terrific, and terrifying way. “Just locker room talk,” she quips as she emphasizes the problems of the patriarchy, particularly the role of straight white men. She’s so handsome, the way her bravado kicks in, “No need to be so sensitive,” she growls, immediately laughing afterwards, acutely see-sawing, describing the performativity and arrogance with which the way cisgender men speak to non-men, belittling our experiences, using our exceptional qualities against us.

Gadsby inspires me to embrace it all, my sensitivity, my rage. She allows me to confront my own homophobia, towards myself particularly, and how it’s ongoing act of survival and learning. It’s a process, and none of us are born woke from the womb. It’s an act of incredible resilience to like what you’ve always been told was wrong about you.

The last time I watched Nanette (I’ve seen it three times) was with one of my closest friends, sitting side-by-side on my leather couch. He hadn’t seen it yet, but his gay heart soon caught up. By the end of the special, we were both spent, lapsed into tears. I turned to him: “How did you like it?” He paused, his skin soaked with tears, “Man… that homophobia bit.” We both sat there, the black screen paused before us. “The homophobia bit ruined me…” And how do we move forward? Gadsby reminds us to resist, to keep pushing, but to also hold dear our hearts, our humanity, and our connection to each other.