I first met Cameron Esposito in what feels like another life: a brief chat backstage while I was working as a server at a Vancouver comedy club during a Just For Laughs comedy festival. She was announced as a surprise guest for the late-night show and my baby queer self was giddy with excitement. My manager assigned me the green room section so I could bring Esposito water and snap a selfie, the height of a thrill for me at the time.

A lot has changed since then—including the pandemic-driven shuttering of comedy clubs that sidelined so many comics—but Esposito remains a titan of queer stand-up in 2022, attracting the fandom and laughs of queers like me. And now she’s ready to get back at it.

Her appearance at the Just For Laughs Vancouver comedy festival on May 28 will be her first full hour-long performance since before the pandemic.

It’s a grand return to the big stage for one of the comedy’s most seasoned queer veterans. In addition to over 15 years on the stand-up stage, Esposito has starred in TV series and movies like Take My Wife and Dark Divide, and hosts the popular queer interview podcast Queery. While her time in the past few years has been spent on TV and book projects—including a recurring role on the ABC drama A Million Little Things—a return to stand-up has Esposito re-entering a familiar sphere.

I reached her over Zoom ahead of her JFL show to talk about the new wave of queer comedians, gender fluidity and her dream podcast guests.

How has your stand-up changed over the past few years, and what can fans expect from these first performances back?

I don’t even know. [Over the past two years] I was doing a lot of performing on Zoom. There was a lot of divorce material and pandemic material that was happening kind of in a vacuum. I mean, audiences were there sometimes—there was a chat function—but audiences were not physically there. Then, during this time, I’ve also been working on a lot of other stuff. I’ve been on location in Atlanta and Vancouver, and a paperback version of my book came out. I’ve been working on my podcast, I’ve been developing some other projects and I’m in the early stages of directing my first feature.

This is all just to say that stand-up is not functioning the way that I’ve done it for 15 years prior. I worked five years in improv before that, so that’s like 20 years of being in live performance. That has all been really different in the last couple of years, and I have no idea what it’s going to feel like to come back to it. I’ve been doing spots around town, but [the JFL Vancouver] show will be one of, like, three or four full-hours that I’m doing this summer. I have a lot to say. I also don’t know. I don’t know where my stand-up is at because we’re all different.

How do you think stand-up more broadly has changed in the last couple years?

I know people have continued to work, but there are some comics who emerged on TikTok or Instagram videos in the last couple of years, and that’s never happened before. Even though YouTube started in 2006, and there are people who emerged from those spaces, for a long time really it was viewed as separate from the stand-up community at large. There were internet comics or YouTubers, and then there were people who are “real comics”—that’s in quotes—who started in physical rooms.

Absent the opportunity to do that, I think everything has just sort of merged into one group of people who are trying to get eyeballs. Folks are coming in from a zillion different places. I think about Ziwe Fumudoh, who has an amazing Showtime show, or Meg Stalter or Caleb Herron, and those folks rising to the top on their own platforms, and then being embraced and incorporated into the larger industry. This is really the first generation of that.

Folks can start anywhere. So I’m curious how that will impact stand-up long-term, given that up until now, the idea of being in a room and cutting your teeth and waiting for your five minutes and working your way up slowly has been the way to break into the industry. If that’s broken, what does that mean about who gets to speak? Is it more democratized and fair and based on talent? How will that affect things long-term?

I was recently rewatching an appearance of yours from 2013 where Jay Leno talks about you being “the future of stand-up.” How does it feel to now be a veteran and a mentor figure to this new wave of queer comics?

It’s complicated. I was one of the first people to have a seat at the table, in that I was out when I started and have talked about queerness the entire time and had some mainstream success. I really am part of the first generation of people who were able to do that. Where I’m at right now is trying to let go of the pain and trauma of being out in front. It was hard, it was super hard. And I’m so happy to have younger folks who seem to be having a different experience. And I’m attempting to catch up with them in terms of just comfort with myself.

There are so many awesome folks who are working, who are not just, like, one generation younger than, but multiple generations younger than me. Because if Joel Kim Booster is one generation down, there are people who are now like two or three generations down [from me]. And they just seem to be having this experience of freedom and self-acceptance. And now I’m just in the process of doing the growth and healing outside of stand-up so that I can just hang with the queer comics who exist now, because it seems like they’re having a different experience of this job.

You can almost see these striations of the generations of queer comics over the past few decades, ranging from Ellen Degeneres to you to people like Joel Kim Booster and then the Gen Z kids coming up now.

That’s why I say the thing also about being able to be out and talk about queerness the whole time—Ellen still doesn’t do that. And, you know, it’s hard to catch up with the people who have benefited from change. But I would like to—I feel like I have a lot to learn about just being comfortable in my own skin from them. For the folks who were [on] the front lines, for strength we need to go to the folks who benefited from that, because they now have something to teach us.

That reminds me of something I’ve seen a lot on TikTok recently, where older queer people are talking about how younger generations have given them space to embrace different words or identities they may not have had access to or had the possibility of models for when they were younger.

In queer culture, there are micro-generations because it has to be the fastest-moving social justice movement in in American history. It has changed so much year by year. The year I graduated from college, was the year [2004] that Massachusetts legalized same-sex marriage, and that’s where I lived at the time. So the week I graduated from college, I went and watched the first couples get married legally in Massachusetts. If I were one year older or one year younger, that would not have been true, and I wouldn’t have felt like it was so wild that this was all happening at the same time.

We are one community and we’re trying to all relate to each other. We’ve all had such different experiences, and it can be year by year. And so I think there’s a lot to say about the learning and communication that we would benefit from up and down generations.

Last year you opened up on social media about using they/them pronouns in addition to she/her. Can you talk more about that?

This is something I’m talking about on stage a lot because people constantly ask me my pronouns, which I don’t know is the experience of every person on the planet. It is definitely my experience. For me, that’s a question I’ve been getting my entire life. So there’s a part of it where now, even if it’s meant with kindness from somebody outside the community, I still feel in my body like I’m a little kid who’s being asked “What are you?,” which was the number-one question I got asked as a kid.

Now we teach people that this is a respectful way to operate in a business meeting. But for me, especially when it’s external to the queer community, when it’s somebody who is a cis-het straight person who reads as a straight person, who probably puts their pronouns in their bio in solidarity, but not necessarily because they’re ever asked in the world. This has been a big journey for me, because I feel like in some situations, this inclusion has actually felt like a huge burden. What I finally decided to do is just become more honest about how I have no idea what the answer to that is.

What are my pronouns? For me, it feels situational. Sometimes I feel like a woman, or like a cartoon fox or like a young lad. It matters to me who you are in life, how you address me. Gender-fluid feels like it makes a lot of sense to me even more than non-binary because that feels like a resting place, where to me it feels so movable. It’s also personal. Especially because of my age and how long I’ve been out and how publicly queer I am and how much my haircut has been written about and how many men’s clothes I’ve worn on TV—I think I just felt like I was supposed to have like a very compact and concrete answer, but I have no idea.

I’ve been thinking about that a lot with all the conversation around Janelle Monáe in the last few weeks because everybody was like, “Wow, big declaration. Janelle Monáe comes out as non-binary!” And it’s like, Monáe has been talking about this stuff for years. Maybe she hasn’t concretely used that exact word to describe herself, but she’s always, you know, existed in this non-binary space of fluidity.

I love that. I also feel like I have been so publicly gender nonconforming for such a long time that in some ways, and this is just something I need to work through, but in some ways it also has made me feel a little misunderstood. To be asked, “Do you identify as a cis person?” I think it’s coming from a place of like, “Hey, help me frame what’s going on with you,” but it’s like, “Have you just met me?” Look at anything I’ve ever worn, anything I’ve ever said, any of my late-night sets. I just feel like I’ve been so publicly in this space for such a long time that, yeah, it’s just something I’m working through.

Who would be a dream guest you haven’t had yet on your interview podcast Queery?

I’d love to have Janelle or Tessa Thompson. For a long time everybody wanted Hayley Kiyoko; that was the biggest request that I would get. It all just feels like an eventuality.

What does queer joy look like to you?

I was in Vancouver for a long time because I was shooting a network TV show called A Million Little Things. There’s something really wild about being on a network TV show and being a physically queer person on network TV. There are things that I do where it’s like nerdy queers would know about them or sci-fi fans would know about them. But this show is a show that I get stopped in the airport for. The people who watch it are a broad swath of humans. People who are not aware of me as a comic, but are just folks who watch network TV.

It makes me so happy that I can have really personal interviews with somebody like you and talk about queerness and human struggles and all that. Looking at you on the Zoom, we would hang out in the same places. There’s no doubt in my mind that if I walked into a coffee shop and you were there I’d be like, “Oh, I found the right coffee shop in this town.” But it makes me so happy when we get beyond the coffee-shop queers. That makes me happy in a whole other way. I’d love to see you in a coffee shop and I’d also like to encounter a blonde, long-haired mom walking with her husband through the airport in Salt Lake City who stops me and says, “Oh my god, I love you on that show.” That, to me, is so fun. And I love that it’s my life right now.

Interview has been edited for length and clarity.