Photo: Michael Rowe
Joel Kim Booster Takes to the Pilgrim House
by Steve Desroches
Joel Kim Booster is back home in Los Angeles after a quick jaunt to Dublin, Ireland, to film a guest spot on a modern reboot of the classic game show Name That Tune. It’s evidence of the global nature of entertainment now where an iconic American show is now shot in Ireland in cooperation with American and Australian production companies. It also reveals that Booster’s career has taken off like a rocket since the 2022 release of Fire Island, the critically-acclaimed and groundbreaking film he wrote and starred in, featuring a majority Asian American cast telling the story of gay men on a trip to the iconic New York LGBT hot spot. A stand-up comic for 15 years now, always out as a gay man, Booster has become a ubiquitous presence on television and in film, but is now back to touring the country with a new comedy show Chose This Way, which he’s taking to the Pilgrim House this weekend.
“It’s both freeing and scary to me as I usually don’t perform in a gay-majority audience,” says Booster about performing in Provincetown. “I cut my teeth on the comedy club circuit where I’d often be the only gay comedian and the audiences are almost always all straight. They couldn’t’ve cared if I lived or died. I had to do a lot of setting up a joke if it was about being gay so that they would get it. It required a lot of explaining. For a gay-majority audience, for a Provincetown audience, you don’t have to do that.”
Booster has visited Provincetown before both on vacation and as the recipient of the Next Wave Award at the 2024 Provincetown International Film Festival, the June event that also featured Fire Island in 2022. It does beg the question, as Provincetown was where his film about the other gay enclave in the Northeast got a big boost before going national, how the two locales stack up to one another. “That is the perennial question isn’t it,” says Booster. “I find it silly to compare them as they are fundamentally very different places. It’s a fool’s errand. I’m not saying one is better than the other, but they are just very different.”
Despite their vast differences, Booster does see contemporary issues that manifest in both. And while a comic at heart, he has a soul committed to equality, of all kinds. That’s perhaps what was the tipping point for him from the success of Fire Island, in that he didn’t just explore sexuality and race, but also class. It is rare to the point of almost non-existence to see a story on screen that examines an intra-LGBTQ class conflict, though in real life it plays out in real time in significant ways, especially in Provincetown.
The script for Fire Island was based on Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, as the romantic relationship at the center of the film is complicated by classism. Often, gay men are depicted as rich and white, and that imagery is frequently pumped out by LGBTQ publications and organizations. Born on Jeju Island, South Korea, and adopted by a white evangelical Christian family in Illinois, Booster comes from a working-class background, a distinction he says often made him feel more “other” than his sexuality or his race, including within the LGBTQ community.
“You often see gay men depicted as DINKS: double income, no kids,” says Booster. “Class just isn’t something talked about or represented in stories about gay people. It definitely feels real to me. When I’d go to Fire Island we’d cram into a house, 16 people into a four-bedroom. Places like Fire Island and Provincetown promise a lot, and they can deliver, but the cost is increasingly impenetrable for most LGBT people. So often you just see gay people as wealthy. What we’re seeing now with the rise in gay Republicans and gay conservatives is because of class. People have class solidarity before they have any other type of solidarity.”
As a comedian on tour, Booster has a vantage point to the national mood, one which he describes as “pretty rotted.” Most everyone is struggling, says Booster, something he hears after shows. He points to “Blue Dot Fever” as evidence, as major tours planned for this summer have been canceled due to extremely low tickets sales. The phenomenon is so-named for the blue dots that signify unsold seats on Ticketmaster’s website. That has proven to be a bit of a boon for more affordable shows like Booster’s as, he says, folks are desperate to laugh in these desperate times. And he’s noticing that audiences, at least his, are becoming more discerning and sophisticated with the humor they find funny. In the MAGA era there’s been a resurgence of baseline jokes about race and LGBTQ people. It’s all a bit of a yawn to Booster who sees it as lazy and a sign of a lack of talent.
“So many of these jokes we’ve been hearing since the playground,” says Booster. “If you’re going to tell a racist joke at least tell a new one. At least make it funny.”
Joel Kim Booster is at the Pilgrim House, 336 Commercial St., Friday, June 26 and Saturday, June 27 with shows at 6 and 7:30 p.m. each day. Tickets ($40/$50/$75) are available at the box office and online at pilgrimhouseptown.com. For more information call 508.487.6424.
