Meet the out crowd that’s really “in”—the gay and lesbian stand-up comics who’ve come out of the closet and stormed the mainstream with the hippest and wittiest comedy acts of the last three decades.

In A Funny Time to Be Gay, Ed Karvoski Jr. traces the evolution of gay and lesbian comedy from the few pioneers in New York's Greenwich Village in the seventies, to the mavericks who played San Francisco's famed Valencia Rose in the eighties, to the comics who starred in their own TV specials in the nineties and continue to headline comedy clubs. With short introductions that reveal the performers’ approaches to both their sexual and professional identities, over thirty hilarious monologues capture the diversity of the gay and lesbian comic community.