Comedian Rhys Nicholson Recalls Logies “Arc Up” At TV Executive For Excluding Queers

Award-winning queer comedian Rhys Nicholson has opened up about the failure of the mainstream Australian entertainment industry to include real LGBTQ+ stories. Speaking on the Hot Hits podcast, the entertainer and Drag Race Down Under judge shared an infuriating encounter they had had with a close-minded TV executive.

“I won’t name names,” Nicholson began, “but a few years ago I was at an after party at the Logies and a head of a channel drunkenly told Joel and I that there’s no room yet in Australia for two queer people to host a major TV show.”

“It’s probably why I don’t get invited to the Logies very often, because I kinda arced up at that party and shouted at that person.”

Rhys Nicholson On The Changing Australian Media Industry

Nicholson, who used to begin their stand-up shows with a joke about being queer just to break the heteronormative ice, went on to reflect on how much has changed in terms of LGBTQ+ representation. 

“I think things are getting so much better,” Nicholson said. “I would love a major network to make a gay drama comedy — like, love story — that is not just ‘oh look at this flawed person’. Like, you know, we’re out of the woods of Law and Order SVU victim or villain territory. They were our only jobs for a while. But I would love a love story that isn’t fetishised.”

Nicholson added that even their comedy, a domain defined by spectacle, has largely been an attempt to normalise queerness, rather than reduce it to an entertaining punchline.

“My whole thing in my comedy career is I’ve tried to talk about my marriage and my relationship and the way that I live in a not  ‘aren’t kooky?’ you know, ‘come and look at us like we’re a zoo’ [way],” Nicholson said.

Reflecting on their participation in more mainstream shows, most recently Season 3 of The Traitors Australia, Nicholson acknowledged that such opportunities didn’t exist for openly queer people even ten years ago. 

The interview comes after gay Australian TV show Invisible Boys, adapted from Western Australian author Holden Sheppard’s novel, quickly became a top-ranking show on Stan and gained international acclaim at a number of festivals.