EDITOR’S NOTE: Some of the content in this article and its accompanying videos may be offensive to some readers.

In 1989, I was in desperate need of food and a place to live. When you’re an actor and there’s no acting jobs that don’t require you to take tickets, sweep the stage or buy cocaine for the producer, you have to find other ways to make a living. Since I don’t know how to do anything else, and since my teaching days were few and far between, I had to figure something out—and quick.

A friend of mine suggested I sing.

The only public singing I’d ever done was when I was ten-years-old and my mother would drag me out in front of her half-drunk suburban pals at various dinner parties, and ask me to play my guitar and sing “Fire and Rain.”

However, I was starving and about to lose my apartment, so I tossed caution to the wind, called up a pal who played the piano and worked up about ten songs I knew by heart.

My cabaret career officially began.

As the years went by and my repertoire went from ten songs to thirteen songs, I played more and more venues: piano bars, hotel lobbies, weddings, funerals, and an occasional bowling alley. You haven’t lived until you’ve sung “My Way” to a crowd of overweight drug dealers in silly shoes.

Along with getting my song list to include music from this century, I also learned very quickly that no one on the planet can actually sing for a full four hours without an oxygen mask. So I had to learn very quickly to fill. I improvised. I talked.

And I talked and talked and talked and then talked some more.

I learned how to include the audience, I learned how to speak about my own life, and most importantly, I learned how to handle myself with hecklers. And the most important lesson for me, was never, under any circumstance, never—even if your piano player’s on fire—don’t EVER, EVER ask an audience: “What would you like to hear next?” Someone will inevitably ask for “Free Bird.”

Last week, Daniel Tosh, (whose show is the lowest of the low kind of low-brow, College Frat-Boy humor ever created), made an unfortunate joke about rape. Tosh opened up his set to the audience asking what they’d like to talk about and some idiot screamed out: “Rape!”, to which a woman in the audience screamed back: “Rape is never funny!” And without thinking, Daniel retorted: “Wouldn’t it be funny if that girl got raped by like, five guys right now?”

And then…everything happened.

People have been blogging about it, complaining about it, standing behind it, and some have asked for Tosh to lose his job.

In the past twenty years of being on stage, I’ve had all kinds of bizarre things happen to me. While I was singing “At Seventeen,” a woman stood next to her husband and began taking her top off. A guy once yelled from the back of a club if I knew anything in sign language. And at a gig in the Chicago Hilton, two men snatched my microphone from me, and sang their own version of “Leaving on that Tranny Train to Georgia.”

Without meaning to portray myself as some sort of comedic saint, I found all of these very, very funny. Now, there certainly have been times when people have done things that have hurt my feelings, made me very angry, or caused me to want to walk off stage in a sequined-huff. But you don’t do that. When you’re in live performance, this is your job. This is the gig. This is how you make your money and when you work in a doctor’s office and you don’t like the nasty ol’ patient at your window, you don’t get to go to lunch.

Until lunch time.

Through trial and error (mostly error), I found my voice on stage, and instead of trying to handle people, or calm them down, or baby sit, I began to speak my truth and tell jokes about things my friends and I thought were funny. I also closed every show talking about my HIV status. I spoke about what it meant to me, how it was shaping me, and what I was trying to feel grateful for. During one of those shows at a club called The Gentry, located on the north side of Chicago, a man after the gig came up to to me as I was counting out my tips from the gigantic glass bowl my accompanist, I kept on the piano and said very seriously:

“I come to this place because I want to have a good time, not to hear about people with AIDS.”

I was stunned, to say the least, but after a breath, I took him by the hand, and reassured him that what I was saying wasn’t going to make anything happen to him.

“This is my act. If it bothers you, you shouldn’t come back. And if you were bothered in the middle of it, you should have left. But I’m not going to allow you to silence me simply because you find what I have to say offensive. You want your own nightclub act so you can say what you want to say? Do what I did: study for years, work your ass off, and then blow the owner.”

He never even cracked a smile. Some people.

Tosh shouldn’t have opened himself up to the audience in a way that gave them that much control; that was his mistake. The guy who yelled “Rape” in the first place shouldn’t drink at comedy shows any more–and apparently has zero friends. And the woman who tried to take control of the show by letting everyone in on how she feels about rape should have picked up her stuff and left. Daniel Tosh is an ironic, shock-comic. If you don’t want to be shocked ironically, go see Debbie Reynolds.

Speech isn’t the problem most of the time. The intention behind the speech is what ignites our feelings. I knew innately that Michael Richard’s racial rant was the truth, just as I knew Tracey Morgan’s use of the word “faggot” was simply a stupid choice of words.

There are no set rules here.

We live in politically correct times–and what to do and when to do it and who not to do it to can get very muddy. Eventually, someone, somewhere is going to get offended by something someone says. And it doesn’t necessarily have to happen on stage. Think about the last time you accidentally insulted someone and how confused you were when they ignored you the next day. It’s not about the words. It’s never about the words. Art is about reflection. What the audience sees in whatever they’re experiencing is totally up to them. One person’s can of soup, is another person’s masterpiece.

The woman in the audience at Tosh’s show had a visceral response to what seemed to be a deep and divisive subject and she felt the need to be heard. Daniel Tosh tried his best to turn a potentially horrifying situation into a punch line. And the guy who brought the subject up to begin with is getting off scot-free. I think siding with anyone in this situation is pointless: everyone’s to blame and no one is.

The day we decide to limit our speech is the day we decide to limit ourselves.

However, just know that if you decide to come to one of my gigs and you decide to use the word “Tranny,” you’re in for a Bette Davis monologue. I may pummel you into the ground with a dead fish, but I wouldn’t want to live in a country where we couldn’t at least have the freedom to figure out where we both stand. I at least want that choice.