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Award-winning burlesque performer GiGi Holliday sits down with podcast hosts Puss and Kooch to talk about owning your own sensuality, the importance of recognizing the DC art scene, and how much she loves Beyonce.
GiGi Holliday on Heavy Flo with Puss and Kooch
GiGi Holliday is an international burlesque performer. Really, she’s a performer in every sense of the word. She’s also a teacher of dance and fitness. In DC, she runs a party brunch known as La Boum Brunch, which is one of Bravo’s Top 5 Raging Brunches in the United States.
The following interview has been edited for length and clarity. To hear everything GiGi has to say, listen to her podcast episode.
A brief rundown on the art of burlesque
I do a very niche art form that has roots in various places. Stripping is definitely a part of it, as well as vaudeville comedy. Hence, why I’m also very funny. But I do the art of tease. It’s a form of striptease that can be very sensual, very funny, very fast-paced, whatever you want.
This art form has been around since the 1800s. Two major names you might know are Josephine Baker and Dita Von Teese. My parents tell their friends, “She’s like a modern day Josephine Baker,” and they go, “Oh, we get it!” And if say Dita Von Teese to other friends, they say, “The woman who was married to Marilyn Manson?” She was a burlesque performer who made burlesque a household name for us.
The difference between burlesque and the work done in a strip club
I’ve been a commercial stripper, as in I’ve worked in a strip club. I find that what I do is sex work and sex work adjacent. So I like to consider a lot of my burlesque “sex-y” work because sex work is a whole different thing. Hustling for tips in a strip bar is different from hustling for tips in a burlesque place.
The difference between a burlesque performer and a stripper is that a stripper can pay their rent on time. That’s a joke, but it’s also for real. I’ve seen burlesque performers go broke and go into debt, myself included.
But I’ve also been one of those strippers who were just like, “Well, I just made a bunch of bands tonight, so I’m gonna go to Red Lobster.” I’m gonna go to the fanciest place and eat and keep it moving because I can afford to do things.
I love both sides of the stone. But for burlesque performers, it’s a different hustle. We’re trying to be the sparkliest, we’re trying to win a different set of awards. We have a whole award system. Strippers also have an awards system. But burlesque performers have to hustle to headline.
Burlesque performers definitely have more of a character, more of an act. Some people can take two weeks to work on an act. I have worked on an act that took two, three years. The costume was expensive. The music was a lot, as were the concept and the dance moves. I was in someone’s dance studio almost every day trying to figure out the music and routine.
I love that routine, love it to death. But it’s also one of those things where I say, ” You’ve gotta pay me a whole lot of money to get me to do this routine again.” I spent a lot of money and a lot of time on this routine. But yeah, that’s the difference.
Learning to own sensuality through burlesque
The burlesque that I do is considered classic, which is what you might know from Gypsy Rose Lee. Evening gowns, very sensual, big band music, that’s my style because—it’s a sad thing—no one ever told me I was sexy or beautiful growing up.
Once I discovered that I myself can be sexy and beautiful and can control my sensuality, burlesque really set the tone for me. And that’s why I decided to do the most overly sexy acts ever. Because you have no choice but to watch this body. It’s the art of tease and the art of sensuality.
I love that people think healing is so cute. Healing is not cute. Healing is terrible. Healing is looking crazy on the side of the road. Healing is pain. So burlesque ended up being a way for me to heal and talk to therapists and ask myself, “Why do I want to do this hyper-sexualized art form? I’m a classically trained dancer. I can just go and be in a dance troupe.”
It took a while, and it took a lot for my parents to get on board. Growing up, my parents focused more on my intellect, which is great. I’m glad they were like, “You’re such a smart kid,” and didn’t really focus on looks.
But when I got into my teenage years, my mom was like, “Why are you not like the other girls who are super girly? I don’t get it.” Even now, I can come home and my mom will be like, “Where are your earrings? Where’s your makeup?” My mom is always made up. She’s retired and at home and puts on lipstick and makeup every day and does her hair.
In my early days, I was always very much like Lady Gaga. I needed the applause. I needed those people to tell me that I was beautiful. It got to be kind of a problem in my first years of performing. I was just like, “Damn, I need someone to always tell me I’m beautiful? Oh, this is a problem.” Again, therapy, what you got for me, sis?
Then we broke it down. I finally got over the hump of, “Alrighty. Burlesque is burlesque. This is a mask you put on. But let’s think about your real self.” GiGi and my muggle self are still one and the same.
I was at a burlesque conference called BurlyCon in Seattle, Washington and took a class by the internationally-known, well-known—we have our own celebrities—Po’Chop. She is a black, queer performer. She’s been in music videos. She’s won grants for her art. She said, “Let me tell you about this black female queer philosopher called Audre Lorde.”
And I was just like, “Who’s Audre Lorde? I went to a predominantly white college, so my philosophy class was a little bit different. Say what?” And one of the things Audre Lorde said in the book we were discussing in the workshop was, “Eroticism should not be second-hand.”
And the moment she said that, I said to myself, “It should come from within you. Okay, got it.” After that, all of my eroticism would be like, “It’s me, it’s me. I’m sexy.”
I have to always think of that Tweet song when she went, “Oops!” She masturbated—that’s clearly what that song is about. She looked at herself in the mirror, was like, “Bitch, I look fly today!” and masturbated.
This reminds me of where we started with this podcast. We’d started thinking of comedy as mainly stand-up and sketch, but we’re realizing comedy reaches so much. I feel like I see a lot of comedy shows that feel so uninspired. It feels like they’re copying someone else. It’s such a freedom to actually discover it from yourself, for yourself. But it takes a lot. It’s a lot of healing to get there.
It’s a lot! And I’m still healing. Hence, why I’m listening to Beyonce all over again. I listened to a podcast called Dissect. They’re dissecting Lemonade verse by verse, line by line, visual by visual. Someone on the podcast said, “The recipe for decolonizing relationships is in Beyonce’s Lemonade.” I literally walked away, literally threw my stuff down. I’m on that next level and layer of me realizing that sensuality is mine and mine alone.
It’s an aha moment, but it’s also like, “Oh. Oh. Ooooh.” I feel like the meme of Cardi B where she was like, “What’s that? What the fuck is that?” That’s how it was.
There is a thing that happens if people get turned on by their own dancing. You can get turned on by your own dancing. And that’s what it literally took. It took me getting turned on by my own dancing, my own feeling of the music, what I think is sexy.
Sometimes it’s also going down a deep hole in PornHub to go, “I don’t like that. I like that. I don’t like that. I definitely don’t like that. Oh, I really like that. Let me take notes.” It’s also realizing what you like to touch, examining your intimate relationships with people.
But now that I’m on this other level of discovering my eroticism, I opened up on OnlyFans because I want to see how far my eroticism can go. Because it’s just me in this apartment. There’s no one else. I have to use my own self to get that. I can’t text somebody and say, “Send me a dick pic.”
And that’s what it is. It’s a lot of self-love. At a dance festival, I was recently called the Shaman of Sensuality. And it was because of Audre Lorde and me thinking about my own sexuality, my own sensuality, and putting all that together, to where even my partner was just like, “This is a new beast that I am taming.”
Burlesque, owning your own sensuality, and relationships
Doing burlesque and how that translated to my relationships was terrible. It’s still terrible from time to time. And I say that it’s terrible because men are trash. And because men are trash, they assume that your sexuality and sensuality is for them. And I’m like, “No, no, no, no.”
I’m pansexual. I’ve dated men, women, non-binary people, everyone in between. And I will say, men drive me insane. And it’s because they assume that your sexuality is for them. I have broken up with people. I’ve had someone tell me, “You’ve got to stop doing burlesque.” And I was like, “You can get the fuck out my house.”
Because why would you shit on my passion? I’m not shitting on you playing Madden 2020. I’m not shitting on your Animal Crossings. I am not shitting on you playing basketball with the boys. I am doing an art form, and I’m sorry that you’ve never come across a being like me.
In the beginning, and even still now, I get people sliding in my DMs that are just like, “I would leave my whole family for you.” And I’m like, “Please don’t. I’m not fun. Please don’t. Don’t.”
You want to know why? Because you’re gonna be disappointed. You’re going to think that I’m in lingerie all day, and I’m all done up, and I’m all cutesy-wootsy. But guess what? I wear Justice League boxer shorts and a sports bra to bed.
The importance of recognizing and supporting DC artists
I was born and raised here. I’m a second generation Washingtonian. I refuse to leave. Even though Duke Ellington may have left, even though Dave Chappelle may have left, even though Wale the rapper may have left, they all come back. Taraji P. Henson has come back multiple times to DC.
I just don’t feel like we, as DC artists, have to leave DC in order to make it big. You can make it big here. It’s hard because our entertainment and our arts are fighting against our politics. So politics is going to be number one. People are always going to be like, “Wait, you guys have art there?”
No DC artist should have to leave DC, to go to New York or California or Atlanta or anywhere else, to make it big. You can do it here. It’s just that DC media has to give a fuck. That’s literally what it is. DC media has to give a huge fuck.
The audience is here. I’ve seen sold-out comedy shows. I’ve seen sold-out burlesque shows. I’ve seen sold-out theater productions I’ve seen sold-out black, sexy, erotic poetry sell out at the Howard Theatre—not one, but two shows. I’ve seen sold-out brunches. It doesn’t matter. The media has to care.
When you put out that press release, you’re just like, “Here we go. We hope we get it. We hope we become BYT’s best picks of this week.” You hope and pray that. There have been multiple times when BYT—not shading them but shading them—have really not picked me up.
But yet, when I am posted on there, everyone is just like, “Oh my God, BYT, you need to put more pictures of GiGi up. This is the content we need.” I got tired. I was like, “I’m not doing this anymore. I’m not, I’m not.”
I see that a lot. The “best shows of DC comedy” or “shows to see this weekend” are out-of-town acts coming to perform. Not only do we have the audience, but we have the talent here. But typically when you see shows get big, it’s somebody from out of town who’s coming. So we’ll give it all this press.
And we see it in the burlesque world. New Yorkers would come back here time and time again and sell out. And then we would be like, “We have the same talent here in DC, and you’re shading us.”
I still think one of my most heartbreaking moments in burlesque had to be when I did two shows at the Howard Theatre. It was a big deal. My mom was there, my sister was there. I was one of the first burlesque performances there in 60 years—60 years, it’s a big deal. Why didn’t The Washington Post pick that up?
Then, we did another show. Again, big time. No one picked it up. We didn’t get booked again. And we were like, “Oh my God, why didn’t we get booked for the Howard Theatre?” A troupe from New York got booked. And it hurt.
I don’t think they realized how that hurt the DC art scene. And that’s it. Out-of-town guests need to understand that it really hurts the local artists. But when me and a couple of other people were just like, “It’s not fair. It’s not right,” that’s when they said, “Oh, we have to book a local person every time they come to town.”
So I have been headliners of local shows. Or my favorite is when they’re like, “Hey, we don’t have any room for you in the show, but we want you to be our VIP.” And I’m like, “Okay, I’ll be your VIP. But you have to give me two drinks. I need to have two other tickets. I need to be sitting front row. If you want me there, I’m gonna be a starlet. I’mma be a socialite. I’m not playing this game with you.”
And it works. Next thing you know, people are like, “Oh, GiGi’s there. GiGi’s going to the show.” It just sucks that DC media doesn’t respect or give care to DC arts.
Thanks for getting wet with Puss and Kooch
According to Gigi, you can find her waltzing up and down the streets of Northeast DC on H Street looking for marijuana.
You can also see her right now hanging out in her own home by following her on Instagram and Facebook. She also says, “Don’t be afraid to email me at gigiholliday@gmail.com as long as it’s not creepy. Because if it’s creepy, I’m gonna beat your ass.” Gigi teaches burlesque classes and gives burlesque advice, but she will let you know everything comes with a price.
If you want to support Gigi’s work, you can send her funds on CashApp or Venmo at the handle @ChocolateLounge.
Tune in next week to hear Puss and Kooch’s interview with DC improviser Angela Karpieniak.
