Jes Tom Talks Less Lonely, the Joy of Change, and Gay Pirate Lube in Our Flag Means Death

There’s something uniquely galvanizing about hard times, and which time could be harder than the end of the world? In their new Off-Broadway comedy Less Lonely, Jes Tom tackles the hunt for apocalyptic love with the same unrestricted queer wit that has become a hallmark of their comedy. A trans elder of the Brooklyn comedy scene in all but age, Tom now gets the opportunity to take a show years in the making and give it a theater-quality upgrade. 

Less Lonely is presented by Elliot Page, and he’s been happy to tell anyone who will listen just how special it has become. When I had the opportunity to speak to Tom about the show before previews began at NYC’s Greenwich House Theater on November 28, change was the topic of the day. Also writing about gay pirates for Our Flag Means Death, but before we could get to that I took the opportunity to dive backwards in time to what Tom might have told their 2016 self after completing the two-year acting program at the Maggie Flanagan Studio. 

“Oh god, I’d be like ‘Buckle up.’ I’d be like, ‘You know everything you know? It’s gone. It’s gonna change’,” they say. And that change started with them: “I’d been going by they pronouns socially since 2011 or something. I was already long into that, but I wasn’t like… out, I guess? I didn’t ask anyone to use they pronouns or anything for me in my first year of Maggie, but I realized I wasn’t gonna be able to do my best work unless I was really honest about who I was.” 

“So, I guess I ‘came out’ for my second year. It was crazy, because it was really hard at that time. That just wasn’t as much in the mainstream consciousness as it is now. A lot of people, probably most everybody, had not really heard that in my acting class,” Tom explains. “It’s crazy to, especially in the context of acting because acting is so embodied, do one year being like ‘Yeah, it’s totally okay to see me one way,’ and then the next year kind of being like, ‘Actually, that has to change.’ In an acting class, you learn a lot about how other people perceive you. What kind of roles can you play? What kind of roles do you wanna play? What are people gonna cast you as over and over again? What’s the position other people are gonna put you in? It was very illuminating.” 

In the same way that Jes Tom has evolved over the years, Less Lonely isn’t the same show it started as. Their longtime obsession with love at the end of the world, the kernel at Less Lonely’s core, has been there for more than a decade to be molded and influenced by their own experiences. 

“I think Less Lonely is largely about change and largely about me thinking I knew myself really well, and then suddenly finding out I have to learn all this new stuff in a lot of different ways, and over and over and over again,” they say. “Less Lonely is a feel-good story that doesn’t seem like it’s gonna be a feel-good story a lot of the way through, but it is. And I want people to leave feeling good and feeling hopeful and happy while facing these kind of dark subjects. I talk a lot about death. I talk about the end of the world. I talk about grief. There’s a lot of weird sex stuff in it.”

“It’s neither like, ‘Oh I’m queer and I came out to my family and they all accepted me and they all understand it exactly.’ Nor is it like, ‘I’ve been rejected for my identity and I’ve experienced all this trauma.’ Which I feel like sort of are the two narratives that queer people are allowed to have in the mainstream… And [Less Lonely is] more about going through hard stuff and feeling hard feelings and being all the better for it,” Tom says before highlighting the message they hope sticks with each audience member: “Be open to change. Be open to constantly changing. You don’t have to think that just because you hold this or that identity right now, even if it’s really important to you right now—like that’s precious, and that’s good—but it’s okay also if that changes. There is great joy in change and growth.” 

For this Off-Broadway version of Less Lonely, Tom is joined by producers Mike Lavoie and Carlee Briglia (Kate Berlant’s Kate, Jacqueline Novak’s Get On Your Knees), director Em Weinstein (The L Word: Generation Q, A League of Their Own), and production designer Claire DeLiso (Let Liv, Hangdog). While the pressure of the performance itself will rest solely on Tom, they explained the team has “been really trying to balance the stand-up and theater vibe, because the ethos of these two performing arts are actually almost total opposite.” 

“As a stand-up comic, my concept of the show is literally like: I get on stage, I talk into a microphone, I say the show, then I walk off. But now, we’re really able to create. What is the world of Less Lonely?… It’s gonna be a fully realized show,” they say. “At the same time, I made it super clear with the team that I want to be as close to just a live stand-up comedy show that you would see in a club, but enhanced by the resources of the theater. Nothing super crazy’s gonna happen.” 

While they have the benefit of final say in decisions about Less Lonely, working in the writers’ room on Our Flag Means Death meant trying to help creator David Jenkins realize his vision of where that story is headed. That show, like Less Lonely, continued to change throughout development. Collaborative discussions in the Zoom writers’ room, writers’ draft scripts, the showrunner’s script edits, improvisation on-set, and final edits to fit runtime constraints all change those initial concepts into the show fans get to see.

“When I was laying down the part at the beginning [of Season 2, Episode 7 of Our Flag Means Death] where Blackbeard wraps up his leathers and throws them into the ocean, of course that was something that David wanted. But for me, as I was putting it down I didn’t totally get that moment until I realized, ‘Oh, it’s a trans allegory.’ He’s taking his stuff and he doesn’t need it anymore. He drops it, and he feels lighter, and the weight comes off his shoulders,” they say. “In the script, I had him catch a glance of himself… And he says ‘bye bye.’ That was one of my lines that made it in. He says ‘bye bye,’ and I loved it.”