We Have Nothing But Respect For Sam Jay’s New Special On Max

In her nuanced, layered, and multidimensional new special, Salute Me or Shoot Me, Sam Jay addresses both masculinity and femininity, her engagement, race, disability, love, society and culture, and more. Beginning the show, Jay confronts the many domestic responsibilities required of someone like herself in the “man role” of the relationship. She presents as a masculine queer woman and her fiancée, feminine. Back in her “dick-sucking days,” the only prerequisites for a successful relationship were being somewhat attractive and, of course, sucking dick. In her new position as a “junior man,” she assumes daily duties assigned to the guy in the relationship, like opening the door and taking out the trash, as well as serious financial obligations as the breadwinner. The hustle alone required to maintain her current lifestyle with her fiancée, suffice it to say all the door holding and trash collection involved, takes up more time and effort than she ever conceived.

In these set roles, her fiancée cannot fathom taking out the garbage, nor can she walk herself into the restaurant on a date, lest she, a 40-year-old woman, get snatched. Jay, during a night out early into their relationship and not yet knowing the severity of her date’s case of cultural norms, walks through the entrance of the restaurant and goes up to the bar to get a drink, thinking her girlfriend is behind her the entire time. Instead, when it comes time to cross the threshold, her girlfriend refuses to put out her working arms to keep the door from closing in her face, ignoring the viable option to hold the door herself. These are just some of the jobs required of Jay in her newfound position as the “junior man,” so told with playful crowdwork, broad, animated gestures, hilarious pauses for effect, and a magnetic stage presence.

Considering and caring about a partner binds a long-term relationship together, Sam Jay recognizes from their 17 years together. Caring about another person every day is in and of itself a big feat, and caring about larger issues like global warming and advocacy for marginalized groups is damn near impossible to maintain on a day-to-day basis. Jay may not be able to care about the starving walruses suiciding off a cliff, but certain issues do get her attention. 

In her skillful manner, she unveils not sick individuals, but a sick society, by removing power from such products of the machine, like slurs meant to separate us from each other. She postures, for example, that our use of the word “retarded” has been misplaced; we’ve been referring to the wrong people. In the way of language development, retarded used to mean stupid, slow, and inhibited, words that describe not people with autism nor Down syndrome who process information differently, but someone like ​​Herschel Walker, who is plain dumb.

Jay further discusses the tools of oppression designed to limit people in our society, like slurs or, for little people, doors. As of September 2015, the organization Little People of America moved to abolish the word “midget” from our collective vocabulary, declaring it a “derogatory slur.” Jay chooses to use the slur in her performance, rather than another preferred term like “dwarf” or “people of short stature.” Instead of focusing on the weight of the word, Jay calls attention to the experience of a little person, highlighting the actual impediments they face when people are caught up with verbiage. She relays an anecdote about her watching a little person struggle to open a door (it’s important to note that because she wanted to see how he opened it, she didn’t help). We hear the frustration in her voice as she elaborates on how we have implemented doggy doors for dogs to have greater mobility and ease of access in life, yet people with dwarfism encounter this obvious flaw in our modern society on a regular basis. A similar plight her soon-to-be-wife faces, little people also contend with the injustice of walking through doors, an issue left out of the cultural conversation so often policed for inclusion. Jay brings light to this underlooked challenge through a subversive approach and evocative storytelling. Unlike her betrothed whose arms lock by her sides at the sheer sight of an entryway, the little guy in the story, she describes, got active, lifting his arms and putting in the effort required to get himself into the building.

Being in another person’s shoes is hard, but it breeds an understanding which can only come from immersing oneself in other people’s environments and seeing things from their point of view. For instance, when she confesses to her all-male friend group that her bitchy attitude is due to her having her period and that everything they were saying was annoying her, her group chat called for the end of all periods. By providing her friends with insight into her experience as a woman, they rose to the occasion and rallied behind her.

Nearing the end of the show, Sam Jay regales us with one last story of grace, one she encountered while waiting for the stall in a men’s public restroom to become available. The man sitting on the only toilet, upon noticing Jay waiting, sucks up his pee and transfers to the urinal for the duration of his stream, in order to leave the stall open for Jay. Through this act of kindness, she comes to appreciate the values, like chivalry, still active and present in our society. They’re not dead, she concludes in her hour-long special now streaming on Max, if you’re willing to meet people where they are at. “It’s just perspective,” she puts forth earlier in the show about being on both sides of gender, uncomplicating the matter, although this point affords keen insight into the rest of the topics covered, like race and respect. “No one’s wrong. We just don’t have empathy for one another.”