Comics Suzi Ruffell and Tom Allen bonded over vile homophobia

Comedian Suzi Ruffell has explained how homophobia she experienced early on her career led to an indestructible friendship with her now podcast co-host, Tom Allen.

Ruffell and Allen, who are both gay, started their podcast Like Minded Friends together back in 2015, way before the lockdown-inspired podcast boom.

For the past nine years, the duo have been releasing episodes almost uninterruptedly every week, where they discuss everything from their day-to-day lives, to their favourite weekly culture picks, and their experiences as queer people.

“We often call ourselves an anxiety and interior design podcast more than a comedy podcast because what we talk about more than anything, is both feeling anxious and then, like doorknobs,” Ruffell exclusively jokes with PinkNews.

Like Minded Friends works well, obviously – every month, it receives around 250,000 listens. Ruffell thinks its success is born from the fact that it’s just a casual conversation between two friends who “never prepare” what they’re going to chat about.

“We just both jump on a Zoom every Tuesday at nine o’clock and it’s just a catch up.”

The Apprentice: You’re Fired! host Allen and Channel 4 regular Ruffell met a few years before the podcast began, following a “terrible gig” at a charity night. “We had a drink together afterwards to lick our wounds and we became quite pally,” she explains.

A tough run at Edinburgh Fringe Festival followed – “We both couldn’t really get an audience, we were routinely playing to 10 people” – and their friendship grew. Yet it was their own early experiences in the comedy industry, which were dogged by homophobia, that brought them closer.

“I know that there was a period where we both first started doing stand up professionally – Tom has been going for like five years longer than me, so he was already on that journey a bit more – but [it] was that time when you’d experienced quite horrific homophobia, quite routinely on stage,” Ruffell reveals.

“It wasn’t unusual for me for someone to shout ‘Dy*e’ or for someone to shout something really grotesque about me needing to be fixed. I know Tom would experience quite horrible homophobia as well on stage.”

Both had to deal with often being the only queer people on comedy line-ups, too – particularly for Ruffell as a queer woman. “For the first six years of my career, I never gigged with another woman, unless it was an unpaid gig,” she shares. “It was so white and male and straight.”

Allen became someone Ruffell could lean on for emotional support when the marginalisation got too much.

“I think just having someone that you could ring and say, ‘That happened to me last night’ or ‘I’m on my way home and that just happened to me’, and for someone to get it, and then [for] someone to just be loving – I think we did that quite a lot for each other, which made us really close,” she says.

More than a decade on, and the industry has come on leaps and bounds.

“I haven’t had that experience with an audience for a long time now. I feel like it’s really improved, but there was a time when I went on stage kind of scared.”

Now, the pair will take Like Minded Friends to the live stage at the London Podcast Festival, recording an episode in front of a live audience. It’s a popular event, a testament to how hard they’ve worked to build a listenership.

“I think we’ve sort of created this community of people that like the vulnerability of it,” says Ruffell, who can often get deep and personal on the podcast. She recalls once recording an episode, when the podcast had first started, right after she had finished crying following the breakdown of a relationship.

The thing she’s proudest of about the pod though is the people it’s reaching. In among those 250,000 listeners are people currently living in one of the 63 countries that still criminalise same-sex activity.

“We’ve received emails from people in lots of countries where you could not even think about living openly,” she says. “Hopefully, we provide a little bit of community. We’re enormously proud of that.”

Suzi Ruffell and Tom Allen will record an episode of Like Minded Friends live on Thursday 5 September at 7pm as part of the London Podcast Festival.

Ruffell will also record Big Kick Energy: LIVE, an episode of her women’s football podcast with comedian Maisie Adam, on Friday 6 September at 7pm.

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