Perhaps one of the best descriptions of the experience of talking to Nicholson comes from an interview they gave to a student newspaper at Oxford University. In it, the writer – no doubt with the best possible intentions – described them, or more accurately their voice, as “that of a slyly conniving imaginary friend”.

Do they remember doing the interview? Nicholson pauses. “I think [the interviewer’s] name was Anastasia!” (So close: it was Gaia.)

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“You know, it’s a funny thing,” Nicholson tells WISH. “Years ago I was the voice of a reindeer in a Christmas ad for Myer. And we did it three years in a row. And I remember some gay street press wrote an article, having done no research, saying the new Myer ad was homophobic because that voice was a negative portrayal of a gay man. And I had to literally come out and be like, ‘That is just my voice. That is how I sound. So please don’t tell me that I’m throwing the gay movement back by 30 years by just talking.’”

The call is coming from inside the house, indeed. But it’s clear that Nicholson has no issue with these kinds of descriptions. Rather, there’s a certain sense of playful pride in them. “I mean, I’ve always been camp,” they add. “I went to a performing arts school. It’s amazing – you’d imagine a performing arts school to be deeply queer. And it kind of was, but not really. I still managed to be bullied in a performing arts school. Wild!”

This unfortunate experience would happen again later, within their own LGBTQ+ community, adds Nicholson.

“Since I was 18 I’ve kind of worn make-up on stage, and if I went out I would have a little bit of a contour. And apparently that was just so unattractive, to the point of people being really dismissive of me. And my voice, thinking it was a put on. Do you know how exhausting that would be? It’s exhausting to just be me anyway. But to have to put all of this on?”

Unapologetically camp, non-binary … the field of comedy, ironically an industry meant to make you feel good, has historically not been the funniest for such members of the LGBTQ+ community. Whether it was Eddie Murphy’s jokes about HIV and AIDS (which the actor has only recently apologised for) or Andrew Dice Clay on stage saying he “hates homosexuals and women” (which the performer has not apologised for) in the ’80s, or Tracy Jordan, back in 2011, telling a live audience that he would pull a knife out and stab his own son if he were gay, LGBTQ+ people have often been the punching bag for joke writers.

It makes chasing a career as a comedian by someone who also happens to be queer sound a little masochistic. So what made them want to do it? “Oh, zero other options!” Nicholson answers.

“I don’t know. I started pretty early, which doesn’t mean I was good,” they joke. “[As a kid] I had all of the galas, 10 years’ worth of galas, recorded on VHS. And then when YouTube became a thing, I was 16 or 17, I would just watch comedy. Always as much standup as possible. And then when I was almost 19 I moved to Sydney and just kind of started trying to do it.”

But for a “zero other options” career choice, the 32 year old has more than made it work. In 2022, they won the 2022 Melbourne International Comedy Award for Most Outstanding Show (formerly the Barry Award) for their show Rhys! Rhys! Rhys!, which went on to achieve sell-out audiences in the US, Canada and the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. They also fulfilled a childhood dream of hosting the Melbourne International Comedy Festival Comedy Gala, scored a Netflix special and a starring role in sci-fi comedy The Imperfects, and his Amazon special, Rhys Nicholson’s Big Queer Comedy Concert, is due out later this year.

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That camp kid from a Newcastle performing arts school can safely say that they have achieved what most would describe as international success, without an ounce of exaggeration.

If you’re familiar with Nicholson’s body of work, you’ll know that their queerness has never been off the table in their own shows. Back in the early days of their career, if you found yourself at one of their shows, it was likely you came away with more knowledge of gay culture than you bargained for.

“I had this weird thing where my first few years I tried to be a very shock comedian. Something that nearly all queer people do,” they go on to explain, “is they confuse brashness – and I’m speaking so broadly – and in-your-face jokes with activism, and it’s not the same. There’s one level of ‘we’re here, we’re queer, get used to it’, but in retrospect what I was doing was I would go somewhere like The Comedy Store, which has a very straight-orientated audience, and I was being very, very, very gay and talking about anal very graphically.”

There were tales of Grindr mishaps (“I had Grindr for a while, but never used it. I remember it was the early days and I just had pen pals. I never actually had sex with anyone from Grindr.”) Their first and only encounter with their one girlfriend (“I high-fived her”) and the observations of queer life, whether it be sex, relationships, friendships or simply dealing with homophobic heckling. I attended one of Nicholson’s earliest shows – they might have been 20 or 21 – where an audience member, presumably straight, yelled “faggot” at the then relatively unknown comedian. Without skipping a beat, Nicholson replied: “That’s a little bit obvious; that’s like me calling you a massive c**t.’”

“I’ve recently been starting to talk more about coming to terms with the fact that I’m non-binary and what does that even kind of mean,” says Nicholson. This road of self-discovery started over a Zoom call. “I was having these big Zooms during lockdown. Every Friday night a bunch of us would have drinks and it would always usually be 10 people on the screen. And then, as the night got later, it would whittle down to about three people and we’d all be very red-wine drunk.”

During one of these late-night confessionals, Nicholson says they began digging deep into experiences and things they had been feeling. “It was then that one of my friends left on the line said ‘Mate, I think you might be gender nonconforming.’ And I was like, ‘Oh. Right.”

Something else clicked for Nicholson when they hit their mid-twenties: a small crisis of consciousness regarding the direction of their material and who it was intended for. After reviewing his hour-long performance, developed over several years, Nicholson found that they no longer liked their own jokes.

“I was having a conversation with [comedian] Zoë Coombs Marr backstage,” says Nicholson. “Luckily because I’m not a nightmare, not to sound like a douche bag, but I’m not a nightmare to be around, people have always been very nice and honest with me. So I was talking with Zoë saying how I really hated my act and blah blah blah. And she just went, this sounds so basic, but she went, ‘Well just stop doing it.’ And I was like, oh right. And then I completely kind of rechecked everything.

Now, the tenor of the comedian’s jokes is more about punching up, so to speak. Or using comedy as a method of connection through shared experiences. Like the humdrum of relationships. If you’ve caught the 2020 show on Netflix, Live At the Athenaeum, or read recent interviews, Nicholson is often riffing about something banal yet sweetly absurd from the vaults of his relationship with former Triple J host Kyran Wheatley. “I was just talking to Kyran about this the other day – that these days I think I’m more of a relationship comedian,” says Nicholson. “All my material is about being in a relationship, and it’s not about being in a queer relationship, it’s just about being in one in general. And I think I feel good about that. I feel like that is kind of helpful and useful in some ways because I’m not creating differences. Seeing a straight couple laugh at something that happened to my partner and I in the same way that it’s happened to them is very satisfying.”

While the tone may have changed, the boundaries for Nicholson’s jokes remain boundless: like admitting they proposed to Wheatley while drunk only to wake up the next day and pretend it never happened. To his credit Wheatley never forgot and on a trip to Scotland, while hiking up a mountain, surprised Nicholson with a ring.

“I was so angry because also this is what he does, you see,” says Nicholson. “I do something, and then he comes back tenfold with more romance and more good stuff, and I come off looking like an arsehole. It happens every Christmas, every birthday. He gives me beautiful, nice things. But I think it’s because he comes from money and his family gives gifts that mean something to each other because money is not an object. My family: no money; love money. It’s almost that you want to leave the price tag on to be like, ‘That’s how much I love you. I love you $200 worth.’”

This wouldn’t be the first time Nicholson got married, however. Back in 2016, to highlight the importance of marriage equality, they got very publicly hitched to fellow queer comedian Zoë Coombs Marr. The event took place at the Comedy Festival club, and included speeches from Hannah Gadsby and even a mock brawl. It was, for all intents and purposes, the first legal gay marriage before gay marriage was even legal. And how is that marriage going? “Oh, it didn’t work out.”

The leap from local comedy notoriety into genuine, global fame came on a Sunday morning. A call Nicholson almost didn’t even answer, courtesy of having been burnt once before. “The last time my agent called me on a Sunday was to tell me that I’m A Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here was firing me, or whatever the version of being fired if you never had the job is.”

There had been rumours, they explain, several years previously that cult series RuPaul’s Drag Race was looking to expand into an Australian market. Nicholson explains that his agent had seen the long list of names going around and warned them not to get their hopes up. Time went by and nothing was heard until that Sunday morning when Nicholson, out getting coffee, answered the call from their agent. “She was crying!” Nicholson exclaims. “I instantly think my other agent’s dead or something and all she said was, ‘He picked you,’ with no context. And I said, ‘What do you mean?’ She was like, ‘He picked, Ru Paul – you’re the judge.’ I think they also liked that I was probably a little bit cheaper than some people.”

Did this kind of quick elevation onto a much larger platform, one with an audience that could match soccer fans for a zealot-like obsession, come with a few surprises?

“My first time doing shows after Drag Race came out,” says Nicholson, “I didn’t realise I’d become a little bit more famous, and to a very particular crowd.”

In Adelaide to write and perform a new show, they found a new crowd attending their gigs.

“These Drag Race fans sitting in the front, drinks on the stage, thinking they were kind of coming to a drag show, having no idea that I was even a stand up. These groups of gay men and straight women clicking their fingers, shouting yaaaasss, and I’d be halfway through something and someone would yell, ‘When’s season two?’ just out of nowhere.”

This year continues Nicholson’s sweeping run of hits with the release of their Amazon special, Rhys Nicholson’s Big Queer Comedy Concert, which also features fellow LGBTQ+ performers such as Geraldine Hickey and Urzila Carlson. Basically, says Nicholson, people who would be heaps of fun backstage. “As a queer person it was so dreamy to get to work on something like this,” they say. “Also, I think people all just reckon comedians (especially queer ones) are big personalities. I gotta say, it was the most laidback backstage I’ve ever been in. What a thrill to have no straight white guys back there eating all the snacks.”

And did they have a favourite performance of the night? “Of course I did. And there is no way I’m telling you who that is.”

This story appeared in The Pride Issue of WISH, which celebrates the game-changers who are shaping Australia into a more diverse and inclusive society.