Belinda Carroll

Belinda was awarded the Woman of Achievement Award from the State of Oregon. The award was presented to her by Governor Kate Brown on March 10, 2020.

Carroll has performed at various annual gay pride events, including Portland Pride 2019's Big Gay Afterparty, and Beaverton's Pride Festival 2019. She has also performed at the Sex-Positive Education & Events Center for Portland's iteration of the international anti-slut-shaming march, SlutWalk.

In 2017, Carroll performed as part of a nationwide comedy benefit for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), a counter-response to the promises of human rights violations on which Donald Trump ran his presidential campaign. Dozens of comedians performed across 20 states. The Portland iteration, called What A Joke, featured Carroll and just three other comedians as representatives of their city.

In 2016, Carroll began working as a tour guide for Know Your City's "Pride Forever: LGBTQ History Tour." She performs annually at Portland's Slut Walk. In 2018, she was designated a Queer Hero as part of Queer Heroes Northwest. The same year, she was chosen as the sole representative for queer Oregon as featured in USA Today's Faces of Pride article. In 2019, the theatre and advocacy group, CoHo Productions, listed Carroll as one of their Iconic Women as part of their This Woman portrait and interview series.

In 2015, one of Carroll's activist pursuits involved a conversation with a gay Ugandan comedy fan who befriended her on Facebook. With his permission, Carroll documented their dialogue and published it in PQ Monthly to spread awareness about the persecution and violence queer Ugandans face.

Carroll's mother was agoraphobic and suffered from borderline personality disorder, and two of Carroll's three brothers became methamphetamine addicts. Carroll herself suffered from acrophobia (the fear of heights) and stage fright, and began smoking a pack and a half of cigarettes daily at age 15, which continued until she was 42. Aside from the cigarettes, she remained a "kind of clean and sober straight-edge person," but when she started performing in drag clubs at age 21, she began abusing alcohol; she had her first drinks on her 21st birthday, consuming five and still not becoming intoxicated. The drinking became a daily ritual involving 1/5th of liquor a day or three bottles of wine. She also abused cocaine that she said "helped alcohol be more fun" and at one point weighed 357 pounds. She got sober with the help of Alcoholics Anonymous at age 31, but shortly thereafter relapsed. It would be years before she would get fully sober again; the precipitating event was an alcohol and cocaine bender she went on at a wrap party's open bar. The episode led to eight hours of vomiting—red wine, vodka, and the cocaine—which she ended up admitting to her therapist. The therapist said that next time this occurred, she wanted Carroll to go to proper rehab, but the idea was so "mortifying" to Carroll that she "threw" herself into four-phase "smart recovery, and therapy, and journaling, and all the self-care stuff [including] exercise." She stopped using alcohol and drugs in 2015 and quit cigarettes in October 2018.

In 2013, she performed as part of Portland: Naughty-Listed—Stories of Holiday Misbehavior, a storytelling series benefiting the Democratic Party of Oregon.

In 2011, Pride NW honored Carroll with their Pride-in-Action Award for Carroll's grassroots work founding Q Patrol, a community foot patrol intended to reduce hate crimes against LGBTQ+ people in Downtown Portland.

Carroll began performing as a professional standup comedian at age 32, after Sarah Palin was nominated for Vice President of the United States. Disturbed by the event, Carroll processed her feelings with joke-writing, subsequently delivering them at an open mic at Cap City Comedy in Austin, Texas. She was only two weeks sober. It so happened that the show was recorded and ended up online, where a comedian friend saw her set. They encouraged her to keep at the craft, and she did, ending up with a sold-out performance for her first gay audience in 2009. This led her to start producing her own shows by and for the queer community, though not exclusionary of non-queer subject matter and audience members.

Carroll came out as a lesbian feminist activist at age 16. Within a year, in 1993, she began campaigning to oppose Measure 9, a proposed amendment to the Oregon Constitution that declared homosexuality to be "abnormal, wrong, unnatural, and perverse," allowed open discrimination, and required the state "to actively discourage homosexuality, teaching that it is a moral offense similar to pedophilia, sadism and masochism." Contemporaneously, Carroll began attending Lesbian Avengers meetings with her girlfriend which proved an education for participating in direct-action advocacy.

In the 1990s, at age 22 when she was working as a dominatrix, Carroll held a Miss Leather title. She performs annually at Portland Pride and in 2013, was named a finalist in the Advocate's Stand Out: The National Queer Comedy Search.

Carroll experienced "relentless" bullying as a youth. Her early queer influences were limited to The Original Coming Out Stories (Crossing Press, 1989), and "sneaking in the occasional gay-themed Donahue." She came out as a lesbian at age 15, declaring herself a lesbian feminist activist at age 16 or 17. Her Republican brothers and the rest of her family members were taken aback, accusing her of doing it to "be contrarian" and "trying to be political for a while." Carroll's mother, a Southern Missionary Baptist Christian, albeit a Southern Democrat, was "shocked," believing that Carroll was "too feminine to be a lesbian". She then rejected her, which prompted Carroll to move out of the house. She was homeless for a year and a half, couch surfing and living on the streets, even attempting suicide.

Belinda Carroll (born February 24, 1976) is an American standup comedian, writer, activist, actress, and singer. She is the founder of the Portland Queer Comedy Festival, organizer of the Portland Dyke March, and is a co-organizer as well as date auction host and fundraiser emcee of the Butch Voices Portland Regional Conference.

Her mother grew up in Cookie Creek, West Virginia on a farm in a house with no electricity. She left school after the sixth grade. In 1956, at age 20, she gave birth to a son, then moved westward with her husband in 1963, working laundry and line cook jobs. During this time, she had a second son. In the early 1970s, her husband divorced her, leaving her in debt as a single mother. In 1976, at age 40, she gave birth to Carroll in Portland, Oregon.