Gabby Windey on Successful Podcasting, Her Wife, and Loving Being Lazy
Words: Gina Tonic | Photographer: Morganne Boulden | Stylist: Ellie Burns | Set Design: Xavier Martinez | Makeup: Akina Shimizu | Hair: Alyx Liu | Videographer: Camille Mariet
Gabby Windey covers The Bed Issue: get yours here now.
Gabby Windey stops me, mid-doomscroll, with her perfect posture, pointedly neutral podcast set up and a monologue that stops me in my tracks. Her words penetrate, punctuated with almost-idioms that feel rehearsed but aren’t. The raspy hiss on the ‘s’ in ‘lesbian’ reverberates around my mind for days, as I wonder where this woman came from.
For many cult internet stars, especially those of recent years, fame has been the result of steady growth, rather than a cash-in on one moment of virality. Comedians like Delaney Rowe and Sabrina Brier exemplify this best – they found what works and stuck at it, cultivating an audience who knew exactly what to expect from them and understood that whatever they would be served, they would enjoy. Gabby Windey’s path to popularity, however, followed a different path to success that’s been just as tried and true: the reality-star-to-massive-internet-presence-pipeline.
“I was travel-nursing through the pandemic and post-pandemic, I found myself in LA.” Windey tells me on Zoom, sitting straight to camera in her conservatory, “I was living in this 200 square foot nothing surf shack in an almost illegal commune – I’m not a surfer! We were literally cooking on a Bunsen burner. Me and my friends had gotten really into scooters, so we were scooting around Venice all fucked up all summer. We did a lot of that in my home video [for her The Bachelor application].”
She adds, “I had an interview for the show in a parking lot because it was COVID. I was doing my best – I blacked out – but it worked, whatever I did.”
Bra: For Love and Lemons | Corset and Arm Sleeves: Erik Charlotte
Dress: Bailey Prado
Full look: Kyriacos
Prior to getting cast on one of America’s biggest shows, Windey worked full time as an ICU nurse, performing as a professional cheerleader for the Denver Broncos in her spare time. Before getting cast, however, Windey was already eyeing up a less fast-paced life. “Right before the pandemic hit, I was transitioning out of the ICU, out of bedside nursing. I wanted to get into aesthetics.” She explains. “But you have to start from the bottom, so I was at a laser hair removal place, fucking up people's hair lines – they did not give you enough training for it – then I had to go back to work because the aesthetic places closed because of COVID, so I had to go back to the bedside.”
Shorts: Vintage Dior from @voulezvous
Windey’s past feels antithetical to the persona she's built online, an internet presence centred on confident laziness. Her first viral video, one that was reposted by Bella Hadid – who Windey thanks “for making my career” – is a piece to camera. “I have business hours. What are you doing, calling me after 3pm? I've lost all my confidence. I've just had lunch. I'm lethargic,” she says. “I've been exhausted since the moment I woke up. I need a break. You want to have a creative call? Over my dead body. Send me an email with Google Slides. You want to have a FaceTime at 9pm? I'd rather gouge my eyes out with a dull chopstick. I don't think so.”
Shoes: Vintage Prada from Last Platinum
Windey laughs when I point out that the mission statement of her podcast Long Winded – “Lazy girls need representation too” – doesn’t quite match up with her ICU and pro-cheerleader past. “I'm a Capricorn. So they're at odds with each other,” she notes. “So I'm driven, always working, driven by money, money, money, money, which is also why I did get out of nursing and I finally got to live my dream of being a professional dancer.”
Dancing – whether for the Denver Broncos or placing second in Dancing With The Stars in 2022 – has been Windey’s goal since childhood. She grew up a self-described “military brat” as her father Patrick worked for the American Air Force for over twenty years, and moved a lot due to his job. She lived Florida, Texas, Illinois, Colorado and California twice as a child. While Windey notes that her earlier years were unstructured, she became a “very good kid” in response to a lack of supervision and support.
“I love to dance. Dancing was a real outlet [for me] growing up. We're of the age where we're all very nostalgic and looking back at what we used to do online, like Webkinz, and I'm like, ‘I wish I knew what any of this meant.’ I was just doing plies and jetés, that was my whole childhood.” Windey continues: “I feel like you're one of two people like that, if you don't have any rules [growing up] you'll like, go crazy, break all the rules that aren't there, or you'll get yourself to be disciplined. And I was the latter. I had a job, I was going to dance class, I was going to school early. I was overly disciplined.”
From high school and at the insistence of her family, Windey followed her dad’s insistence she get a vocation and went to college to become a nurse, the same career path that her mother had followed. Windey worked as an intensive care nurse for six years before getting into emergency relief nursing during the pandemic, doing 80 hour work weeks for FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
“I feel like I've lived a whole life before getting into entertainment, and I think it's really lent itself to what I'm doing now,” she drawls in her signature monotone, reflecting on her past “Now I'm like, I want to get a tramp stamp, shave my head, or do anything that I can rebel with. I feel like I'm going through my naughty phase now. I'm a lesbian now!”
I feel like I've lived a whole life before getting into entertainment, and I think it's really lent itself to what I'm doing now.
During our conversation, Windey seems pleased that her queerness and podcast have overtaken her reality telly past as the main reason people know her name. It’s not that Windey is hiding her onscreen origins – she has spoken at length about winning The Traitors US, finding Michael Buble creepy behind the scenes on Dancing With The Stars and the surrealness of almost winning The Bachelor. It’s more that this list of reality show appearances doesn’t have much sway outside of the USA. Reality television fame is, more often than not, region-specific and while the occasional contestant makes the transatlantic journey to stardom across the pond based on their showreel alone (characters like Tiffany Pollard, the entire cast of Vanderpump Rules and, conversely, our own Gemma Collins, spring to mind) it’s still a rarity – I’d be shocked if anyone in America knew all the Kim Woodburn mannerisms that are burned into every Brit’s subconscious. But Windey now joins the cast of reality contestants to make it across the continents: “It means the world to be across the pond!”
Windey came out publicly as a lesbian on morning panel show The View, almost two years ago. “It was really the only place to do it.” Windey details, “I have ties with ABC because of The Bachelor and Dancing With The Stars. So I told my manager, ‘I'm gay. I'm very seriously dating a girl’ and I didn’t want to come out on social media, because then people will start writing your story for you and you don't have control over the narrative, but I did want to be able to speak on it publicly.”
She continues: “One of the heads of ABC was like, ‘You name what outlet you want to go on.’ It was between Good Morning America or The View because those are ABC owned and I didn't want a sit down, serious conversation on GMA. It is not the vibes. They'd be like, ‘Oh, okay, well, how repressed are you…’ Please, no. The View is a seven minute interview. You're surrounded by women. It's left-leaning, whatever you want to call it, and I got to tell my own story in a very non serious way. So I think it was perfect, actually.”
Windey married writer and comedian Robby Hoffman at the start of 2025, and at any opportunity, in this interview and across the internet, Windey makes a point of emphasising the impact their loving relationship has had on her. The pair met outside a lesbian bar in LA, where Windey’s friend had brought her to help her with the internal questions that she had started considering about her sexuality. Another friend of theirs recognised Hoffman from her comedy work and wingmanned the pair into conversation. From there, Hoffman took the reins.
“I could see her wheels turning so fast. She knew that she had an opportunity in front of her. She immediately started… not laying it on thick, because she has the most confident swag of a person, man or woman, that I've ever met. But she just did what she does best, and I was like putty since then.”
Once given the sign off to gush about her partner, Windey does. “She just gives me so much confidence; she had a lot of people in her life when she was a kid that instilled so much confidence in her, whereas I didn't really, so she gives me all of that knowledge and all that love and confidence that she got as a child. With her behind me, I feel like I can do anything. She makes me feel like the most beautiful, the most accepted, the most loved and I think that's given me room to really be myself.” Windey adds: “Sometimes I'm like, we're always talking about each other. I hope people don't think it's performative. We're each other's lives.”
“With my wife behind me, I feel like I can do anything. She makes me feel like the most beautiful, the most accepted, the most loved and I think that's given me room to really be myself.”
As well as her confidence, Windey attributes the success of Long Winded to Hoffman too. With the show snowballing in success, raking in millions of listens and views for its host across multiple social media platforms, we finish our conversation by discussing the next plans for Windey’s global takeover.
She smiles conspiratorially at me over our Zoom call. The screen we’ve been chatting through for the past 45 minutes morphs into a would-be TikTok edit as she proclaims: “I want to retire. I can retire, Robby won't, probably ever, but I'm on the phone with a financial planner and like, I can put away every single paycheck. It's fine. I don't need that Miu Miu anymore. I just want to retire. That's my next goal.”
Gabby Windey covers The Bed Issue: Get yours here now.