‘Saturday Night Live’ Had a Rocky History with Queerness. Now It’s Gayer Than Ever
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The most recent “Saturday Night Live” sketch to go viral — or at least, the most recent one that multiple of this writer’s own friends sent to him — was the type of joke that you could easily find by scouring gay stan Twitter. On a December 2024 episode of the venerated sketch comedy series, Jane Wickline popped onto Weekend Update to sing a song about Sabrina Carpenter. Or, as she amusingly put it beforehand, a song in which she is Sabrina Carpenter bemoaning how nobody is creating lesbian rumors about her like her peers Olivia Rodrigo or Taylor Swift.
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The sketch proved a bit polarizing: many (perhaps older people) didn’t get it, while others recognized the sense of humor right away: a younger, pop culture-pilled, very online, very gay sensibility. It’s a comedic tone that, increasingly, has become a hallmark of the long-running NBC series as it ages into its golden anniversary.
Over its history, “Saturday Night Live” has had something of a rocky road with how it has approached queer culture on the show — not particularly surprising for a show that’s also had a long history of being a predominantly straight white male boys club. The series did introduce its first LGBT cast members relatively early into its run, during Season 11 in 1985 — Terry Sweeney was the first gay male cast member (his husband, Lanier Laney, was also on the writing staff), and Danitra Vance was the first lesbian on the show, although only Sweeney was out during their short-lived tenures.
Both tenures were unfortunately very short-lived: Season 11, Lorne Michaels’ return to the showrunner position after several years away, was a notorious failure, and both were let go at the end of the season along with most of the buzzy cast members, which included Robert Downey Jr., Joan Cusack, and Anthony Michael Hall.
By all accounts, neither of them had great experiences on “SNL.” Vance (who sadly passed away from breast cancer in 1994) was reportedly unhappy with the various stereotypical Black female characters she played throughout her run on the show, which included parts like a teen mother named “Cabrini Green Jackson.”
Sweeney had similar complaints: in a 2015 interview, he said the writing team didn’t know how to give him material, and that “Everything they put me in was either gay or in drag.” In the book “Live from New York: The Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live,” it’s alleged that former cast member turned host Chevy Chase subjected Sweeney to homophobic bullying during his episode on the show, pitching one sketch where the cast member played an AIDS patient.
After Vance and Sweeney left the show, it was almost three decades before the show featured another openly gay performer in its cast. And the humor of the show, when it ever (rarely) addressed gayness, tended toward the leering and the mocking. There were some bright spots (the 1991 sketch “Schmitt’s Gay,” a parody of oversexualized beer commercials, is pretty harmless), but there were also notoriously offensive portrayals that have aged exceedingly badly. There was the notorious “Canteen Boy Goes Camping” sketch from 1994 that featured Alec Baldwin as a scoutmaster preying on Adam Sandler’s recurring character generated considerable controversy from viewers who found it homophobic and making light of pedophilia. During her time on the show, Cheri Oteri had a recurring character named “Mickey the Dyke,” that was mostly just a collection of broad stereotypes rather than anything rooted in reality. One 2011 sketch rested its entire punchline on the idea of trans people taking estrogen treatments.
Other sketches and characters that are considerably more well-loved and fondly remembered today nonetheless fell into the trap of having queerness itself be the sole punchline rather than anything deeper. “The Ambiguously Gay Duo,” which ran on and off from 1996 to 2011, was a sketch based entirely on the premise of guessing whether the titular pair was gay or not. Bill Hader’s beloved Weekend Update character Stefon played a bit more into queer culture with his recurring bit about “New York’s hottest club,” but at the end of the day, it was still a caricature of a gay man mostly written and performed by straight men.
It was only in 2012, when Kate McKinnon was added to the show as a featured player on Season 38, that “SNL” gained its second openly gay cast member (and first openly lesbian cast member). Unlike Sweeney or Vance, McKinnon wasn’t pigeonholed during her time on the show: in contrast, she was arguably the biggest star of the series during her long tenure, and did everything from political impersonations like Hillary Clinton and Elizabeth Warren to goofy original characters like a chain-smoking alien conspiracy theorist.
Around that time — and as support for gay rights grew, culminating in the 2015 legalization of gay marriage — more gay writers joined the show’s writing staff. Most notable was Chris Kelly, who joined the show as a staff writer in 2011, was promoted to supervising writer in 2014 during the show’s 40th season, and eventually became co-head writer with his writing partner Sarah Schneider during the 42nd Season, making him the first openly gay head writer on the program During his term, he wrote many sketches for McKinnon and Aidy Bryant, including the goofy buddy duo comedy parody “Dykes and Fats,” or the memorable, widely beloved, and very sapphic 2017 Totino’s Pizza Roll Super Bowl parody starring Kristen Stewart.
In the mid-2010s, more and more prominent LGBT writers on the staff began to emerge, most notably Julio Torres, whose surreal, offbeat humor resulted in some incisive sketches from 2016 to 2019 like the beloved, queer-tinged “Wells for Boys,” or “The Actress,” which starred Emma Stone as a method actress in a gay porno. Written by queer writers, the sketches also feel noticeably more authentically gay: certainly still using queerness in its humor but digging deeper into real queer experience.
In 2019, writer Bowen Yang was promoted to an on-air cast member after a year as a writer on the show. Since his hiring, other openly gay cast members have become more commonly hired, including Punkie Johnson and Molly Kearney, the first nonbinary cast member on the show (both have since left “Saturday Night Live.”) Like McKinnon, Yang — who has been relatively well known for years thanks to his successful podcast “Las Culturistas” — is now arguably the most well-known current member of the cast (outside of longest-tenured Kenan Thompson), and certainly the busiest outside of the show, with roles in blockbusters like “Wicked.”
Yang’s hiring saw a noticeable shift in sensibility for the show, which began to engage more frequently with a certain type of chronically online queer humor. One of the earliest examples was the hilarious (and, for network TV, shockingly filthy) “Sara Lee” sketch from 2019, which saw Harry Styles play a gay intern for the baked good company who accidentally leaves thirsty tweets from the company, which gave us the instantly meme-worthy phrase “Must get rid of toxic in community.” Then there are sketches riffing on pop culture ephemera like “M3GAN” and its popularity with the queer community, which clearly comes from someone who has spent hours scrolling through and reading Twitter. That can be something the show takes heat for (ripping off Twitter has certainly become a common accusation people levy at “SNL” sketches), but you can tell that sketches like these and one that casts Travis Kelce as a gay’s low-commitment straight male friend comes from someone with a sharp eye on queer culture.
For all of the progress “Saturday Night Live” has made in queer humor, the show isn’t perfect, and its queer representation isn’t either. Most infamously, the show continues to court controversy by frequently inviting comedian Dave Chappelle, who has become known for frequent transphobic jokes in his sets, onto the show twice since his controversial special “The Closer.” In 2024, the show also attracted attention when Shane Gillis hosted the show; Gillis, notoriously, was hired and then fired from the cast in 2019 after internet users uncovered several racist anti-Asian, and homophobic jokes from his podcast. Letting the comedian on, even temporarily, five years later felt like a backslide in the worst way. And while the show now has plenty of queer writers and performers, there are still gaps in its representation, including zero trans stars on its record.
Still, progress can be made, and “SNL’s” track record — from an overwhelmingly straight program to one of the most reliably gay shows on TV — is more than proof of it.
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