The Ambivalently Gay Viewer: "Saturday Night Live"’s Mixed Record on Gay Humor

Hot Pants and Feather Boas

Over the years, American comedy has derived plenty of laughs from repeating, without irony, stereotypical characterizations of minorities. SNL may have broken many comedy rules, but it didn’t initially break this one, especially when it came to gay men.

In a 1980 skit, soldiers are tested for homosexuality by being quizzed with questions such as “What was Judy Garland’s first movie?” and “Who is the Mayor of San Francisco?”

Nothing much seemed to have changed by 2005, when, in the reoccurring sketch “Gays in Space,” a limp-wristed gay space crew, wearing silver uniforms and short-shorts, make lewd sexual references and catty comments while sipping cocktails. At one point, they encounter a ship run by a lesbian crew who wear flannel and have their hair styled in mullets.

In other words, the message from SNL has frequently been clear: gay men are lisping, cross-dressing queens who love shopping and Barbra Streisand.

The producers of the show are aware that SNL has sometimes taken heat for their portrayal of gays, but caution that the creative team is not a monolithic group with one single comedic approach to gay comedy.

“The personnel [at SNL] is always changing,” says Seth Meyers. “It’s the people who work here on any given year, on any given week. We don’t always look back in the past and see what we’ve done because we weren’t here in the past.”

Meanwhile, one of the show’s head writers, Paula Pell, is an out lesbian. In fact, she recalls reading the online reaction to some “lame gay references” in a sketch she’d written. “Everyone was saying, ‘They don’t get it right, because it’s such a straight show,’” Pell says. “But it was a gay person who wrote it! It wasn’t a straight perspective, just me being old.”

Indeed, the show has occasionally subverted gay stereotypes and even parodied those who traffic in them. A sketch from the fall of 2007 about the outing of Harry Potter’s Albus Dumbledore parodied an apparently clueless J.K. Rowling and an even more clueless Larry King’s attitudes about gay people.

Meanwhile, Chris Kattan’s popular 1990s “Mango” character was an effeminate, melodramatic go-go dancer who swishes and slaps his butt (always to the tune of Everything But the Girl’s “Like The Deserts Miss The Rain”). But Mango, who was eventually identified as at least quasi-gay, is also portrayed as an object of male desire. In nearly every skit, he is romantically pursued by a straight, (usually) male celebrity — David Duchovny, John Goodman, Ben Affleck, Matt Damon, or Samuel L. Jackson — who just can’t get Mango out of their minds.

Kattan definitely camped it up, but given that the stereotype usually features effeminate men romantically pining after masculine straight men, it was refreshing to see the stereotype reversed.

Finally, there was Julia Sweeney’s gender-bending “Pat” (1990-1994). SNL made people’s discomfort with an indeterminate gender the butt of the joke, not necessarily Pat him/herself.

Hogwarts and Ass-Bury Park

In the world of sketch comedy, gay men aren’t just limp-wristed interior decorators; they’re also obsessed with sex. It’s another gay stereotype that SNL has frequently resorted to for easy laughs.

“The first same-sex couple in New Jersey was married Monday in Asbury Park,” Jimmy Fallon reported in a March 2004 Weekend Update segment. “Really, in all of New Jersey, the gay dudes had to get married in a place called Ass-bury Park? Really? C’mon.”

Meanwhile, in a November 2007 Weekend Update segment, Seth Meyers reported on the news that Harry Potter’s Albus Dumbledore isn’t just gay; he has “hogwarts.”

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