The secret gay history of SNLHow a drag performer wooed Lorne Michaels, how an ad for “Homocil” changed the course of comedy, and more queer tales from writers and actors, past and present.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/tv/2025/02/15/snl-50-gay-history/The 50th season of “Saturday Night Live” has been pretty gay.
There was Chappell Roan telling the camera, “Only a woman knows how to treat a woman right.” There was a sketch featuring three different Jennifer Coolidges. There was Bowen Yang as Charli XCX, Sarah Sherman as Troye Sivan and Ariana Grande playing a mom hazing her son’s boyfriend.
It’s a sign of the times, sure. But the gay history of SNL stretches well past this decade, into the early years of the show.
It all started when a drag performer named Connie Chutzpah sent Lorne Michaels a bouquet of flowers.
The year was 1984, and Terry Sweeney had gotten wind that Michaels was back at SNL after a five-year hiatus. Sweeney, a veteran of the New York comedy scene, had written for Michaels’s short-lived replacement Jean Doumanian in 1980. He left after a season but went on to get a rave review in the New York Times for his work in a comedy revue called “Banned in France.” An NBC talent scout had even checked him out.
Sweeney had an idea.
“I went and got flowers from behind a flower shop,” Sweeney said. “They were throwing out dead flowers, and I gathered them and made them into a bouquet. It was so hideous.”
Sweeney sent the bouquet to Michaels with a note that read: “I spent my own money on these because I’m trying to get on the show. So if you’re not going to use me, here’s how much they cost and I expect a refund check.” He signed the card Connie Chutzpah, the name of his drag character.
It worked. Sweeney was hired in 1985 on SNL’s Season 11. His comedy partner and husband — now legal, then in name only — Lanier Laney was also hired to write.
There was a hitch. At the time, NBC required its on-camera talent to sign a morality clause avowing that you weren’t a criminal, a convict or a homosexual.
Sweeney refused to sign. He had already come out in 1973.
“I couldn’t go back from that,” Sweeney said. “We’re talking 1985. That’s 12 years of living without shame or worrying what anybody thought.”
Michaels went to bat for Sweeney, who ultimately didn’t have to sign. “He stood up for me,” Sweeney said. “He was a friend, a loyal friend in some ways.”
Sweeney’s season performing at SNL was not always rosy. At read-throughs, he remembers his pile of scripts being noticeably thinner than other cast members’.
“A lot of people on that show didn’t write for me,” he said. “Or they didn’t know how to.”
Michaels had warned Sweeney about this when he was hired. “He said, ‘Don’t let it throw you when they don’t write for you,’” Sweeney said. “‘Write your own stuff.’” (Michaels wasn’t available for this article, citing scheduling conflicts due to the anniversary special.)
Sweeney took his advice and also found some allies in the writers room: his husband, Laney; Al Franken; and Carol Leifer (who would also later come out as gay). Still, Sweeney says there were some writers who never wrote a single sketch for him.
In “Live From New York,” James Andrew Miller and Tom Shales’s oral history of SNL, Sweeney and fellow cast member Jon Lovitz both recalled host Chevy Chase making crude and homophobic comments to Sweeney.
“Those stories? They’re all true,” Sweeney said with a laugh.
Danitra Vance, a veteran of New York’s experimental downtown theater scene, was also hired for SNL’s 11th season. Vance’s sexuality was a bit of an open secret. In 1984, she appeared in a revue by the gay theater troupe Hot Peaches playing a “career lesbian” in an original sketch called “1-800-LESBIAN.”
1800LESBIAN
Sweeney remembers gently teasing her about coming out. “She’d be like: ‘Listen, Terry, I’m Black, I’m a woman, I’m from the projects. I don’t need one more thing they can use against me.”
Sweeney and Vance, who died in 1994, were not the first gay cast members at “Saturday Night Live,” but Sweeney was the first openly gay cast member.
Denny Dillon had been in the cast of the sixth season. Dillon didn’t publicly come out until 2020, but she was open with some people in her circle. “The people I worked with knew I was gay,” Dillon says. “Did all the crew know I was gay? I don’t know, but certainly the writers did.”
Dillon speaks warmly of the people she worked with at SNL. But it wasn’t perfect. “Of course, at that time, the word ‘lesbian’ was literally a punch line in lots of scripts,” Dillon said.
Doumanian’s single season heading the show is remembered by many SNL historians and fans as a boondoggle, with humor that was more juvenile and less funny than it was under Michaels’s direction.
But Dillon remembers Doumanian as a producer who helped bring gender parity to the show. “She did really well by women,” Dillon said. “It was not a boys’ club my season.”
Dillon noted a sketch in which she played her recurring character Penny Waxman dropping in on her niece, played by Debbie Harry, who comes out to her as a lesbian.
She also stands by “The Leather Weather Report,” in which she played a dominatrix weather reporter.
“It was so gay,” she said with a laugh. “And I got more fan mail from that sketch than I ever got in my life.”
Sweeney is also proud of the gay content he was able to get on the air in Season 11: a sketch with Jerry Hall that turned the homosexual subtext of “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” overt; one with Madonna poking fun at the tabloid-fueled AIDS panic after Rock Hudson’s death; his regular appearances in full drag as Nancy Reagan.
“I’d get letters that said, ‘My parents hate gay people, but they love you,’” Sweeney said. “That part, I’m proud of.”
The (not so) gay ’90s
After Sweeney was let go, there wouldn’t be another openly gay cast member until 2012.
That’s not to say that there weren’t LGBTQ sketches. There were. And while they weren’t always homophobic per se, they treated being gay as a novelty — as something that would be out of the everyday experience of viewers.
The ’90s saw “It’s Pat,” a recurring sketch where strangers tried to surmise the gender of Pat, played by Julia Sweeney; a commercial for a beer called “Schmitts Gay” that inverted hyper-hetero babes-in-bikinis advertising tropes; and Robert Smigel’s recurring animated sketch “The Ambiguously Gay Duo,” which poked fun at the homoeroticism of superhero pairs such as Batman and Robin.
There was also “Mickey the Dyke,” about a girl named Mickey who is … a dyke.
NBC Lesbian Programming - Saturday Night Live
The character Mickey the Dyke, played by Cheri Oteri, was created by cast member Mark McKinney for one of his “Chicken Lady” sketches, which he had originated on the sketch comedy show “The Kids in the Hall.” During rehearsals for “Happy Holiday Tales: Mickey the Dyke Comes Out for Christmas,” someone from the standards department objected to the script.
“Cheri, we have you saying ‘dyke’ 16 times,” Oteri recalled the woman saying.
So, how many times could she say the word? The next day, she got an answer: 13 times.
Oteri said that over the years, several gay people have told her that “Mickey the Dyke” was meaningful to them.
But she remembers getting even more positive reactions from gay men for her portrayals of the cable-access porn star Robin Byrd, as Debbie Reynolds in “Leg Up” and opposite Will Ferrell in the recurring “Cheerleaders” sketches.
“It made me feel very, very good to know that the gay audience was now enjoying SNL,” Oteri said.
“After we did the cheerleaders, every girl and her gay male friend had a Halloween costume,” she added.
Paula Pell was hired as a writer in 1995. Five years later, her buddy James Anderson was also brought into the writers room. Neither were closeted, but they weren’t fully out, either.
Anderson said that when he was first hired, he tried to butch up his voice when recording his office voicemail greeting. It didn’t work. “Every time I played it back, just a big ol’ girl came through,” he said. He and Pell turned it into a sketch for Alec Baldwin.
A shift in the aughts
A turning point for the show came in 2001, when Pell and Anderson wrote a commercial parody for a prescription drug called “Homocil,” a drug treating the anxiety of having a gay son. The ad ended with the slogan, “Because it’s your problem, not theirs.”
Pell was called into a meeting about the sketch. Producers were concerned that the commercial would come off as homophobic.
“It was the most gay-positive thing that had ever been written at SNL by 100 miles, and I was just baffled,” Pell recalled. She explained over and over that the sketch was meant to make fun of homophobic parents, not gay children.
“I finally just said, ‘Well, I’m gay, and I’ll just tell you that there is not one gay person in my life who will not be gloriously thrilled to see this on SNL,’” she said.
The room went silent, Pell recalled. “I was like: ‘I guess I did it. I guess I came out.’”
“Homocil” marked a shift toward sketches that wove LGBTQ content more seamlessly into the show. That would continue for decades.
Anderson stayed at SNL until 2020. He was responsible for some of the gayest and most gay-coded comedy, including “Gays in Space,” “GP Yass” and “Liza Minnelli Tries to Turn off a Lamp.”
Liza Minnelli Tries to Turn Off a Lamp - SNL
Anderson’s contributions didn’t go unnoticed by some LGBTQ comedy nerds watching from home.
In 2016, when Julia Louis-Dreyfus was hosting, the SNL writer Sudi Green invited her friends Bowen Yang and Matt Rogers to come to 30 Rock as her guests. Anderson found the three laughing in a lounge on the 17th floor and joined them. At one point, Rogers turned to Anderson and asked, “Did you have anything to do with the ‘Deep House Dish’ sketches?”
Yes, that was him.
Yang asked if Anderson had written the Destiny’s Child parody “Gemini’s Twin.”
Yep, him too.
“That was the moment where I was like, ‘Oh, this was the gay voice responsible for so many beloved things that have been on the show that have had that sensibility,’” Yang said.
The Bowen era
When Yang sent in an audition tape for “Saturday Night Live” in 2017, he was certain nothing would come of it. “They will never hire an effeminate Asian man to be in the cast,” he thought.
Even after he was brought in to Studio 8H for an audition, he made an emotional post on Facebook in which he said he knew he would never be cast on the show because of who he was and how he looked.
But things were changing at SNL. Kate McKinnon joined the cast in 2012. The fact that she was gay was basically a nonissue, both in the press and in her performances. (McKinnon’s representatives didn’t respond to a request to participate in this story.) Ditto John Milhiser, an openly gay cast member who appeared on the show for Season 39.
Several LGBTQ writers had been hired, including Chris Kelly, Sam Jay, Alison Gates, Kent Sublette and Julio Torres. Torres wrote 2017’s toy commercial parody “Wells for Boys,” a sketch that spoke knowingly to the queer experience without ever using the word “gay.”
Wells for Boys - SNL
Still, Yang had his guard up when he was hired as a writer in 2018. “I was trying to write within the mold of an SNL sketch when I was starting out,” Yang said. He described Torres as “throwing a life preserver” to him when he started. The first sketch Yang got on the air was “Checques,” a “soapy ‘Dynasty’-meets-‘Dallas’ commercial” that he wrote with Torres. “That led to Julio and I having this really great working relationship together.”
Yang was brought from the writers room into the cast of SNL in 2019, making him the fourth openly gay cast member on the show. The next year, Punkie Johnson was hired, and in 2022, Molly Kearney became the first cast member who identified as nonbinary.
“Working at SNL, there’s such a rich lineage of queer comedy and queer writing, it was actually such a relief to work there and feel like I didn’t have to at all pave a path,” said Celeste Yim, a writer hired in 2020 and promoted to writing supervisor in 2022.
“It was so loving,” said Jimmy Fowlie, who was also hired as a writer in 2020. “Even the straight people were wonderful, too,” he joked.
Pell felt the love when she returned as a guest writer for an episode on Season 49. McKinnon roped Pell into appearing in a sketch she had written with head writer Gates called “Tampon Farm.” Written by two lesbians, it featured an openly gay cast member and an openly gay pop star, Billie Eilish. Pell was no longer the only one in the room.
Tampon Farm - SNL
Alex English had mostly fond memories of his time writing for the show for three seasons starting in 2021 but acknowledged there was room for improvement. “There’s already a short list of Black representation on the show,” said English. “Gay, queer Blackness, that’s pretty new.”
“You have to dance a little harder,” he added.
There have also been controversies about some of the hosts that Michaels has booked. Donald Trump and Elon Musk have both hosted since 2015. Dave Chappelle, who has negatively fixated on trans people in his comedy, just hosted for the fourth time in January.
When Chappelle hosted in 2022, Yim, who identifies as trans and nonbinary, sat the week out. It wasn’t an unprecedented move — Nora Dunn had skipped Andrew Dice Clay’s hosting week in protest of his attitudes toward women — but unverified rumors of a possible wider “strike” created a small media firestorm.
According to several people familiar with the situation, during the dress rehearsal for the show in 2022, Chappelle made a joke in his monologue that referred to Yim’s pronouns. The fact that a host would target a staff writer was particularly upsetting to the cast and crew.
After the rehearsal taping, sources say, there was a heated exchange in which Michaels excoriated Chappelle for the joke. Chappelle didn’t tell it live on air.
Yim was not interested in diving into the details, but English, who had previously criticized Chappelle in his stand-up sets, gave his reasons for personally deciding to stay on that week.
“How would I look going home to my family, to my uncles, to my dad, being like, ‘They let me go for not writing for Dave Chappelle?’” he said. “They would have disowned me. Not for being gay but for being that gay,” he added with a laugh.
Anderson had retired in 2020, before Chappelle’s 2022 appearance, but in his 20-year run he worked with a wide variety of hosts. “When someone’s political views don’t align with you completely, it’s a little difficult,” Anderson said. “Those are tough times at SNL, but that’s sort of the gig, too.”
“The most interesting thing about working there is that you are put with people that you would not normally cross paths with,” Yang said the Monday following Chappelle’s most recent hosting gig. “The beauty and the tension of it is that you are all duty-bound to that, and there is this shared goal.”
Yang is also philosophical about the role that LGBTQ people have played on SNL since its inception.
“There have been queer people all along,” he said. “It’s incredible that we’ve already had a trans head writer in Harper Steele.” (Steele, who was not yet out during her tenure at SNL from 1995 to 2008, declined to participate in this story.) “The secret gay history of the show is that it has always been a show that is a pluralistic place,” Yang continued. He cited the current cast, which includes club comics, queer comics, body horror comics and TikTok comics.
“It’s been a more interesting show because of all those things,” Yang said. “And it’s not so secret anymore.”
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