204: A Queer History of SNL, Part One
Welcome to a new season of Gayest Episode Ever. It will be a Saturday Night Live-centric season. Among the regular, sitcom-focused episodes, we will be doing periodic deep dives into the LGBTQ-focused sketches that ran on the show during its various eras.
To kick it off (and to kick off the new season), we are starting with a two-part look at the various queer-adjacent recurring sketches from SNL. This first episode covers the launch of the show until the mid-90s, and next week’s episode will get us through the current era. Enjoy? Maybe? It’s a lot to take in, honestly, but we swear it’s worth discussion.
Here are this episode’s sketches:
Anita Bryant (s5e16 — Burt Reynolds, April 12, 1980)
Dion (s9e8 — Flip Wilson, December 10, 1983)
Nancy Reagan (s11e2 — John Lithgow, November 16, 1985)
Coffee Talk (s16e13 — Roseanne Barr & Tom Arnold, February 2, 1989)
It’s Pat (s17e3 — Kirstie Alley, October 12, 1991)
Lyle the Effeminate Heterosexual (s17e16 — Mary Stuart Masterson, March 21, 1992)
Mickey the Dyke (s22e8 — Martin Short, December 7, 1996)
Ambiguously Gay Duo (s23e20 — David Duchovny, May 9, 1998)
Jeffrey’s (s26e12 — Sean Hayes, February 2, 2001)
Mango (s27e9 — Ellen DeGeneres, December 15, 2001)
You can watch the sketches on Patreon. You can see Drew’s master list of LGBTQ-focused SNL sketches here.
Episode artwork by Ian O’Phelan.