This is not the finish line. For gay men in the entertainment world, there has never been a finish line, never a moment when you couldn’t measure how far they’ve come and turn around to see how short they are. Gay men can have such a connection to Booster’s all-on-the-table stand-up act that when they meet him, some of the more boundless people will grope him enthusiastically (it makes him acutely uncomfortable; please don’t do it). But other audiences still have a long way to go, he says. “I see a lot of stand-up across the country when I travel, and it’s wild how our existence is still used as punch line. The idea of homosexuality is still very funny to a lot of people.”
Also, large parts of the industry have not moved beyond casting decisions that may have felt fresh twenty years ago, but not anymore. “I still audition for stuff here,” says Matt Rogers, who lives in Los Angeles, and “it’s still mostly assistants or [the heroine’s] best friend is like,’Girlyou carry Which?'” On his upcoming show, Rogers will “play the senior associate – he’s very clear that he” not the assistant. … It’s great to make him aware of the stereotype and see him navigate through it.”
Despite all the progress that has been made, the era when discussions like this would have been unimaginable is still recent enough to remember and grim. “I think about Terry Sweeney a lot,” Yang says. Now in his early 70s, Sweeney was a pioneer who made his mark before the people in this story were born — in 1985, when he became the first gay man hired as a regular cast member on “Saturday Night Live.” Sweeney was “the gay”; he “had a moment”; and his great impersonations of Joan Rivers, Nancy Reagan and (it was a different time) Diana Ross might have made him a star in a newer era of “SNL” or of America. But Sweeney came into the limelight during the AIDS crisis, at a time when the demonization of gay men was on the rise, and the show essentially quarantined him and treated him like the odd man out. He lasted one season.
“I’m sure I wouldn’t have survived a week,” Yang says. It seemed “so shocking that there was a gay guy on ‘SNL’, but it always felt like the writers found it shocking too. … Sometimes I get to this dark place where I think, ‘Have we got? [moved beyond that]† Do people see me as this novelty on the show – that I come in, do my weird song and dance and then leave? Not me to think that’s true. I’m clearly in a much better situation than he was. But I think about him a lot.”
We’re not here anymore. We’re not even where we were ten years ago, when Torres, still looking for his voice as an artist, started doing open mic nights with no idea if he was going to meet a hostile audience or not. “Then, years later,” he says, “I’m asked to do a queer-only open mic. And I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, are there enough aspiring queer comedians to have their own open mic? ?’”
“Not to say, ‘I knew them then,’ but these are all people I’ve seen grow and develop,” Yang says. “I hope we’ve learned from all of this that we’ve all charted our way to some version of fulfillment or success or that we’ve found our own voice. I know I’m just spitting out all these serious little sentences, but I think I’m just saying there’s such a thing as this community of people all looking out for each other. And I hope it stays that way.”
