Why Does "Saturday Night Live" Have A Problem Casting Gay Men?
Political comedian James Adomian is well-known for his impersonations of larger-than-life figures like Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders, and Ted Cruz, whom he voices on Showtime's Our Cartoon President). But one accolade has eluded the out 38-year-old: A spot on the cast of Saturday Night Live.
There hasn’t been an openly gay male cast member on SNL since Terry Sweeney joined for a single season in 1985, and even he slipped under most people's radar. (It took a quarter-century for SNL to add out lesbian Kate McKinnon.)
Chris Kelly became SNL's first openly gay head writer in 2016, but left the following year o work on a Comedy Central series. And while Julio Torres is helping to keep the writers' room queer, he doesn't appear in any sketches.
"It would be nice if they put a gay man on camera on that show," Adomian told the Daily Beast at SXSW. "I’ve been out of the closet the whole time since I auditioned 13 years ago. You would think that they would have tried to put someone else on that was a gay man. It’s about time."
Why a comedian is or isn't added to SNL's lineup is hard to pin down, but Jake Weisman, the out co-creator and co-star of Comedy Central's Corporate, is fairly certain why Adomian was passed over.
"Because he’s gay," Weisman told DB. "Because they’re bigoted."
Even if the audience and writers have change with the times—and even that's debatable—Lorne Michaels hasn't. "The guy at the top’s the same," says Weisman, "People are just calling it out more." Adomian thinks Michaels is afraid of alienating straight middle-aged men, the kind who think, "I’m not gonna let my kid watch a show with a gay man.”
Ironically SNL delves into "gay" humor with relentless regularity, mining homoerotic situations for awkward laughs, like the one comparing Captain Hook and the Lost Boys to to a "Bryan Singer pool party." You could make a whole "Best Of" episode featuring nothing but 'hilarious' gay kisses.
But as skits like the Fire Island spoof Cherry Grove and the cop-show parody Dyke & Fats proved, gay sketches can smart and funny without making us the butt of the joke. (Even if, like Bill Hader's Stefon, they're usually played by straight actors.)
There's certainly no lack of young gay male comics on the scene—Billy Eichner, Matteo Lane, Joel Kim Booster, to name just a few. “We are in a golden age of gay male comics," Adomian says. "We are very well-presented at live shows and on the internet. Television? Not so much."
If we can't get an out cast member on SNL, how about having RuPaul host? It's really the least they could do.