Terry Sweeney, the first openly gay cast member of NBC’s Saturday Night Live, is denouncing the show’s “homophobic” treatment he allegedly received back in 1985.
Sweeney is one cast member who is not often spoken of, having been dismissed after only a season. But he not only was the first openly gay member of SNL, he was also the first openly gay actor on network TV.
Speaking to Vulture, the forgotten comedian did not blame SNL chief Lorne Michaels for how he was treated during his one season. Indeed, he gives Michaels credit for hiring him in the first place.
“I give Lorne credit for hiring me. He supported me. He never did anything homophobic toward me — never,” Sweeney said.
“I’m sure he had his own pressures from the network. After that season, everybody was looking like, Okay, you failed. We brought you back, and now you failed. Well, that’s the end of you. But I give all the credit for hiring me,” he continued.
Sweeney feels his presence as a gay man on TV during the height of the AIDS crisis was important to his community.
“People needed to see a gay person on TV at that moment. That’s what was needed — a gay person who wasn’t dying, who was lively and running around doing drag, being funny, being outrageous. And I kept hearing that over and over. I got letters and letters from people telling me, ‘Thank God you’re doing it.’ They just hadn’t seen anybody openly gay like that. And I was doing gay stuff,” he said.
But Sweeney said he still feels that he was treated badly during his tenure.
“I had to deal with white-collar homophobia. Educated boys. Nobody went by my office and yelled, ‘Fag!’ Instead, it was, ‘I don’t really have any ideas for you. We need a mailman in the sketch; we don’t need a gay mailman,'” he said. “Randy Quaid was in the cast, and we would get to the read-throughs, and he would have a huge stack of scripts. I would have two or three sketches. They just didn’t write for me.”
Sweeney added that some of the writers even refused to work with him when he asked them to. He said they would tell him, “I’m working on something,” and then shun him. He added that Carol Leifer and sometimes Al Franken would work with him. But few others would. “I hadn’t felt that way since junior high school,” he said.
One of his least favorite memories was an untoward suggestion from the legendary — and legendarily troublesome — SNL alum Chevy Chase.
Of Chase’s stint as guest host, Sweeney said, “[H]e asked who the ‘gay one’ was, and I put my hand up. He said, ‘I’ve got an idea for a sketch. We say you have AIDS and start weighing you throughout the show, and you keep losing weight.’ The whole room was aghast. And so I just got up and walked out,” Sweeney said.
He added that he was losing a lot of friends to AIDS at the time, so it was a very emotional period.
He told Vulture, “when I was on SNL, I lost 13 friends during that season to AIDS. Thirteen! I went to memorials, burials, funerals. And then I went into work, and I was supposed to be funny, and nobody was writing for me. It was very, very tough. I was emotional during that time. There was a lot of death around the gay community, and no one was talking about it. I was in this parallel universe where I was mourning people’s lives and my friends. I’m supposed to come in, and here’s people not wanting to write a fucking sketch for me. I was like, Fuck you. I was angry.”
Ultimately, though, he feels that staying true to his sexuality was more important than staying on SNL and hiding his proclivities.
“Years later, who’s going to remember the sketches you’re in? But they’ll remember that you said ‘I’m gay’ when it was a time when you weren’t supposed to say that ever. And nobody had ever said it before without shame,” he explained.
Ultimately, Sweeney said that he was unable to find work for a decade after being fired by SNL. And his first job after that dry spell was on 1990s hit sitcom, Seinfeld. “Back to the top!” he noted.
Follow Warner Todd Huston on Facebook at: facebook.com/Warner.Todd.Huston, or Truth Social @WarnerToddHuston
