Gayest Episode Ever

What's Gay About Dexter's Laboratory?

Hi all. We're doing a Cartoons That Made Us Gay this week about two fairly gay-leaning segments that aired on Dexter's Lab. They're not readily streaming, which is mindboggling, so I'm posting them here so Patrons can see what we're talking about.

The segments in question are "Barbequor" (from S1E4) and "Sun, Surf and Science" (from S2E33).

Also is there a third one I'm overlooking? Let me know and I'll add it!

Weirdest Episode Ever: The Saved by the Bell Saturday Morning Cartoon Preview

“Who Shrunk Saturday Morning? (September 9, 1989)

Strange as it may seem, most people’s first experience of Saved by the Bell occurred on the Friday night before the show started airing in earnest on Saturday morning, but it wasn’t technically an episode of Saved by the Bell. It was NBC’s 1989 Saturday morning cartoon preview special, which featured Zack, Screech, Lisa and Slater (but specifically not Jessie and Kelly and CERTAINLY not Tori) getting beamed into a TV, where they ...

The Saved by the Bell Saturday Morning Cartoon Preview

Hi! As promised in our recent Saved by the Bell episode, we're doing what I guess is a Weirdest Episode Ever? It's the NBC Saturday morning cartoon preview, which stars the cast of Saved by the Bell introducing the cartoons that the show would be airing alongside this season... and it's really weird, independent of the weirdness of these live-action specials in general. The plot involves Zack and Screech and eventually Slater and Lisa (but not Jessie and Kelly) getting sucked into a TV where ...

Tori from Saved by the Bell Is a Lesbian Icon

“The New Girl” (September 19, 1992)

Tori Scott is more than just the mysterious seventh Bayside High student who exists in a fractured Saved by the Bell timeline in which Jessie and Kelly don’t exist. She’s also really gay in the tradition of Jo from The Facts of Life, and not only because Leanna Creel, the actress who played Tori, came out in real life. Erin Fletcher returns to explain why she’s actually a better match for Zack than Kelly or AC Slater… because Zack Morris i...

Community’s Gay Dean Is Not Actually Gay

“Queer Studies and Advanced Waxing” (March 31, 2015)

In its sixth and final season, Community decided to explore the series-long running joke about Dean Pelton’s mysterious, complex sexuality. Henry Gilbert once again joins us to discuss how the dean is not actually gay — he may be a pansexual imp, after all — but in forcing him to pick a tidy label, this show does a good job showing how many queer ...

Drew Carey Has a Cross-Dressing Brother Who Just Might Be Trans

“Drew’s Brother” (November 19, 1997) 

We finally did it! We not only found the perfect guest for this episode — writer, performer and UCB alum Joan Ford — but we also got the chance to tell the world that The Drew Carey Show deserves to live it. It’s not only the most successful Friends clone but also the only one that sustained a whole series about working class young people. And in its th...

The Drew Carey Show, "Drew's Brother"

Coming up this week, we're finally — FINALLY! — cover The Drew Carey Show. Specifically it's the one where Drew's brother comes out as a crossdresser and the show accidentally does a trans character. Because this show is not streaming anywhere (for reasons we will address in the episode discussion), I'm posting this one here for you all to see. Enjoy!

The Associates Meets a Gay Joke It Doesn’t Like

“The Censors,” (April 10, 1980)

James L. Brooks followed up the hit Taxi with another workplace ensemble that skewed decidedly fancier: The Associates featured a young and unknown Martin Short among a group of fresh hires at a Wall Street law firm. The show didn’t work and is almost forgotten today. But its second-to-last episode did feature a trip to the Hollywood set of a sitcom where a producer battles an overzealous censor. There’s a gay sublot, but the overall story is a ca...

This Week's Episode: The Associates, "The Censors"

Hey all. We are doing a deeper dig this week, and it's something that is harder to find online. It's "The Censors" from the James L. Brooks co-created series The Associates, and it's both the one gay episode this show did and also a showcase for a pre-SCTV Martin Short. Glen and I are discussing tomorrow, but if you've got any thoughts, post them here.

This series is one the failures on Brooks' filmography, even if critical reviews of this lawyer sitcom were very enthusiastic. In fact, ...

How I Met Your Mother Meets a Gay Brother

"Single Stamina" (November 27, 2006)

Art TK! Sorry this is getting up later, but this week was a real mess! You're getting your next regular Patreon episode on Wednesday, BTW. But here's some dummy text for this: In hiring Wayne Brady to play Barney's gay brother, HIMYM is acknowledging that Neil Patrick Harris's real life sexuality had viewers wondering how it impacted him playing such a broad caricature of hetero masculinity. Plus his episode might have made him actually come out IRL...

This week's episode is... late

Hey all. You should have gotten a new Patreon feed regular episode today, but you didn't and you may not until Friday/early Saturday. Apologies. My dad is in town for my birthday and also I've got an extracurricular thing that is taking up all my time. But you will get it — and then another regular episode next Wednesday.

Cartoons That Made Us Gay: Conan the Adventurer

“The Red Brotherhood” (September 17, 1993)

Heads up: This episode has a brief discussion of suicide, but I will tell you where to skip ahead if you don’t want to hear about it.

The first live-action Conan movie is a spectacle of blood and beefcake. The sequel, however, eschews violence in favor of something more kid-friendly, which makes sense on paper until you stop and notice that Arnold Schwarzenegger is wearing a loincloth the whole time. Is it strange to insert a Physiq...

What’s Gay About Jeopardy(!)?

What if we broke format to discuss America’s favorite smartypants game show? Well, we did it. And special guest Emily Heller joins us to discuss Amy Schneider, who became Jeopardy’s second-longest-running winner ever — and as a result became a household name and a trans icon. 

Listen to Emily’s Jeopardy podcast, What Is…? A Jeopardy! Podcast on 2024-05-22 02:05:29 +0000 UTC View Post

Amen Pits Two Closeted Sitcom Stars Into an Onscreen Smackdown

“The Courtship of Bess Richards” (October 4, 1986)

The second episode of Amen concerns Sherman Hemsley’s Ernie trying to land his choir a new singer in Nell Carter’s Bess, and the result is a comedy of errors in which both he and she perform romantic interest that neither is capable of actually feeling. The result is a WWF-style wrestling match between these two iconic sitcom stars, and we’re joined once again by 2024-05-15 05:36:43 +0000 UTC View Post

Mary and Phyllis Date a Possible Homosexual

“Menage a Phyllis” (November 2, 1974)

In the third-season Mary Tyler Moore show episode “My Brother’s Keeper,” Rhoda famously said the word “gay,” turning a plot about her association with Phyllis’ brother on its head. Two seasons later, Phyllis shows up in another episode that discusses gay issues but weirdly doesn’t say that word. Regardless, there’s perhaps more to be made of the newsroom’s opinions about what codes as gay, and 2024-05-08 01:57:14 +0000 UTC View Post

Facts of Life Does a Covert Gay Episode With Cousin Geri

“Cousin Geri” (December 24, 1980)

Fun game for listeners: Tale a shot every time Drew mentions the phrase “gigantic bitch” in connection with Lisa Welchel’s Blair, who is in rare form this episode as she shuns her disabled cousin Geri for reasons that aren’t the ones you’re probably assuming. In this discussion, we bring up why Geri Jewell is a trailblazer as far as being queer and also one other thing and also why “actress recurring on Deadwood” is lowkey code for les...

The Cartoons That Made Us Gay: Saint Seiya

Have you ever heard of DEATH QUEEN ISLAND?

Saint Seiya is one of the most popular, most long-running anime series that American viewers haven’t heard of. Despite immense popularity in Europe, South America and the parts of North America that aren’t the U.S. or Canada, the series took forever to get to English-speaking territories, as Knights of the Zodiac, and it just never took off the way it should have. That’s too bad, because Saint Seiya is very good and very gay. In this epis...

No New Episode This Week

Hi all. We explained this in the ad break a few episodes back, but I wanted to formally post here that we are moving into a new production schedule where we will be taking one week off per month, which means there will not be a new episode on the Patreon feed this week — and no new episode on the main feed next week. We’re doing this just because it’s really helpful to me to have a little wiggle room, time-wise, and also we will be using the off weeks to do a bonus episode. (As stated i...

"What Is Anime?"

This week, you're getting a new (and long-delayed) episode of Cartoons That Made Us Gay, and to get the episodes I had to rip my DVDs of the anime Saint Seiya. The were printed in 2003, and it is a trip to go back to a time when the American market for Japanese animations was so untested that the disc essentially opens with a primer on what anime is. (It's also an advertisement for a now-defunct anime website, but still.) This was too much of a throwback not to share.

Saint Seiya was a ...

Drawn Together Forces Xandir Out of the Closet

“Gay Bash” (November 10, 2004)

For better or worse, Drawn Together represents a very real trend in mid-2000s humor. It specifically sought out to tell the most offensive jokes it could get on air, but that’s what makes it surprising that the episode where Xandir admits he’s gay isn’t the parade of easy jokes you might expect. The B plot sucks rancid balls, to the point that we don’t even use clips from it in this discussion, but you might be surprised how this animated reali...

Daria Should Have Kissed Jane Instead of Tom

“Dye! Dye! My Darling!” (August 2, 2000)

Spend a little time in a Daria fan community and you’ll find folks who ship the title character with her best friend, Jane. The show actually never does a gay episode and only gets the slightest bit queer in the first movie, Is It Fall Yet?, which has Jane affirming her heterosexuality despite how very queer she might seem. In this episode, we’re discussing the nonetheless existent lesbian vibes between Daria and Jane — and who better t...

Lucy Meets a Drag Queen

“Lucy and Jim Bailey” (November 6, 1972)

Basically, Lucille Ball did a solid for one gay performer, but in doing this, she also helped make gays a little less scary for America. Jim Bailey was a female impersonator who who had already made appearances on late night TV for this uncanny ability to turn himself into female celebs. Lucy, however, gave him a showcase on her popular prime time sitcom, showing her viewers that not only were drag queens not scary, but in fact they can be a ...

American Dad Does a Meta Backdoor Pilot

“Top of the Steve” (March 18, 2019)

Animated sitcoms like playing with corny TV conventions more than live-action sitcoms do, and maybe none has more fun with the sitcom genre itself than American Dad. In this episode, Steve nearly spins off into his own series, but unlike every other entry in our Backdoor Pilots series, he’s actually aware of what’s happening to him. It’s a weird one-off that gets meta in the way that’s very typical of Seth MacFarlane show.

And this i...

A Queer History of SNL, Part Four: The Lost Years

People use the term “the lost years” differently when speaking of Saturday Night Live, but this podcast is using it specifically from the time Lorne Michaels left the show after season five up until season eleven. Aside from Eddie Murphy’s presence on the show, these are the sketches that are less remembered today because they weren’t rerun on Comedy Central in the 2000s as much and they’re largely absent from the cache of episodes preserved online today. And that’s too bad, becau...

SNL: The Lost Years

When we come back a week from Wednesday, we will be doing so with our next SNL episode, which will pick up at the end of the classic era and go all the way until Lorne Michaels' return / the hiring of Dana Carvey and Phil Hartman and therefore the kickoff of what we millennials think of as the start of the modern era. It's weird, honestly, and it's not most people's favorite version of the show, but it's worth discussing nonetheless. Here are the clips we'll be discussing for this episode. De...

A Two-Week Hiatus for Organizational Purposes!

Hi! TL;DR version: We need to take two weeks off due to some competing schedules. I apologize for this, but it will be for the best.

The past few weeks, I’ve been realizing that I need more of a schedule buffer around the new Patreon episodes, because it’s always coming down to the wire and I’m sometimes not getting it up until Wednesday afternoon or even Thursday. So this brief hiatus is specifically to get more episodes in the can so on any given week it’s *not* cutting so clo...

Sex and the City Meets an Effeminate Heterosexual

“Evolution” (August 19, 1999)

If you came of age in the late 90s or early 2000s, you live in a world informed by Sex and the City — whether you realize it or not. It’s probably one of the most influential TV shows to air during our lifetimes, and so it’s more than time that we look at one of its many LGBTQ-themed episodes. Joining us to discuss Carrie, Samantha, Miranda and Charlotte is returning guest 2024-03-07 20:55:48 +0000 UTC View Post

Newhart Meets a Gay

"Homes and Jojo" (May 1, 1989)

TNewhart is a show about white people who live in the snow, and while 70s-era Bob Newhart sitcom is the one pop culture remembers better, this is the longer-lived, more-Emmy-nominated of the two. What the 80s-era Bob New1hart sitcom has working in its favor are future Simpsons showrunner David Mirkin, who gives a host of wacky townspeople not unlike what you’d find in Springfield, and the duo of Julia Duffy and Peter Scolari, who male a perfect yuppie co...

Jerri Blank is a Pansexual Sex Predator

“Blank Relay” (August 13, 2000)

Honestly, we could have picked just about any episode of Strangers With Candy to focus on for this podcast, but we ended up deciding on the one where we see Jerri Blank at her most girl hungry. It’s light on Mr. Noblet and Mr. Jellineck, but we can always circle back to this one in another two hundred episodes, right?

Watch the Exit 57 “Down in the Basem...

Gimme a Break Transformed Into a Lesbian Perfect Strangers

“Joey’s First Crush” (January 28, 1987)

Few other shows changed as much as Gimme a Break, which began as a fish-out-of-water sitcom that had Nell Carter playing mom to three white girls in California but ended up with Nell and her best friend, Telma Hopkins’ Addy, co-parenting two white boys in New York. Minus the kids, it’s basically a female-female twist on Perfect Strangers, only they don’t get steady boyfriends. Perhaps in an effort to make the show seem less gay, they t...