“Landlady” (October 15, 1984)
Right at the top of its second season, Kate & Allie did the thing so many sitcoms do and put out an episode that explicitly says, “No, these characters aren’t gay.” In this case, CBS had allegedly worried that viewers might suspect Susan St. James and Jane Curtain’s characters are anything other than platonic friends. On hand to discuss the sh...
2021-05-28 02:25:26 +0000 UTC View Post“Alison” (May 16, 1983)
Most of you haven’t had the chance to watch Love, Sidney, the the NBC series that ran from 1981 to 1983 and which featured Tony Randall as the title character — a gay man who is out to everyone but the audience. The show features queer themes more than you’ve been led to believe, perhaps, and interestingly it’s the hourlong episode “Alison” that sho...
2021-05-22 20:04:27 +0000 UTC View PostIt's another installment of our semi-regular Patreon-only series where we share what we've been watching aside from the stuff that we view specifically for GEE and then we take great pains not to mention the stuff we've watched that sucks, but if you pay close attention you can tell what we're leaving out.
2021-05-15 21:57:01 +0000 UTC View Post“Dr. Urkel and Mr. Cool” (November 12, 1993)
Yep, we finally figured out a way to talk about Family Matters. When Laura asks Steve why he is the way his is, he says he’s born this way — but then he uses science to become someone else. The metaphors are easy to make, even if the writers probably didn’t have anything gay in mind when they made this episode. Prepare for an overview...
2021-05-14 06:50:54 +0000 UTC View Post“Enter Batgirl, Exit Penguin” (September 14, 1967)
The final season of the 1966 live-action Batman series saw the debut of Batgirl, a twirling, high-kicking female hero created to get more girls invested in the series — and more dads to keep paying attention. But Batgirl’s creators didn’t count on the fact that they were creating the exact kind of character that little gay...
2021-05-06 22:16:59 +0000 UTC View Post
In April, we gave an endorsement to The Great North episode “Pride and Prejudance Adventure” for giving the show’s gay character, Ham Tobin, a love interest just six episode into the show’s first season. Today, we’re interviewing Charlie Kelly, the writer of this episode, t...
2021-05-03 16:49:57 +0000 UTC View Post“You Brought a New Kind of Love to Me” (August 16, 1984)
Heads up: In this episode we use the “F” word — no, not that one, but the gay one — but only because the subject matter itself uses it.
This week, we look into Brothers, which ran for five seasons and 115 episodes on Showtime, 1984 to 1989. The show revolved around one of the three titular brothers coming out, and ...
2021-04-30 07:09:28 +0000 UTC View Post
A heads up: This week's regular episode will be posting tomorrow, but in the meantime we give you Drew and Glen going on several tangents.
Have you always wanted to see Shelley Long have sex with Tom Cruise? Then have we got the movie for you. This 1983 Sleeper features Long before Cheers became a hit and Cruise before Risky Business made him a star. And while it is technically an 80s sex...
2021-04-28 23:40:29 +0000 UTC View PostSome of My Best Friends Are…” (October 9, 1976)
The fifth season of The Bob Newhart Show has a gay episode functions differently than most other show’s gay episode. For one thing, its central gay character is one who’d been on the show before; it’s just that no one — neither on the show or watching the show — knew he was gay. For another thing, it’s not the last time we se...
2021-04-22 06:23:18 +0000 UTC View Post
Hey, remember when Drew and Glen discussed that one episode of King of the Hill where Peggy meets a drag queen and halfway through we realized there was a trans reading to this character that probably should be explored in greater depth than two cisgender guys were capable of? We...
2021-04-19 20:59:35 +0000 UTC View Post“Pride & Prejudance Adventure” (March 14, 2021)
The Great North is not Bob’s Burgers with snow. Okay, it is a little bit, but the show has its own vibe and, more importantly for our purposes, an out gay teen as well. In the show’s sixth episode, Ham not only meets a love interest but actually gets to kiss him full on the lips — and that is neither remotely controversial nor ...
2021-04-16 00:35:12 +0000 UTC View PostIt's that time of year again! You vote on which LGBT-focused episodes of classic sitcoms you'd be most interested in us covering this year. Vote for as many as you'd like. And if there is something not on this list that you'd like to hear, tell us in the comments.
2021-04-13 01:35:36 +0000 UTC View Post“Pilot” (February 28, 2001)
In the wake of Will & Grace’s success, the other broadcast networks each made efforts at their own homo-centric TV shows, and the CBS twist on this formula was Some of My Best Friends, which lasted only five episodes. The show was an adaptation of the indie comedy Kiss Me Guido, and it starred Jason Bateman and Alec Mapa as its resident gays. 2021-04-09 07:40:04 +0000 UTC View Post
After a suggestion by Drew’s heterosexual acquaintance, we’ve decided to discuss the gayest episode of The Muppet Show we could find. Tony Rodriguez joins us for a discussion of Muppets but also a fairly obscure FCC ruling that shaped prime time television for every child who grew up in 80s and 90s America, pl...
2021-04-02 20:44:38 +0000 UTC View Post
We are very pleased to congratulate Tony Rodriguez, our friend and the most-frequently occurring guest on Gayest Episode Ever, on his new job: voicing Julio on The Simpsons. Tony is a gay Cuban-American and Julio is a gay Cuban-American, so it’s just too perfect that the former made his debut as the latter on last Sunday’s episode, “Uncut Femmes.” Before he goes too Hollywood, we manage...
2021-03-30 22:05:37 +0000 UTC View PostWhelp, we’ve made it: one hundred episodes. By which I mean that we actually hit that mark several episodes ago, by various standards, but this is when we are actually observing that this is a thing we have done repeatedly over a set amount of time. For this episode, Drew and Glen talk about what this podcast has ended up doing in contrast to how they thought it would work when it launched. A...
2021-03-26 01:12:54 +0000 UTC View PostWe Like to Watch is a mini segment that occurs either biweekly or semimonthly, depending on how you look at it. It's just Drew and Glen discussing what all we are watching aside from the shows we focus on in the weekly GEE installments.
BTW, here is the episode of Mond...
2021-03-19 23:30:35 +0000 UTC View Post
Heads up: This episode revolves around a funeral for a character that we are reading as trans. The humor had at the expense of the deceased may be difficult for some audience members to hear.
”Ebbtide’s Revenge” (December 15, 1990)
If you’re reading this episode title and saying, “I’ve seen every Golden Girls, and I’m pretty sure Dorothy doesn’t have a trans si...
2021-03-19 02:28:32 +0000 UTC View Post
“Spell It M-A-N” (January 6, 1993)
You might be surprised to learn that Doogie Howser M.D. only lasted four seasons and 97 episodes, but perhaps because Neil Patrick Harris has continued to be famous ever since, the show casts a lot longer of a shadow than it might otherwise. This fourth-season episode deals with Vinnie (Max Casella) being horrified to learn that his college roommate ...
2021-03-12 00:24:25 +0000 UTC View PostHi, all. Due to some schedule rearranging, this week’s Doogie Howser episode and probably the next few weeks' episodes will be arriving on Patreon slightly later than usual. Apologies in advance, but it's a change that is ultimately going to allow us to make more episodes. Hold tight plz!
2021-03-10 19:54:14 +0000 UTC View Post
If you just hopped into a movie theater one weekend in 1982 and saw Night Shift, you might not expect that two of the leads, Shelley Long and Michael Keaton, would not only go on to become households names but would also outshine the guy who’s top-billed: Henry Winkler, playing a very un-Fonzarelli-like role. You might not also expect that director Ron Howard would go one to become one of the...
2021-03-06 00:59:01 +0000 UTC View Post
“The Dance Show” (October 21, 1990)
Given the reputation of Married… With Children, you might be surprised to know that it’s treatment of a same-sex married couple is actually pretty progressive. But yeah, in spite of his many hang-ups, Al Bundy seems pretty nonplussed by the prospect of two guys being married, even if the part that impresses him most is dedicated food preparation...
2021-03-03 08:34:14 +0000 UTC View PostWe Like to Watch is a mini segment that occurs either biweekly or semimonthly, depending on how you look at it. It's just Drew and Glen discussing what all we are watching aside from the shows we focus on in the weekly GEE installments.
Heads up: we discuss the availability of the second season of Promised Neverland before we found out that it sucks.
2021-02-27 21:03:57 +0000 UTC View Post
What does it take to get a teen-centric show like Moesha to do a gay episode? Well, we talked to the writer of “Labels,” Demetrius Andre Bady, who explains how the idea arose, how the final product differed from the original script, and what he thinks the legacy of the episode is today. Even better? He tells us which of the Moesha cast members pulled him aside to praise the bravery it took ...
2021-02-26 06:10:34 +0000 UTC View Post
“Three Women and a Dummy” (May 13, 1996)
Alongside Murphy Brown, Designing Women and The Nanny, Cybill was one of CBS’s female-forward heavy-hitters in the 1990s. It didn’t last as long as the other three — and yes, there’s quite the story there — but in its four seasons it did manage to give us the Waiter. Played by Tim Maculan, he’s one of the more important queer charac...
2021-02-24 07:32:48 +0000 UTC View Post
“Labels” (October 1, 1996)
It’s the tale of two sitcom episodes. Depending on who you are, this is either an episode about Moesha meeting a gay teen who’s scared to come out, or it’s an episode about the dangers of gossip. Maybe it’s both. We are joined once again by Dr. Alfred L. Martin Jr. to discuss t...
2021-02-17 06:40:36 +0000 UTC View PostSo this will be new to some listeners. This episode, our Patreon episode concluded with a bonus segment where Glen and I just talk about what we've been watching on TV outside of what we watch for this podcast. However, upon asking you all on Patreon, you announced that you'd prefer this were a standalone mini-episode, rather than a tacked-on, end-of-the-episode affair. So here is that new segm...
2021-02-15 23:25:26 +0000 UTC View PostHi, all. In case you didn't make it to the end of this week's Roseanne episode, we are trying out a new segment about what all else we're watching — that is, the TV shows we won't be featuring on GEE anytime soon. The thing is... we don't know where to put it. It might be a bonus segment at the end of the regular Patreon episode, after the outro music. But it also could be a standalone segmen...
2021-02-12 02:52:36 +0000 UTC View Post
“Ladies’ Choice” (November 10, 1992)
Ninety episodes later, we dared to venture back to Roseanne. How does its legacy of LGBT advocacy hold up all these years later — and in light of the show’s namesake’s hard right turn into all manner of Trumpy badness? Glen and Drew have their takes, but that ultimate decision is up to you. However, this episode represents a milestone in re...
2021-02-10 08:56:51 +0000 UTC View Post
“Out of the Closet” (November 1, 1976)
Rest in Peace, Cloris Leachman. She leaves behind a legacy that includes such sitcom greats as The Mary Tyler Moore Show, The Facts of Life, The Simpsons, Malcolm in the Middle and Raising Hope, as well as a great body of other acting work. For two seasons, she also starred in a spinoff to Mary Tyler Moore that had Phyllis Lindstrom starting over...
2021-02-03 23:10:41 +0000 UTC View Post