“It was Lorne Michaels and [producer] Bernie Brillstein had kind of a thing where they did not hire gay people, so I never got to audition,” Bagley recalled. “All my friends did, and I was always kind of a standout at The Groundlings, but I was out. … The problem with being out back then was there were no guardrails. I mean, if somebody didn’t want to have you on their show… I don’t know, they weren’t trying to seek out LGBTQ people back then.”
Bagley went on to claim that Yang was the “first conscious” out gay hire at Saturday Night Live, and that Michaels didn’t know Kate McKinnon was gay when she was hired. Both claims are dubious (Before SNL, McKinnon was on The Big Gay Sketch Show), particularly because SNL‘s first openly gay cast member was Terry Sweeney, who joined the cast for one season in 1985, the year Michaels returned as executive producer following a five-year hiatus. But Sweeney didn’t have it easy. “My husband and I were the only gay writers on the show,” he said in an interview on the SNL50 red carpet earlier this year. “It was tough for me. Some people wouldn’t write for me because I was gay. Or they go, ‘I don’t know what a gay…’—like, they needed a mailman for a sketch. They go, ‘Well, we don’t need a gay mailman, so we can’t use you.’ I go, ‘You know I can deliver mail?’ So everything was like, ‘You’re gay and I don’t really know what that world is about.’ And the fact that I did drag, they were like, ‘Is the circus coming to town?'”
So although Bagley didn’t quite have his facts straight (no pun intended), it’s unfortunately not hard to imagine Michaels declining to hire another out gay star for decades after the rocky season Sweeney experienced. (Michaels reportedly had to force Chevy Chase to apologize to Sweeney over the vitriolic homophobic jokes he made while hosting that season.) Thankfully, Saturday Night Live has changed along with the culture, but Bagley isn’t the first to speak up about perceived homophobia in the casting process. James Adomian did get to audition in the early 2000s, but told The Daily Beast in 2018 that “It certainly didn’t help that I was openly gay.” (Corporate co-creator Jake Weisman also told the outlet he though Adomian was passed over because the show is “bigoted.”) He theorized that it was an issue with the SNL execs. “[They’re saying], I’m not homophobic, but I’m afraid that my audience is,” Adomian stated. “I think that Lorne Michaels is afraid of America’s dads… ‘I’m not gonna let my kid watch a show with a gay man!'”
