The Hollywood Reporter
‘Outstanding: A Comedy Revolution’ Review: Trailblazing Queer Comics Get Their Due in Entertaining Netflix Doc
BY DAVID ROONEY
June 15, 2024

In the opening section of Outstanding: A Comedy Revolution, you might be forgiven for thinking this is an extended Pride Month promo to breathe new life into Netflix’s 2022 special, Stand Out: An LGBTQ+ Celebration. But in a Q&A following the rousingly received opening-night screening at the Provincetown Film Festival, director Page Hurwitz clarified the chicken-and-the-egg situation, explaining that she produced the event at the Greek Theatre in Los Angeles, which assembled 22 prominent queer comics on the same bill, as a foundational building block for this documentary surveying the rich history of LGBTQ+ comedians.

At a time when a new generation of queer comics from across the sexual and gender identity spectrum has emerged into what appears to be a thriving scene, this is an invaluable primer on the many performers who kicked down resistant doors to make today’s greater representation possible.

Even if it only served as a vehicle for the rediscovery of the hilarious Robin Tyler, the first lesbian comic to come out on national television in 1978, the doc would be invaluable. When Tyler and her partner Pat Harrison, who performed as the comedy duo Harrison and Tyler, took on anti-gay crusader Anita Bryant — “I don’t mind them being born again, but do they have to come back as themselves?” Tyler asks — ABC promptly canceled their deal.

Gay comedians like Charles Nelson Reilly, Paul Lynde and Rip Taylor were all over television in the 1970s, but they remained closeted; the thinking at the time was that coming out equaled certain career death.

Even a comedy titan like Laugh-In veteran Lily Tomlin, despite making no secret of her relationship with her longtime partner and now wife Jane Wagner, says that actually declaring herself a lesbian back then was unthinkable. But the fabulous Norman Seeff shot of Tomlin looking fierce in an “Evolve or Die” muscle T-shirt makes it clear that by the mid-‘80s, she was hiding nothing.

Tomlin is one of several heavy-hitters whose interviews and comedy clips provide insight into both the barriers in place and the subversive ways many comics got around them. Going back to the Black vaudeville circuit of the 1920s with performers like “Moms” Mabley, queerness has long been a factor in stand-up, whether implicit or explicit. Sandra Bernhard, Margaret Cho, Rosie O’Donnell, Wanda Sykes, Marsha Warfield, Eddie Izzard, Hannah Gadsby and Bruce Vilanch are among those weighing in with illuminating commentary.

One of the most moving aspects of the film is how it highlights the mentor-mentee dynamic of queer comedy, with each trailblazer passing on an expanded legacy to the next up-and-comer. Both Bernhard and Cho talk of Tomlin as a major inspiration, while Joel Kim Booster acknowledges that queer women in comedy were his chief influence.

Another thread that emerges is the one-step-forward-two-steps-back factor of queer representation in comedy. The advances of each decade keep hitting a wall of backlash, whether it was Bryant’s “Christian” crusading in the ‘70s or AIDS hysteria and the family values push of the Ronald Reagan years or the “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” mentality of the ‘90s, when Bill Clinton was in office.

One of the most exhilarating clips has Bernhard appropriating the disco classic “Do You Wanna Funk?” as a rallying cry for sexual freedom, provocatively skewering the stifling conservatism of public figures like Reagan and Jerry Falwell.

Several commentators make the point that unapologetically anti-gay comedy remained widely acceptable through the end of the last century and beyond, whether it was the goofy gay-panic humor of Mel Brooks and Sid Caesar or the outright homophobia of Eddie Murphy’s stand-up specials. The flip side is Richard Pryor’s appearance at a 1977 gay rights fundraiser at the Hollywood Bowl, where he talks frankly about the joys of sex with men before turning on the well-heeled, predominantly white audience for their absence from the Black rights struggle.

Input from Scott Thompson of Canadian comedy group The Kids in the Hall is especially poignant as he talks of having to create characters to hide his sexuality behind. His acerbic bar fixture Buddy Cole was notable as “the first gay character who fucked.” Elsewhere, tacit pressure made it clear that straight audiences could get on board with queer comedy so long as they didn’t have to think about actual gay sex.

Cho was another disruptive force against that unspoken rule, with a defiantly raunchy brand of personally revealing comedy. This was precisely what queer comics were told not to do, instead being encouraged to make their material “palatable.”

The prevailing coyness around the nitty-gritty of queer sexuality in comedy is echoed also in the famous guest appearance of Ellen DeGeneres on The Rosie O’Donnell Show, where she jokingly came out as “Lebanese” and O’Donnell played along, adding that she might be Lebanese too. It’s significant that while O’Donnell’s popular daytime variety and talk show ran for six seasons in syndication and had a writers’ room filled with queer comics like Judy Gold, the host still operated under the assumption that coming out was a career killer.

Many of the interviewees discuss the experience of being unable to land a booking after their sexuality became public knowledge. One of the more emotional moments features Todd Glass recalling his successful breakthrough years as a staple of late-night comedy, never even contemplating coming out, until a heart attack and a hospital visit from his partner gave him the courage to take that step. Sykes had a different means of arriving at that point, more or less accidentally coming out by mentioning her wife during a public appearance.

Hurwitz, a former comic herself, has a great eye for choice material, clearly having dug like a truffle hound through decades of archives to find clips that often remain eye-wateringly funny today.

Inevitably there are conspicuous absences — among them Kate McKinnon, Bowen Yang, Cole Escola, John Early and Jerrod Carmichael, perhaps partly justified by the choice to focus largely on comics who participated in the Greek Theatre event — and areas where the doc could have pushed harder. Any discussion of homophobia getting a pass for way too long in comedy should include the infamous Tracy Morgan rant, when he told a Nashville audience that he would “pull out a knife and stab” his son if he were gay. Even Dave Chapelle’s inflammatory transphobic material gets only cursory coverage.

If there’s a significant flaw in the doc it’s that for a film so willing to contextualize queer comedy in the political landscape of the past, it’s surprisingly reticent about the alarming climate of the present, with a concerted push well under way to roll back many of the gains of LGBTQ+ rights. Surely somewhere on the cutting room floor someone voiced an opinion about all that’s at stake in the upcoming election?

Even so, Outstanding makes a persuasive, highly entertaining case that the evolution of queer comedy is inextricably bound to broader developments in representation, and that emerging next-gen queer comics could learn a lot from their forebears.

The post ‘Outstanding: A Comedy Revolution’ Review first appeared on We Got Bruce!.

Decider
The Village People Disco Musical ‘Can’t Stop The Music’ Is An Infamous Flop — But A Flop That’s Infused With Pure Queer Joy
By Dave Holmes 
September 28, 2023

It is one of the most famous flops in movie history, a disco musical that was released on the very day the entire world decided it was good on disco. It cost $20 million (in 1980 money, so adjusted for inflation, that’s way more) and took in $2 million (in 1980 money, so adjusted for inflation, that’s way less; don’t overthink it). It is the reason we used to have the Golden Raspberry Awards, or maybe still do, I don’t know, because honey, I don’t want to be in that energy wave.  

It is the Village People origin musical/Steve Guttenberg vehicle Can’t Stop The Music, and it is a shittering glitshow that must not be missed. (If you’re keeping score at home, it’s currently sitting at 22% on Rotten Tomatoes.)

Like most good things, the story of Can’t Stop The Music begins over drinks at a 1978 dinner party at Jacqueline Bisset’s house. Allan Carr was invincible — fresh off having produced Grease, which itself was fresh off becoming the highest-grossing movie musical of all time — and was looking for a splashy next act. He convinced Bisset and her guests to come with him to a late-night taping of Don Kirschner’s Rock Concert, featuring a new act called The Village People. They went, The Village People village peopled, and the drinks (and other stuff) did what drinks (and other stuff) do, which is make ideas seem really good. He envisioned a big-budget musical called Discoland, featuring Jacqueline Bisset herself as the female lead, to which she said whatever version of “aw hell nah” people were saying in 1978. 

But Carr would not be deterred. He got Bruce Vilanch to write the script on spec, and then rewrite it when Carr decided Olivia Newton-John should be the female lead, and then re-rewrite it again when she turned it down and Carr pitched it to Raquel Welch, and then again to Cher, by which time Vilanch asked for some money and Carr fired him. The part eventually went to Valerie Perrine, her love interest would be played by a first-time actor and Olympic gold-medalist we now know as Caitlyn Jenner, and as the Americanized version of Village People Svengali Jacques Morali, an unknown named Steve Guttenberg. It was, everyone agreed, going to be hot stuff. 

Now, it is important to point out that Allan Carr, Jacques Morali, and all but one of the Village People are gay as hell. And though the gay community was making strides toward visibility and civil rights in the late 1970s, this was a thing that still needed to be suggested in mainstream entertainment rather than made plain. Carr and new screenwriter Bronte Woodard set out to make a movie that was very gay in the way the Village People were, which is to say “not explicitly, but obviously to anyone who bothers to give one second of actual thought to what is directly in front of them.” It is a script full of double-entendres, and single-entendres, and frequently jokes you are not sure whether you have entendu labeled correctly. It is saucy if you know what to listen for, it is clean as a whistle if you do not, which most people still do not — and I know that because Donald Trump is still playing “YMCA” at his rallies — and that is unequivocally a song about San Francisco bathhouse culture. You can’t tell me this isn’t documentary footage of Andy Cohen’s first day in New York.

The making of Discoland was troubled. The film was largely shot on location in Greenwich Village, on the same streets at the same time as a film the Greenwich Village people were not too psyched about: William Friedkin’s leather-scene gaysploitation film Cruising. The gay community often showed up to disrupt the filming, only to be told by Discoland’s director Nancy Walker that this was a good gay movie. (That’s right: Nancy Walker, Rhoda’s mom, the Bounty paper towels spokeswoman.) Near the end of production, that hideous Disco Demolition night happened at Comiskey Park, the trade magazines said nobody was buying disco anymore, so they changed the title to Can’t Stop The Music. 

Speaking of things that can’t stop, Steve Guttenberg is basically like this for the whole two hours of the movie. 

Do you remember back in the heyday of Sex and the City, how when the cast was interviewed, they would often say some variation of “New York City is almost the show’s fifth main character?” There are about seventeen main characters in Can’t Stop The Music, and you might say that cocaine is the first and loudest, and most important of them. Like the gayness of many of the film’s characters, it is never explicitly laid out that everyone involved with this film is zooted up out of their goddamn minds, but if you know, you know. You also know if you don’t know.

Roger Ebert was a shady lady about Can’t Stop The Music, as was his custom. “They advertised this as the entertainment explosion of the year, and it was a bomb alright,” he said on the special Worst of 1980 episode of his and Gene Siskel’s show Sneak Previews. “It’s a movie that couldn’t seem to start the music, a traffic jam of unrelated characters who crowd together and create general confusion.” And yes, he’s right, there’s a lot going on: Steve Guttenberg is trying to launch a singing group, Tammy Grimes is trying to get Valerie Perrine to back to her modeling career, there are six Village People and none of them have any character traits or inner lives, Paul Sand and Marilyn Sokol and June Freaking Havoc are there, and no two people I have mentioned so far are in the same movie. It’s a lot! 

“But wait,” you’re saying. “This sounds like you are describing a bad film.” And yes, to the degree that quality can objectively be determined, this is a mess of a movie. But what is good about it is what makes it important, and that is the pure joy with which it was made. Can’t Stop The Music is not just a movie about how the Village People came to be (which is good, because I just watched it, and if you asked me right now how the Village People came to be, I’d say, “They…met, or something”). It is, or at least it was intended to be, a movie about the Seventies becoming the Eighties. About the glorious new world that felt like it was right within reach. “These are the Eighties,” a couple of different characters say, with maximum sincerity. “You’re going to be doing a lot of things you’ve never done before in the Eighties.”

It is a real punch in the fucking gut to hear those words. In August 1980, a few weeks after the movie came out, Bronte Woodard died of a nameless illness that was beginning to afflict gay men. Ronald Reagan would be voted into office three months later, and wouldn’t mention AIDS until nearly five years after that. By 1995, 10 percent of the 1.6 million American men aged 25-44 who identified as gay were dead. A generation was literally decimated. In the Eighties, we did a lot of things we’d never done before. Jacques Morali died of AIDS in 1991.

This year, really by accident, I’ve stumbled onto some high-quality queer art: the campy, drag-fueled 1981 video for “Brand New Dance,” a thrilling pop single from San Francisco artist Tommy Spence. “I Could Not Believe It,” the teenage diaries of a Black gay teen in 1979 Simi Valley who would grow up to be Los Angeles art-punk legend Sean DeLear (who can also be seen in the fascinating punkumentary Desolation Center, on Amazon Video or the Night Flight app). The Keith Haring exhibit at The Broad. Hell, the early work of The B-52s. These allow us to imagine a world that could have been, to appreciate a queer perspective, to honor all we have lost by facing what lies ahead with pride and energy and empathy and humor. We owe our best to the generation ahead of us, and to the generations to follow. 

Is Can’t Stop The Music high-quality queer art? Maybe not. But like the works above, it is suffused with pure queer joy, which was revolutionary then and remains so now. And queer joy is going to go a long way toward saving us, if we let it. 

Ultimately, it’s a better bet than cocaine. 

Dave Holmes is an editor-at-large for Esquire.com, and host of the Earwolf podcast Homophilia, and his memoir Party of One is in stores now.

The post ‘Can’t Stop The Music’ Is A Notorious Flop, But It Overflows With Pure Camp Joy first appeared on We Got Bruce!.

Washington Blade
Queer history becomes ‘Visible’ on new Apple TV docuseries
By John Paul King
February 12, 2020

At a time when television is setting new records in terms of onscreen recognition for LGBTQ identities and issues, it might be easy – especially for the younger among us – to forget that it wasn’t always that way.

There was a time, not long ago, when one might never even know LGBTQ people existed based on what they saw on TV. Such figures as Liberace and Paul Lynde, who are now seen as representing a sort of queer proto-visibility with their flamboyant onscreen personas, passed in their day as straight to the majority of their viewing public, incredible as it may seem to us now; and Stonewall, now widely known as one of the most significant moments in the struggle for LGBTQ equality, was never mentioned in a single network news broadcast when it happened, a mere 50 years ago.

Partly because of the television industry’s suppression of all things queer during most of its history, most of LGBTQ history has long been invisible, preserved only in the memories of those who took part, and in greater danger of being lost forever with the passing of each succeeding generation.

Fortunately, embedded within the story of television itself is an entire narrative revealing the queer history that was taking place right before the eyes of millions of viewers, even as it was happening – and thanks to “Visible: Out on Television,” a new 5-part mini-docuseries debuting this weekend on Apple TV+, it’s a history that is now being told, out, proud and queer.

Created by Emmy-nomiinated filmmakers Ryan White and Jessica Hargrave, the series investigates the importance of television as an intimate medium that has shaped the American conscience – and illuminates how the LGBTQ movement has shaped television. It combines archival footage, interviews with key players from the movement and the screen, and narrations by community icons Janet Mock, Margaret Cho, Asia Kate Dillon, Neil Patrick Harris and Lena Waithe, to explore themes such as invisibility, homophobia, the evolution of the LGBTQ character, and coming out in the television industry.

Each hour long episode focuses on an era in the timeline of television history, paralleling the evolution of queer representation in the medium with the cultural history that was occurring around it.

*DISCLAIMER: SPOILERS BELOW

The first installment, titled “The Dark Ages,” gives us a chilling look at an era that surely exemplifies what the slogan “Make America Great Again” was meant to evoke in the minds of a nostalgic older generation – at least, those among them that had been privileged enough to ignore its inequality and injustices. We are reminded that the first mention of the word “homosexual” came in the televised Army-McCarthy hearings of 1954, during discussions about the security risks posed by LGBTQ government employees whose “deviant” lifestyle presumptively made them vulnerable to manipulation by Communist agents; that during the 1960s, the news media, including respected CBS anchor Mike Wallace, hosted “experts” of the day who propounded the belief that homosexuality was a curable psychological disorder; and that Lance Loud, the first openly homosexual person to appear on television when he was part of “An American Family,” the docuseries that followed his household for thirteen weeks in 1973, was demonized and vilified by a press that called him “leechlike” and described him as “an evil flower.” In each case, it’s impossible to ignore the echoes of similar homophobic rhetoric that has resurged during the Trump era.

Yet in the same hour, we are also shown the signs of hope that blossomed in the midst of all this darkness, through the gradual foothold that was made by an LGBTQ presence on television, from the non-stereotypical gender presentation of coded characters like Sheila Kuehl’s Zelda on “The Many Adventures of Dobie Gillis” and Lynde’s Uncle Arthur on “Bewitched,” to the groundbreaking depictions of openly queer people on Norman Lear’s “All in the Family.” The episode ends with the glimmer of an even brighter future that appeared with the emergence of openly gay Harvey Milk as a substantial political figure.

That we know all too well how his story ends gives us all the more reason to want to binge watch straight through each of these five excellent episodes.

With insight and commentary from familiar contemporary figures (such as Wanda Sykes and Wilson Cruz, both of whom are also executive producers, along with director White), historic queer icons (like Ellen DeGeneres and Bruce Vilanch), and lesser-known voices from the early days of LGBTQ activism, “Visible” presents a thoughtful, emotionally resonant, clearly focused, and deeply informative look at queer history as it fought its way into mainstream consciousness through a powerful medium that still connects us all. It’s a must-see event for LGBTQ audiences who thirst for knowledge about the community’s past, yes – but also for anyone who wants to gain an understanding of how representation on TV works to shape the culture surrounding it, as well as why it matters.

The show drops on Apple TV+ on Friday, February 14. You can watch the trailer below.

The post Queer history becomes ‘Visible’ on new Apple TV docuseries first appeared on We Got Bruce!.