Let’s start there, with Paul Lynde, caustic and grimacing, surrounded by other 1970s-era celebrities and yet unmistakably a party of one, parrying sneery, baiting questions on the game show “Hollywood Squares” in a manner that minced right up to the edge (“Paul, why do Hells Angels wear leather?” “Because chiffon wrinkles too easily”) and, on rare occasions, over it (“Paul, you’re the world’s most popular fruit. (The podcast format, in which gay obsessions can be discussed and deconstructed at length, or in which the hetero world can be filtered through gay sensibilities, as it is on Sam Taggart and George Civeris’s “ StraightioLab,” has become fertile turf for emerging comedy stars.)Ī LONG TIME ago in a galaxy far, far away, there was the center square. “There is a receptiveness to queer humor and queer subjects in comedy that wasn’t there before,” says Rogers, 32, who first got to know Yang when they were New York University students and has co-hosted the entertainment-focused podcast “ Las Culturistas” with him since 2016. The performers interviewed for this story are all between 27 and 35 - young enough to be rewriting most of the longstanding rules but old enough to know that they’re at the center of something that didn’t really exist as recently as five years ago. It’s all changed so fast that at one point, while he’s discussing a sketch about corporate sponsorship of gay pride parades that he did with Lil Nas X last May, Yang, 31, catches himself and says, laughing, “Why am I talking about this in the past tense, like it’s another era?” It can sometimes feel that way.
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None of these performers occupy a niche because they don’t have to. Yang is the “S.N.L.” superstar and the guy on your favorite podcast and Awkwafina’s frenemy cousin on “ Nora From Queens.” And so on.
#NEW YORK TIMES AM I GAY OR STRAIGHT CRACKED#
Young-White is the guy who cracked up Jimmy Fallon and the very young (now former) “ Daily Show With Trevor Noah” correspondent and the guy who keeps getting suspended from Twitter (once, memorably, for pretending his was the official account of the F.B.I.). It’s a lot of names, and one reason they can’t be subdivided into smaller groups is that most of them shuttle seamlessly from one medium to the next. Benny Drama), Drew Tarver, Julio Torres, Bowen Yang and Jaboukie Young-White. The list of guys populating this world is a long one - besides Perkins, a partial rundown would include Joel Kim Booster, John Early, Alex English, Michael Henry, Jay Jurden, Ryan O’Connell, Larry Owens, Matt Rogers, Benito Skinner (a.k.a.
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A fad is identified, a box is checked, a responsibility is fulfilled and the circus moves on. But the problem with a moment is that it passes a moment can become nothing more than an occasion for audiences to raise their eyebrows and notice something before the next moment, when a different breakthrough catches their attention.
#NEW YORK TIMES AM I GAY OR STRAIGHT TV#
Having a moment, in the late ’90s and early aughts, meant that, suddenly, a gay performer or character would appear in a space that had been previously dominated by straight people - say, at the center of a TV sitcom like “ Will & Grace” or a stand-up special, or as the voice of reason to the leading lady in a romantic comedy like “My Best Friend’s Wedding” - and everyone could applaud and say, “We solved it! Representation at last!” It was a pop-cultural phenomenon that started to surface when Perkins, who’s 31, and other gay comedians of his generation were in middle school. I don’t think it’s fun to be ‘the first.’”Įven as a kid, Perkins could vaguely perceive that gay entertainers were, in certain other realms of pop culture, “having a moment.” It didn’t feel great. “I remember Googling gay comics and nothing coming up, especially gay Black comics,” says Perkins, whose blazingly funny stand-up work ranges from sweet to goofy to raunchy. WHEN DEWAYNE PERKINS was a teenager growing up on the South Side of Chicago, he would occasionally turn to Google in search of, if not himself, somebody who at least came close.