Dave Wilson | Pinklisting / 1985 [TV-SNL sketch]

one of your own kind

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jim Downey, Al Franken, Tom Davis, and Don Novello and others (screenwriters), Dave Wilson (director), Pinklisting / 1985 [6.27 minutes] [TV-SNL sketch]

 

I suppose we have to give credit to Saturday Night Live for taking on such a taboo subject in 1985. The episode, comparing the current hysteria about AIDS and the gay spread of the disease with McCarthyism, mocks those who in 1985 still kept their distance from gay men for fear of infestation, thus forcing many gay men back into the closet.

     Actually, some of the incidents portrayed in the sketch were based on real events. As Matthew Rodriguez, writing in the online magazine The Body noted, “The sketch aired the fall after Rock Hudson died, after the tabloids ran several stories claiming his Dynasty co-star Linda Evans got AIDS from kissing the star.” There was still the notion among many in society that AIDS might be spread even by breathing in the same air, even though by this year of this work, most of the medical establishment had long corrected their original fears and confusions.

    In this version of that hysteria, a famous actress Melinda Zoomont (played by Madonna) is distressed since she thought they had cut the sex scene. The director, Art (Randy Quaid) explains that since in this soap opera she’s going to have male star Clint’s baby and he kidnaps her in later episodes, they had to reintroduce the scene where they loll naked in a hot tub. Yet the actress is furious since, proclaiming in her best Bette Davis imitation, “…I told you, I don’t do love scenes with actors I don’t know,” meaning she won’t even associate with who are not verifiably proven to be heterosexual and, so she was misinformed, therefore safe from acquiring the HIV and AIDS.

     At that very moment, Clint pulls up in his Harley-Davidson motorcycle. With a flat-top blonde hairdo, and walking as close to John Wayne as he is able, looking more like a robot than a man cowboy who just wet his pants, Terry Sweeney—the only openly LGBT actor on SNL until Kate McKinnon and John Milhiser, both of whom joined the cast in 2013, and Bowen Yang, who joined the cast in 2018—quickly convinces Melinda of his heterosexuality by responding to the director’s introduction by saying, “You don’t have to introduce me to television’s sexiest star.”

     However, during his makeup session with Joan Cusack, he reads is own favorite tabloid. He quickly scans the sports page announcing that the Raiders “clutched,” before he turns the paper around to read the headline: JUDY GARLAND BIO: LISA UNWANTED, upon which he immediately breaks down in a supposedly gay campy like outburst, putting his hands to head and gasping, “Oh my god, when are they going to leave that poor woman alone?” When he regains his composure again, it’s all sports that he pretends to talk about.

     The director now explains the scene: they share a glass of wine, gaze into each other’s eyes, you kiss passionately, you take off your clothes and you get into the hot tub. He demands that the sound director turns on the sound for the hot tub. “That’s a hundred and eight degrees in there, so you two should be quite comfy.

      Art suddenly calls in the censor, since the director a question about the kissing scene.

     Jon Lovitz, in his first SNL appearance, does various versions of tongue movement to represent kissing that is most definitely off limits.

       The actors begin their scene, but suddenly a pulley falls loose and a rock comes crashing into the small child’s pool next to them, all setting Lionel and his character Clint into a screeching hysteria fit, which immediately leads Melinda to declare: “Wait a moment. You’re gay!”

        Clint answers, “Yes, I’m gay.” Standing, he continues, “And now you all know. Art, you can fire me if you like, but I can’t go on living a lie.”

        The director responds: “Clint, I admire your guts, and I think you should know I’m gay too.”

        Suddenly, somewhat like the famous scene in the film Spartacus, where all his soldiers claim to be the leader, so does the entire crew (which includes later better-known figures such as Robert Downey, Jr. and Anthony Michael Hall) and the makeup artist also admit they’re gay.

         Clint summarizes: “Living out this little charade, you know, was not a matter of choice, but a matter of survival. [Looking hard at Melinda] But then I supposed you wouldn’t know anything about that.”

         Melinda stands, claiming she does understand them, admitting that she’s an “intravenous drug dealer.”

         Art wonders if they can now shoot the scene, but Clint storms off the set, insisting that there’s no way that he will work with an “intravenous drug dealer.”*

         Critic Rodriguez found the sketch to be disarmingly edgy and progressive.” While IndieWrite found it to be “something even more rare: the mainstream media addressing AIDS in 1985 in a borderline sensitive manner.”

          But frankly, except for a couple of moments, I did not find it amusing, and found Madonna’s acting to be something near to atrocious. Furthermore, all the gay stereotypes are here: the effeminate high voiced hysteria, the closeted queen, and the final self-righteous coming-out. Yes, the show should be lauded for taking on the subject; but they could have done so much better if they only had known a little more about the queer world and those who inhabit it. Rock Hudson didn’t have to mime a straight man; that’s what as a gay man he looked like, a gentle speaking baritone with a chiseled hunk’s body that drew in nearly every woman who came near him, from the seasoned (even if she claimed to be totally naïve) Elaine Stritch to my own mother. Even Howard, when I told him early in our relationship that Hudson was gay, refused to believe it.

        Although this sketch, moreover, is focused on those who would shun and isolate primarily gay men, it says nothing about all those gays and others who were actually suffering from HIV or full AIDS, and spews none its ire at those many parents and friends who had left their sons and daughters to die alone, without love. Let alone does it talk about the real political ramifications of a US President and his government appointees who refused to fund sufficient money for AIDS research, many who were only too happy to ignore and punish the gay community which most suffered the devastation of the disease.

     By 1985 the scourge and its effect on the gay the community was well known, yet this sketch makes no reference to it. Although someone like Jonathan Swift might have put irony to good use to create a comic statement; however, by 1985 irony as a literary tool unrecognizable my many people in the US, and the comic talents of Downey, Franken, and others were not up to doing much else than poking fun at those who misunderstood that the disease was spread not by sharing a hot tube or kissing, but in making love, in sex itself—a subject still off the radar in US TV offerings. In a sense, we have never recovered from the religious right’s views of the 1950s with which this reminds us in its first frames.

     Finally, I’d like to ask, are we supposed to feel that there is some equivalency between wanting to keep a distance from gay men and desiring to have nothing to do with an intravenous drug dealer? Is Clint’s refusal to work with Melinda Zoomont connected, in some manner, with her refusal to have anything to do with gay men? I see no corollary, and find the joke almost offensive, particularly given the not-so-distant events I mention in the footnote below.

 

*Audiences of 1985 would also be aware of the 1981 killings of the so-called Wonderland gang, who dealt in cocaine and heroin, and were shot to death in their Laurel Canyon, Los Angeles home for their robberies of other drug dealers.

 

Los Angeles, July 11, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (July 2025).