“So Chandler looks gay, huh?”
Chandler Bing: Lovable loser or gay best friend? Long before he wound up with Monica — sorry,
spoiler alert — the show Friends considered making Chandler the most
prominent gay character in television history. Until they decided to straighten him out.
“Sometimes I wish I was a lesbian… Did I say that out loud?”
Hey friends, I’m Matt Baume, I make video about queer pop culture milestones. This
time we’re looking at just how close Friends came to making
Chandler gay — and whether that would have been a triumph … or a huge mess.
“Ooooh, Chandler’s home.”
And by the way, if you want to watch any of the shows I talk about in this video,
I’ve got streaming links in the description to where you can watch them all streaming. There’s
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And hit the like and subscribe bell so you know when I’ve got more videos like this.
So if you’re not familiar with Friends — how??? It was one of THE most popular TV shows in history,
running from the mid-90s to early 2000s. It’s about six twentysomething Gen-Xers living,
laughing, and loving in implausibly large Manhattan apartments.
And not only was Friends super popular and beloved and influential — it spawned an entire new genre
of hairstyle — it was also a lots less shy than other shows of the mid '90s about doing
gay episodes. It even has a very nice lesbian couple who appear throughout the show’s run;
and Friends featured one of the first same-sex weddings on primetime television,
with a cameo by Newt Gingrich’s lesbian sister
“Oh my God. Now I’ve seen everything!”
And an episode from season 1 featured this,
possibly my favorite line reading of the entire series:
“There’s father’s day, there’s mother’s day. There’s no
lesbian lover day." “Every day is lesbian lover day!”
All right. Put THAT on a t-shirt.
Also a quick queer sidenote here — the show was originally called
Friends Like Us, but NBC shortened the title because it was too close
to another show that premiered a few months earlier, These Friends of Mine,
which was later retitled … to Ellen. That’s just a little foreshadowing for later.
Anyway, here’s Friends star Matthew Perry, who played the character of
Chandler. He’s smart, he’s funny, he’s sarcastic, he’s unlucky in love, he’s well
dressed … by the standards of the time. Look, I swear, this is just how we all dressed back then.
He was also believed to be totally gay, both by characters on the show and by people in real life,
which would have been pretty groundbreaking — gay characters almost NEVER appeared on US network
sitcoms. When Chandler appeared, a lot of viewers were sure he’d be the one to change all that.
And to understand why, I want to show you what happens in one particular episode — Season 1,
episode 8, first aired in November of 1994.
It starts with one of Chandler’s coworkers trying to set him up on a date.
“Do you want a date Saturday?” “Yes please.” “Okay,
he’s cute. He’s funny.” “He’s a he?” “Well yeah.”
As soon as they realize what’s going on, they’re both mortified.
“Okay. I'm just gonna go flush myself down the toilet now. Okay. Bye bye.”
This scene by itself is pretty groundbreaking — remember,
at this point, sitcoms almost never had gay storylines. And for Friends to stick
its neck out and tackle this topic so early in its run — the eighth episode — is pretty bold.
But not TOO bold. Chandler goes to his friends and asks if THEY ever
thought he was gay — or at least, if they think he was SOMETHING. Just to
give you a sense of how uncomfortable TV was with gay characters at the time,
nobody in this scene ever utters the word “gay,” they just refer to it as “that” and “it.”
“Can you believe she actually thought that?” “Yeah.”
In fact, they ALL thought he was … that.
“Did, uh... any of the rest of you guys think that when you first met me?”
“I did.” “Yeah, I think so, yeah.”
Now Chandler’s even more upset. To quote Oscar Wilde, to be mistaken as gay by
Shelly in data entry may be regarded as a misfortune. But to be thought of as
“that” by your trendy Manhattan friends feels like a crisis.
Chandler’s got a real mystery on his hands. Why do so many characters think he’s “that”?
Well, to answer that, let’s take a peek behind the scenes at how Chandler got made.
Friends was created by Marta Kauffman and David Crane. Crane is gay,
and early in the development of the show,
he said that he “entertained the possibility that Chandler could be gay.” There’s even
little hints of that plan in the pilot episode — here’s one of the character’s very first lines:
“Sometimes I wish I was a lesbian.”
And Crane says that little vestiges of the gay plan are still in the pilot,
like this line at the end when Chandler’s describing a gayish dream:
“I’m in Las Vegas. I’m Liza Minnelli.”
Oh boy. How I wish I could’ve seen Matthew Perry’s Liza impression.
“Will a Fosse neck do it?"
But in the end, Chandler was made straight. Because, Crane says, they cast a straight
actor. If they’d gone with a gay actor, he said, they might’ve stuck to the gay plan.
But that wasn’t the end of it. Instead of having the character be gay,
they decided to just have everyone THINK he’s gay.
“WHAT IS IT?!” “Okay, I -- I d'know,
you — you just -- you have a quality.” “Yes. Absolutely. A quality.”
“Oh, oh, a quality, good, because I was worried you guys were gonna be vague about this.”
And “vague” is exactly what the show was going for when it came to Chandler’s “quality.”
According to one of the writers, Adam Chase, Marta Kauffman and David Crane ordered
everyone to lose the gay storylines … but keep the gay jokes. Their instructions were,
and I quote: “Write it gay and play it straight.”
And audiences noticed. Oh boy, did they notice.
There are SO MANY articles from around this time about how gay Chandler seems.
So many interviews where they have to very patiently explain, no, he’s not gay, really,
I promise. Entertainment Weekly had a whole column about him with the headline simply “Out?”
Even other members of the cast thought that Chandler was gay at first.
“When I read the script I thought Chandler, he’s the gay character. That’s the gay character.
And then Matthew — oh he’s not gay at all, he’s doing it,
but the character’s not gay, how is he doing that?”
Yes, how IS the heterosexual acting so convincingly heterosexual? Truly,
it’s a gift. Must be method acting.
As Friends got more popular, fascination with Chandler’s gay-but-not-gay sexuality
only increased, and there were some truly bizarre reactions. My favorite is a Saturday Night Live
skit from 1997, and bear with me on this one because the humor is … fascinatingly weird.
The skit is a parody of Friends, and the first weird detail is that Matthew Perry plays the
Joey character instead of playing the Chandler character. The second weird detail is that the
Chandler character is played by Colin Quinn, and the joke of the skit — and this is the
whole joke — is that Colin Quinn plays Chandler with an exaggerated femme affectation.
“Oh my stars, it’s a wonder I didn’t simply faint dead away. Heavens to Betsy.”
I honestly can’t tell if I should be offended by this delivery. I
THINK it’s supposed to be a mocking stereotype. But I kind of love it,
because that’s really NOT how anyone thinks gay people sound, so if he’s trying to do gay,
he’s just missing. Unless what he’s going for is celebrated gay icon Snagglepuss?
“Heavens to murgatroyd!”
Anyway, as the skit goes on, Matthew Perry pretends to get annoyed about
Colin Quinn’s impression. He think’s it’s TOO gay.
“I don’t play Chandler like some fff — big gay foppish guy.”
And this is where the skit truly blasts off to another planet. Colin Quinn says that he wasn’t
trying to act gay at all, and he was actually basing his impression off of character actors
like Edward Everett Horton. This is a reference that seems like it was written exclusively for me,
and is maybe the only funny joke in the entire sketch,
because Horton was an actor in the 1930s who made an entire career out of playing coded
gay characters. Here he is in “Trouble in Paradise” — he’s the one on the left.
“You know, I’m not the marrying type. I like to take my fun and leave it.”
“Nice suit.”
I talk about Horton more and his appearance in the movie The Gay Divorcee in my video about
Hollywood’s greatest sissies. There’s a link to that in the description. But
getting back to Saturday Night Live and Friends. The skit ends with Matthew Perry
deciding he WILL play Chandler as gay from now on, and here’s what THAT looks like.
“Joey, be a dear and fetch me my shawl, I’m rather chilly! Oooooh!”
And that is the end of the sketch! I think I like it, because it’s such a weird misunderstanding of
gay. I guess straight people thought gays … have a lot of shawls, like a babushka? Now,
I'll admit, I personally do get chilly a lot, but I honestly can’t explain that punchline,
let me know if it makes any sense to you. Was “be a dear and fetch me my shawl” some
kind of gay code in the ‘90s that I just don’t remember? And if so, can we please bring it back?
Anyway. This is just one of many occasions in which it was clear that
everyone noticed that there was something queer-ish about Chandler. Write it gay,
play it straight. Or, getting back to that season 1 episode of Friends, a certain quality:
And I think there’s a particular reason that so many viewers picked up on that. There were almost
no recurring queer characters on American network primetime sitcoms in the early 90s,
aside from the occasional guest. One of the only times network sitcoms ever
had queer characters was on Very Special Episodes, virtually never in the main cast.
And very special episodes could get exhausting. As we learned from six seasons of Glee.
But there as one place on TV that queer people DID appear regularly in the 90s,
and that was the news. The early '90s saw a huge surge in activism around marriage and
military service. The 1992 presidential election centered a ton of attention
on the HIV epidemic. There was a queer march on Washington in 1993.
Americans were starting to realize that gay people are everywhere. They could be your
coworkers. They could be your family. They could be your friends. They could even be ON Friends.
And Chandler fits pretty neatly into the way that queer characters were sometimes coded
on TV at the time. As one of his colleagues describes it:
“People think I’m gay."
"Yeah, you know, people ask me that about you too."
"Yeah, because I’m single, I’m thin, and I’m neat.”
That, plus his close friendship with Joey, and a general sassiness,
was all it took to draw attention to the character.
Plus there are a few other hints. In that season 1 episode,
where the coworker thinks he's gay, all of his friends tell him that he has a gay
“quality.” Chandler finds his coworker so he can make sure she knows he’s not gay.
But then she happens to mention that she was going to set him up with a nerdy guy named Lowell. And
Chandler’s insulted that she wasn’t planning to set him up with the office hottie, Brian.
“Well, I think Brian's a little out of your league.”
“...You don't think I could get a Brian? Because I could get a Brian. ...I'm really not.”
Write it gay, play it straight.
But if Chandler HAD been gay — written gay, played gay — would the show have been funnier? Would that
have let them tell better stories? Well, let's take a look at what happens next in this episode.
At this point, Chandler’s running out of people to tell that he’s heterosexual. He winds up at a
funeral, for sitcom-plot-related reasons, and he tries to hit on a woman. But he’s interrupted by
his friend Ross, who for other sitcom-plot reasons has taken painkillers, which has loosened him up.
“And listen, man, If you wanna be gay, be gay…”
“You were right.”
So that’s kind of funny, but what’s the punchline here? It’s essentially that Chandler's gay,
which was also the punchline in the first scene with his coworker, and the scene with his friends,
and the other scene with his coworker. That joke — it’s just
funny for someone to be was gay — seems to be the only gay joke that Friends wants to
tell. And not just on this one episode. A few seasons later, when Ross and Rachel are
interviewing nannies and one of them is a very sensitive man, here’s that joke again:
“Are you gay?” "Ross!"
And in another episode, when Chandler accidentally accepts
a job transfer to Oklahoma and tries to talk Monica into moving there with him:
“Chandler, I don’t even wanna see the musical Oklahoma!”
“Really? Oh What A Beautiful Morning?”
“Are you trying to tell me that we’re moving to Oklahoma, or that you’re gay?”
I could go on. They go to this well A LOT. And these jokes usually aren’t mean, they are funny,
but it’s always just a slight tweak of the same one — it would be funny if someone was gay.
And that’s it. It’s basically the same gag as that SNL skit.
I should also mention, there’s a multi-episode storyline with Chandler’s parent that’s
a bit more complex — both good and bad. That’s a topic for another video.
But those jokes also tend to be pretty one note — just, wouldn’t it be funny if someone was queer.
And what’s weird about this is that there are a lot of good jokes to tell about being queer.
Homosexuality can be funny! Queer comics were telling good jokes about being queer
at the same time that Friends was on. For example, here’s gay comic Bob Smith:
“Then my mother says to me Bob, you’re gay,
are you seeing a psychiatrist? I said no, I’m seeing a lieutenant in the Navy.”
And Scott Thompson on Kids in the Hall:
“Americans know as much about Canada as straight people do about gays.”
Natalie Wynn has a whole video about the connection between comedy and marginalized
groups called “The Darkness” — she does an amazing job of unpacking the
ways that comedians can use their experiences as marginalized people
to create funnier jokes. There’s a link in the description if you want to watch that.
But Friends even seems to go out of its way to avoid any other gay joke. In the
final scene, Chandler finally tracks down a homosexual to insist to that he’s straight.
“I dunno what Shelley told you about me, but, uh...
I'm not.” “I know. That's what I told her.”
He’s relieved that finally someone believes him, and then they have this exchange:
“You can tell?”
“Pretty much. Most of the time. We have a kind of... radar.”
Why would he say radar and not gaydar? It’s not a witty joke, but it’s right there. I
can’t imagine how they missed it. But what they DIDN’T miss was throwing in one more “he’s gay”
joke at the very end. After Chandler’s been reassured that he’s not on anyone’s gay radar,
he’s left by himself to mutter angrily that nobody tried to set him up with hot Brian.
“If I wanted to get a Brian, I could get a Brian. Hey, Brian.”
It’s a good gag! But the writers just keep telling the same joke, and missing others.
It would have been a huge milestone if the creators of Friends had gone ahead and made
one of the friends gay. It was such a popular show — if it could compel millions of Americans
to change their hairstyles, imagine what it might have done to public attitudes about homosexuality.
But ultimately, I just don’t know if they could have pulled it off.
If this is how you play gay ....
“I’m rather chilly. Ooooh!”
Maybe go ahead and stick to what you know.
This episode isn’t the last time that Friends goes to the
queer well — in fact they showed one of TV’s first lesbian weddings. That was a
huge huge deal. If there’s other episodes of Friends that you think I should cover,
let me know in the comments. Thanks to everyone who makes these videos with support on Patreon.
If you want to see even more clips that I dug up in researching this video,
head over to patreon.com/mattbaume to get access to some patron-exclusive posts. Subscribe to my
cute little newsletter over at mattbaume.com. And join me for some game livestreams and
queer chit chat every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday evening at twitch.tv/mattbaume.
Now if you’ll excuse me...
"I simply shall perish without a glass of buttermilk!"