“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  

also a link to my Patreon if you’re enjoying  my videos and want to help me make some more.  

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.”

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!"