In the past decade, gay men have become less defined and ghettoized by our sexuality than ever before, making terms like "fag hag" feel as retrograde as, well, "Will & Grace." It's turned what was once a special relationship between two cultural outsiders - gay men and the straight women who love them - into an eye-rolling cliché. While these videos are funny (really, really funny, actually), they exist in an uncomfortable space where you aren't sure if the character of the Sassy Gay Friend is a commentary on how our modern culture views homosexual men and their fag hags by contextualizing it in a historical setting, or if they were just banking on a gay stereotype to get laughs, like Jack from "Will and Grace." As Thomas Rogers wrote in his article " Ladies: I'm Not Your Gay Boyfriend," this secondary form of humor doesn't embrace gay culture as much as laugh at it: You took a roofie from a priest":Īnd here, talking the Giving Tree out of her "abusive" relationship with the boy:
Here he is, saving Juliet from killing herself by telling her, "I think you're 14 and you're an idiot. The Sassy Gay Friend is a character played by comedian Brian Gallivan who pops up in the lives of Shakespearean characters like Ophelia, Juliet and Lady MacBeth (and more recently, Nina from "Black Swan") to save them from their impending doom with his signature catchphrase, "What, what, what are you doing?" (His exit line is also the same in every episode, chiding the woman that she is "a stupid bitch.")
Do you have a gay best friend who gives you fashion advice and tells you when you're being a stupid bitch? Well, why not? Gay men have been the hottest accessories for straight women ever since "Will and Grace" made neutered homosexuals safe for prime time, and according to a Web series by Chicago's comedy troupe Second City, some of the most famous women in literature would have been better off with their own Sassy Gay Friend.