Author
Well, it remains to be seen if my time is well-spent on an SNL Homowatch or 
not, but hallelujah, the season is over. If anything egregiously gay-obsessed comes up in the summer reruns, I’ll hork up a blog item about it. If not, I’ll think about reviving the SNLHW (hey, if everybody can abbreviate everything nowadays, so can I) in the fall.
This week was pretty light on the gay jokes …
Air date: May 15, 2010
Host: Alec Baldwin
Musical guest: Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers
[Author’s Note: This is my “SNL Homowatch,” where I count and try to make sense of Saturday Night Live‘s endless obsession with making jokes about gay people and gay sex, without letting gay writers or gay performers have a go at the joke themselves. It’s a cycle I call enlightened homophobia — jokes about gays, frequently made at the expense of gays, and made by people who would never, ever want to appear homophobic. You can read a long explanation here and scroll back for other installments I’ve written since March 2010.]
Air date: May 8, 2010
This is SNL Homowatch, where I track the number of haha-that’s-GAY jokes that the writers at Saturday Night Live deliver each week on their forlorn (for Lorne? haha) march toward 1 a.m.
I laid (haha x 2) my mission statement out for this project in last week’s inaugural edition, including a “lighten up, Hank, why don’tcha!” disclaimer. So you might want to go back and read that before you give me a freshly made batch of lighten up, dude. That said, thanks to all of last week’s commenters and the linky-linkersons who pointed new readers here.
For years I’ve been vaguely (in a teensy way) bothered by Saturday Night Live’s complete dependence on sketches that make fun of being gay. I don’t know exactly why. I’ve written a little about this before — “enlightened homophobia,” which is probably socially harmless (as is most televsion, really) but nevertheless irritates me. In the 1990s, after her disastrously unproductive season on SNL, Janeane Garofalo was quite free with her gripes about the SNL culture and one of them was that the male writers were obsessed with gay and anal sex jokes. In a 1995 interview with New York magazine she said: