HBO actor and comedian Tim Bagley never got to audition for Saturday Night Live because he was out as a gay man, he claimed on Tuesday.
Bagley said “people knew” SNL “would not hire openly gay people” during his appearance on SiriusXM’s The Julia Cunningham Show. The 67-year-old character actor, who has appeared in recent years on Somebody Somewhere, And Just Like That and Hacks joined The Groundlings in 1989. That group launched the careers of several SNL stars including Jon Lovitz, Will Ferrell, Maya Rudolph, and many others.
But Bagley couldn’t get as much as an audition, he said, because “I was out as a gay man.”
Bagley alleged that SNL boss Lorne Michaels and influential manager Bernie Brillstein “had kind of a thing where they did not hire gay people, so I never got to audition.”
“All my friends did, and I was always kind of a standout at The Groundlings, but I was out,” he continued. “That’s the problem with being out back then was there were no guardrails. I mean, if somebody didn’t want to have you on their show,” they didn’t have to, he explained. “They weren’t trying to seek out, you know, LGBTQ people back then.”
Bagley, who has made dozens of guest appearances on shows like Seinfeld, Curb Your Enthusiasm and Will & Grace over the past 30 years, is not the first to accuse SNL and Lorne Michaels of not wanting to hire openly gay people during the height of the show’s popularity.
Comedian James Adomian told the Daily Beast in 2018 that he thinks being openly gay kept him from getting a spot on the cast, though he did get to audition several times in the early 2000s. “It certainly didn’t help that I was openly gay,” Adomian said. “I think that Lorne Michaels is afraid of America’s dads.”
Sources told the Daily Beast then that Adomian just wasn’t a fit for the show and a person close to the show similarly disputes Bagley’s accusations now. A representative for Lorne Michaels did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Bagley does acknowledge that there has been some progress towards LGBTQ+ representation on SNL.
“Bowen Yang is there now, and it’s taken quite a long time… he was the actual first conscious, you know, gay person hired,” he said. “It’s taken a long time, but the SNL machine has kind of changed or shifted, and I know that there are people that have come out since.”
In fact, SNL’s first openly gay cast member was Terry Sweeney, who Michaels hired when he returned as executive producer to the show after a five-year hiatus in 1985. Sweeney was fired along with most of that year’s cast at the end of the show’s 11th season.
More recently, LGBTQ+ cast members have included Punkie Johnson, who has spoken about not feeling like she “fit” at the show, and the show’s first nonbinary performer Molly Kearney, who was let go ahead of the show’s 50th season.
And yet, despite the progress, Bagley claimed that Michaels was still adjusting to the idea of having a gay cast member when Kate McKinnon first openly acknowledged her sexuality to Rolling Stone in 2016.
“Kate McKinnon, she was hired and everything, and she was so brilliant, but they did an article in Rolling Stone where she was like, ‘I’m gay,’” Bagley recalled. According to him, Michaels “didn’t know that, and he confronted her and she said, ‘I didn’t think that it would matter.’”
