This January, one of the co-hosts of the podcast Gayest Episode Ever, uploaded a supercut to YouTube of every LGBTQ+ joke from the entire run of The Simpsons, so far. It is called ‘Smithers and Beyond.’ The podcast is hosted by Drew Mackie, who works as a journalist, and Glen Lakin, who is a screenwriter. Each episode of their podcast discusses what they have determined to be the ‘gayest episode’ of any given television show.
The supercut is two hours long, and there is a lot of information to engage with. It is fairly clear to see how the treatment of the LGBTQ+ community improves as the years go on. In the span of thirty years, previously homophobic characters become more accepting, some even bi-curious. The majority of the gay jokes in the first ten to fifteen years that The Simpsons was on the air do not age particularly well. A gay person watching them might be made to feel like a bit of a creep, as their only consistent representation on The Simpsons was Waylon Smithers. Smithers’ main character trait is his inexplicable obsession with Mr. Burns, and he is certainly not the most dynamic character on the television show, especially not in the early seasons.
The Gayest Episode Ever podcast discusses what this supercut really means in greater depth. They have three different episodes on The Simpsons, reasonably so, as the show has been on so long that its episode count is around the length of three long-running television shows (Seinfeld, 30 Rock, and How I Met Your Mother combined, is not as long as The Simpsons). They focus on “Homer’s Phobia”, the fifteenth episode of season eight, “Three Gays of the Condo”, the seventeenth episode of season fourteen, and “Livin’ La Pura Vida”, the seventh episode of season thirty-one.
“Homer’s Phobia” came out in 1997, and Mackie and Lakin discuss how this was an important episode of The Simpsons with regards to the LGBTQ+ community. The majority of gay representation on the show was based in jokes and stereotypes, like Smithers. However, in this episode there is a dynamic gay character, John, voiced by John Waters. The plot of this episode follows the family as they meet and befriend John. Homer particularly seems to enjoy his company, until he discovers that John is gay. He stops interacting with John, but Marge and the kids continue to, until Homer starts to think that John is turning Bart gay. At which point, Homer decides he has to do whatever he can to turn Bart straight again, despite how unfounded the idea that a person’s sexuality can be ‘switched’ is. Homer and Bart end up going on a hunting trip that results in them nearly being killed by reindeer, but luckily John comes and saves the day.
This episode functions almost as an apology for Smithers. Where he is a stereotypical flat character whose only real attribute is being gay, John is a well-rounded character who shows the audience that not every gay person is like Smithers. In thirty years, The Simpsons are yet to do something similar with Apu, who for a long time was not just the only South Asian character on the show, but really the only South Asian character on mainstream western television.
In this episode, Homer is almost comically homophobic, saying things like “oh my god, I danced with a gay”, and “now we can never say only straight people have been in this house”… but in the words of Mackie and Lakin, for Homer to go on this journey might be more valuable than not. If a viewer was perhaps somewhat homophobic, seeing Homer go through a change may have been a better influence than it would be to see characters who were already accepting of people of different sexualities and sexual identities. This is one of the episodes of The Simpsons to have won an Emmy.
The next episode of The Simpsons featured on Gayest Episode Ever was “Three Gays of the Condo”, released in 2003. The hosts of the podcast do not like this episode as much as they did “Homer’s Phobia”. Mackie and Lakin discuss how this episode could have been much better than it was but is really just another stereotypical representation of gay people. In 2003, gay marriage had not yet been legalized, and the plot of this episode revolves around Marge and Homer having a fight so serious that Homer moves out, and in with two gay men. There aren’t any genuine interactions between really any of the characters in this episode. The only reason that Homer and Marge get back together is because one of the gay men, Grady, kisses Homer, and subsequently Homer wants nothing to do with him. This kiss seems to occur for essentially no reason on Grady’s part.
Lakin discusses how this could have been a much more engaging episode if it interacted with the idea of Homer getting a glimpse into the single, bachelor lifestyle, while Grady got to have a glimpse into the married with children lifestyle. Both are lifestyles that neither character felt like they could have, and from this, they might have had genuine and legitimate interactions. This may have also done a bit to justify why Grady kisses Homer, other than just relying on the stereotype that gay men are sexually attracted to all other men. Interestingly, this episode also won an Emmy, beating out Futurama’s ‘Jurassic Bark’.
“Three Gays of the Condo” does, of course, offer representation, but is the representation worthwhile when it just furthers various stereotypes? This idea relates to the most recent episode of The Simpsons that Gayest Episode Ever has covered, “Livin’ La Pura Vida”, which came out in 2019. In this episode, Marge’s sister Patty and her girlfriend come along on a family vacation with the Simpsons and some of the other families who live in Springfield. They are gay, but the fact that they are is not the focus of the plot of the episode, or the main conflict, and the story is not in any way tied to the fact that they are gay. They just happen to be gay people, and they go about their lives like anyone else. This is a much more valuable portrayal of gay individuals than what is present in “Three Gays of the Condo”.
Also in this episode of the podcast, Mackie discusses how in making the supercut, he had to include a trigger warning. One of the jokes features Lenny stating that he is a trans person. This results in Bart electrocuting him and Lenny collapses. At this point, Chief Wiggum shows up and shoots Lenny nearly half a dozen times while he’s lying on the ground. The joke is apparently that Lenny deserved to die because he was trans. This is possibly the worst joke in the supercut, especially considering the number of trans people who are murdered in the real world, also for no reason. In light of how Disney has now put disclaimers on some of their old and racist content available on Disney Plus, one might wonder if something similar will be done with this.
There are early episodes of The Simpsons that involve Homer trying to turn Bart straight, and recent ones have Homer voluntarily dressing up in drag. The Simpsons has always been a reflection of western culture, and now that it has been on the air for so long, it clear to see how the culture has changed in the last thirty years. Although the show has become more accepting of gay individuals, it seems there is still a lot that could be done on the show with regards to the trans community.
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