Tim Bagley claims he couldn’t audition for ‘SNL’ because ‘they wouldn’t hire openly gay people’

Tim Bagley says any dream of his to join the Saturday Night Live cast was crushed early on.

During a recent appearance on SiriusXM’s The Julia Cunningham Show, the 67-year-old comedic actor claimed that despite having a promising start as part of the Groundlings — an improvisational and sketch comedy troupe that launched the careers of many SNL stars — in 1989, he couldn’t audition for the sketch comedy series because he was out as a gay man.

“I was out as a gay man and people knew that they would not hire openly gay people,” Bagley alleged about SNL boss Lorne Michaels and late manager Bernie Brillstein.

“[They] had kind of a thing where they did not hire gay people, so I never got to audition,” the Somebody Somewhere star continued. “All my friends did, and I was always kind of a standout at the Groundlings, but I was out. That [was] 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 just [didn’t have to]. They weren’t trying to seek out LGBTQ people back then.”

As it happens, Bagley is not the first person to accuse SNL and Michaels of having issues with hiring openly queer people during the peak 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.”

Still, Bagley — who has proven his comedic chops with guest appearances on shows like Will & Grace, Seinfeld, and Curb Your Enthusiasm — noted that SNL has boasted its LGBTQ+ representation over the years, especially with cast members such as Kate McKinnon and Bowen Yang becoming prominent figures on the show.

“It’s taken quite a long time… he was the actual first conscious, you know, gay person hired,” Bagley claimed. “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.”

SNL’s first openly gay cast member was actually Terry Sweeney, who Michaels brought onto the season 11 cast when he returned as executive producer to the show after a five-year hiatus in 1985.

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McKinnon, who had joined the cast after starring on the Logo sketch comedy series The Big Gay Sketch Show, became the first openly lesbian cast member in the history of the show when she joined in 2012.

John Milhiser joined the cast as an openly gay man in 2013, followed by more LGBTQ+ cast members such as Yang, Punkie Johnson, and the show’s first nonbinary performer Molly Kearney. Other LGBTQ+ cast members who were not out professionally during their time on SNL include Denny Dillon, Danitra Vance, and Sasheer Zamata.

Yang started at SNL as a writer in 2018 before being promoted to cast member the next year for season 45, becoming the show’s first Chinese American cast member and one of only a few out gay stars in the show’s history.

He’s made a name for himself at the legendary sketch show with impressions of JD Vance and Fran Lebowitz, and out-of-the-box “Weekend Update” characters like the Iceberg That Sank the Titanic and viral baby pygmy hippopotamus Moo Deng. Not to mention, Yang has also scored four Emmy nominations during his time on SNL, including making history in 2021 as the first featured player to be nominated.

He’s also the lead of a fan-favorite sketch from last year in which the actor “reveals” himself to be a toxic straight man that the night’s host fall in love with. The OG sketch featured Sydney Sweeney and the sequel, titled “Bowen’s Still Straight,” included Scarlett Johansson.

Yang can next be seen in Wicked: For Good, coming to theaters later this year.