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Terry Sweeney refused to be closeted when hired as SNL cast member 30 years ago
Ronald Reagan was US president and had yet to utter the word AIDS when Terry Sweeney landed a coveted spot in the cast of NBC’s Saturday Night Live in 1985.
Sweeney, whose book Irritable Bowels and The People Who Give You Them will be released soon, was openly gay and made clear to the powers that be that he was not going to lie about it.
‘It was such a big deal. The cover of People magazine was “Rock Hudson Has AIDS.” There was an AIDS frenzy going on,’ he tells Out.com. ‘You didn’t even understand how you got it. If you had a gay waiter, you wondered if he washed his hands. There was a lot of misinformation and hysteria.’
Despite this, Sweeney was frank with SNL’s executive producer Lorne Michaels telling him: ‘I am openly gay and I‘m not going to go in the closet.
He said he wasn’t going to do the standard closeted actor thing of giving interviews about a made-up fiancé who died and he never got over it or saying he’s never had time to find the right person.
Sweeney had simply been too impacted by the AIDS epidemic that had killed so many of his friends. This was 11 years before breakthrough life-saving drugs were available.
‘I’d been to so many funerals and I wasn’t going to join in the shame by hiding in the closet,’ he says. ‘It would have been a disservice to my friends who had died, my friends who were sick. If you were gay, you were always going to memorials or to visit people in hospitals. Straight people were able to go merrily along their way, but this disease was picking off talented gay people one by one.
‘I thought, “I’m not gonna do that. I don’t care if this is my big break. At the end of my life, I want to live with myself.” I didn’t sign the morals clause in my contract. I just said no. I have to give Lorne and [NBC exec] Brandon Tartikoff credit for going along with that.’
During the 1985-86 season, Sweeney was best known for his portrayal of then-First Lady Nancy Reagan. He also did impersonations of Diana Ross, Patti LaBelle, Joan Collins, Brooke Shields’s mother Teri Shields, Joan Rivers, and Ted Kennedy.
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Greg Hernandez
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