Gayest Episode Ever

The Great North Pushes Aunt Dirt Out of the Bunker — and Out of the Closet

“Bear of Beeftown Adventure”(April 7, 2024)

About a hundred episodes later, this podcast is pleased to report that The Great North got even gayer with the season four addition of Aunt Dirt, voiced by Jane Lynch. She’s been living in a bunker for sixty years and in this episode she learns about what it means to be ...

Mr. Belvedere Meets a Kid With AIDS

“Wesley’s Friend” (January 31, 1986)

Yes, it’s this episode. If you’ve seen any bit of it, it’s probably the one line delivered by the focus character, and while we will admit it’s a major groaner, it’s not representative of this whole episode. No, this is a Mr. Belvedere “very special ep...

Cartoons That Made Us Gay: Samurai Pizza Cats

“Gender Bender Butterflies!” (January 23, 1993)

We realize there’s a chance you may not have heard of this series, a redub of an anime that said hell to localization and just made something bonkers and weird. We are going to suggest that this might be a show you should have heard of, because on top o...

No regular episode this week

Hi all. I will level with you: I need to skip the regular episode this week. Not only have I got taxes, but I've also moved my base of operations to the kitchen table, where I have been besieged by my dog and also increasingly emboldened squirrels. My desk fell apart and the new desk is late in arriving and podcast editing is...

Titus Is the Real Star of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt

“Kimmy Goes to Her Happy Place!” (April 15, 2016)

Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt is a funny show. Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt is a flawed show. These two things can both be true simultaneously, and you can not like the plotline given to Jane Krakowski’s character, where it turns out she’s actually Lakota posing as whit...

What’s With All the Orphans in 80s Sitcoms?

If you grew up watching TV in the 80s, you may have noticed that there was a preponderance of… if not shows about orphans specifically then similar shows where the care of children was entrusted to people who weren’t their parents and maybe didn’t know how to raise kids. We’re talking Diff’rent Strokes, Rags to Rich...

My Two Dads Can’t Escape the Gayness of Its Title

“The Family in Question” (May 9, 1988)

It might seem like a joke today, that a show called My Two Dads is about two very hetero bachelors. And it should seem hokey, but don’t let that stop you from appreciating My Two Dads for being a smarter, funnier version of Full House. They debuted the same week, and unlike F...

Tablecakes Productions (2018-2024)

Hi all. Because I feel like people might skip through the mid-episode “ad” but also because I wanted to create a space to field questions, I’m writing this post to announce that as of Jan. 1, Gayest Episode Ever is no longer a TableCakes Podcast. Katherine and I came to see that we had different business aims, and so we...

Gilligan’s Island Does a Body Swap Episode 

“The Friendly Physician” (April 7, 1966)

Sure, Gilligan’s Island may have skewed family-friendly, but its love of genre parody meant that it did a body swap episode in which all of its female characters end up in male bodies. Horny! That’s enough to get our attention, even without the mad scientist bad guy with ...

Curb Your Enthusiasm Acknowledges That a Child Seems Gay

“Larry vs. Michael J. Fox” (September 11, 2011)

For better or worse, Larry David is a truth-teller, and the fictional version of him can help but to poke at social taboos. In this Curb Your Enthusiasm episode, Larry suspects that Michael J. Fox may be using Parkinson’s to get away with bad behavior while also insi...

Sailor Moon Meets the (Trans?) Sailor Starlights

“A Night Alone Together: Usagi in Danger” (August 17, 1996)

In our fourth look at Sailor Moon, we’re discussing the final season, which features the Sailor Stars. Canonically, they’re female superheroes who magically become boys in order to remain in disguise, and as a result some Sailor Moon fans consider them ...

The Grand Unified Theory of Why Frasier Seems Gay

“The Matchmaker” (October 4, 1994)

Whelp, it’s our 250th episode (sort of), and we’re celebrating by going back and reexamining our first-ever episode and, really, the reason this podcast exists in the first place: “The Matchmaker” from Frasier’s second season, which the show used to tell viewers definitiv...

It’s All Relative Was ABC’s Attempt at a Will & Grace

“Pilot” (October 1, 2003)

Even NBC tried to replicate the success of America’s first popular gay sitcom, and this week we’re joined once again by Steven Capsuto to discuss an attempt to bring same-sex parents to...

Bob’s Burgers Gives Marshmallow a New Voice

“Hope ’n’ Mic Night” (November 10, 2024)

Long-running animated sitcoms face a unique challenge in having to account for an episode that aired more than a decade previously, and this recent Bob’s Burgers proves that this can be accomplished thoughtfully and deliberately. “Hope ’n’ Mic Night” repeatedly ...

No episode this week

Whelp, it was going to be a tight squeeze anyway, because of Thanksgiving, but here's the deal: We had a cool thing planned for this week, and some of you might have been able to guess that something like this was coming. But as a result of shifting schedules, I was not able to get our special guest and Glen at the same time,...

It’s a Will & Grace Thanksgiving!

“Homo for the Holidays” (November 25, 1999)

What? An episode of Will & Grace that Drew actually likes? Kind of! This season two episode has Jack coming out to his mother over Thanksgiving dinner, and it’s basically the gayest Thanksgiving episode of any sitcom ever. And it’s a good piece of TV with some thou...

King of the Hill Accidentally Explores the Muscle Gainer Subculture

“Bill, Bulk and the Body Buddies” (May 20, 2007)

Can one illustration of a buff Bill Dauterive change your entire life in an instant? Well, for some people, yeah. This King of the Hill outing manages to stuff in a whole lot of imagery that will be familiar to a certain gay subculture. It’s inadvertent — and spec...

That Girl Meets the Cross-Dressing Cops

"A Muggy Day in Central Park" (November 14, 1968)

A contemporary of Bewitched, That Girl aimed for a more sophisticated audience than most sitcoms of its era. Not only does it look more cinematic, in a way that sitcoms generally wouldn't until the 2000s, but it's also more clearly a feminist show, where Marlo Thomas pla...

No new episode this week!

Hi, all. We decided to shuffle the schedule. Instead of taking next week off from posting new episodes, we're just skipping this week. It's all in an effort to give my brain something to occupy itself on Election Day, honestly. But next week, Nov. 6, you'll be getting your regular early GEE Patreon. Surprise: It's about THAT ...

Weirdest Episode Ever: Stevil Returns to Terrorize Family Matters

“Stevil II” (October 31, 1997)

There’s a joke to be made about a “scary” episode of a sitcom that was shambling zombie-stye around on CBS when it should have died a natural death on ABC. Nonetheless, here is the long-awaited(?) follow-up to Family Matters’ infamous Stevil episode, in which a murderous ventri...

Boy Meets World Does a Scream Parody

“And Then There Was Shaun” (February 27, 1998)

Somehow, Boy Meets World got ABC to say yes to a parody of Scream within the confines of the TGIF lineup. That’s wild enough, but it’s even more surprising what this “it was all a dream” episode lifts directly from the 1996 slasher. Joining us to discuss this un...

Bewitched Unleashes the Gay Scourge That Is Uncle Arthur

“The Joker Is a Card” (October 14, 1965)

Nearly two hundred episodes later, we’re finally returning to Bewitched to give Uncle Arthur a proper introduction. And while he’s a big part of Bewitched’s gay fandom, Paul Lynde brings a lot of baggage to the role that taught Americans to laugh at eccentric gay weirdo...

Karl Is The Simpsons' First Gay Friend

“Simpson and Delilah” (October 18, 1990)

Not only the earliest gay-themed Simpsons episode we’ve ever done, this one is also the first gay-themed episode The Simpsons ever did. And while its character, the enigmatic Karl, doesn’t get to be explicitly gay, we argue about whether having a gay-coded character might...

A Different World Meets a Potential Lesbian

Heads up: This is the regular Patreon episode that would have normally gone up on Wednesday, but we recorded later. You'll get another regular episode again next week!

“Wild Child” (February 4, 1988)

Officially, A Different World never did a gay episode and there were no queer students at Hillman. Nestled in t...

Weirdest Episode Ever: Perfect Strangers Does a Bizarre Adult Baby Fantasy

“Yes Sir, That’s My Baby” (February 8, 1992)

This may well be the worst thing we’ve ever watched for podcast-recording purposes. Whom do we have to both blame and thank for this bizarre episode of TV? Nina Matsumoto, Canadian sensation and accl...

The Beetlejuice Cartoon Is Weird, Gross and Very Queer

“Pranks for the Memories” (September 18, 1991) and “Beetlebones” (September 27, 1991)

Sure, we’ve all thought more about Beetlejuice in the last few weeks than we have in the last few decades, but we come to you today not to discuss the sequel film but the animated spinoff. Henry Giardina returns to explain wh...

It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia Stops Being Funny to Be Gay Instead

“Mac Finds His Pride” (November 7, 2018)

Twelve seasons in, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia stopped giving Mac the Smithers treatment and let him be gay, but it’s the season thirteen finale we’re talking about because it highlights Mac’s sexuality without making jokes, at least for the third act. The episo...

Cartoons That Made Us Gay: Dexter’s Laboratory

“Dial M for Monkey: Barbequor” (May 18, 1996) and “Sun, Surf and Science” (April 1, 1998)

More often than not, our Cartoons That Made Us Gay episode have us reading against the grain to find LGBTQ representation on a show that wasn’t intended to have anything. That’s not always the case, however, an the firs...