Lea DeLaria

Look, we at Media Magpies are not going to claim that the history of queer people on television began in the ‘90s. If we did, we would fully expect to get Billy Crystal to write us a strongly-worded letter about Soap, if nothing else, and he wasn’t even actually queer, just playing a queer character. Queer history on television openly started in the ‘70s, and queer-coded history goes back even further. But the ‘90s were the era where openly queer characters were beginning to be played by openly queer actors, although it would take longer for trans people.

Lea DeLaria was one of the people who launched that movement. Now, you younguns may not remember The Arsenio Hall Show, but it was an interesting part of ‘90s pop culture that we’ll get around to exploring in more detail at some point. Lea DeLaria appeared on it as the first openly gay comic to appear on one of the nighttime talk shows. Doubtless there had been closeted ones before; doubtless there had been ones who would later come out. But DeLaria started her set by informing the audience that she was “a big dyke,” a term she said she’d been told not to use but one that Hall said he didn’t care if she used if it’s how she identifies.

She didn’t hit all of the big ‘90s iconic shows, but she was at Carol and Susan’s wedding on Friends and she did do Will & Grace. Basically, you wanted a woman of her type, and she was there, being of her type. She did Further Tales of the City, along with two of the Kids in the Hall and Joel Grey. She played Eddie and Dr. Scott in the 2000 revival of The Rocky Horror Show. She hosted Out There, the first-ever LGBTQ+ stand-up special on Comedy Central. She was off-Broadway in The Most Fabulous Story Ever Told, a gay retelling of the actual Bible.

And of course, there’s the more straight-coded shows. Matlock, for example; I don’t imagine her character was explicitly queer on Matlock. Possible but unlikely on Saved by the Bell: The New Class. Her character on One Life to Live is queer—my Gods, the plot summary I had to read to figure that out—and she played her character’s time-traveled psychic counterpart from 1968 (soaps, man) who is male, but One Life to Live is not a show that’s specifically aiming for brownie points in that way. Stunt casting, possibly, and of course queer characters are basically nothing compared to time-traveled psychic counterpart.

So yeah. After all that, Orange Is the New Black seems almost unimportant. Her albums, which I’d love to listen to at some point, because we’re not just talking her stand-up but also a few of music. And apparently she started performing “the U-haul joke” in 1989, meaning she’s believed to have actually originated the joke about how what lesbians bring on a second date is a U-haul. It doesn’t get more iconic in the community than that.