The best (& worst) LGBTQ+ sketches in 'Saturday Night Live' history

Fifty years of 'live from New York, it's Saturday night!'

The sketch comedy show has been on the air for 50 years on NBC and still airs on the network, is now also extended to the Peacock streaming service for its catalog of past seasons and the live-streaming of new episodes.

The first-ever episode of Saturday Night Live premiered on Oct. 11, 1975 with a cast of Dan Aykroyd, John Belushi, Gilda Radner, Chevy Chase, George Coe, Jane Curtin, Garrett Morris, Laraine Newman, and Michael O'Donoghue lined up that first season.

Created by Lorne Michaels — who is still running the comedy sketch variety show today — SNL has become a comedy institution in the U.S., launching many careers of some of the most successful comedians of our time. While Saturday Night Live and other mainstream comedy platforms haven't always been welcoming or kind to LGBTQ+ talent, the series has undeniably evolved over the years and even propelled a few queer comedians to great success.

So, to properly assess how far SNL has come and try to imagine its future, there's nothing better than taking a trip down memory lane and revisiting some of the very best (and some of the very worst) LGBTQ+ sketches in the show's history.

Scroll through to check out some of the best and worst LGBTQ+ sketches in Saturday Night Live history.

WORST: 'It's Pat'

"It's Pat" was a recurring sketch that ran between 1990 and 1994 on Saturday Night Live. The titular character, Pat O'Neill Riley (played by Julia Sweeney), was a gender-ambiguous person that Transparent creator Joey Soloway described as an "awful piece of anti-trans propaganda" in 2017 (via The Wrap).

Ahead of the 50th-anniversary special of Saturday Night Live, Sweeney addressed the criticism that Pat was a transphobic character. "Pat isn't trans or nonbinary," Sweeney said on The View when asked about the character. "Pat is a man or a woman, but you just don't know which Pat is… that is the joke. But I did understand the criticism, and I took it to heart, and I thought about it a lot."

WORST: 'Lyle, the Effeminate Heterosexual'

Dana Carvey played an effeminate character named Lyle who first appeared on SNL in November 1989 and was last seen in March 1992.

These sketches, named "Lyle, the effeminate heterosexual," were largely about this character trying as hard as he could to prove that he was straight (and not gay!) despite being "effeminate." For instance, in his final appearance, Lyle obsessed over a new Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue while interacting with a mailman.

WORST: 'Ambiguously Gay Duo'

The polarizing "Ambiguously Gay Duo" — an animated series originated by Robert Smigel and Dino Stamatopoulos in 1996 for The Dana Carvey Show — followed the premise: "What if characters like Wallace and Gromit were clearly having a sexual relationship?"

"I didn't know much about what would be acceptable to the ABC audience watching after Home Improvement," Smigel explained in a Reddit AMA from February 2016, adding: "What if we did two superheroes and everyone suspects they're gay? It was always more about the people obsessed with their sexuality than the heroes themselves."

It didn't take long for the "Ambiguously Gay Duo" segment to move from The Dana Carvey Show to Saturday Night Live. The two main characters, the titular duo of ambiguously gay superheroes, were Ace (voiced by Stephen Colbert) and Gary (voiced by Steve Carrell).

WORST: 'Mickey the Dyke'

Cheri Oteri's recurring Saturday Night Live character Mickey the Dyke appeared more than a handful of times from 1995 to 1997. Mickey was presented as a stereotypical butch lesbian who, similarly to "Lyle, the effeminate heterosexual," was afraid to come out.

Though recent films like Bottoms featured lesbian characters who were evidently queer but didn't necessarily identify themselves as such right away, that is a massive evolution from the way Mickey was presented on SNL.

WORST: 'Once Daily Estro-maxx'

This infamous SNL sketch, "Once Daily Estro-maxx," features former cast member Bill Hader in a fictional commercial self-identifying as a "busy guy and a pre-op transsexual in his third month of hormone treatment." The character advertises a new pill named Once Daily Estro-maxx, a "single daily pill that gives you all the sex-changing hormones you need."

Another character, played by Paul Brittain, shows up to say, "I'm the head of a major corporation. I can't spend all day increasing market share and turning my penis into a functional vagina." Fred Armisen and Bobby Moynihan play other characters seen in the commercial. Moreover, Kenan Thompson plays a TSA agent.

After the sketch first aired in January 2011, the Human Rights Campaign organization called on NBC to "apologize" for it, arguing that the sketch "blatantly mocked transgender people [and] minimized the challenges they face." The HRC also called out Saturday Night Live overall, accusing the series (at the time) of "relying on anti-transgender humor" and supporting many "false stereotypes that could be used as fuel for anti-transgender sentiment."