With Joel Kim Booster and Bob the Drag Queen packing stand-up shows, and Instagram-famous humorists like Danae Hays and Rob Anderson boasting hundreds of thousands of followers, the days of comedians choosing between a career and the closet are long gone. But as Page Hurwitz’s new documentary, “Outstanding: A Comedy Revolution,” reminds audiences, less than two decades ago, being out in the world of comedy was a revolutionary act.
Blending interview clips with archival footage and snippets from a special night of queer stand-up, “Outstanding” — which debuted Tuesday on Netflix after making its world premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival — brings together multiple generations of joke-tellers to trace how LGBTQ comedians spent the past century fighting for a place in the spotlight and how queer women, in particular, made it possible.
“We have a long legacy, and yet we haven’t necessarily been able to celebrate our heroes,” Margaret Cho, one of the comedy legends featured in the film, told NBC News. “We’re now finally elevating these voices and giving them the legacy treatment that they deserve.”
The documentary begins by looking at how the relatively liberal 1920s gave way to the more conservative post-war years and a comedy landscape that turned gay slurs into a favorite punchline.
As the film explains, despite the Stonewall riots in 1969 fueling the modern gay rights movement, the tendencies of the postwar years lingered into the ‘60s and ‘70s, an era that also saw the rise of evangelists like Anita Bryant and early anti-LGBTQ efforts. So comedians like Lily Tomlin, who appears in “Outstanding,” were forced to remain closeted on TV, while others — like Robin Tyler and Pat Harrison, of the lesbian, feminist comedy duo Harrison and Tyler — were shooed out of the public eye.
“We were political, so we didn’t last long on television,” Tyler, whom the documentary credits as the first person to perform openly gay comedy on TV, said in an interview. “People said, ‘Oh, you could have been big stars’ — you know, as long as you stay in the closet. But closets are vertical coffins.”
According to Tyler, she and Harrison, who had been romantic partners, lost the contracts for their ABC variety show in the ‘70s because they were seen as too risky for the network. While that meant losing out on a certain degree of commercial success, she said, it also allowed them to be even more outspoken on and off the stage.
“We did such radical things. We did things on sexism and racism, and we’d grab our crotches and go, ‘Hey, hey, hey!’ like guys. Even Ms. magazine said we were too radical, and we were going upset men,” Tyler said, referring to the feminist magazine founded by Gloria Steinem. “And, yes, we were. And, yes, we did.”
Eventually the duo split up, and Tyler went out on her own. But her time as one-half of Harrison and Tyler and the post-Stonewall years served as the foundation for what she describes as “Robin Tyler the activist.”
“We made women the subject rather than the object of humor. We just took all the jokes on women, and we did them on men. And we found out that men didn’t have a sense of humor,” she joked.
If Tyler showed how stand-up could further the gay rights movement, the comedians who followed her gave it an incisive edge.
As “Outstanding” details, speaking openly about sexuality took on new meaning for queer comics, and especially gay men, in the ‘80s and early ‘90s, particularly once the AIDS crisis became the subject of homophobic propaganda. But out of that came a transgressive, bawdy style that flew in the face of public opinion, Reagan-era policies and laws like “Don’t ask, don’t tell.” From “Kids in the Hall” co-creator Scott Thompson to Sandra Bernard and Cho, LGBTQ comedians started telling jokes that were both unapologetically sexual and queer.
“When I was a young comic, people were saying, ‘Don’t talk about sexuality; just be cute.’ But to me, that wasn’t appealing,” Cho said. “To talk about sexuality was an empowering way to feel beautiful, to feel desirable. It was a way to assure myself that the things that were said to me — that I was ugly and I was unf***able — were not true.”
Like Tyler, Cho’s career initially took a hit because she was deemed too progressive for TV and, after losing the contract for her ABC show, “All-American Girl,” she went back to stand-up. But returning to the stage turned out to be fortuitous, as it was there that she established herself as one of the voices of a burgeoning style of stand-up — for queer people, by queer people, as the comedian Guy Branum describes it.
Another influential voice of the era — which the documentary frames as a time of shifting perceptions and big coming-out moments led by queer women — was Judy Gold. In “Outstanding,” the Emmy-winning producer and stand-up veteran talks about the blowback she received in the mid-‘90s for talking about her kids during her sets.
“I was really at the top of my game, but I could not live with myself if I didn’t talk about [my family],” Gold told NBC News. “When I started talking about that part of my life, you could feel a pullback. You could feel this, ‘Wait, she’s not who I thought she was,’ and some people would leave.”
While she was saddened by that reaction initially, she said, the response eventually motivated her “to go even deeper and start talking about how ridiculous this entire situation was.”
After her stand-up career began to slow, Gold started working as a producer and writer on the “The Rosie O’Donnell Show.” In 1996, the first year it aired, Ellen Degeneres essentially came out on the talk show amid rumors about her being gay, which circulated ahead of her character coming out on “Ellen.”
In the episode, Degeneres and O’Donnell, who also appears in the documentary, made not-so-subtle jokes about being “Lebanese” that were immediately decoded by queer viewers around the country.
“It was a wink at all of us — like, you know, ‘We’re getting there.’ It was sort of for the gays,” Gold said.
Although it would be another few decades before things were noticeably different for queer comedians, Gold said, the episode created a sense of hope that things were starting to change. Though, perhaps, no one could have predicted just how much they actually would.
“When you think of the comics of the ‘90s, Andrew Dice Clay and all these bro types, there was a lot you could say and not get in trouble. The straight clubs were still incredibly misogynistic and such a boys club,” she said.
Now, she added, she hears very different material during her frequent visits to New York City comedy clubs.
“I walk in there, and these comics get on stage [and say,] ‘Hi, I’m trans’ or ‘my wife’ or ‘my husband.’ Nothing — no one cares,” she said. “I want to cry for joy. I am glad they don’t have to go through what we went through.”
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