The seldom discussed aspects of the 1969 Stonewall riots. The romance between a 40-year-old Cher and a 22-year-old whom the tabloids called “Bagel Boy.” One of the first sitcoms to address the AIDS crisis. (“Designing Women,” of course.)
All of these subjects have been plumbed recently on “What the Old Gays Remember,” a video series on the Instagram feed of Guy Branum, a 50-year-old comedian, writer and actor in Los Angeles.
It’s a highlight reel from before 2000, when gay marriage was barely talked about, when few celebrities were out, and when drag queens had not yet sashayed their way into prime time.
Branum, who self-identifies in his videos as a “middle-aged gay man here to tell you about the things that only the old gays remember,” is showcasing a different moment, and what it meant to claim those slivers of culture as his own.
The goal, as he describes it, is to memorialize “the frivolous and the serious,” and to reach young gays who seem to believe both that they invented everything and that they need to learn a history they don’t know.
The seed for the project was planted in Palm Springs a little more than two years ago, when Branum went to a pool party and a young gay guy swam up to him and peppered him with questions about the AIDS crisis.
Not long after, Branum was filming a comedy video on the streets of West Hollywood. He was there with a young producer, the comedian Tori Piskin — “a straight girl from the Upper East Side” — and was constantly explaining “aspects of queer culture to her.”
“I just texted him, and I was like, We should do a series called ‘What the Old Gays Remember,’ where you just talk about pop culture moments only, you know, a middle-aged gay guy would remember,” she recalled in an interview.
“My immediate response was ‘insult,’” Branum said.
(Billy Eichner, a comedian who has worked with Branum numerous times over the years, offered some gentle reassurance. “We’re not old yet,” he said.)
The more Branum thought about the premise, the more sense it made. Particularly as a member of the first generation of gay men to be out in large numbers and surviving past their youth.
Eichner, who is three years younger than Branum, describes this group as a “middle child” of sorts between Gen Z and the gay boomers who were decimated by AIDS.
Branum’s videos include campy stories, such as the time Celine Dion upstaged Aretha Franklin (“like an idiot,” he said) at VH1’s “Divas Live” in 1998. As well as more earnest reflections about the bodybuilding star Bob Paris, who gave up his career in 1989 by coming out of the closet.
“This is not journalism. This is history told to you through the telephone,” he said via video chat on a recent afternoon, seated at a desk at his West Hollywood rental in front of a painting of Gandhi and Mr. Belvedere, holding hands. “This is trying to get the energy of an older gay guy in the back room at Akbar telling you a thing that you didn’t know before”
Branum worked as a writer and actor on “Hacks,” the award-winning show starring Jean Smart as Deborah Vance, a stand-up comic loosely inspired by Joan Rivers.
Onscreen, Branum played a Vance superfan who eventually grows hostile enough to wag his finger in his idol’s face, while bellowing: “The problem is that you went Hollywood.”
Branum doesn’t think there is much risk of the same thing happening to him.
He presents being an outsider as something that’s not really a choice, much less something he can change. (Even GLP-1s have failed him, he notes.)
Never mind the fact that he can be seen all over the place of late.
He has a role in “Stop! That! Train!,” the campy RuPaul comedy that opened this month (think: “Airplane,” but with lots of queens). He does stand-up gigs all over the country and will be taking his solo show, “Be Fruitful,” to the Edinburgh Fringe in August.
He grew up in Northern California (“not the good part,” Branum says of the town, Yuba City). His father was a construction worker. His mother worked for a gay couple at a flower shop.
She liked the couple, Branum said. But that didn’t stop her from using a slur to describe them, he remembered.
After high school, Branum headed to the University of California, Berkeley, where he studied (ahem) history and political science. From there, he went to law school at the University of Minnesota, then returned to the Bay Area.
By day, he was a contract lawyer. By night, he was a fledgling stand-up.
But juggling professional identities didn’t go well. Branum said he was quickly fired from the law firm “for spending too much time writing jokes.”
Breaking into the entertainment business took a while. Few gay comedians were out in the ’90s and early 2000s. What little mentorship existed in the industry largely involved a certain amount of “sexual predation,” he said. “And not being somebody who was most people’s idea of, like, a sexual delight, I didn’t get a lot of that,” Branum said.
Thankfully, there was Chelsea Handler, who in started a talk show on E! in 2007 called “Chelsea Lately.” Branum became a regular, then started writing jokes for Joan Rivers, whom he calls “a battered creature” with a specialty for “taking in broken birds.”
By “broken birds,” he meant underemployed gay comedians who had previously worked with and fallen out with Kathy Griffin.
“On one level, it was the dream of 8-year-old me, sitting in Melissa Rivers’s dining room underneath the Passover dishes, watching her bicker with her mother,” Branum said.
“But it also was a nonunion job that didn’t pay well,” he added. “I had to be doing, like, three other jobs at the same time.”
Other TV writing jobs followed, as did small onscreen roles. In 2018, Branum published a memoir, “My Life as a Goddess: A Memoir Through (Un)Popular Culture.”
Much of the book talks about his more than four decades of failing to make friends and find a boyfriend.
“I am generally a human being incapable of personal relationships,” Branum said over video chat.
With the introspection comes a performer’s constant salesmanship: If people are curious about his one relationship, he notes, it’s a major topic in “Be Fruitful.”
Interested parties can also find him on Grindr, he notes.
Branum is having fun trawling the past for “Old Gay” memories. But the videos, while lighthearted, find their way in front of a decently large, predominantly gay and very opinionated audience.
In May, soon after Barney Frank died, Branum posted a video about the former congressman’s affair in the 1980s with a prostitute, who happened during that time period to run a sex ring out of his benefactor’s Washington apartment.
Branum knew his audience might get angry about any Frank commentary — either hagiography for a member of Congress whose coming out made him a path breaker or for criticism of his politics. “He was a real gay guy,” he said, continuing the history lesson: “Sordidness and sexuality is part of our world.”
The post He’s an ‘Old Gay.’ Gather Round. appeared first on New York Times.
