Bossypants
by Tina Fey
Reagan Arthur Books
288 pages, 26.99
TINA FEY has achieved renown as the first female head writer at Saturday Night Live, as a spot-on Sarah Palin impersonator, and as the creator of the hit TV series 30 Rock; but her embrace of gay-positive themes and plotlines is only now getting attention. What’s striking about Bossypants, her bestselling memoir, is that Fey devotes an entire chapter to all the gay and lesbian kids who, growing up with her in the Philly suburbs, helped to create her uniquely comic, even camp, sensibility.
The gay chapter bears this proviso: “All names in this story have been changed to protect the fabulous.” Recalling her time spent in a youth theatre program, first as a box office manager and later as a children’s theatre director, Fey writes about “the four-year-long pride parade” that shaped her vantage point as an outsider: “Like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, I was embraced by the gays. … I was filled with a poisonous, pointless teenage jealousy, which, when combined with gay cattiness, can be intoxicating. Like mean meth.” 
This same sentiment reverberates throughout Mean Girls, Fey’s first screenplay (2004), in which the film’s high school heroine sits on the sidelines with gay friends Janice and Damien. At one point Damien is seen belting out the sappy, self-affirming song “Beautiful” (“No matter what you say…”) at the Christmas recital, all the while being pelted by shoes.
In her own adolescence, Fey quickly bonded with the program’s costume designer, Tim, and his even “meaner, louder” and “impressively gay” brother Tristan. She coins the term “the half closet” to describe the open secret of the boys’ sexuality. There’s also Karen and Sharon, a female couple, who share Fey’s love of Dynasty and homemade nachos, along with Richard, who comes out after attending the Pennsylvania Governor’s School for the Arts, which might as well have been called the “Pennsylvania Governor’s Blow Job Academy,” if you “imagine a bunch of seventeen-year-old theatre boys away from home for the first time for six weeks,” writes Fey.
Fey’s tribute to her gay cohorts transcends nostalgia, however, when she finds herself a staunch defender of gay rights during the Reagan years. Trapped in a health class in which Mr. Garth lectures on “how to spot and avoid homosexuals,” a young Fey remembers her blood beginning to boil before correcting him. “I think what you meant to say was ‘child molesters,’ not ‘homosexuals,’” she tells him and, with her love of the last word, adds: “He just watched my hands move as I talked, not unlike a dog.” There hasn’t been a Tina this cutting in a campy context since Faye Dunaway, as Joan Crawford in Mommie Dearest, bellowed from her rose garden: “Tina, bring me the ax!”
The fifth season of 30 Rock (just out on DVD) begins with Alec Baldwin asking Fey (as alter-ego Liz Lemon): “Do you know what a prize I am in the gay community? There’s a term for it: I’m a ‘bear’ and I’m a ‘daddy.’” Then, with the flip of his coif, “I’m a daddy bear.” The typical 20-minute episode is so densely packed with wordplay and punch lines that the viewer often feels amused and overwhelmed in equal measure. Another impressively gay episode, from Season 4, springs to mind; as a satire on the arranged marriages of Hollywood, James Franco plays a version of himself, a leading man “actively looking,” as his manager puts it, “for a relationship with a human woman to dispel certain unsavory rumors.” After a non-disclosure agreement, Lemon learns that Franco’s real love object is exactly that, an object: a Japanese body-pillow named Kimiko. (Fey, Franco, and the body pillow end up having a threesome.) This is the same episode in which Lemon’s newly outed cousin Randy visits Manhattan to get a flavor of the big city. Only days later, Liz spots Randy on the Today show embracing an African-American sailor, enthusing: “We’re in love! He’s quitting the Navy and we’re going to get married in Massachusetts!”
Now 41 and the youngest recipient of the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor, Fey is fast becoming of one of our greatest allies in mainstream American comedy. But even she knows that what’s at stake politically for gay people in America is no laughing matter. Fey puts it bossily in Bossypants: “And we really need to let these people get married, already!”
Colin Carman, PhD, teaches English Literature at Colorado Mountain College, Breckenridge.
