Bronson Pinchot on his early TV role as gay lawyer

In Bronson’s own words:

There was going to be a black lawyer—because of course, don’t we all know that “black” is a character—there was going to be a chauvinist lawyer, there was going to be a gay lawyer, and then there was going to be the Mary Tyler Moore character that Geena Davis played. And at the time I auditioned for that show, I had so little money that someone had given me a gift basket for Christmas, and I would limit myself to two slices of the apple and a bite of cheese every day. That’s how poor I was. So I went in, and they were so afraid that nobody would want to do the gay lawyer that they didn’t even show us the script. It was 1984! So they said, “Well, we just want somebody likeable, and here’s your line, say this line,” and I do the line, and they gave me the part. Then I saw the script, and it was like, now he’s the gay lawyer. And I said, “Fine, I could care less!”

Then when we started to rehearse it, I would think of funny things to do, and I was like, “I want to be misting the plants, and I want to be doing this,” and they said, “No, no, no, no, you can’t do anything that’s like actually gay. We’ll give you one line a show that’s like, ‘I sleep with men.’” I was a kid, and it was an entirely different world, it was a world away from the world now, so there I am doing this job as a gay man on television, and I played a gay man in Beverly Hills Cop. So, every time I would go on a blind date or something, the first question would always be, “Why do you play gay roles?” And I would say, “It’s not like a sign I wear on my head that says that’s all I’ll do,” but they just happened to coincide, so that was a strange period in my life. There weren’t that many of that role out there. There was Billy Crystal in Soap, and then there was me. These organizations I had never heard of would come to me and say, “Would you host the gay and lesbian whatever?” and I was like, “Why? Because I’m playing this role?” And then it would be like wink, wink—it was very weird. I wish I had been 35 instead of 25—25’s young. You forget how young 25 is. If I were 35, I would have been like, “You bet I will! I’ll be there with bells on.” I mean, I’m on a list of famous people who are left-handed, because I wrote with my left hand on the show. I don’t go out of my way to tell people that I’m not left-handed—they think I am, and that’s a compliment, because then I made myself write left-handed, that’s who I decided he was, and it made sense to me, because I figured he was such a right-brained kind of guy. To this day, people swear that I have an accent.