Terry Sweeney broke ground as Saturday Night Live‘s first out gay castmember during that program’s 1985-86 season.
Now Sweeney, 75, is breaking his silence on a decades-long feud with Chevy Chase after Chase proposed Sweeney appear in an SNL sketch mocking the AIDS epidemic.
The ignominious chapter is one of several revisited in I’m Chevy Chase and You’re Not, a new documentary about the comedian set to premiere Jan. 1.
In the film, director Marina Zenovich reminds Chase of the joke that offended Sweeney, best remembered for his lacerating impression of then-first lady Nancy Reagan.
“You said something to Sweeney like, ‘Oh, you’re the gay guy. Why don’t we ask if you have AIDS. And every week, we weigh you,’” she said.
Of the joke, SNL creator Lorne Michaels then explains, “I think Chevy was just being Chevy. He would say things that were funny, and he would assume you were comedy people, and he could speak that way. You know, we would say terrible things, because that’s what would make us laugh.”
Of course, this being 1985, the rapidly escalating AIDS epidemic was already ravaging gay communities worldwide. The joke would have been particularly hurtful to Sweeney, who was already feeling isolated as the only gay member of the cast — indeed, the only out gay actor on network TV.
Chase responds in the doc: “Terry Sweeney, he was very funny, this guy. I don’t think he’s alive anymore.”
Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter, Sweeney, very much alive and well, responds via instant message, “Don’t you think he is saying this and making himself look more like the ass he is!!!”
The doc has also earned the ire of Chase’s former Community co-star Yvette Nicole Brown, who firmly distanced herself from it and all attempts to reinvestigate Chase’s firing from the show amid accusations of hurling racial epithets.
To jog Chase’s memory regarding the Sweeney incident, Zenovich reads to him from Tom Shales and James Andrew Miller’s SNL oral history, Live From New York: The Complete, Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live as Told by Its Stars, Writers, and Guests.
In it, Sweeney recounts how Chase entered his dressing room and apologized for the AIDS joke, but was “furious that he had to apologize to me.”
Chase responds: “My memory is that he is lying, is my memory. He’s not telling the truth. That isn’t me. That’s not who I am. And if I am that way, my life has changed, because I have to live with that now for the rest of my fucking life.”
“It all reflects rightly horribly on him!” Sweeney says of Chase’s comments in the doc.
As for a section of the film that recounts how Chase was abused by his parents as a child, positioned as a possible explanation for why so many of his former colleagues consider him “an asshole,” Sweeney doesn’t mince words.