Episode 5 Premiere Time and More. Kennedy Jr. Meet The Suspects. That may sound preposterous, but could it be any truer? Friends , which hit right as I entered middle school, was my first exposure to a gay relationship.
I was a self-deprecating jokester in my teenage years. Everyone on Friends was wrong about him, so they were wrong about me too! So when I say my life would have been totally different if Matthew Perry had played the first lead gay character on TV three years before Ellen , I have the memories of a deeply closeted teenager to back it up.
This exchange sets Chandler on a path of self-discovery, one that immediately stalls out and leaves him doing circles in a no homo cul-de-sac for nine seasons. It does, and I know that because I lived out this exact plot when I was a freshman in high school.
I find it hard to imagine this exchange taking place today and resulting in a mortified person slowly backing out of a break room.
Chandler spends the episode trying to figure out what it is that makes him seem so… you know. The gayness is implied, even in the scene where Chandler asks his friends if they thought that when they first met him. None of them can pin down what it is about Chandler. Monica sums it up best:. Chandler does have a quality. Since Chandler stayed straight, the show got to do all the gay jokes without having to commit to actual gay representation.
