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no laughing matter

That time Richard Pryor admitted to hooking up with men & called out the hypocrisy of the LGBTQ+ community

By Cameron Scheetz June 28, 2024 at 1:00pm
Photo Credit: Getty Images

Stand-up comedy is largely a solo act, but as Netflix‘s fantastic new documentary Outstanding: A Comedy Revolution proves, there’s long been a community of LGBTQ+ comics at the forefront of our social revolution, even if we didn’t always know it.

In director Page Hurwitz’s film, a long-overdue spotlight is shone on the queer voices who blazed new trails for us in entertainment, from early icons like Robin Tyler and Moms Mabley, to counterculture firebrands like Sandra Bernhard and Margaret Cho, to the legendary Lily Tomlin.

And it’s through Tomlin’s story we’re reminded of yet another influential comedian who was part of our community, too, even if he isn’t always discussed as such: Richard Pryor.

Richard Pryor at the Star-Spangled Night For Rights in 1977 | Photo Credit: Getty Images

Richard Pryor’s Gay Confession At ’77 Human Rights Benefit

In 1977, Tomlin was one of the hosts of a show at the Hollywood Bowl called “The Star-Spangled Night For Rights,” intended as a fundraiser in opposition to Anita Bryant’s anti-gay movement, though billed as a broader “human rights benefit.”

She had convinced her good friend Pryor—already a crossover comedy star who had made his way into film and television roles—to be part of the show and, when he took the stage, he wasted no time in calling out the event for being about gay rights while not really saying “gay rights.”

“I came here for human rights, and I found out what it really is about is not getting caught with a d*ck in your mouth,” he joked in footage from the evening, which is unearthed in Outstanding: A Comedy Revolution.

“Ain’t a motherf*cker out here [who’s] come out here and declared themselves gay,” Pryor continued. “Ain’t nobody did shit. Everybody, as you say in politics, ‘skirted the issue.'”

And that’s when he admitted it: “I have sucked a d*ck,” which was met with a roar of applause from the crowd.

What’s more, Pryor didn’t try to play it off as a mistake, or something he didn’t really want to do—he went on to describe the moment, calling it “beautiful,” and even going into detail about how this former intimate partner of his knew how to make him “c*m quick.”

That admission, from one of the comedy world’s brightest stars, feels just as fearless now as it did back in 1977.

Richard Pryor’s Bisexual History

What’s fascinating is that Pryor was saying things like this back then on one of the biggest stages possible, and yet we still don’t really talk about his queerness—or at least his comfortability with queerness—as part of his legacy.

Pryor, who died in 2005 at 65, was married a number of times to different women over the years, but many people close to him have discussed the idea that he was openly bisexual. In the 2014 biography Becoming Richard Pryor, author Scott Saul first claimed the performer “acknowledged his bisexuality.”

Famously, famed music producer Quincy Jones once told Vulture that Pryor had had sexual relations with actor Marlon Brando—something the comic’s ex-wife Jennifer Lee corroborated, saying that he wasn’t ashamed of it at all. In 2018, she even told TMZ Pryor was open about his bisexuality among friends throughout his career.

But even in his own words—specifically his 1995 autobiography Pryor Convictions—the comedian spoke about his queerness, writing about his short-lived relationship with a trans woman named Mitrasha, which he said was “two weeks of being gay.”

The Star-Spangled Night For Rights wasn’t the first or last time Pryor would discuss hooking up with men on mic, but the moment stands out especially because of what he said next…

Richard Pryor Calls Out Racism In The Queer Community

Remarking how few Black people were amongst the crowd that night at the Hollywood Bowl, Pryor said, “You white folks are having big fun, talking about, ‘give us the right!'” Referencing anti-police riots in one of LA’s historically Black neighborhoods in 1965, he continued: “When [Black people] were burning down Watts, you motherf*ckers were doing what you want to do on Hollywood Boulevard—didn’t give a sh*t about it!”

“This is an evening about human rights. And I am a human being,” Pryor avowed. He was booed off stage shortly thereafter.

Photo Credit: Getty Images

It’s a powerful moment to this day. In the same breath he essentially confirmed he was part of the broader LGBTQ+ community, he called attention to what set him apart and that, just because we all fall under the same queer umbrella, it does not mean that we’re all treated the same, or that we even treat one another the same.

That self-examining discussion of intersectionality—across race, gender, sexuality—is part of what makes Outstanding: A Comedy Revolution such a necessary document of where our community’s been and where we are right now.

And it’s thanks to artists like Richard Pryor, who fearlessness questioned authority and pushed for true equality, that queer voices from all backgrounds and experiences have been at the forefront of social change.

“Richard Pryor is one of the great, bright lights of queer comedy,” Guy Branum says in the documentary. “But we’re never allowed to talk about it. He was unrepentant in talking about everyone he had loved, and all of the sh*t he had gotten up to. And, it is to me, still amazing that he was as honest as he was in the ’60s and ’70s.”

For more insights into the radical history of LGBTQ+ comedy, you can stream Outstanding: A Comedy Revolution on Netflix right now.

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3 Comments*

  • Kangol2

    An original, from
    start to finish.

  • Donston

    This is a bit of revisionist history. We can talk about intersectionality. But Pryor only dated were yt ch-icks. And he clearly dealt with internalized phobias and made a handful of anti g-aA-y jokes and tra-nsphobic jokes. Pryor never pushed qu eer positivity. While Pryor only went to that rally to berate a bunch of yt qu eers. I’m here for re-examining Pryor and his dimensions. But let us not act as if Pryor wasn’t “problematic” or ever wanted to be q u eer “representation”. If y’all want to have a real, nuanced conversation about people then have it. But the media seems to be more focused on creating martyrs or villains.

  • Donston

    None of this takes away from how groundbreaking Pryor was or the fact that for a famous bl-ack man to even hint towards qu eerness back then was quite brave. I just don’t like rewriting history for the sake of narrative/po li tics.

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