Billy Eichner Praises 'Sex And The City' For Early Inclusion Of Gay Bar

While we still don’t have enough LGBTQ+ representation on our screens, for many of us who’ve got a few decades under our belt, it’s not hard to remember a time when that representation was far more scarce—and when what we did get was almost exclusively through a heterosexual lens to the point of being unrecognizable as anything amounting to a real queer experience.

Billy Eichner recently reflected on one of the first times he remembers that shifting, when he saw Stanford Blatch (Willie Garson) go to a gay bar in season two of Sex and the City.

The plot revolved around Stanford wanting to meet up with a guy he had been speaking to in chat rooms, only to be hit with an underwear-only dress code at an after-hours gay bar. It’s perfectly 1999, but an explicitly queer version of 1999 that Eichner recalls rarely seeing on TV at that point.

“The fact that Stanford was going to gay bars felt so radical and really pulled me in,” he told People. “I immediately knew, because I’d been there several times, it was shot at an actual gay bar in Chelsea in New York called Barracuda, which is still there.”

The experience of seeing his local haunt on mainstream HBO stuck with him, and led to group hangs with friends watching Sex and the City weekly.

“It was one of the only shows that created what, at that time, felt like a more authentic — not perfectly authentic — look at gay men and our relationships with women,” Eichner added. “The conversations the women were having felt like conversations that I was having with my friends. You just never saw them depicted that way.”