The Broad City star and comedy writer turns gay expectations, Fire Island anxiety, bad romance, and painfully funny vulnerability into The Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Gay
For decades, queer culture has fought for the freedom to live authentically. But what happens when being authentically gay means admitting you don’t particularly enjoy some of the things you’re supposedly expected to love?
Eliot Glazer has some thoughts.
The comedian, actor and television writer behind projects including New Girl, iCarly, Billy on the Street and the animated The Boys spinoff Diabolical has spent years making audiences laugh. Now, in his new essay collection, The Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Gay, Glazer turns the joke inward, examining what happens when you feel like the minority within the minority.
It’s a book about being gay while occasionally feeling like you’re doing gay wrong.
When Glazer and I connected to discuss the book, I told him his collection reminded me of the hilarious queer essay books I devoured 15 or 20 years ago, particularly the work of author Michael Thomas Ford. Glazer wasn’t familiar with Ford, but immediately wrote down his name.
“I’m excited to read that,” he said.
That exchange seemed appropriate for a conversation about a book rooted in discovering that there isn’t just one way to tell a queer story.
Glazer’s title itself is a playful declaration of imperfection. Rather than presenting himself as an authority on how to live your best gay life, he chronicles awkwardness, anxiety, relationships, nightlife, Fire Island, sex, theater and all the occasions when he felt as though everyone else received a gay instruction manual that somehow never arrived in his mailbox.
That feeling goes back to college.
Glazer remembers coming out during his first year and immediately trying to figure out what he believed gay life was supposed to look like.
“I was really trying to assimilate into what the homonormative experience looked like to me,” he recalled. “I was really just trying to fit in.”
That included studying the people around him for clues — right down to attempting to wear nicer denim.
Eventually, something clicked.
“What am I doing?” he remembered thinking. “I don’t need to make myself uncomfortable to try to fit in.”
The revelation wasn’t really about jeans. Glazer began realizing that certain expectations surrounding nightlife, clothing and socializing simply weren’t part of his identity. More importantly, there was nothing wrong with that.
“I have to figure out my own thing,” he said, “but that’s okay.”
That process of stepping outside yourself also became essential when Glazer began transforming his life into a book. After years writing scripted television, he already understood character development: characters don’t simply change between the beginning and ending; audiences need to see the incremental steps along the way.
Writing about himself required applying those same rules to Eliot Glazer.
“I had to get that perspective and get that distance to be able to tell the story of myself,” he explained. “To see myself from outside of myself, which is an odd thing that I’ve never really had to do before.”
Fire Island Isn’t Going to Cure Your Neuroses
Few destinations occupy as much mythical real estate in gay male culture as Fire Island. It’s simultaneously beach vacation, queer sanctuary, party destination and cultural institution.
Glazer discovered that paradise doesn’t necessarily come with an off switch for anxiety.
He readily acknowledges Fire Island’s beauty and the freedom it can provide. It can allow queer people to become versions of themselves they might not feel comfortable being elsewhere. Yet for Glazer, transporting himself to an idyllic gay destination didn’t magically eliminate the pressures he already carried.
“As much as it can be this Shangri-La in this gorgeous, verdant beachside fantasy, it still carries, for me at least, the same pressure,” he said.
Even surrounded by beaches, greenery and deer casually approaching the boardwalk, Glazer remained Glazer.
“The neuroses doesn’t just fade away just because deer are coming up to you on the boardwalk,” he joked. “It doesn’t all just become a fairy tale.”
I compared his description to queer recreational destinations near Seattle — places where nature, parties and community can coexist with plenty of drama. Glazer laughed at the comparison but emphasized that his reaction isn’t a judgment on anyone who thrives in those environments.
For him, however, Fire Island, a circuit party in Europe or a packed gay resort can produce essentially the same response: paralysis.
He recently saw an advertisement for an Atlantis cruise showing what appeared to be thousands of shirtless men dancing shoulder-to-shoulder.
“God bless each and every one of them,” Glazer said, “but that looks like a punishment to me.”
The image alone seemed “unpleasant and terrifying in every possible way.”
Somewhere, presumably, several thousand shirtless men just clutched their pearls — assuming Atlantis allows pearls near the pool.
Embarrassment Is Where the Good Stuff Lives
Glazer doesn’t spare himself in the book, and that willingness to reveal the humiliating parts of his life is central to why the essays work.
When I asked whether there were stories that made him wonder if he’d gone too far, the answer was immediate.
“Oh, definitely.”
We discussed one particularly embarrassing story involving a dentist, but Glazer sees those moments as more than opportunities for shock or laughs. They’re where readers can recognize something genuine.
“Vulnerability is essentially the magic bullet to making a story good and real and authentic,” he said.
There were things Glazer ultimately chose not to include, but both he and his editor pushed him toward discomfort rather than away from it.
“If you can’t laugh at yourself, then what’s the point?”
Years of comedy also taught him that carefully projecting an image of yourself isn’t nearly as funny as admitting to the moments when that image completely collapses.
“The real clownish and humbling moments,” he said, “just connect with people.”
That philosophy represents an evolution in his comedy as well. Glazer admitted that earlier in his career, punching down could be easy. By his 30s, his perspective began changing. Instead of turning frustrations about gay identity outward, he became more interested in observation — and in removing judgment from the equation.
The result is comedy that’s less concerned with declaring who is doing queer life correctly and more interested in admitting that none of us really knows what we’re doing.
When Theater Wasn’t the Safe Space
Glazer’s complicated relationship with belonging didn’t begin in adulthood.
Growing up on Long Island, he initially found joy in musical theater. For generations of LGBTQ+ kids, theater has been portrayed as a refuge — a place where the kid who doesn’t fit comfortably elsewhere might finally find their people.
For Glazer, that wasn’t exactly how the story unfolded.
By high school, a teacher began speculating about his sexuality and discussing it with his friends.
“It was not a safe space,” Glazer recalled. “It was the least safe space.”
The experience became especially frightening because this was the late 1990s and around Y2K, when being openly gay as a teenager could still feel dangerous.
The teacher, he said, repeatedly dangled the possibility of outing him.
“It was altogether threatening and dangerous and intense.”
Rather than helping him embrace theater, the experience drove him away from it.
It was a moment in our conversation where our experiences unexpectedly intersected. I shared my own memories of being involved in high school theater while people repeatedly questioned whether I was gay — including openly gay peers who outed me before I was ready to come out myself.
Times have changed considerably, Glazer noted, particularly in the ways many younger queer people can approach identity with less secrecy. But his story is an important reminder that the spaces we nostalgically remember as LGBTQ+ sanctuaries weren’t necessarily safe for every LGBTQ+ kid who entered them.
Learning From Comedy Heavyweights
Glazer’s career has since put him alongside an impressive collection of performers, including Seth Rogen, Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin and Billy Eichner.
What did working around people at that level teach him about developing his own voice?
Be yourself — although Glazer knows that answer sounds deceptively simple.
The performers he admires are “really true to themselves,” he said, but getting there requires self-awareness and a willingness to dig beneath the carefully constructed public version of yourself.
“It really requires that sort of excavation of the self,” Glazer said. “And it’s not fun.”
But when that excavation works for performers such as Rogen and Tomlin, he added, it’s difficult not to learn from them.
Our conversation briefly detoured into Rogen’s 2012 Barbra Streisand comedy The Guilt Trip, which Glazer hadn’t seen in years. That led to the kind of pop-culture tangent that feels perfectly at home in a conversation with someone whose comedic worldview can move effortlessly from gay identity to Barbra Streisand.
Jinkx, Bosco and the Art of Being Smart and Stupid
Then there are the queens.
I was delighted to discover that one of the people praising Glazer’s book was Seattle’s own Jinkx Monsoon, someone I’ve interviewed many times over the years.
“Oh, I love her,” Glazer said.
Ask him about favorite drag performers and the list grows quickly.
He loves Bosco — another Seattle queen — along with Irene the Alien, Shea Couleé, Trixie Mattel, Kelly Mantle and Delta Work.
What attracts Glazer to great drag isn’t simply glamour. It’s intelligence combined with a willingness to be completely ridiculous.
He loves a drag queen who is “so quick” and capable of balancing being “intellectual and just stupid.”
Jinkx, he believes, does that exceptionally well.
Perhaps, we joked, there’s something in Seattle’s water.
Trixie Mattel, a friend of Glazer’s, ranks among the funniest people he knows. He’s also drawn to performers such as Kelly Mantle and Delta Work, whose talents found renewed audiences through podcasts and other projects after Drag Race.
“It’s fun to see them have that second wind,” he said.
I brought up Suzie Toot, whom I’d recently seen perform her cabaret act in Seattle. Watching her, I immediately thought that if Jinkx Monsoon had a drag daughter, it might be Suzie.
Glazer agreed.
“That makes perfect sense to me,” he said. “That’s an easy correlation.”
Finding the Other Misfits
Beneath all the jokes, humiliations, bad dates and gay cultural expectations, The Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Gay is ultimately about belonging.
Not necessarily belonging to the group you were told you were supposed to fit into — but finding the people who understand why you never quite did.
I asked Glazer what he hopes stays with the reader who reaches the final page still feeling as though they don’t fit comfortably inside a queer box — or any box.
His answer was simple: Say it out loud.
“I hope that they then feel permission to be more forthright about it,” he said, because when people admit those feelings, the misfits have a better chance of finding one another.
Glazer suspects they’re not actually a tiny minority.
“I do think it’s a silent majority as well.”
After spending years searching for like-minded people, the book became his opportunity to send out a signal.
He hopes readers who recognize themselves in his experiences feel “emancipated” enough to send out their own.
“Say the same,” he said, “and find the rest of us.”
That brought us to the question I ask everyone I interview, regardless of whether they’re gay, straight or somewhere else entirely:
What does the word queer mean to you?
For Glazer, queer is ultimately about rejecting the blueprint society hands you.
“I think it’s an umbrella term that gives anybody and everybody the opportunity to live on their own terms,” he said, without needing a checklist proving they’re “doing it right.”
Queerness, in that sense, isn’t another restrictive identity box. It’s permission to get outside the boxes.
“It really is just permission to be different in any way possible,” Glazer said. “From the most extreme to the slightest and even the unspoken. It’s just permission.”
Glazer recognizes that some gay men still recoil from the word because of its history as a slur, and he respects their right to reject it. But he also sees enormous value in its reclamation as an increasingly inclusive umbrella.
Giving people more room to describe themselves, he reasoned, doesn’t take anything away from anyone else.
“How could that work against you?” he asked.
Maybe that’s the real secret hiding beneath the wonderfully self-deprecating title of The Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Gay.
There is no perfect gay.
There’s no mandatory Fire Island pilgrimage, required circuit party attendance, approved wardrobe, ideal relationship, compulsory nightlife schedule or gay final exam. You don’t have to love every supposedly universal piece of queer culture to belong to the community.
You can be anxious. You can be awkward. You can skip the party.
You can apparently even wear bad denim.
For Glazer, embracing that imperfection has become something more meaningful than simply learning to laugh at himself. It’s an invitation for the rest of the queer misfits to stop hiding, start talking and finally find one another.
And if that makes someone a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad gay, Glazer seems perfectly comfortable with the company.
Eliot Glazer’s Book, it available everywhere where books are sold.
