Judy Gold Wants a Lesbian Sit-Com!

The hilarious, deadpan Judy Gold talks about this constant craving in her new show, The Judy Show: My Life as a Sitcom, beginning June 30 at the DR2 Theater.

I just called the lesbo-visible comic and got the gay lowdown on it.

Me: Hi, Judy. Tell me about your wacky new show.

Judy: It starts when I was a kid and I was addicted to sitcoms. I wanted to run away to their houses and be in their families. The Brady Bunch, The Partridge Family, Mary Tyler Moore, All in the Family, Maude ...

They had a profound effect on me. I thought I was going to be Rhoda and I'd have my own sitcom. I became a comic, and starting in about 1999, I started pitching my life as a sitcom. For some reason, they rejected me. I want to get a gay family on TV. People could watch the socially relevant sitcom and forget the family's gay.

Me: There's no gay family on TV?

Judy: There's Modern Family, but it's always a baby who can't really talk. It's two men -- it's always men -- and they have an adopted, I think, Asian.

Me: Tell me some rejections you've gotten from execs.

Judy: "America's not ready for a gay family." One said, "It's not gay enough. It doesn't have enough gay sex." We're a married couple with kids! We don't have fucking sex! What are you, nuts?

Me: It's funny you mention Mary Tyler Moore's show. She was a single woman, but as they explain in the final episode, she had a family.

Judy: Her friends were her family, and when you're gay, your friends are your family. I so related to that whole creating-your-own-family situation. I found out where the house is [the one used in the exterior shots] in Minneapolis and I went there and sat and stared at it. When I moved to L.A., I found out where the Brady Bunch house is and drove past it 100 times.

Me: I think that was also used as Bates Motel.