When asked in a 2019 interview with TV Line if “Family Guy” was really phasing out the gay jokes, executive producer Alec Sulkin answered, “Kind of, yes. If you look at a show from 2005 or 2006 and put it side by side with a show from 2018 or 2019, they’re going to have a few differences. Some of the things we felt comfortable saying and joking about back then, we now understand is not acceptable.”
Executive producer Rich Appel added, “It’s not us reacting and thinking, ‘They won’t let us [say certain things].’ No, we’ve changed too. The climate is different, the culture is different, and our views are different. They’ve been shaped by the reality around us, so I think the show has to shift and evolve in a lot of different ways.”
Sure enough, the gay jokes of later-season “Family Guy” are a bit less crass than the gay jokes of early “Family Guy.” In an episode like “Customer of the Week” in season 19, the gay joke of the episode is that an increasingly-out-of-control Lois is surprised that one of the guys she’s kidnapped is gay but the other one isn’t, even though they live together. (“Fine, you win with your gay stuff!” she says.) The joke here is mostly that Lois sucks, and also that it’s ridiculous she’d be quibbling over this issue given the stakes of the situation.
Meanwhile, there’s the 2009 episode “Family Gay,” where Peter turns gay for an episode. One of the jokes here involves a conversion therapy camp counselor giving the campers baseball bats to beat up “Harry the Homosexual.” With the gay campers taking the bats and walking off-screen towards Harry, the counselor yells, “No, don’t use the bats like that! No, don’t use the bats like that either!” The whole episode is a crass, cartoonish depiction of gay men, so it’s no surprise that it didn’t win any GLAAD awards that year.
And yet, it’s hard to get too mad at “Family Gay.” Not only is the episode’s central message that gay people should be fully accepted for who they are, a position that wasn’t considered a safe one at the time by any stretch, but all the crass gay jokes are done with a heavy amount of irony. The episode knows that most gay men aren’t actually having 11-ways most of the time, and it trusts its audience to understand the same. For the most part “Family Gay” depicts gay people as silly but harmless, whereas the conversion camp counselor is depicted with genuine scorn. When the counselor yells at the gay campers to stop using the bats in that way, it’s not just a cheap gay joke; it’s also a scene where the gays triumph in the face of hatred, rubbing the counselor’s face in the futility of his mission. (At least, that’s my optimistic take on the scene’s subtext.)
You could also argue that all the gay jokes helped make the episode more persuasive to homophobic viewers, lulling them into a false sense of security before hitting them with the pro-gay rights closing message. A lot of people will outright reject an episode’s social commentary if it feels too much like a lecture, but for most of its runtime “Family Gay” definitely doesn’t feel like one.