"Will & Grace" Changed American Culture. Jon Kinnally Was One of Its Main Writers From Start to Finish
Jon, author of the funny new mini-memoirs collection "I'm Prancing As Fast As I Can," talked to me for two hours about the baby steps "Will & Grace" had to take to fully come into its gayness.
Hi, Caftaners. Greetings from Mexico City, where I am ONCE AGAIN for a few days. I do love this city. I am actually going to Coyoacán tonight to see a musical about the life of Frida Kahlo—that’s how shamelessly touristy I’m being. Tragically, though, I’ve taken no photos so far on this trip so I’ll just give you this photo I took a few weeks ago of an image from the Pierre et Gilles exhibit that’s here at the gorgeous Franz Mayer Museum through February, should you be here between now and then.
And that’s only one of the sexy images in the exhibition. Alongside, of course, typically Pierre-et-Gilles glitterfied portraits of types like Madonna, Charlotte Rampling and the Almodóvar icon Rossy de Palma.
Friday, however, before I stepped out into the bustling wonderland that is CDMX, I spent two hours talking to TV writer and now book author Jon Kinnally (the link is to his website), who now lives with his husband in Sitges, Spain. (Yes, that gay beach town Sitges.) Jon, who is about 60, has a slim but very funny and even moving mini-memoir out now called I’m Prancing As Fast As I Can: My Journey From a Self-Loathing Closet Case to a Successful TV Writer With Some Self-Esteem. (That subtitle, among the world’s best, should tell you something about Jon’s comic touch.)
If you read the book—which I highly recommend as a perfect end-of-summer read, especially for those whose book-reading attention span has been seriously diminished by screen scrolling and Netflix bingeing—you’ll learn about many aspects of Jon’s life, from growing up a closeted Gen X suburban gay (much like me lol!) to losing one of his first loves, ACT UP NY member Luis Salazar, at a young age (but not to AIDS, actually) to his current marriage. It’s shot all the way through with hilarious references dear to the hearts of we gays who were little boys in the 1970s and teens in the 1980s, from The Bionic Woman to Mark Spitz in his Speedos to the queer subtext of The Boy in the Plastic Bubble. I promise you’ll love it.
However, what I really wanted to focus on with Jon was his long stint (with his longtime writing partner Tracy Poust) as a regular writer for Will & Grace, from the show’s original run from 1998 to 2006 and then on its Trump 1.0-era reboot from 2017 to 2020.
The very first few minutes of the Will & Grace pilot, which aired September 21, 1998:
For me, personally, Will & Grace—in part, I think, because it was a network show—didn’t have quite the erotic or emotional power of Sex and the City, a concurrent show that also played a large role in advancing American discourse on gender and sexuality at the turn of the 21st century. But W&G’s impact cannot be denied. As Jon and I discuss in this chat, W&G was one of those rare shows whose name became shorthand for a kind of cultural before-and-after, as in “And remember, this was well before Will & Grace…” or “These are kids who grew up with Will & Grace…” (I guess the 1970s equivalents would be shows like Mary Tyler Moore, All in the Family and Maude.) We can certainly talk all day about how W&G framed things like sexuality, race and immigration (Rosario!), but it can’t be denied that it played a huge role in not only normalizing but glamorizing gayness—especially professional-class urban mostly white male gayness—and the intermingling of gay and straight people and culture.
I’ve always wondered what the internal discussions among W&G’s creators were about how far they could push the envelope season to season, because, as you’ll likely remember if you watched the show, it became more and more authentically itself as the late 1990s became the early and then mid-2000s. And then the reboot in 2017 was a particularly clever response to the first Trump era. (One thing Jon and I talk about was, were the show to be reincarnated now, how if it all it would address the significantly more vicious and vengeful reign of Trump 2.0—or if it would at all, given how big media seems to be kneeling and caving before this out-for-blood administration in many ways.)
Preparing for our chat, I watched endless YouTube clips of W&G’s “best moments.” I’d expected to cringe a lot (as I did when I recently rewatched Season 1 of SATC) at the outdatedness of the humor, especially around anything having to do with sexuality or race. But, in fact, I cringed not that much at all. Mainly I was struck by the virtuosity of the writing and of the acting, particularly the bits of physical comedy that, as Jon notes in our talk, were taking a page directly from I Love Lucy. I was also reminded that Debra Messing—in a moment when she has become divisive for standing up for Israel—was a particularly gifted comic actress, the exquisitely understated foil to Karen and Jack.
So let’s just get into this talk with Jon! Next week’s Caftan is of a far more serious nature, even if my interviewee is undeniably a hot (youngish) daddy. And a note, as ever, to longtime free subscribers: If you continue to like these weekly chats, please consider becoming a paid subscriber for only $5/month. These days, I’m doing a lot of unpaid activism (like accompaniment of immigrants at risk of ICE detention after their court hearings) that’s cutting into my paid gig time, so continued support coming from Caftan really, truly helps me get by right now.
Thanks, folks. Now, straight from Sitges, is the good-hearted funnyman Jon Kinnally. Follow his Instagram here and buy his delightful, quick-read new book. xo Tim
Jon, congratulations on the book. It’s really funny—and moving. When did you write it? In bits and pieces over years?
I wrote stories over the last several years to read out loud around town in L.A. at different reading and performance groups, like UnCabaret. I wrote enough pieces to write a book, but my agent said, “No one wants a memoir by a middle-age gay white guy—right now, no one gives a shit about that.” Then I heard the same thing from other people. And I kind of got it—like, okay, if I’d just done this five years earlier. But times have changed. So I finally found an agent who liked it who found a publisher who liked it. So this middle-age gay white guy has a voice! I finally got my voice!
I know exactly what you’re talking about and I started this Substack partly for that reason. I was like, “Nobody cares about us anymore”—and I don’t just mean older white cis gay men but older gay men in general—“so I’m going to make a Substack where we can care about one another.” Who cares if we’re not the zeitgeist anymore the way we were in the Will & Grace era?
I know! Chris, my husband and I were sitting at a cafe in L.A. and we had our beagle, Daisy, with us, and these two twinks walked by and were like “Oh my God, what a cute dog!” And they were petting the dog and loving on it, and then just got up and walked away. They didn’t even look at us. For all I knew, they didn’t even see us. I was almost expecting them to say, “This poor dog is all alone at this table.” Like, weirdly the handle of the leash would just kind of be floating there.
[laughs] Like a bad 60s sitcom effect! I hear that. But to your point, you did the right thing. What I tell writers of any demographic is, “Just do it—just look for the agent who will find a place for it, even if it’s a small publishing house.” And if nobody wants it, just publish it yourself. You can’t let what the market or the zeitgeist wants stop you from making something you want and need to make.
I agree with the fact that there are so many voices that need to be heard, and thank God they’re being heard and there’s progress made. Everyone should be heard. But then, I’m like, “What about me?” I guess I had my time in the sun, but now I still want to write something funny or be creative.
But what I wanna get in here, so we don’t sound like two white men saying “We don’t have a voice anymore!”, is that it’s good that it happened this way, that—how do I say this so I don’t sound like a privileged asshole? I just wanted to make people laugh. I don’t care if it’s hugely successful or not. I’ve made my mark. I was fortunate that way and I hope it helped others to move forward to make their marks a little bit. I’m happy things are changing for people and I hope they continue.
But also, to your point, it’s such a weird time, because, yes, there’s been this expansion of representation, especially in the world of culture, right? The world that we live in, whether it’s high or pop culture. But now we’re in this right-wing era where, on the political end, they’re pushing back so hard on diversity and really trying to restore white men to primacy, you know? So it’s such a weird time with forces going in different directions at the same time.
So you think our books will sell more now? [laughs]
Yes, exactly, the white man is back! [laughs] No, I really think, and this applies across the board, I think about all the people who weren’t the flavor of the month for so long, and, you know, many of them kept making stuff and very often found platforms even if they weren’t the most super commercial mainstream platforms.
So Jon, you live full-time in Spain now with your husband, Chris?
Yes, we moved full-time to Spain about a year and a half ago—for many reasons.
One of which is we saw what might be coming [politically]. But there were also financial reasons. There was no work! There was Covid and then Hollywood strikes and it was hard to find work, so we were like, “Let’s move to Europe while we’re still relatively young.” So we live here now. We have no more ties to the U.S. except for the friends I miss.
Where are you?
In Sitges, the beach near Barcelona.
Oh, of course. It’s the Provincetown of Spain!
It’s different than Ptown because Ptown, the few times I’ve been, it felt like a gay ghetto. And here it’s very mixed. There’s locals, families with kids, then there’s a lot of older gays and expats. And at certain times there’s lots of tourists.
Well, you’re right. There once was a working- or middle-class Portuguese family population in Ptown, but as they all got the opportunity to sell their charming little run-down homes for upwards of a million dollars, they left. And now, setting aside the tourist surge between May and October, it’s almost entirely a retirement town for gays and lesbians who are at least middle class, because maybe they bought their condo 25 years ago.
It’s rich and white.
It’s always been white, unless you want to count the Portuguese as non-white. It’s the tip of Cape Cod. But now it’s rich and white. It’s hard now to even spend a week there, it’s so expensive. Even in the 90s, there was a kind of bohemian, charmingly run-down sea town vibe. That’s gone. Almost every single home has been refurbished to a fare-thee-well with another million dollars. But anyway! What’s a typical day like for you in Sitges?
There’s the typical day I want to have and the one I really do have. The one I want to have is where I wake up early and get to the gym and go for a dip in the Mediterranean, then work for several hours, then have a siesta. That hasn’t happened yet. We sleep until eleven and then it’s a mad scramble to the gym, because it closes between 1pm and 4pm. Then there’s shopping and errands to do, then trying to find out what social media am I supposed to do. Am I posting something, too much, too little? It’s a lot of anxiety! Then I take a nap. Then we might go to this place called Judgment Square, a small kind of gay area here. One every corner there’s a bar and the seats all face the street. So you go in the late afternoon and drink and people-watch and judge.
I love that it’s called Judgment Square. For a gay hangout, that’s too perfect on at least two levels, right? And what about evenings?
Once we’ve had a few drinks at Judgment Square and feel like we’ve dragged enough people to feel better about ourselves, we’ll go to a restaurant and get some tapas. In my fantasy day, we buy fresh vegetables and go home and cook them. In my reality day, we are tipsy and go to the tapas place and spend more money than we should. Although you can live cheaply here, if you work at it. And then we come home. We’re old now. We watch TV and maybe talk to people on the west coast. I bought knitting needles and some yarn, thinking I’d learn how to knit. I haven’t picked them up at all. I also intended to go to cafes and read books. But I learned that by the third cafe con leche, my stomach is really sick and I have to run home. So my fantasy of my life here hasn’t quite come true yet.
Are you working on anything right now?
I’ve written a few more stories for the second book. Because there will be a demand! [laughs] So I better have stories ready. But it’s really hard to work— I like to work with a deadline, which I came up with from writing for TV. It’s hard for me to work without that. Also, there are distractions here. The Mediterranean is right outside my window. And if someone says, “Do you wanna go get a drink?”, I just drop everything and do it. I throw on my scarf. That’s another reason I moved to Europe—so I can wear scarves and not feel bad about it.
Are you at a point where you don’t have to work?
Well—yes and no. I actually took my pension when we left. When we moved here, I thought, “Maybe I’m finished,” but I quickly realized that I still want to be creative. I think I’m a funny person. I’ve had evidence presented to me to that effect. I still want to write stuff that is funny and then maybe slip something of drama or sadness underneath that. But I felt like I wasn’t done creatively, and that learning to knit wasn’t going to cut it. So that’s why I got on this book project. Now I’m thinking about what the next project could be.
Have you considered writing a novel or a collection of short stories?
I’ve thought about that. I know so many good writers, like my friend Blair Fell.
I just interviewed Blair about his delightful new novel Disco Witches of Fire Island. We’re old friends too. So you grew up near Syracuse?
Yes, Liverpool, a suburb. I never want to go back there. It was awful. I couldn’t wait to get out of there. I just wanted to get to New York, or else I was scared I was going to become a truck driver—no offense! So I moved to New York in 1988 right after college. I came in the thick of it. I hadn’t really had a boyfriend or dated. I was out to some people but not others. AIDS and HIV—that was the life.
Where did you live?
Clinton Hill in Brooklyn, which was a really bad neighborhood then but I think is nice now.
It’s so posh and gentrified now.
I had my laundry stolen. I saw someone else wearing my favorite shirt. Then I came to the East Village in Manhattan, then ultimately Hell’s Kitchen before it became Chelsea North [meaning an extension of the gayborhood].
Didn’t you live in L.A. in the Will & Grace years?
Yes. This was before. In 1997, I followed my writing partner Tracy Poust out there. We’d been in a comedy group in NYC called Loud Blouse. She’d moved to L.A. to take a job and I followed and was trying to be an actor. But then a door opens and you walk through it.
To jump back for a minute: Make for me a mood board of your first year in NYC in 1988. What do you remember?
Being scared, because that’s who I was. I was a waiter taking singing and dancing classes. It was a culture shock. AIDS and HIV became a presence in my life in a way it had not been in college at SUNY Oswego. An activist part of me started to emerge. I got involved in ACT UP and was a foot soldier there, because I felt like I had to be doing something.
There was obviously a black cloud hanging over NYC. And I found my family in ACT UP, a community. And it gave me a purpose so I wasn’t just a silly wannabe actor. It gave me friendships that lasted for decades and it helped me become a more dimensional person—maybe. There’s a lot of loss there and I think the bonds you make with people in that kind of situation are really intense. I saw a lot of people die.
And you lost your boyfriend, right? Luis Salazar?
Yeah. But Luis did not have HIV. He died of leukemia.
Oh, that’s right. I remember that from your book. I’m sorry.
Yes, once someone said [cynically, because they thought it was really AIDS], “Oh, I read that Luis Salazar died of leukemia.” And I said, “Uh, well, he did.” He was in ACT UP and he worked for an AIDS testing facility whose name I can’t remember. [Per Luis’ New York Times obituary, he was an HIV/AIDS research assistant at Columbia University’s public health school who died at age 27 in 1992.] If he’d died of AIDS, he’d have had no shame in saying so. But no one could wrap their heads around the fact that he didn’t actually die from AIDS.
Anyway, he was from San Francisco, where there’s an AIDS grove in Golden Gate Park. So one day I finally paid the $1,000 to have his name put on there. But they put his name over one of the cracks in the pavement. They said they’d fix it, but I haven’t been back yet to make sure.
Do you think surviving so many people at such a young age, including a lover, had an effect on you for the rest of your life?
I already had walls up, and I think they got cemented even more. I had to protect myself. I talk about this in the book. There’s two things that seemed opposing. My friend Ryan asked me once if I felt anger or regret that I didn’t have as much sex then as I could have. Now of course there’s PrEP and nobody’s worried so much. But in fact, we had a lot of sex. There were all those backrooms. But the sex had an element of, “I’m doing the best I can to have safe sex, but am I really?” Oral sex with condoms—in reality, nobody was doing that.
But I think that shows how gay men realized informally, ahead of the science, that it did not really pass through oral sex, or many, many more people would’ve become positive.
I think there was an element there of—danger?
Risk.
Risk, yes. It was scary but it was also kind of hot. Do you think that’s stupid?
No. I know entirely what you’re talking about. I think gay men eroticized the forbidden. Even today, these young gay guys, there’s obsessed with “being bred” or with “taking loads.” And I think that’s like an offshoot of how sperm became, like, the sexy Devil’s juice. There’s still something kind of charged about that, which I think comes partly out of the pre-PrEP years where taking a load was verboten. You were considered pathological if you did that. And, as activist Tony Valenzuela talked about when I chatted with him, you weren’t even allowed to say that you wanted it, to say, “I know I can’t do this, but I sure miss it or I sure want it.”
Or, “But damn, I did it last night.”
Right.
But going back to ACT UP, it helped me work out a lot of anger on many issues, not just AIDS.
ACT UP was definitely about more than AIDS.
It was therapy for me. It gave voice to my rage.
Right. So to get into Will & Grace, tell me how you got involved. I have some key cultural questions about the show I want to ask you.
My writing partner Tracy Poust was good friends with Michael Patrick King [best known for directing and writing Sex and the City]. He brought her out to L.A. so she could for him. So I followed her and was trying to be an actor out there. But we wrote some spec scripts, which meant that you wrote an episode of an existing show that was your proof that you could write for that show. We wrote an episode of News Radio and Third Rock from the Sun.
So off that, Michael got us a meeting with Max Mutchnick and David Kohan [the creators of Will & Grace].
I think I was even selling Tracy and I as a real-life Will and Grace. But we got the job. And I was catering back then and I had one of those shitty tuxes that you bought in a thrift store to wear as a caterer. And I came home that night and had two messages on my answering machine. The first said that my bankruptcy had gone through. The second one was that we’d been hired on Will & Grace. So once we were writing for the show and were nominated for an Emmy, I got rid of that tux and had made this other tux based on the one that Warren Beatty wore in Shampoo. This black velvet ’70s tux with flared legs.
Warren Beatty in Shampoo is the sexiest and most stylish man who ever lived.
Obsessed! But anyway, for the first period of the show, Tracy and I both thought we were going to get fired any minute. But then we relaxed into it.
I remember watching my first episode of W&G, in my apartment in Chelsea with some friends including my friend Troy, who said, “We have to watch this funny new show.” I remember feeling almost—I could not believe, and I think I felt weirdly exposed, because I had so many relationships with girls that were like the Will & Grace relationship. I probably had three Graces. I remember thinking, “I can’t believe they seized on something so under-the-radar, these friendships that exist between gay men and straight women.” I couldn’t believe there was a network show about a relationship like that. It seemed so niche. We’ve now seen a million iterations of that relationship, but at the time it had not really been codified in pop culture. And then Sex and the City did it simultaneously with Carrie and Stanford Blatch.
So, do you remember any of the early conversations about what kind of a show you were going to make, and how you were going to thread this needle, because, like you said in the book, the only mainstream TV show that had gone into gay-main-character territory was Ellen…
…which went off the air a few months before W&G debuted. It was a very awkward transitional time for gay representation. Today, especially if you’re watching non-censored TV, like Netflix, queer characters usually look and talk the way queer people really look and talk. But back then, you had to find a way to package it to make it palatable. Did you have those conversations about how far you wanted the show to go?
Yes. Tracy and I weren’t there for the pilot, but, yes, Max and Dave had to tip-toe. Max was gay and Dave was straight, so they had a kind of W&G relationship but with the show, they had to have a girl in the relationship. I’m sure they had millions of conversations and notes about how to toe that line. They told us that, with test audiences, not all of them even got that Will was gay. [laughs] It’s kind of sad. It’s mentioned once or twice that Will’s just gotten out of a relationship and is in pain. But if you’re not paying attention… and then at the end of the pilot, Will and Grace kiss and she asks him if he feels nothing, and he says, “Nothing.”
But once the show was on the air and getting good ratings, we were all like, “Let’s give Will a boyfriend. The gay gloves are coming off.” And that was its own journey. It wasn’t easy. Thank God we had Jimmy Burrows as a director, because he had a lot of clout, so he could act as the go-between between the network and the creative team. We had to fight for it. We thought we could do it quicker than actually happened, but it was actually baby step by baby step. First, Will could date someone off-camera. Then maybe we’d see the guy on-camera. Then eventually he spent the night with the guy—off-camera.
Last night, I ended up watching endless clips from the show on YouTube. I’m trying to remember—Will dated Bobby Cannavale, right?
Yes.
Now of course there’s the famous, funny scene where Will and Jack kiss on live TV on The Today Show in front of Al Roker. A very clever way of getting what I believe was the first gay kiss on network TV.
Yes, because people like their gays funny.
And then of course Will kissed Taye Diggs, in what was called the first gay interracial kiss on TV, and then of course Bobby later on.
You touched on a real historical trope in pop culture, which is that the gay has to be a funny eunuch. I would say this is less so for Gen Z girls, but I think traditionally many straight women who fancy themselves quite liberal and pro-gay can really cringe at gay sex. They don’t want to see it. Maybe it’s because of a fantasy they have that their gay is their little pet. And gay men having sex is a reminder to them that at the end of the day gay men really want to be with other gay men.
It’s a very fraught area.
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