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Terry Sweeney

Terry Sweeney
Born Terrence Sweeney
(1950-03-23) March 23, 1950 (age 67)
Queens, New York, United States
Nationality American
Occupation Comedian, actor, writer

Terry Sweeney (born March 23, 1950) is an American writer, comedian and actor.

Terrence (Terry) Sweeney was born in 1950 in Queens, New York and raised in Massapequa Park, New York as the younger of two children to Terrence, a butcher, and Lenore Sweeney. As a child, he was bullied and used books to comfort himself including the Nancy Drew mysteries and performed his own Broadway plays. At a young age, his interest in the performing arts grew. He graduated Farmingdale High School in 1969 and attended Middlebury College where he learned Spanish and Italian and graduated in 1973 with a bachelor of arts degree. In his sophomore year, he became engaged to a girl but Sweeney had started identifying himself as gay by the fourth grade. Before becoming a writer, he worked as a drug rehabilitation counselor and waiter.

Sweeney is best known for his appearances as a regular cast member of Saturday Night Live (SNL) during that program's 1985–86 season. He was discovered by Lorne Michaels while Sweeney was performing in a New York play,Banned in France, in 1983.

Sweeney, who is not related to fellow SNL alumna Julia Sweeney, had also been a writer of sketches for SNL during the early 1980s under producer Jean Doumanian prior to being hired as a member of the cast.

He was SNL's first openly gay male cast member; Sweeney was "out" prior to being hired as a cast member. Sweeney's run on the show came at a time when there were few openly gay characters or actors on television. For roughly 27 years, there were no other openly gay cast members on SNL, until Kate McKinnon (a former cast member of Logo's The Big Gay Sketch Show) was added to the cast in April 2012.

According to the book Live from New York: The Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live, during a sketch on the Madonna/Simple Minds episode where he plays a gay actor who pretends to be straight in order to star in a movie, a stage light falls into an empty pool, causing Sweeney to shriek and nearly fall out of his chair. This action was not scripted nor planned. (The book erroneously states that this happened to Damon Wayans, who only appeared on the episode in a commercial parody.)


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