gay adjacent

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This term gay adjacent appears in print at least by a 1997 issue of the LGBTQ-interest magazine The Advocate. A review of the then-released film LA Confidential characterizes straight actors Russell Crowe, Guy Pearce, and since-out-of-the-closet Kevin Spacey as gay-adjacent because they had taken on gay roles in cinema.

Bet you didn’t know Russell Crowe played an adorable young gay man looking for love in the 1994 Australian dramedy The Sum of Us? Oh, you did? Well, in that case, we could cheer you on and say you’re gay adjacent.

Adjacent, here, means “next to” or “bordering on,” increasingly used with nouns in the late 1990s and 2000s to describe something as “almost” (e.g., hipster-adjacent millennials or vegan-adjacent cuisine).

The Advocate notably took to gay adjacent again in 2002, though expanded its meaning. In an interview with Steven Hill (the hunky bartender on The Real World who struggled to keep his top on while at work), writer Chuck Kim called him gay adjacent, implying Hill could attract more gay viewers to the show.

The term was mostly used by gay publications to refer to straight people who had some “brush” with gay culture until a 2005 broadcast of The Daily Show helped bring it to a wider audience. Correspondent Stephen Colbert responded to Christian fundamentalist, who claimed Hurricane Katrina was sent to punish gays, by noting New Orleans’ heart of gay culture, the French Quarter, was by and large spared: “The lesson of Katrina is: God loves gays, but hates the gay-adjacent.”