How the Homosexuals Saved Civilization - Cathy Crimmins [47]
Chapter 8
Game-Show Sissies and Gay Dads—and Was Gomer Pyle a Fairy?
Perhaps Lucy qualifies as gay television because most of
the story lines typically involve Lucy masquerading as
someone or something she’s not in order to get into Ricky’s
act. Or to get more analytical, maybe Lucy appeals to gay
men because on some level they can identify with Lucy and
Ethel—a pair of 1950s housewives who repeatedly take
delight in defying male patriarchal authority and tradi tional male/female gender roles.
—Stephen Tropiano, The Prime Time Closet
TV, particularly the sitcom world, starts and ends with gay
men. Until Roseanne, those gay men (and women) were
much like the Jews of early Hollywood, keeping to them selves that which might turn Middle America off. Mr.
Mooney, Uncle Arthur, everyone on H. R. Pufnstuf, Phyl lis’ unseen husband, Lars, Speed Racer, Mr. French, even
real-life variety performer Alan Sues, etc., etc., etc., were
all kept in the closet, however clear the subtext.
—David Poland
TV was campy from the moment it first appeared in American homes. Dad turned on the set, and the whole family watched Milton Berle prancing around in a dress. Years later, in 1999, Berle would end up suing a real estate company for six million dollars because it used an image of him dressed as Carmen Miranda in a full page ad in Out! magazine. The caption: “Every queen deserves a castle.”
Berle declared through a lawyer that he wanted to make it clear that he had nothing against homosexuals, but he did not want anyone to think he was one. Berle’s drag wasn’t supposed to be taken seriously—it was gay, in the old-fashioned sense. “We are deeply concerned that a generation of Americans unfamiliar with Berle’s classic shtick are seeing Berle depicted as a homosexual within the pages of this gay magazine,” said his attorney.
Berle was ninety-one when he filed suit. Would any television viewers under the age of forty even know who he was? By the late 1990s, Will & Grace was already on the air, and we were all accustomed to the idea that a straight man could act gay. And Tom Hanks had done his drag time in the eighties on the campy sitcom Bosom Buddies, a kind of low-grade Some Like It Hot, or Billy Wilder Lite.
By the Lenny Bruce rule, Milton Berle was gay, even if he was a heterosexual. (Which all agree he was, with a penis rumored to be huge in Hollywood—who keeps these penile measurements, anyway? I thought it was mostly gay men.) Any man in a dress represents an aesthetic of artificiality. It has nothing to do with whom he screws. I don’t care how married Barry Humphreys is, or how many children he’s sired. His character Dame Edna is gay. Or, better than that, she is a gay icon. She is a gay diva, like Liza and Judy and Julie Newmar.
And while we’re at it, another early television giant, Jack Benny, seemed gay, too, even though he was a married man. He swished, he flipped his wrists, he played the violin. The Jack Benny walk was famous—in one Lucille Ball show, as Lucy tried to seduce him, she wiggled her hips and beckoned him. “Walk this way,” said Lucy. “I always do,” said Jack. It was part of his onstage and on-screen character to flaunt his effeminacy. Jack Benny was a proto-Pee-wee Herman.
Proto-Gay Characters, Faux or Real
There were a lot of faux-gay men around in the early days of television. Some of them really were gay, like Wally Cox on Mr. Peepers. (Or was he? Some information cites Cox as a ladies’ man and best friend/roommate of Marlon Brando. Other gay websites and books claim him as a gay man and even insinuate that he was more than a roommate to Brando.)
I have a friend who’s always wanted to