How the Homosexuals Saved Civilization - Cathy Crimmins [50]
To watch old game shows, even those produced in eighties, is to notice a slower pace that allows ad-libbing. Games such as To Tell the Truth, I’ve Got a Secret, Password, The Match Game, and The Hollywood Squares were less about contestants than they were about the celebrities. These verbal-packed “contests” eventually gave way to an even chattier form, the pseudo-competitions meant to humiliate contestants, such as Chuck Barris’s The Gong Show (1976-1980) and the apotheosis of the non-game show, The $1.98 Beauty Show, which debuted in 1978.
Hosted by a very gay Rip Taylor, The $1.98 Beauty Show was a misogynist parody with contestants of all sizes, shapes, and ages competing for a cheap crown. It was definitely a precursor to all silly reality contest shows on nowadays, such as Fear Factor or Road Rules. Rip Taylor was (and still is) a fey, mustachioed, confetti-throwing comic. As host, he elevated a very bad concept to exquisite camp. Whereas Chuck Barris was a rather brash, nasty figure on The Gong Show, Taylor was benignly funny.
Rip Taylor has since been grand marshal of gay parades and has spoken fairly openly about his homosexuality. Yet when I contacted his agent to interview him for this book, he declined to talk about being a gay figure on television. In addition to introducing a super-swishy homosexual image into middle America’s living rooms, he is even off the charts in gay circles. On a website called “You Know You’re a Queen If . . .” anyone who scores more than thirty points on questions is “sassier than Rip Taylor.”
Recently Taylor appeared in the Jackass movie spawned by the popular television show. When asked why he wanted Rip Taylor to be in his movie, Johnny Knoxville said, “I love Rip Taylor. And Jackass has a lot of gay undertones. It’s pretty much chock-full of ’em.”
I guess Knoxville is right, which proves how mainstream “gay” preoccupations have become. His Jackass cast is forever giving one another bungee wedgies or sticking things up one another’s butts.
Sky Gilbert, a gay Toronto columnist, wrote about Jackass in a piece called “The End of Straight.” He notes that the young ensemble of buff heterosexual men is always stripping off clothes.
And what do they do after they take it all off? Well, they lick honey out of each other’s ass cracks (not actually filmed in this movie, but alluded to), they stick firecrackers in each other’s butts or take endless glee in having a couple of male pals over to watch them shove a dinky car toy up their rectums.
If this film holds any truth at all about what constitutes good, not-so-clean, masculine fun, well, then a lot of it must involve guys playing with each other’s nasty ol’ rear ends.
Queer Sitcoms, Wholesome Gay Fathers, and Queer Granddads
Among queer-studies professionals, Bewitched is considered the queerest sitcom ever made. This is not because of Paul Lynde’s guest appearances as Samantha’s “queeny” Uncle Arthur, nor because of Agnes Moorehead’s presence as Samantha’s mother. (Moorehead has widely been alleged to have been a lesbian, despite two marriages.) And although Dick Sargent, the second man to play Samantha’s husband, Darrin, later came out after the show went off the air, even that is not why Bewitched has been dubbed a gay show.
No, the queer designation comes about more on metaphorical terms. Samantha, a witch by birth, has decided to marry a mortal. She promises husband Darrin that she will not reveal her true identity to anyone else, and that she will not practice witchcraft in her daily life. So Samantha becomes a closeted witch, who can only share her true lifestyle with her extended witch family when they drop by to create havoc. The term “witch hunt” has always been used in modern times to mean unfair prejudice. And here, in the modern tale of Samantha Stephens in 1964 America, we have a story that