How the Homosexuals Saved Civilization - Cathy Crimmins [51]
I loved the show as a kid, and felt it unfair that Samantha had to do things the tedious mortal way. I would never vacuum a house if I were a witch, I vowed to my nine-year-old self. I adored Samantha and hated Darrin with the same fe rocity that I hated “Master,” the piggy astronaut in I Dream of Jeannie, who always locked his female genie in a bottle. (Talk about campiness!) It turns out that a lot of gay boys were also watching Bewitched, and that they saw Samantha’s plight as similar to their own. Samantha had her “straight” life and the “witch life” in which she could summon William Shakespeare to her side, or fly up to the North Pole to see Santa Claus. All of her relatives were flamboyant and fun. All of Darrin’s associates were straight and dull.
Early television sitcoms fall into two categories. Either the writers presented a utopian idea of what the American family should be (Leave It to Beaver, Father Knows Best) or they gave us a means to escape into a fantasy of otherness. I preferred shows in the second Bewitched-type category, such as My Mother the Car, in which Jerry Van Dyke bought a used car only to find that it was inhabited by his mother’s spirit (the voice of Ann Sothern), or My Living Doll, where Julie Newmar played a beautiful six-foot robot girl. Is it just a coincidence that Ann Sothern and Julie Newmar are both idolized by many gay men?
The later Mork & Mindy had the same campy tone—when aliens come to town, it’s always time to hike up the campiness. The scenes in which the aliens reverted to their natural selves always played as humans putting on alien “drag” costumes—Uncle Martin in his shiny green suit with the antennae visible on his head, and Mork in his spacesuit, holding a helmet and talking to his planet’s commanders.
Thinking back on it now, these fantasy sitcoms seem as queer as that great gay film favorite The Wizard of Oz, which was telecast yearly from the 1960s on. (Although it was made for the movie screen, few Americans under seventy have ever seen it in a theater.) The Wizard of Oz has been dissected again and again as a quintessentially queer movie. Yet it is the most important pop-culture nexus between the straight and gay worlds.
Television homosexuality would be easier to write about if every actor rumored to be gay suddenly admitted to it. But the fact remains that Gomer Pyle (Jim Nabors) might have been gay (don’t ask, don’t tell). Mr. Nabors isn’t saying. And Mr. Brady (Robert Reed) of The Brady Bunch really was homosexual, by his own later admission. Perhaps that’s why he came across as so gentle and kind. One of the big revelations for me was Grandpa Walton—in real life, Will Geer had lived with the founder of an early homosexual organization, The Mattachine Society. Grandpa Walton was a communist and a homo. I love that. One of my gay friends in West Hollywood told me a story about Will Geer’s later years, when he lived in the Hollywood Hills and still admired handsome young men. “I might be too old to cut the mustard, but I can still lick the jar,” he was supposed to have said on many occasions.
Gay Writers, Straight Shows
“The show was a fantasy world of beach parties, sideburns, and little black dresses, and I, for two blessed hours, got to forget about being a gay teenager,” reminisced Aaron Harberts in a magazine piece when Beverly Hills, 90210 was about to go off the air. Harberts and his writing partner, Gretchen Berg, became part of the writing staff for 90210’s last two seasons. “Some say that 90210 has had a profound effect on gay culture and vice versa. . . . Before Friends and Frasier, before gay and lesbian characters were simply plot-point twists or quirky best friends, 90210 tackled many topics important to gay people. We did coming out in high school, gay adoption, and gay bashing.”
Harberts says he and his writing partner also were able to “flex our high-camp muscles” by creating Gina, the spiteful, figure-skating cousin character. “The problem with camp, though,” writes Harberts,