Subtitle: Sitcoms, Specials, and the Queering of American Culture
By Matt Baume
(Smart Pop Books, 2023)
Once upon a time, I lived in front of the TV set, that big old blocky thing with three main channels and a few others if the TV aerial was having a good day. For an anxious, introverted kid, this was a great form of play, no ball skills required, no need to brush up on and quote hockey stats. I stuck with my imaginary friends who were fleshed out with voices and images inside the box in the den—Peter Brady (a curly-haired middle child like me—and cute too, though I was a little confused about why that mattered), Scooby Doo, Gilligan, a Jeannie in a bottle and, most of all, Mary Richards. The ’70s was a golden TV decade for me. But then, so were the ’80s and ’90s. Television viewing offered safe exposures to humans, along with animated talking dogs, an alien from Ork and a banjo-playing frog puppet.
Since I ate up TV trivia more eagerly than goals and assists for Guy Lafleur and much (but definitely not all) of my childhood confusion turned out to be about the fact I was a nascent gay, I grabbed a copy of Hi Honey, I’m Homo! Sitcoms, Specials, and the Queering of American Culture when I saw it on display at The Strand’s flagship bookstore in New York City. Even better, its author Matt Baume was scheduled for a book talk the next night. I sat in the front row—unabashedly outing my TV geekdom along with sixty other attendees.
I’ve now had the time to finish the book, carefully guarding my consumption, limiting myself to a chapter per day. (Funny how my parents never monitored my TV time.) First, a small quibble with the title. I don’t love the main title, but I suppose it’s an homage to family sitcoms and the breadwinning father’s return after a day at the office. It’ll do. The subtitle, however, should be tweaked by deleting “Specials” since the book focuses on a dozen sitcoms, appearing chronologically from “Bewitched” to “Modern Family,” each allotted a chapter.
Baume does an excellent job weaving American political and cultural history from the time that each sitcom ran, to help show how gay references on TV comedies reflected society and, sometimes, were ahead of their time, perhaps even prodding America toward greater understanding and acceptance. If sometimes in the first half of the book it seems a stretch to devote an entire chapter to a show like “Alice” with a single gay-themed episode or “Barney Miller” having a recurring character appear on eight episodes out of a 170-episode series run, it’s because it was that difficult to get any sort of gay content on network television. In addition to gay culture still being closeted everywhere but the biggest cities, there were TV censors, the Family Viewing Hour and grassroots conservative organizations such as the National Federation for Decency that threatened boycotts and pressured advertisers. A television producer invited migraines when flirting with putting a gay character in the cast of “Soap” or by choosing to have a drag character named Beverly LaSalle on three episodes of “All in the Family.” Fortunately, the creators of these shows were committed to being topical and edgy.
Baume had to make choices that other TV nerds like myself can quibble with. I would have gone with a single episode of “Mary Tyler Moore” over “Alice.” I loved both shows but the MTM depiction is more positive than the “Alice” episode wherein the titular character spins on the notion that gay men are pedophiles as she wonders whether she should allow her son to camp overnight with a gay man (and her macho, seemingly straight diner boss, Mel). I also found Baume’s gay interpretation of an episode of “Dinosaurs,” a show I’ve never seen, to be unconvincing. The Ice Age raptor son is going against parental and societal values by wanting to be vegan. Parallels can be made but there is no evidence the writers were touching on gayness. I believe the show’s writers simply thought it would be funny—and different—to have a hardcore carnivore go against his family and declare he fancied broccoli, but this really seems like standard situational comedy, a teen trying something that wigs out the parents.
I can’t figure out why Baume didn’t include a chapter about the Tony Randall-Swoosie Kurtz sitcom, “Love, Sidney,” which aired forty-four episodes over two seasons from 1981-1983 and, according to Wikipedia “was the first program on American television to feature a gay character as the central character.” (Randall’s Felix Unger on TV’s “The Odd Couple” (1970-1975) also came off as gay to many viewers based on neatnik, effeminate stereotypes.)
It’s also a mystery why Showtime’s “Brothers” (1984-1989), about three brothers, one of whom is gay, gets short shrift. That sitcom illustrates how the burgeoning cable channels could take more chances which, ultimately, moved the bar for the major networks as well. Furthermore, the entire chapter on “Cheers” feels like a cheap attempt to attract readers being as it was such a ratings success. The show’s gay content is scant whereas another ratings juggernaut, “Roseanne,” was far more gay-friendly, featuring Sandra Bernhard as a bisexual friend and Martin Mull as Roseanne’s boss, Leon, who eventually marries Fred Willard’s attorney character, Scott. (These supporting characters, while groundbreaking, didn’t make up for the fact that neither Roseanne’s sister, Jackie (Laurie Metcalfe), or daughter Darlene (played by lesbian actress Sara Gilbert) weren’t written as queer, but that’s part of the discussion Baume could have fleshed out.) I'm wondering if Baume or his publisher nixed the "Roseanne" chapter since Roseanne Barr has fallen so epically...and not on account of her anthem singing.
One thing I tired of in Hi Honey was all the repetition. The negative depiction of homosexuality on “Marcus Welby, M.D.” appears in four separate parts of the book. An account of people protesting outside the offices of “Soap” is mentioned verbatim in the book’s opening vignette and then a hundred pages later. It seems incidents of repetition are an editorial choice based on an assumption that some readers will skip chapters about shows they didn’t know or like, but this dummies things down (and offers annoying moments) for people like me who opt to read from cover to cover. Rather than harping on “Marcus Welby,” I’d have loved some elaboration on an almost random reference on page 101 about the fact ABC employed an on-staff psychic named Beverly Dean. Yes, things were kooky in the ’70s!
Sigh. Baume’s book is still interesting for this TV aficionado. When the gay content is more apparent, giving him more to work with, the chapters are much more interesting. The chapter on “Ellen” is furtive ground, even if I wanted more in-depth analysis of the clunky yet earnest season that followed Ellen Morgan outing herself to Laura Dern’s Susan and, via microphone, to other airport passengers. I would have loved a tub of popcorn as I gobbled down Baume’s accounts of “Will & Grace” and “Modern Family.”
Television has come a long way in its portrayals of queer characters. Perhaps today’s awkward, nascent gay boys have more opportunities to understand their identities by catching content so accessible on phone and laptop screens.
