Gays Next Door in 1972: The Doris Day Show

In 1972, when I was 11 years old, my friends and I liked a sitcom called The Doris Day Show, mainly because it was squeezed between the beefcake-heavy Here's Lucy and Sonny and Cher.  

It was a Mary Tyler Moore clone, a workplace comedy centered on Doris Martin (Doris Day), a hip, sophisticated journalist for Today's World magazine, living in San Francisco and dating a number of cute guys (including Patrick O'Neal and bisexual rat packer Peter Lawford, left).

And, in a television first, there was a gay couple living next door!

Lance and Lester (Alan Dewitt, Lester Fletcher) were often referred to, and appeared in the November 27, 1972 episode, "The Co-Op."  I didn't catch the flamboyant stereotypes, and no one used the word "gay" -- I wouldn't hear the word on tv until 1976 -- but I saw that two men had found a way to live together, escaping the heterosexist mandate .  Could San Francisco be a "good place"?

Doris Day got her start in the light musical comedies of the 1940s, but she made her mark as a liberated woman in a series of Camelot-era sex comedies with suggestive titles: Pillow Talk (1959), It Happened to Jane (1959), Lover Come Back (1961), That Touch of Mink (1962), The Thrill of it All (1963), Move Over Darling (1963).  Her usual costar, gay actor Rock Hudson, helped her tiptoe around the boundary between not knowing that gay people exist and knowing but not saying.

But her sitcom began as a hayseed comedy!

In its first season (1968-69), The Doris Day Show was Green Acres: City girl Doris, a new widow, moves to her father's ranch with her two sons, Toby (Todd Starke) and Billy (Philip Brown, below, who would go on to a successful career as a soap hunk), plus a ranch hand (James Hampton, right) and a housekeeper.  It aired on Tuesday nights, just after another relic of the 1950s, The Red Skelton Show.

Doris hated hayseed -- she didn't even know that her husband Martin Melcher had signed her up for it.

So in the second season (1969-70), she made some changes: although still living on the ranch, Doris commuted into San Francisco, where she worked as a secretary for Today's World magazine.

Today's World: Modern, hip, with it.

She got two quintessentially urban coworkers, played by  McLean Stevenson and Rose Marie.

In the third season (1970-71): Doris and her sons lived in an apartment over an Italian restaurant in San Francisco (Ranch?  What ranch?), where she got a gay-vague next door neighbor (Billy DeWolf).

In the fourth season (1971-72), the transition was complete: Doris was a sophisticated career woman, Ms. instead of Mrs., who had always been single (Kids?  What kids?).

And she managed to finagle some gay neighbors out of the network, something Mary Tyler Moore was never able to do.

Henry Willson: The Man Who Invented Beefcake

During the Cold War of the 1950s, the Clark Gable-Cary Grant- Fernando Lamas model of  masculinity, the suave, sophisticated bon-vivants who sipped champaign at El Crocadero, fell into disfavor.  Movies began to display a new model of "youthful masculinity" featuring regular guys, small-town boys who sipped sodas at maltshops.   They had to be wholesome -- God-fearing, mother-respecting, patriotic -- yet sexual, overbrimming with erotic energy, aware (without stating it) that sometimes things happened in bedrooms.

They had to be stunningly handsome, of course, and muscular -- for the first time ever in the movies, they would rip their shirts off regularly, providing a beefcake spectacle that might draw audiences away from the still-prudish tv.

Walt Disney and his minions scoured the countryside to provide a stable of Adventure Boys for the teen and preteen audience -- James McArthur, Roger Mobley, David Stollery,  Tommy Kirk, Tim Considine, and many others.

For adult beefcake, the go-to guy was talent agent extraordinaire Henry Willson.

 Born in 1911, Willson began his career as a talent scout for the Zeppo Marx Agency, where he signed on future film great Lana Turner.  In 1943, he became the head of the talent division for David O. Selznick's Vanguard Pictures.  He and his assistants prowled gyms, modeling agencies, athletic events, and community theaters looking for prospects. Muscle Beach was a good bet, training ground to dozens of bodybuilder hopefuls drawn in by Earle E. Liederman's chatty columns in Muscle Power.

Since he was gay, Willson tended sign up men who were gay, or bisexual, or at least "gay for pay."   He spruced them up, arranged for acting lessons and gym memberships, and gave them strong, macho, all-American names:

Orton Whipple Hungerford III = Ty Hardin
Robert Mosely = Guy Madison
Francis Durgan = Rory Calhoun
Merle Johnson = Troy Donahue
Roy Harold Scherer = Rock Hudson

They present a straight facade to the world, of course, so Willson conspired with movie magazines and gossip columnists to send them on dates with female stars or link them romantically with in-the-know starlets.  Sometimes he even arranged "Hollywood marriages."  It seems that the "hiding in plain sight" was part of their appeal, adding a salacious twinge, "is he or isn't he"?


In 1953, Willson opened his own agency.  He didn't need to seek out prospects anymore; he was receiving 9,000 letters per week from high school football players and small-town thesbians anxious to make it big.  And some did -- if they were willing to make it on the casting couch first, or at least flirt a bit.  Almost every Hollywood hunk of the new beefcake model got his start as a Willson boy:

Doug McClure
James Darren
Chad Everett
Dack Rambo (left)

John Saxon
Nick Adams
Clint Walker (left)
John Derek
James Gavin

Willson didn't care for bodybuilders, except for Cal Bolder -- they had to find their representation elsewhere. And a few other hunks managed to find work without him.  But even if they weren't discovered by Willson, they often realized that connections are everything, and gay, bi, or straight, they became regulars at his weekly pool parties:

Ed Fury
Farley Granger
Van Williams
Robert Stack

Roddy McDowall
Steve Reeves
Tony Curtis
Aldo Ray
John Bromfield
Gary Conway
Gary Lockwood
Richard Long
Robert Wagner (left)

Disaster hit in 1955, when Willson made a deal with Confidential magazine to keep the rumors off Rock Hudson in exchange for a story about Tab Hunter's arrest at a gay party in 1950 (the actor and agent had a falling out).  The deal fell through, and Willson was effectively outed.  His established clients left -- most denied that they had ever met him -- and it became difficult to sign new clients.

During the 1960s, the fresh-faced, wholesome look became  "square," replaced by shaggy and androgynous,  and Willson's career ended.  Destitute, drinking heavily, forgotten by his former friends, he moved into a rest home for indigent Hollywood stars, and he died of cirrhosis of the liver in 1978.

But he left an amazing legacy, a 1950s world where "gay" was always just beneath the surface.

George Nader: Actor and Gay Activist of the 1950s

Lots of monsters landed in space ships during the 1950s, or crawled out of the ocean, but by far the most ridiculous was Robot Monster (1953): a guy in a gorilla suit and a diving helmet. He's killed everyone on Earth except for eight survivors. He goes after them one by one, even killing a little boy (breaking the rule that children in horror movies are invincible).  He falls for a survivor girl, refuses to kill her, and gets in trouble with his boss, who destroys him, leaving three survivors. But it might be a dream.  Hopefully it's a dream.

Other than the ridiculousness, the movie's main claim to fame is George Nader's chest.  The actor spends most of the movie with his shirt off -- until he's killed by the Robot Monster.

The 28-year old Nader had only been in Hollywood for a few years.  He arrived just in time for the beefcake revival, when gay agent Henry Willson placed dozens of guys with monosyllabic names like Rock and Guy in movies based on their hunk appeal.  George costarred with several of them:

Steve Cochran in Carnival Story (1954)
Rory Calhoun in Four Guns to the Border (1954)
Tony Curtis in Six Bridges to Cross (1955)
John Saxon in The Unguarded Moment (1956)

But stardom eluded him, probably because of the gay rumors; he refused to put on a heterosexual facade, like his lifelong friend Rock Hudson.

In the early 1960s, the gay rumors forced George and his partner Mark Miller to move to Europe, where he finally found stardom -- and gay subtexts -- as secret agent Jerry Cotton in a series of German movies.  Heinz Weiss played his assistant/ boyfriend, Phil Dekker.

George retired from acting in 1974, and devoted himself to writing and gay rights activism.  His first novel, Chrome (1978), remains rare example of a science fiction novel with a gay male protagonist.

He died in 2002, survived by Mark Miller.  They had been together for 55 years.

John Wayne was a Sissy

During the 1950s and 1960s,, John Wayne was the symbol for an all-American frontier masculinity that never really existed, but many people longed for: tough, surly, taciturn, quick with his fists and a gun.  He starred in war movies, dramas, and comedies -- he even played Genghis Khan, but he was most famous as a cowboy hero or antihero in movies with gutsy one- or two-word titles: Hondo, The Searchers, Rio Bravo, True Grit, Big Jake, The Shootist. 

But the "epitome of masculinity" was actually rather gender-transgressive:
1. His real name was the gender-bending Marion.
2. Watch him walk.  He sashays like RuPaul.
3. He had small, delicate hands.
4. He was slim and svelte, nothing like a muscleman.
5. He got his start as a "Sandy Saunders, the Singing Cowboy."
6. In His Private Secretary (1933), his character is a feminine-coded bon vivant who wants to marry a minister's granddaughter, but he's too "debauched."

And he had his share of gay subtexts, surly, taciturn guys with no particular interest in ladies who buddy-bond with the hunkiest star du jour that studios could cram into a cowboy suit.  Just to name a few:

1. The Searchers (1956).  Ethan (John Wayne), who has no particular interest in ladies, buddy-bonds with Martin (screen hunk Jeffrey Hunter) en route to saving a girl from savage Indians.

2. Rio Bravo (1959).  Sheriff John T. Chance (John Wayne) teams up with Colorado Ryan (contemporary teen idol Ricky Nelson).

3. The Comancheros (1961). Texas ranger Jake Cutter (John Wayne) arrests Paul Regret (screen hunk Stuart Whitman), but then needs his help to fight the Comancheros.

4. The Undefeated (1969): former Union and Confederate officers (John Wayne, screen hunk Rock Hudson) must work together to guide a group through war-torn Mexico.

The Duke was notoriously homophobic, even in the days when homophobia was rampant, though he and Rock Hudson managed to work together on the set of The Undefeated.

And racist: in an infamous Playboy interview in 1971, he stated that he believed in white supremacy until "the blacks are educated to the point of responsibility."

Why was he trying so hard to maintain white heterosexual male privilege?  Was it that big a problem for him to share the world with people who were gay, or black, or female?

Sounds like a sissy to me.

Love, Sidney: Tony Randall Plays...Um...You Know

In a 1972 interview in the gay-vague After Dark magazine, Tony Randall said that he'd recently seen some gay porn.  "Just terrible!  Just disgusting!  There's nothing to watch in that. It confirms something I've always suspected -- they don't like it."  Later he said "There is no such thing as homosexuality -- it's just something invented by a bunch of fags."

Rather an odd statement from someone who had played the gay-vague friend to gay actor Rock Hudson in several movies, including Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter (1957), Pillow Talk (1959), and Send Me No Flowers (1964).  But at the time he didn't believe the rumors -- "6'5, built like Tarzan, very virile. A man's man. I didn't believe it for a moment."

Apparently he spent his life believing that all gay men swished.

Still, he kept trying to incorporate gay plotlines into The Odd Couple (1970-75), about two divorced men sharing an apartment, the prissy, gay-coded Felix (Tony) and the boorish slob Oscar (Jack Klugman).  Every other hip urban sitcom had a gay episode -- why not his?  Maybe Felix could find an article Oscar was writing on gays in sports, and assume that he was gay.  Or they could accidentally get booked onto a gay cruise.  The network censors nixed every idea, so Tony and Jack started baiting the censors by hugging and kissing.  Here's a clip of outtakes.

In 1981, Tony Randall starred in the tv movie Sidney Shorr: A Girl's Best Friend, about a depressed gay artist living in Manhattan who takes in a single mom and her daughter. The gayness was gingerly tiptoed around, conveyed through hints and innuendos.  Oddly, he didn't swish.

The tv version, Love Sidney (1981-83) faced howls of outrage long before it aired.  Right-wing nutjobs hated the fact that a gay man would be openly portrayed on tv (also a woman who had sex without being married).  So Sidney was de-gayed as much as possible, and Laurie (Swoozie Kurtz) became merely divorced, not "loose."

How de-gayed was Sidney?  He never says anything, but there is a photo of his long-dead lover placed tactfully in the background in the apartment. He doesn't know any other gay people, although he rescues a suicidal one in the penultimate episode.  Actually, he doesn't have any friends of his own, although he is quite obsessed with his mother.

He doesn't date any women, except in the 1983 two-parter "Allison."  It doesn't work out, because he's still pining "for someone he lost."  "I really hate her!" Allison exclaims.  Sidney cautions: "Don't hate...er, that person."

That's as gay as tv got in 1983.

That's as gay-friendly as Tony Randall got.