It's a Man's World: A Gay Threesome from the 1960s

 Speaking of Ted Bessell, before That Girl, he starred in It’s a Man’s World (1962-63) as Tom-Tom, a college student obsessed by Beat poetry and jazz, both emblematic of the multisexual bohemian subcultures of the 1950’s.  

Tom-Tom lives on a houseboat with his teenage brother Howie (Michael Burns, right) and boyfriend Wes (Glenn Corbett, above, who by the way was bisexual, and appeared in Physique Pictorial under the name Glenn Robinson).

But the couple is not happy; they are always arguing about chores and money.  One night Tom-Tom can’t take it any more.  He wanders into a waterfront tavern, where newly-arrived country boy Vern (Randy Boone, left) is playing the guitar. 

In perhaps the first gay pick-up in television history, the two exchange suspicious glances and then knowing grins.  The next scene shows them returning to the houseboat to spend the night together, and in the morning Tom-Tom tells Wes that it was not just a bar pick-up – Vern is moving in.  

Wes gets somewhat snippy about this new threat to his dominance, but soon he decides that having a cute farmboy around might be fun, and the episode ends with the trio splashing about in the water, the first gay three-way relationship in television history.

This series was before my time, and I only saw one episode, thanks to an ebay collector.  Unfortunately, according to tvobscurities.com, later episodes backed away from the gay subtext -- really more of a text -- and gave them girlfriends.

See also: That Girl: Will and Grace for the 1960s; and Get Your Beefcake on Route 66

That Girl: Will and Grace for the 1960s

Why did That Girl (1966-71) made my childhood list of tv programs “good beyond hope"? The tale of Ann Marie (Marlo Thomas), madcap wannabe actress on the loose in a bright, effervescent New York City, had  some beefcake -- hunky guest stars and Don Hollinger (Ted Bessell) in extra-revealing 1960s pants.  But there were no same-sex plotlines, no same-sex romances. It's about a boy and a girl.

But still, Marlo Thomas and Ted Bessell were both gay allies.  Ted previously costarred with gay actor Jim Nabors on Gomer Pyle and bisexual Glenn Corbett on  It's a Man's World.  Today Marlo Thomas writes a column on gay and women's history for The Huffington Post.

And they do not portray Don and Ann as in love. Indeed, they rarely even kiss. Instead, depictions of their evenings together often fade out with Don wisecracking and Ann laughing, like warm and caring friends enjoying each other’s company (in the third season, ABC helpfully added a kissing scene to the closing credits, to remind us that they were to be taken as a romantic couple).

Instead, they often treated the romantic reading of their relationship as a joke: in “The Good Skate” (September 1967), when Don presents Ann with a small jewelry box, she concludes that it contains an engagement ring and gapes in horror: she doesn’t want to get married. But it really contains a skate key.

Surely most lovers would consider such a joke rather cruel, but Ann laughs it off as mischievous fun.







ABC wanted the couple to marry in the last episode, but they refused. The series ended with Ann and Don trapped in an elevator en route to a Women’s Liberation meeting.

Two decades later, when Marlo Thomas and Ted Bessell discussed a reunion movie, they agreed that Ann and Don had remained close friends, but never married.

They wanted fans to be free to explore their own feelings, instead of believing that their destiny necessarily lay in a cookie-cutter, assembly-line heterosexual romance. She and

Bessell took pains, therefore, to ensure that their characters could be read in any of the many ways that women and men might approach each other as equals: perhaps as romantic partners, but perhaps as friends. In that last category it is easy to read Don as a gay man.