We Got It Made: 1980s Sitcom with Gay Actor Tom Villard

When I was at Indiana University studying for my M.A., lots of the guys in Eigenmann Hall watched the sex comedy We Got It Made (1983-84), about two nerds who hire Mickey (Teri Copley), one of those ubiquitous 1980s servants who provide joie de vivre along with the housework.   I watched because it was stuck between the must-see Mama's Family and Cheers.  It wasn't awful.

1. The odd couple, button-down attorney David (Matt McCoy, left, John Hillner) and goofy salesman Jay (Tom Villard), had a nice gay subtext going on, in spite of the cheesecake maid and their respective girlfriends.

2. A hot bear cop, Max (former pro wrestler Ron Karabatsos), lived downstairs, with his teenage son Max (Lance Wilson-White).

3. Like Three's Company, it was all about thinking people were having sex, sex itself: Mickey sleepwalks and ends up in the boys' bed; Mickey and Jay work on a screenplay, and David thinks they're having an affair; Mickey's diary entry makes everyone think that she wants to have sex with David; Mickey sleepwalks and ends up in the boys' bed.

4. Tom Villard (right) was gay.  In the mid-1980s, I occasionally saw him at Mugi, the gay Asian bar in Hollywood. He came out as gay and a person with AIDS in an Entertainment Tonight interview in February 1994, which at the time was career suicide; but he thought that speaking out was more important.

He was one of the nicest guys in Hollywood.

When he died in November 1994, his partner,  production designer Scott Chambliss, set up The Tom Villard Foundation to provide assistance to people living with AIDS.