My Two Moms: Fred Koehler

Fred Koehler is short and rather husky, with a round, handsome face and a befuddled expression that makes him perfect for roles as oddball outsiders with no heterosexual interests.  Instead, they are gay-vague, yearning for love, acceptance, and family.

Like Ben Sharpless, teenage son of the obsessive sheriff Nolan in Birdseye (2002).

Or Andrew Schillinger, son of the white supremacist Vern Schillinger on Oz (1999-2003). (Who, by the way, gets several nude scenes, including a frontal.)

Or the mentally handicapped Pemon in Little Chenier (2006).

Or the obsessive-compulsive Lists in the Death Race franchise (2008, 2010, 2012).

But Boomers will always think of Fred Koehler as Chip, the child of two moms (Susan Saint James, Jane Curtin) on the sitcom Kate and Allie (1984-89).  Ok, they're heterosexual roommates, not lesbian life partners, but they provide a stable home, each acting as a mother to all of the kids, so what's the difference?

They even suffer a bit of reverse discrimination.  Their landlords, a lesbian couple, plan to classify them as two families and charge them double rent, until they are convinced that family consists of people who love each other, regardless of whether they are sleeping in the same bed.  

The lesbian landlords appeared only in that one episode.  The rest of the series was gay-free, but the message has remained throughout Fred's career: family is family.

A Separate Peace

Boys at boarding school have been falling in love with each other since Tom Brown's School Days, but for some reason high school teachers -- and homophobic school boards -- never notice.  They scream in agony over novels with a brief reference to a gay uncle, but novels about schoolboys in love are perfectly fine.

In the 1970s, my junior high and high school English teachers assigned many homoromances, as Chaim Potok's The Chosen and Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes, but the most overt of them was A Separate Peace (1959), by gay author John Knowles.

Based upon Knowles' experiences at the elite Philip Exeter Academy, A Separate Peace pairs shy, quiet 16-year old Gene Forrester with the effervescent, carpe-diem Finny.

In the days before teenagers had any idea that same-sex desire existed, Gene can't understand the intensity of his attraction, resulting in envy, jealousy, and anger.  He "accidently" breaks Finny's leg, ending his athletic career.  Finny forgives him.

Later, Finny falls down a flight of stairs, breaks his leg again, and dies as a result (even today, many novels about gay people kill them as psychic punishment).

When I first read the novel, I couldn't understand why Gene loved and hated Finny at the same time.  Today I know about internalized homophobia.

There have been three movie adaptions of A Separate Peace.  The producers seemed more gay-savvy than high school English teachers, as they all tried to minimize the homoromance. The 1972 version, which starred John Heyl (who never acted again) and Parker Stevenson (later to star in The Hardy Boys series with Shaun Cassidy), made the boys' uncertain future in World War II pivotal to understanding Gene's rage.

The 2004 version diluted the romance by immersing Gene and Finny into a group of four boys.  The 2011 movie short kept all of the competition and removed all of the desire.

Bell, Book, and Candle

Gillian doesn't like being in the lifestyle.  Having to hide all the time, to lie about your identity; the hedonism; the endless affairs.  She wants to live a "normal life," with a husband and kids.  She falls in love with publisher  Shep Henderson and leaves the lifestyle, in spite of the admonitions of her Aunt Queenie and fey "brother" Nicky.

Meanwhile journalist Sidney Redlich is investigating the lifestyle.  Most people aren't even aware that people like that exist, he says, but there are hundreds in Manhattan alone.  They have their own hangouts, like the Zodiac Club, where the aging queen Bianca de Passe holds court with her many admirers.

Nicky invites Sidney out for a drink and comes out to him -- "You're closer to one than you think."  Soon the two are inseparable companions, working on a book together, no doubt lovers as well.

Meanwhile Queenie has fun hinting that she is, um, that way, to see if anyone suspects.  No one ever does. "I could say it openly on the bus, and no one would believe me."

Ok, Bell, Book, and Candle (1958) is "really" about witches, one of the witch-as-persecuted-minority vehicles that continued with Bewitched and Sabrina the Teenage Witch.  But it couldn't have more gay symbolism if it tried.







Actually, it was trying.  The details about "the lifestyle," Gillian's desire to be "normal," Nicky's seduction of Sidney Redlich, and the drag queen aunties all reflected books like The City and the Pillar (Gore Vidal, 1948) and The Homosexual in America (Edward Sangarin, 1952) which were starting to reveal the existence of gay people, "hundreds in Manhattan alone."  Playwright Jon Van Druten, who was gay, also wrote I am a Camera (1951), based on Christopher Isherwood's Berlin Stories, about the gay subculture of 1930s Berlin.

Many of the stars had gay connections.  Kim Novak (Gillian) attended the parties of 1950s gay Hollywood with Tab Hunter and Rock Hudson. Elsa Lanchester (Queenie) was married to a gay man.  Ernie Kovacs (Sidney) portrayed a number of lisping, mincing "pansy" characters on tv. And in 1959 Jack Lemmon (Nicky) would star in the quintessential absurdist gay comedy, Some Like It Hot. 

Fall 1978: My First Gay Novel: Neveryon

During my freshman year at Augustana, shortly after the summer of Grease, I was looking for anything written about gay people.  Readmore Bookworld had nothing, and the "h" section of the card catalog of the Augustana College Library listed only Nothing Like the Sun, by Anthony Burgess, which had no gay characters in it.  Carefully-worded inquiries to my sophisticated, artistic friend Aaron, who took me to The Rocky Horror Picture Show (he was gay, but didn't know it yet) revealed that there had been only four gay writers in the history of the world: Shakespeare, Oscar Wilde, Tennessee Williams -- and Samuel R. Delany.

Today Delany is a veritable queer theorist, churning out solemn, artsy tomes on race, sexuality, identity, and male prostitution that delight the deconstructionists. But in 1979 you had to wade through dense, turgid prose in Triton, Dhalgren, Babel-17, and The Einstein Intersection to find glimmers of characters who were multisexual, multigendered, and incorrigibly decadent.  Where were the gay people?

Apparently Dhalgren has been made into an experimental play.  I have no idea what it's about.

I didn't hold out much hope for the Neveryon series (1975-79).  First, there was a lady hanging around the mighty-thewed barbarian hero, as if he was a Conan the Barbarian clone.  Second, there were quotations from Lacan, Foucault and Derrida.

But it turned out to be a gay love story.

 Gorjik, a “great muscled, affable, quiet giant of a youth,” rises from slavery to a position of power, and then goes out to acquire some slaves of his own.  He buys Small Sarg, a barbarian prince (which means he’s dirty and smells bad), takes him home, and  indicates that they are to have sex. Small Sarg responds “that’s silly. . .that is what boys do,” but he agrees to “do it” anyway, as long as he can remove his slave collar first.  Gorgik happily obliges, since he is into S&M, and wants to wear the slave collar himself.  After their first encounter, they both pretend to be asleep while thinking of coy ways to cuddle: Delany is good at describing sex, but affection between men makes him queasy.

Later in the book, they become professional abolitionists, invading crumbling, decadent castles to liberate slaves. Sometimes Gorgik is captured and tortured, but he rather enjoys it.  They take turns wearing the slave collar and refer to each other intermittently as “master.”  When questioned about this odd arrangement, Gorgik responds: “We are lovers. . .and for one of us the symbolic distinction between slave and master is necessary for desire’s consummation.”

One wishes that, at least by the end of the series, they would settle down to a nice egalitarian partnership, but after a lifetime of subtle hints and heterosexist "fade out kisses," Gorgik and Small Sarg came to me as a Copernican revolution.

Here, for the first time ever on a printed page, I read of men who loved each other, and who were lovers.  The image of Small Sarg beneath Gorgik’s massive arm, staving off sleep, lying perfectly still so Gorgik wouldn’t shift position, remained with me forever.

See also: Michael Moorcock.