"Love, American Style": I Will Defend Your Right to Shine

Love, American Style (1969-74)  aired when I was in grade  school and junior high, late on Friday nights, when my parents were already in bed and I was watching tv with my sleepover friends or my brother, loggy and yawning, eating enormous dishes of ice cream, feeling very grown-up and somewhat mischievous. 

It was an anthology, with three humorous stories every week, all somehow related to "finding love" (all heterosexual love, of course, but who knew that anything else existed?). 

Some of the episodes were actually dramas rather than comedies ("Love and the Ledge").  Some were paranormal or science fiction  ("Love and the Vampire".  Some were only tangentially related to romance.

Sex was hinted at ("Love and the Coed Dorm"),but no one actually did the deed.  This was at heart a conservative show, aimed at an audience that was home on Friday nights -- old people and kids, both confused and disturbed by this new world of sexual freedom, longing for the old days of "true love's first kiss."

No beefcake -- at least, none that I remember.  An occasional cute guy, like teen idol Kurt Russell or Ronnie Howard of The Andy Griffith Show, but mostly oldsters. like Charles Nelson Reilly (from Lidsville) and Paul Lynde (from Bewitched).

Wait -- both of those actors were gay.

Stuart Margolin (top photo) starred in risque interstitial gag pieces,  chasing secretaries around desks or trying to glimpse a bit of cleavage.

But there was some buddy-bonding, guys working together to acquire something of value or evade an enemy, with the "finding love" tacked on at the end so the story would fit the premise. One stands out in my mind:

The guy is afraid of girls, so he asks his buddy to hide in the closet and offer advice during the date. To explain why he is going into the closet so often, he brings out items that he wants to show the girl: a bowling ball, a tennis racket, skiis -- until the apartment is full of junk.  The girl expected sex, not an episode of Hoarders, so she gets up to leave.  Then the guy kisses her,and they get engaged.

Get it: he keeps going into the closet to meet a man.  And he keeps coming out of the closet with masculine-coded sporting equipment, to show the girl that he's really interested in...well, that's about as far as they could go on prime time television in the cold winter of 1972.

I'm only thinking of the gay symbolism now, of course.  When I was in grade school and junior high, what mattered was feeling warm and safe but also dangerous, glimpsing a world built for someone else, an outsider who somehow belonged.

On a star spangled night, my love,
You can rest you head on my shoulder.
And by the dawn's early light, my love,
I will defend your right to shine.