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

When I was at Indiana University, lots of guys in my dorm watched the 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 doing things, not actually doing them: 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 get with mike with David; Mickey sleepwalks and ends up in the boys' bed yet again.

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.

Hacks: Disgraced comedian decides to turn lesbian, gay leather guy spirals, and there are some jokes. With bonus Devon Sawa

  

 

I've been avoiding the recommendation of Hacks, on MAX, because the icon shows two ladies in bikinis, and who wants to watch a tv show about computer hackers in bikinis?  But yesterday I casually looked through the episode list, and saw what looked like a black guy at a gay leather bar.  

Not many black guys into leather -- in years of going to the Faultline in West Hollywood, I only met one.  So maybe this show is worth checking out after all.

Turns out that the title is a misdirection. Hacks is an obsolete term for writers who churn out incompetent but popular trash,  In this case, the hack is Deb Vance (Jean Smart), a Vegas lounge lizard trying to revise her snarky 80s-style standup for a more sensitive generation.  Her head writer and confidant, Ava, had her own standup career cancelled after an insensitive tweet.  I'm reviewing the gay leather bar episode, 2.4, "The Captain's Wife."

Scene 1: At a dusty farm, Deb is filming an infomercial, selling strange-looking socks. Her bus driver, Weed, keeps turning on the air conditioning. Her photographer, Damien, notes that she forgot the American flag print. "Stupid f*king American flag."  Lots of presumably gay characters here: Weed is played by a very butch Laurie Mecalf, and Damien by Mark Indelicato.

Head writer Ava wants to stay behind during Deb's upcoming gig on a gay cruise, because she's afraid of water, and can't swim.   "You're going. Wear a life jacket."

And forget all the sensitive nonsense: Deb's going to do her old stuff, the classics.  "The gays get me." 

Scene 2: Swishy guys in a club bathroom gossipping and snorting cocaine. Marcus  (Carl Clemons-Hopkins, below) puts on a business suit: it's 7:00 am, and he has a breakfast meeting across town.  I remember staying at a sex club all night.  They put out a breakfast buffet at 6:00 am.  They ask him to stick around for his mental health.  He refuses, but he lets them score some of his addies (Adderall, a stimulant used to treat ADHD).

Scene 3: Boarding the cruise ship, Deb wonders why there are so many ladies in line. Famous comedian Margaret Cho, the last cruise's headliner, is just leaving. She tells Deb that the audience was mediocre, but the gay sex was great.

"Wait -- I thought this was a gay cruise."

"It is.  A lesbian cruise."

Uh-oh.  Gay men love Deb, but lesbians hate her.  She doesn't understand why. Ava suggests "the hundreds of thousands of jokes at their expense that you've told over the years."

Scene 4: At the cruise ship bar, Ava is approached by a grabby, hand-kissing, way over-eager lady horndog. She's not actually freaked out.  I wonder if she is a lesbian, too? Wikipedia lists a girlfriend and a boyfriend. 

Meanwhile, Deb calls her agent, Jimmy (Paul W. Downs), to complain about booking her on a lesbian cruise.   He's busy working on a residency -- a permanent casino gig.  "How about Terrible's Casino?"  "No way -- too far from the Strip."  

There actually was a Terrible's Casino, though I can't imagine why someone would choose that name.  It closed in 2020.

Next Deb chides Ava for having fun instead of writing some lesbian jokes.  "You speak lesbian, right?  Cause you're half?"  I don't know what that means. Maybe a lesbian mother and a straight father? 

Scene 5: Back in Vegas, Marcus, the gay leather bar guy, gets home to find two middle aged ladies on his couch. One is his mother.  "What are you doing here?" he asks angrily. "I told you I needed to get work done today." They came to pet his dog and upbraid him for spending all night at the club. He yells at them for trying to control his life.  

Scene 6: Ava is trying to dump someone's ashes into the ocean, when a lady approaches to flirt and ask her to the "She-ano Bar."   Cut to Ava getting ready, telling Deb about the Olympic athlete on board. Girlfriend going to get her some lady jocks.  She invites Deb to come along as her wing-person.  Nope, but Deb is willing to fix her outfit.

As they are bonding, Ava wants to know: with all her jokes about how terrible sex with men is, has Deb ever considered being with a woman?  "Nope.  I like men.  I wish I was gay, because it would be a hell of a lot easier."  Are you crazy, lady?  Let's start with your Sunday school teacher telling you that God hates you, and work our way forward.

Ava calls her out on her straight entitlement, and Deb agrees that it might not have been easier to like girls -- back when she was a kid in the 1960s. But she got a crush on John Lennon of The Beatles and never looked back.

"But why do you like men?"  I was asked that a lot, back when coming out meant a barrage of stupid questions. You like who you like, idjit. You don't have any control over it.

Ava concedes that "your sexuality is not a choice," but Deb still should try to figure out why she is straight.  "Maybe you aren't really attracted to men, you're attracted to their power." 

Scene 7: Convinced to try it out, Deb goes to the She-ano bar and cruises some lesbians.  The next morning, everyone at the breakfast buffet is friendly, and she has embraced lesbians as a potential audience: "They love women, and I'm a fabulous woman." 

Left: Former teen heartthrob Devon Sawa, whom Deb has sex with in another episode. 

Scene 8: Marcus at the club, dancing his butt off with his swishy friends He's dressed as a BDSM bottom, but it's not a leather bar, it's an old-style gay disco. 

He runs into Wilson -- according to wikipedia, his ex-boyfriend.  The breakup has resulted in his downward spiral.  He wanted to call and say "I love you," but he's blocked all of Wilson's social media profiles and deleted his number.  Wilson is concerned about his drug use, but doesn't want to get back together.

More Deb and a lot of Devon after the break

Duck Tales: Not Your Grandfather's Donald Duck

When I was growing up in the 1960s and 1970s, I bought as many Gold Key Disney comics as I could find: the anonymous artist (later identified as Carl Barks) sent Donald Duck, Uncle Scrooge, and their three identical-triplet nephews on rousing adventures:  The Lost Crown of Genghis Khan, the Mines of King Solomon, the Golden Fleece,  the Fabulous Philosopher's Stone, the Flying Dutchman.  Come to think of it, I first heard of those legends in Disney comics.


It was a masculine world of high adventure, with no women and no references to heterosexual desire.  Donald, of course, had a girlfriend back home, but she rarely appeared in the adventure stories, and neither Uncle Scrooge nor the nephews displayed any heterosexual interests.

Gold Key comics gradually disappeared during the 1970s, but in 1985, fledgling company Gladstone started publishing Disney comics again.  In West Hollywood, my regular Saturday night routine was to cruise at Mugi, the gay Asian bar, then stop at the Book Circus for a pile of Gladstones. I liked the reprints of classic Carl Barks stories from my childhood. The European versions of the Ducks were sometimes interesting.  But I didn't like Don Rosa's new comics: he gave Uncle Scrooge a passionate, life long romance with Yukon show girl Glittering Goldie. Yikes!

Between 1987 and 1990, the WB broadcast DuckTales, with animated versions of the stories.  Donald Duck is absent, and there are many new characters, including the housekeeper Mrs.Beakley and a girl, Webbigail, I guess to draw in a female audience.

I didn't watch; I was usually busy on weekday afternoons, and besides, I was afraid of what they would do to heterosexualize the beloved gay icons of my childhood.  Have Uncle Scrooge torn between Duck versions of Betty and Veronica? Have Huey, Dewey, and Louie compete over who would bring the it-girl to the school dance?

Now there's a new version of Ducktales (2017-),  with many differences to adjust to the changing times:

1. Donald is back.  He still speaks with that impossible-to-understand Clarence Nash voice from the 1930s cartoons.

2. Mrs. Beakley is a secret agent/bodyguard, not a dowdy housekeeper.

3. Huey, Dewey, and Louie are differentiated into nerd, teen operator, and a third that I haven't identified.

4. Their parents were never mentioned in the comics (except their mother, Della, wrote a note in an early Carl Barks one shot).  Presumably they were dead, which is why Uncle Donald was raising the boys.  But now Della is back. Apparently she was an astronaut, stuck on the moon for several years.

5. Their Boy Scout-like club, the Junior Woodchucks, was boy-only.  Now it's gender-inclusive.  .

6. In the first episode of Season 3, Huey and Violet, a regular rival who has appeared in four previous episodes, compete for a major Junior Woodchucks prize.  And we find out that Violet has two dads!

They have no speaking parts, but they're very obvious,drawn to stand out from the other characters, both wearing "I'm With Dad"t-shirts.  First they are sitting with the other parents during a presentation; then they appear in the background during a sports day; and finally they come up onto the stage to congratulate Violet on winning the prize.

Ok, it's the third season, and as far as I can tell, neither they nor Violet appear in any later episodes.. Not a lot of representation.  But seeing them share the screen with Uncle Scrooge, Donald Duck, and the nephews isamazing, as if Duckburg has been gay-friendly all along.

Behind the Iron Curtain: A Radio Free Europe Commercial from the 1970s

During the 1970s, when fear of the Soviet Union was rampant, a tv commercial appeared depicting a boy with rusty chains wrapped around his head, being brainwashed by Soviet propaganda.  A voiceover solemnly intoned "They took his country.  Now they're taking his mind.  Millions of children are growing up behind the Iron Curtain in Albania ... Bulgaria ... Czechoslovakia ... Hungary ... Poland ... Romania ... Yugoslavia."

I thought the boy was cute.  Maybe I could rescue him from his brainwashing!

In the school library, I found books on most of the countries "behind the Iron Curtain," with lots of pictures of boys and men.  They weren't sitting in dark rooms with chains around their heads.  They were dancing in traditional costumes, swimming in public pools, going to school, or just posing in groups.

But that made the brainwashing more insidious, I reasoned.  It was even more important to go to those countries and rescue them:

Albania

Bulgaria

Czechoslovakia  (now the Czech Republic and Slovakia)

Hungary

Poland

Romania

Yugoslavia (now divided into several countries, which I'm not going to list here, because if I make a mistake, I'll get in trouble).

I recently found the commercial on youtube.  It was directed by Jack Goodford, who also directed Mr. Magoo Cartoons for the UPA Studio.

Radio Free Europe was an anti-communist group broadcasting news and information from its base in Munich.  It still broadcasts to 21 countries in 28 languages.

R.E.M. has a song called "Radio Free Europe."  I don't understand the lyrics:

Keep me out of country in the word
Deal the porch is leading us absurd
Push that push that push that to the hull
That this isn't nothing at all