Maybe Not Out These Gay Comedians Showed The Way

 

By Erik Piepenburg

The New York Times

In 1987, David Letterman was taping his late-night show in Las Vegas before rowdy audiences of mostly young men in preppy pullovers and muscle shirts — prototypical bros raised on “Porky’s.”

In one episode, Letterman introduces a “very funny and strange, peculiar man who first played Las Vegas way back in 1963.” The sea of seemingly straight guys parts, and to a cartoonishly accelerated rendition of “Happy Days Are Here Again,” the comedian Rip Taylor speed-walks through, ferociously hurling heaps of confetti, his signature entrance shtick.

I’ve had this clip on repeat since watching “Outstanding: A Comedy Revolution,” a new Netflix documentary about the history of queer stand-up comedy. Not because Taylor plays a big role in the film, but because he and two other groundbreaking gay comics — Paul Lynde and Charles Nelson Reilly — do not.

“Outstanding” does briefly single out the three men as renowned comedy elders, even though they weren’t primarily known for stand-up. The documentary also does right by underappreciated comedians like Robin Tyler and Bob Smith and household names like Rosie O’Donnell and Margaret Cho. 

But why just the cursory mention of Lynde, Reilly, and Taylor? It’s as if we couldn’t possibly glean anything meaningful from old-school comedians who were apolitical and effeminate, steppingstones for contemporary comedians, like Hannah Gadsby and Jerrod Carmichael, who are willing to wait for a room to quiet down so they can talk about difficult childhoods.

Lynde, Reilly, and Taylor didn’t sit in their trauma. They kept it light and never talked about their biography in a serious way, because doing so would have led to questions they weren’t prepared to engage with. Maybe that’s why the documentary made me race to YouTube to see these Stonewall-generation funnymen with dippy but dark-edged sensibilities that were shaped by decades of self-hatred and fear the likes of which a 20-year-old today cannot fathom.

These three queens mesmerized me as a teenage closet case in the ’80s. Lynde, who died in 1982 at 55, was my favorite naughty center square on the game show “Hollywood Squares.” Reilly, who died in 2007 at 76, was the quippy diva from “Match Game,” though both were initially famous for sitcoms and Broadway.

Peter Marshall, the host of NBC’s original daytime “Hollywood Squares” from 1966 to 1980, remembers Reilly as a “brilliant” comedian and a close friend.

“To be around Charles was really special,” Marshall, 98, said in a phone interview. “He became like my brother,” 

I remember Lynde, Reilly, and Taylor mostly from games, variety, and talk shows. They communicated in femme gay signifiers that we take for granted on television in the decades since Jack McFarland, Sean Hayes’s “Will & Grace” character, skipped across the screen. We’re talking sibilance, expressive hand gestures, bitchy asides, sexual innuendos, arch delivery. In the ’80s, gay men and other in-the-know people recognized that these comics were gay even if, like my parents, they didn’t acknowledge it out loud.

Marshall told me that Reilly — a Tony Award-winning actor who studied under Uta Hagen — never really hid his gayness publicly as he became more successful. By contrast, Marshall said, Lynde seemed “embarrassed” by his homosexuality even as post-Stonewall gay freedoms blossomed.

Still, Marshall said, they “were extremely talented and funny and very dear.”

Growing up Gen X and naïve in Northeast Ohio, I didn’t know that these men were gay or that their manner was camp. And I didn’t know their winking humor was rooted in Hollywood’s pansy craze of the 1920s and ’30s when actors like Franklin Pangborn played prissy hotel managers and other queer-coded characters at a time when being publicly gay carried the risk of arrest.

As a boy, I must have intuited that what was foppish about Lynde, Reilly, and Taylor coursed through me, too, even without the words to explain why. It took me decades to understand that in being themselves on television, they subversively gave me an invaluable gay gift: visibility.

I primarily remember Taylor, who died in 2019 at 88, as the confetti-thrower who made my mother scream with laughter. It’s only after being out for 34 years that I appreciate why I couldn’t take my eyes off him. It’s in his cocky but effete delivery, the same vocal quality I heard when theater queens debated who was the superior Mame at West Village gay bars. It’s in his Mitzi Gaynor-giving wig and yellow marabou maxicoat that looks like what Big Bird would wear if he were Sesame Street’s pimp.

Robbie Fortney, Taylor’s companion of 44 years, said Taylor used to stop his schoolyard bullies with silly faces. 

“That was his defense, and that’s what he did for the rest of his life,” Fortney, 77, told me.

The Diverting Tinkerbell: It’s a time-tested survival strategy that gay men like Taylor learn quickly and use generously as needed. Butch, he was not. Then again, nobody showed me you could be gay and masculine. On “Letterman,” Taylor’s flamboyance is a shocking contrast to all those hooting audience members in Ray-Bans, the same kind of man who laughed at his jokes when he was a boy — his best and most immediate way of avoiding their blows.

Fortney said that when people assumed Taylor was gay, he bristled at the perception, even as he emceed AIDS benefits and, in 2005, served as the grand marshal of the Pride parade in Washington, D.C., Taylor’s hometown.

Take what happened at a coffee shop when a young fan thanked Taylor for being out.

“He said, ‘You’ve made things so much easier,’” Fortney recalled. “All Rip gave him was a smile and a nod like, fine, now you can leave. He would not accept what an influence he was.”

Lynde’s story is more tragic. Joe Florenski, who with Steve Wilson wrote the Lynde biography “Center Square,” said the comic was an overweight boy who struggled with being made fun of until he found a solution.

“He could get laughs for being funny, not for being the chubby kid,” Florenski told me.

Lynde never officially said he was gay, although he was out to close friends. His arrests for public intoxication made the news, as did a 1965 accident in which James Davidson, a 24-year-old actor friend, fell to his death from a ledge outside Lynde’s San Francisco hotel room. 

Erin Murphy, the actress who played Tabitha, the witch Samantha’s daughter on “Bewitched,” said she loved working with Lynde in his supporting role as her nutty Uncle Arthur. But, she said, he “was caustic in retrospect.”

“He had a biting humor that I appreciated,” she said. “But he wasn’t warm and fuzzy, on and off camera.”

Lynde’s complicated legacy continues to resonate, and compilations of his best material are available on TikTok. In 2020, the actor-director Billy Eichner said he planned to play Lynde in a biopic. (A spokesperson for Eichner said the film was “in development, he’s attached and working on it.”) I could see Eichner and Hayes, two out actors who know from gay Hollywood history, starring in a “Feud” season about the bosom-buddies rivalry between Lynde and Reilly.

Fortney was discussing Taylor but could have been talking about Lynde and Reilly, too, when he described Taylor as “a reluctant hero” who “did something for gay comedy without trying to be the gay comedian.”

You know who gets this? Carson Kressley, an original cast member of “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy.” He carries the comedic gay guest torch as a regular judge on “RuPaul’s Drag Race” and a celebrity contestant on the game show “25 Words or Less.” 

Kressley considers Lynde, Reilly, and Taylor to be reality television pioneers in that they were “the most real version of themselves” that networks would allow at the time.

“When I was starting out, in my subconscious I was thinking, I can be as camp and as me as I want to be because these people had done it before,” he said. “They were trailblazers.”

In that Letterman clip, Taylor’s short set is a pile-on of juvenile prop gags. “The odd couple,” he barks, lifting up a brassiere fashioned so that one cup is larger than the other.

The crowd eats it up.