Gay spectatorship: it used to be all about deciphering.

Before True Blood, Glee, Ugly Betty, and Modern Family, gay characters in television tended to be canny in-jokes among writers; the game was to see how far gay signifiers and innuendo could be pushed so as to register with one smaller audience while completely going over the head of another broader one. It’s a certain campy, broad, conspicuous, idiosyncratic, or “colorful” quality that marks these characters as somehow “other.” This is what accounts for the are-they-or-aren’t-they? inscrutability of Crypto-Gay characters — they have to be discerned by those in-the-know, and their natures are channeled through the eye of the beholder.

Mainstays like Dr. Smith from Lost In Space, Batman and Robin, half the cast of Bewitched, hothouse flower Monroe from Too Close For Comfort, and even more contemporary figures like Joey and Chandler from Friends, the Crane Brothers from Frasier, and ball-breaking Xena are likely to come to mind first, but I’ve assembled a gathering of ten characters who’ve hit home with me through the years and remained favorites who’ve largely managed to slip under the gaydar:

10. Bart Simpson

That’s right — I said it: America’s Bad Boy is gay. We don’t all grow up as egodystonic, sad young men craving love and belonging. Young Bart has a blazing contempt for all traditional male authority figures — principals, police, pastors, God — and no one is the object of his scorn more so than his own father, whose law he’s defied for over twenty years and counting. Sister Lisa may be the alternachick of the Simpson clan, but she’s unfailingly been portrayed as boy crazy and straight arrow at heart. Bart — not so much.

Granted, he’s had one-off girlfriends, but it’s his enduring friendship with “flamboyantly gay” (according to official school records) Milhouse Van Houten that’s been the source of several gay panic moments for Homer. To this day, just thinking about the two jumping on the bed in bouffant wigs while singing Eurythmics’s “Sisters Are Doin’ It For Themselves” will have me rolling on the floor, and do keep in mind that while the notoriously Left-leaning Simpsons has multiple gay or gay-seeming adults, it also features numerous kids who are openly or implicitly queer, with “Queen of Summertime” Martin Prince, Nelson Muntz, Ralph Wiggum, and Rod and Todd Flanders joining Alpha Gay Bart and Plato-esque Milhouse in getting the side-eye from the concerned adults in their lives.

9. Joanne ‘Jo’ Polniaczek

Say it — you hated that Moral Majority whore Blair Warner on The Facts of Life even when you were little and couldn’t quite articulate why. As essayed by Lisa Whelchel — secondary only to antediluvian Kirk Cameron as the most buzzkill sitcom actor/home schooling proponent in TV history — Blair was bad enough to begin with, but when the writers scrapped half the cast (only Molly Ringwald could’ve possibly taken her down), who was left to stand in her way?

Enter Nancy McKeon as brunette frenemy ‘Jo’ Polniaczek to save the day. If Blair was everything you detest about straight women — vain, preening, sheltered, stuck up, and daddy-pleasing — then Jo was the darkly beautiful teenage gang deb lez with the awesome accent who worked with her hands and leveled the balance of power at Peekskill, Natalie and Tootie serving as the bridge between the two antipodes. It’s a given that Blair ascended the Republican ranks after graduation and became either a Fox News bunny, the weepy chick on the The View, or governor of one of the A states, but what about Jo? Let’s just say Rachel Maddow and Michelle Rodriguez bear a more than passing resemblance to our girl.

8. Sean McNamara & Christian Troy

Just fuck each other already! Never has a TV series before Nip/Tuck featured two ostensibly straight men who were so emotionally entwined to the point that they couldn’t live without each other. Between all the Botox, tanning, waxing, working out, and expensive threads, this duo became honorary gays around season two, but their true cred comes from achieving a completely new and elaborate form of Crypto-Queer sidestepping: the I-fuck-her, I-fuck-you proxy bang.

This an ingenious form of bed-hopping that involves two men who are sexually obsessed with each other nailing the same woman and having her act as a human condom to buffer their same-sex desire. If these two weren’t screwing each other’s wives and girlfriends, then they were fathering each other’s kids. Ultimatums, couples counseling, dividing assets, breaking up, making up, threewaying, body dumping — they did it all, but when it came to just admitting their love, they always held back, and the series’s cut-the-cord finale was all the more devastating for it. As more prominent gay characterizations appear on TV and make Crypto-Queers moot in the process, these two may very well mark the end of an era.

7. Dr. Michael Mancini

Just go with it: an ego-driven, Catholic, skirt-chasing man-whore whose relationships with the opposite sex were contentious to say the least. With five failed marriages and a broken engagement under his belt, something was clearly not right with Dr. M. One gay in the Melrose Place complex seemed glaringly ill-balanced given the West Hollywood locale, and Michael — who thanks to Thomas Calabro‘s great comic abilities and playful sex appeal never became wholly unsympathetic — seemed to just make the same mistake over and over again with a different wife he ended up hating.

Why am I calling gay? Two words: Matt Fielding, the building’s sore thumb resident gay who was the only one Michael was even remotely capable of maintaining a relationship of mutual regard with. Colluding to save each other’s asses, turning to one another in a jam, being there when each was at their worst — these two made a surprisingly functional pairing whose loyalties stemmed beyond mere symbiosis and bordered on actual genuineness when cat-fighting and back-stabbing were the natural order. Forget about all the vixens and ex-hookers, Mikey; a secular humanist commitment ceremony with Matt at the beach house sounds fab, and with Prop 8 on the books, it’s not like he’ll take you to the cleaners.

6. Kimmy Gibbler

Ah yes, the kooky best friend/next door neighbor, created to serve as a comic foil for a more normalized leading character and often finding his/her very existence contingent upon that relationship. When new friends or (don’t say it!)…boyfriends start to enter the plot, the best friend finds her ties to the American Everygirl in jeopardy of being severed. Jealousy and angst will result, and if this were a ’50s film or stage drama, a noose and an enigmatic goodbye-cruel-world letter will follow.

But we’re in Sitcom Land, where all families are ridiculously well-off, take May Sweeps vacations to Hawaii, and live in MC Escher-style homes able to house twenty fucking people comfortably. As Full House‘s dink-next-door, Kimmy (the Milhouse to D.J.’s Bart) was especially…wacky. The Tanner Daughters were all flaxen-haired catalog girls, but Kimmy had a drag-like presence marked by lots of spandex with jungle print and feather trim — it’s as if Screech from Saved By The Bell were in disguise — and emanated a lanky, boyish butchness that set her apart as a hapless tag-along. Devoid of context like family or even her own love interests, she was clearly a neglected latch key kid with a Brandon Teena thing going on, looking for love and acceptance on the streets of San Francisco with the family of her dreams.

5. Sigmund The Sea Monster

“When you find that special someone you never expected to…,” went the theme song to Sigmund & The Sea Monsters, and much praise to Sid & Marty Krofft for blessing the world with some of the queerest children’s programming ever. The wondrous Sigmund treated us to the exploits of a nebbishy gay Creature From The Blue Lagoon getting thrown out of the grotto by his low class family and shacking up with a pair of So Cal surf brat brothers.

See, Sigmund sucks as a Deep One because he’s so darn sensitive and kindly, and his journey to the ‘burbs pits two families — neither particularly nuclear or “normal” — against each other for his fate. Sigmund’s tentacled brood are characterized as Queens Borough I-talians by way of south-of-the-Mason-Dixon-Line white trash who can’t bear to see him happy, whereas his adoptive family includes two boys (the elder one played by Johnny Whitaker, who was also there for Jodie Foster) with a pair of ceaselessly absentee parents and only Mary Wickes‘s Aunt Zelda to look after them. In a typical episode, Sigmund falls in love with the neighbor’s dog, Aunt Zelda very nearly discovers the boys’ secret holed up in the clubhouse, and shirtless, jams-clad Whitaker croons a love ballad out into the surf by moonlight to no one in particular.

4. Diana

Don’t get me wrong: I’m loving the state-of-the-art, rich-in-allegory V reboot, and Morena Baccarin‘s superb Lizard Queen — with her gamine haircut, Scientology timbre, executrix suits, and humanity-free Sarah Palin eyes — hits all the right notes, save one: the evil Lez! Basilisk bombshell Jane Badler‘s a hard act to top in that department. Bad TV rightly averred that she gave even ’80s dragon ladies Joan Collins and Stephanie Beacham “a run for their money as Bitch of All Time.” Joan and Steph were hard all right, but can even they outdo Diana by downing live hamsters, committing genocide, having their own Nuremberg trial, shooting rivals out into space, and threatening to nuke L.A.? Bitch was cold!

Lady Di also clearly had an eye for the gals; men were just stepping stones or obstacles to power, but the fairer sex were more her thing as evidenced by her brazen sidling of the show’s heroines. You could crossbreed a jackbooted Nazi fräulein with a high-class dominatrix and the result still wouldn’t go as far over the top as Diana. This lizard-in-a-woman’s-skin didn’t take shit. When her would-be hubby Charles (get it?) tried to force her into marriage, she practically unhinged her jaw in grossification at the thought of it. Whether she was taking a ceremonial bath of live eels, sacrificing young men to the Lizard Gods, or having tongue-lashing, venom-spitting cat fights, Diana was bad as she wanted to be…like a real reptile.

3. Lorne, aka Krevlornswath of the Deathwok Clan

Buffy, with its lesbian witches, bi slayers, gay geeks, and tortured monsters, was not prone to shying away from queerness, but its spin-off Angel had a decidedly more male-slanted, urban feel, and with fewer female characters to transpose gayness onto, it seemed the L.A. gang was strictly straight. Then came Lorne as an unlikely ally and even unlikelier daring-doer, bringing his sparkling wit, great hair, sage advice, sartorial swing, and showstopping pipes to the mix. In sensational discovery Andy Hallett, series creator Joss Whedon found his queer muse.

Lorne’s backstory was revealed thanks to him having to return to his home dimension of Pylea to help retrieve lost Vision Girl Cordelia, and a more brilliantly cheeky allegory for a gay man’s return to painful childhood turf could not have been penned. His best moment? Is it when Lorne brings the music-loathing Pyleans to their knees — literally — by belting out “Stop In The Name of Love”? Having his gender-neutral hulk of a mother shun him for shaming the clan by going into showbiz? How about letting loose with “Somewhere Over The Rainbow” as he says so long to the homeland? There’s a dark undercurrent that touches every gay life, and as future seasons found Lorne embittered and exhausted with a not-so-brave new world, so too was Hallett dealt an unjust card, dying at only 33 from congestive heart failure. A dirge for a fallen hero…

2. V.I.C.I.

“A girl unlike other girls!” By the time the mid-’80s rolled around, the too-pat Eisenhower Era family sitcom was losing its wheels, and by the dawn of the ’90s, tidy nuclear broods were beyond passé. In the Reagan Years, families now had to deal with weird token relations whose very existences must be kept a secret from an outside world that could not accept them. A.L.F. had a stranded alien, Harry & The Hendersons featured an adopted sasquatch, Family Ties tested us all with an infuriating Young Repub, and Small Wonder had Voice Input Child Identicant — that’s V.I.C.I. if you’re nasty!

What better coded metaphor for futile gender reorientation therapy than to have a cybernetic engineer bring his pet project android home with him, conceal her in the family unit, put her in a parodic frilly dress despite her utter dearth of innate femininity, and experience the hijinks that ensue from her failing to pull the ruse off? In a prefab world where nothing seems real, V.I.C.I. (incarnated with Rhoda-like hollowness by Tiffany Brissette) was a total chimera. Snoopy neighbors, corporate sabotage, Child Services, and evil robot clone Vanessa are one thing for her to contend with, but what happens when V.I.C.I. finally does develop emotions and concludes the best way to deal with her tormented sham of a life is…murder?

1. Joey Harris & Michael Taylor

This show’s premise as summed up by Best Week Ever: “We’ve got bad news. Your Mom is dead, and she was a slut.” In 1987, the only way you could have two men raising a child together on TV was if you relied on that timeworn narrative cheat: a dead mommy, this one torn between two dueling pieces who win joint custody after she bites it. Still, at heart this series embodied every gay kid’s dream to be brought up in a Big Apple loft by a Playgirl-ready bear (Greg Evigan) in acid wash and a doting Jew (Paul Reiser) with a thing for enormous Cosby sweaters.

Happily, My Two Dads ditched bland wholesomeness and instead opted for a kinkier family dynamic that turned up in the likes of other Me Decade series like Who’s The Boss and Charles In Charge. If you had a babe-like male housekeeper or nanny introduced into your home as a kid, you’d sure as hell start to obsess over him sexually as the lines between employee, family, and lust object get increasingly hazy. Dads succeeded in upping that tension by having its child star raised exclusively by her crushes, and not only did the young heroine take after Mom and have two boy toys from school on a string, but she merrily speculated about both dads’ sex lives with too-attentive vicarious elation. Keep in mind that one was actually her biological father, but it didn’t seem to matter. All the cock-blocking love interests in the world couldn’t straighten this bunch out… or distract our eyes from Evigan’s barely-there do-me tanks.

© 2010, Shawn Baker. All rights reserved. Nightcharm.com