The Projection Booth Podcast
Special Report: Bruce Vilanch Makes the Yuletide Gay
By Mike White
Dec 25, 2023

The podcast episode features an interview with Bruce Vilanch discussing the holiday special “Making the Yule Tide Gay” and his experiences working with Paul Lynde.

The post Podcast: Bruce Vilanch on Paul Lynde first appeared on We Got Bruce!.

LGBTQ Nation
When comedy came out of the closet: comedian Bruce Vilanch on the rise of queer representation in TV
by Greg Owen
Thursday, November 3, 2022

“I’m not a historian. I write what I observe,” out comedy legend Bruce Vilanch tells LGBTQ Nation.

Maybe it’s an effort at humility or avoiding a distraction from his brand because he thinks historians aren’t funny.

But the great ones, from Herodotus on down, share a deep interest in the customs and people they observe, and that describes Vilanch to a T-dance on a Sunday afternoon at The Abbey in West Hollywood. He’s a watcher.

That includes television, where – besides appearances on the big screen, Broadway, and in bathhouses (where he reported for the Chicago Tribune in 1975) – Vilanch has made his biggest impression. He’s earned Emmys for Oscar telecasts, starred as a Hollywood Square, and written for some of the most iconic variety shows in the business, from Donny and Marie to The Star Wars Holiday Special.

He’s also worked or rubbed shoulders with practically everyone in the business (and beyond), from Bette Midler to Diana Ross to Cher to Elton John to presidents and princesses. And he’s helped raise millions for AIDS and other LGBTQ charities.

Vilanch’s time in television coincided with a sea-change in LGBTQ representation on the small screen, and he spoke with LGBTQ Nation about all that he observed.

His t-shirt that afternoon read, “See You at My Intervention,” and the conversation began with a plug for his new musical, Here You Come Again, featuring the songs of Dolly Parton and hints of a new book in the works.

***

LGBTQ Nation: What’s the book about?

Bruce Vilanch: About 4000 pages.

LGBTQ Nation: You just wrapped the premiere engagement of Here You Come Again in Wilmington. How was the show received?

BV: It’s a big hit! Audiences like it. What is wrong with them?

LGBTQ Nation: That song was huge when I was growing up.

BV: It sounds like the title of a porno movie, but we went with it anyway. We thought there was enough recognition.

LGBTQ Nation: Has Dolly seen it yet?

BV: We downloaded it every night for her. She liked what she’s seen. She won’t see it live until Nashville, which will be in May in Patrick Cassidy’s theater. So then she’ll show up, I think, with her tits and all those things she puts in the window.

First on our list of subjects was Batman – William Dozier and Lorenzo Semple Jr’s candy-colored TV version of the comic book classic that aired on ABC from 1966-1968.

Homoeroticism pervades the story, featuring a swarthy, mysterious leading character and his handsome “ward,” Robin. But the producers brought the camp to the concoction, featuring an all-star line-up of outrageous villains and incredulous storylines.

LGBTQ Nation: When did you first see Batman?

BV: When I was in college. We would gather around to watch. We were stoned. And it was like, well, it was low-camp. It was intentionally bad, ridiculous, and over the top. And for me, and for like the gay guys who I knew, it was about looking at Tallulah Bankhead and Eartha Kitt, Julie Newmar, and Ethel Merman as Lola Lasagna.

LGBTQ Nation: What was the gay quotient?

BV: The gay quotient, that was pretty gay. All that stuff was perfectly gay but gay like Butch Romero? I don’t know if we knew about him at that point. Well, my age group had known about him. People who’d been in Hollywood for years, of course, knew about him.

Cesar “Butch” Romero, a bona fide Hollywood leading man, played the first on-screen version of Gotham City’s malevolent Joker.

LGBTQ Nation: What’s Romero’s backstory?

BV: Cesar Romero. He was a beard. He was everybody’s escort. He was a big queen, and it was well-known, and he was a confidante for many women who needed to have a movie star take them places. You know, who wouldn’t try anything with them? And I think a lot of guys, I think that they respected his secret because everybody has secrets of one sort or another. And so much was back then. Secrets were traded, and secrets were currency.

LGBTQ Nation: Another Batman villain was Liberace, who played identical twin brothers, one evil and one a famous concert pianist. The character wasn’t gay, but Liberace was.

BV: Liberace was Liberace no matter what he did. You know, of course, he was like beyond gay. Because one of the things about gayness, with Liberace, there was no sexual component in the gayness. He was a great, huge flamboyant stage character. A lot of these guys who were gay and fey and had these huge flamboyant stage personas that they were selling it was divorced from sexuality. It was about performance art. And it didn’t occur to me that Liberace had a huge dick and I would one day want to sleep with him. But that’s another story.

In 1968, NBC brought Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In to television. Producer George Schlatter’s irreverent take on the counterculture featured an ensemble cast including breakouts Goldie Hawn and Lily Tomlin, and one token, though unacknowledged, gay cast member.

LGBTQ Nation: Let’s talk about Alan Sues on Laugh-In. Among his recurring characters was Uncle Al the Kiddies’ Pal, a perpetually hungover children’s show host; Big Al, an effeminate sportscaster, obsessed with ringing a bell; and a manic drag version of cast member Jo Anne Worley.

BV: Well, that was pretty gay. He was in that group of eccentric comedians like Rip Taylor, Paul Lynde, Billy De Wolfe, Edward Everett Horton, and Richard Simmons, who were all gay in life but had big personalities that the audience would kind of nod at, because maybe they had an uncle who was like that. Or maybe they had a pastor who was like that. Those who got it got it. And those who didn’t just think they were fun characters.

LGBTQ Nation: You mentioned Paul Lynde, who played Uncle Arthur on Bewitched at the same time Alan Sues was on Laugh-In. They weren’t out, but they were both a visible gay presence. Is that fair to say?

BV: Yeah, I mean, in the sense that anybody was before Stonewall. Stonewall is a handy demarcation, but it didn’t change things overnight. But in the 70s, things began to get loose in that people began to identify themselves as gay and not just eccentric or flamboyant. And the last gasp of all of that was all those guys I’ve mentioned. They are fabulous characters, but their sexuality never came into it.

After Stonewall and through the 1970s, television comedy’s closet door creaked open. In 1971, Nielson’s Number 1 rated show, All in the Family, featured a gay storyline. In 1972, the short-lived sitcom The Corner Bar was home to TV’s first recurring gay character. And in 1976, cult favorite Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman featured not a dissembling pair of brothers sharing the house next door but longtime companions Ed and Howard.

BV: We were shooting Donnie and Marie in the same building. I must have seen them at the taco truck.

LGBTQ Nation: Another gay baby step in the ’70s was Three’s Company with John Ritter, who you worked with.

BV: Yes. That was John pretending to be gay so that he could live with two girls. It’s like a variation on Some Like It Hot, but it wasn’t as severe. He didn’t have to dress up. I wrote something on Love Boat where he did have to dress up as a woman to pursue his runaway bride.

On Three’s Company, he occasionally had to put on kind of f**gy mannerisms to convince Mr. Roper that it was real. I was never offended by that because it was a plot device. But back then, we had not gotten rid of some of our own self-loathing. Or I had, I think, I had self-loathing. I just thought that stuff was funny, like a straight guy having to pretend to be a fairy. I mean, I thought John was funny. But I’m sure at the same time, there was a segment of the audience that was on Roper’s side.

Later that same year, in the fall of 1977, ABC premiered Soap from Golden Girls producer Susan Harris. The world was introduced to Billy Crystal as Jodie, the first gay ensemble character in American TV history.

LGBTQ Nation: Let’s talk about Soap.

BV: It’s historical now. It’s the first gay character on television. But the thing about Soap was it was a parody of soap operas. So everything was larger than life. So he was gay, but because he was gay, he had to transition into a woman. It was all this stuff that didn’t make a whole lot of sense in the real world.

I don’t know that Susan Harris was looking to score historical points with it, although I’m sure, somewhere in the back of her mind, she thought, well, ‘This will be something they’ll talk about.’

But when Billy was playing it, it represented, at the time, a real career risk for him because it would type him as the gay guy for people who didn’t know him. He was looking for a big acting career in movies, so it was a brave move for him to play because nobody had done it before. If it was a plan to get the public to go with the idea that somebody was gay, it was a genius plan because it worked.

LGBTQ representation in TV comedy foundered in the 1980s, while AIDS devastated the gay community and Nancy Reagan stalked the sitcom stages with her “Just Say No” campaign. By the end of the decade, though, two unlikely sources ushered in a mini Golden Age of gays on the airwaves: the new FOX TV network, and Canada, home to the sketch comedy show Kids in the Hall.l

LGBTQ Nation: Were you a fan of Scott Thompson’s Buddy Cole on Kids in the Hall?

BV: Very extreme character. I mean, he did the most extreme stuff, you know, Queen Elizabeth farting for three minutes. And the half-man half-chicken are some of my favorite things from that show.

And Buddy Cole, it’s a fabulous comment on all lounge singers and a certain kind of older queen who’s seen it all. He’s probably not as sophisticated as he’s putting on that he is, but that’s his character. And it’s kind of like Auntie Mame on Ativan. A slower version of Auntie Mame.

On FOX, Rupert Murdoch put two gay executives, Jamie Kellner and Garth Ancier, in charge of the upstart network, programming The Tracey Ullman Show with Francesca’s two gay dads; The Simpsons featuring iconic cameos from Harvey Fierstein and John Waters; and almost all-Black sketch show, In Living Color, with Damon Wayans and David Alan Grier as two Men on Film.

LGBTQ Nation: They played Blaine Edwards and Antoine Merriweather.

BV: It was hysterical. For the first time, it was two Black queens carrying on, which I thought was bold. Black guys have a much harder time of it because the Black community is so built around a church. That permeates everything. When AIDS hit, it was hard to raise money in that community because they viewed it as the devil’s work. And the big leaders came from the Church, Jesse Jackson, and Al Sharpton, back in the day.

So these two guys, saw the world through the movies. And it was their reaction to this world that often didn’t include them. But they certainly were caricatures. We were laughing at ourselves, at a stereotype, which we all know to be accurate. And didn’t see anything wrong with that. Now, of course, it’s a whole other world where you’re not allowed to find any of that stuff amusing, or you’ll be canceled at sunrise.

LGBTQ Nation: In 1997, three years into her sitcom Ellen, and after much speculation, Ellen DeGeneres came out simultaneously as the first gay lead of a show in the history of television, and as gay herself.

BV: You can never take it away from her. No matter what is said about her later, she was politically very, very important. But when Ellen came out, the show changed direction. Because the show was about a girl looking for a partner. And when she revealed herself to be gay, suddenly she was looking for a woman. And while they overlooked the fact that she was out, they didn’t want to follow her romantic exploits with women.

And that was what killed the show, and she predicted that, but they brought her back for a lot of money, and then wound up ditching her six months later.

LGBTQ Nation: The same year Ellen got dumped, NBC premiered Will & Grace.

BV: She paved the way for Will & Grace, and it became a genuine, genuine hit. With that show, people began, I think, to look at the whole gay thing differently, because we made fun of ourselves.

And at the same time, we were in the culture. We moved into the mainstream. We were not depicted as criminals, or people who were going to commit suicide, or any of the things that had been just objects of fun.

They were real people, and they had real relationships. And had big guest stars! So there’s more room for people who are just generally crazy and their gayness is part of that. They don’t exist because they’re gay, but because the character is gay.

LGBTQ Nation: Will & Grace has been off the air since 2010, and there hasn’t been a gay TV comedy blockbuster since. Do you think gay comedy has gotten less funny now because of gay mainstreaming?

BV: I don’t think it’s less funny, I think it’s just different. But the last few years, it’s upended everything. Comedy is a landmine. And I think the jury is still out. You discover what you can get away with by not getting away with it. By somebody saying, ‘That’s not, you can’t do that!’ I mean, the world is full of scolds, and it’s all become high school and everybody’s taking you to Student Council. So I think we’re in a transitional period. The next generation will probably speak louder, younger people who are a whole lot less flustered than we are. But then along comes George Floyd and #metoo, and suddenly, they’re all flustered on totally different issues.

LGBTQ Nation: Do you need a victim to make something funny? Does somebody have to be the object of comedy?

BV: That’s comedy generally, obviously. There’s nothing funnier than watching pomposity be deflated. And there has to be somebody pompous. It’s the old banana peel thing. You know, you get a snooty high society lady on Park Avenue slipping on a banana peel, it’s hilarious. Because she’s undone. And so that’s ancient. That goes back to the Greeks.

It’s hard to remove that from the culture because it’s a human thing. So it’s a tough one to answer. Because it’s one of the pillars of comedy and obviously there has to be a funny way of looking at things that other people don’t have. That’s comedy.

This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

The post Unpacking The Comedy Closet With Bruce Vilanch first appeared on We Got Bruce!.

NewNowNext
Paul Lynde’s Absurdly Gay 1976 Halloween Special
by Lester Fabian Brathwaite
10/25/2019

Can We Talk About…? is a weekly series that wants to be somebody, wants to go somewhere—so it’s waking up and paying attention.

Full disclosure: I’m one of the few gays who doesn’t love Halloween. I’m not sure why: I love dressing up, pulling pranks, and laughing maniacally by the light of a full moon, but Halloween has never done it for me. But I’m glad so many people love it because it leads to things like The Paul Lynde Halloween Special, a mythically bad variety special that boasted a veritable “Who’s that?” of Hollywood.

It only aired once, on October 29, 1976, but bootleg copies of it floated around on VHS for decades before it was officially released on DVD in 2007. YouTube followed suit, as did, most recently, Amazon Prime, where you can watch this screen gem in all its cheesy, extremely retro glory (?). Of course, most of you reading this probably have no idea who Paul Lynde was, so let’s start there.

Ben de la Creme as Paul Lynde during a RuPaul’s Drag Race Snatch Game challenge.

Lynde was the biggest queen in Hollywood this side of Liberace, having crafted a lovingly acerbic persona in ’60s fare like Bye Bye Birdie, Bewitched (playing the sneaky and snarky warlock, Uncle Arthur), and The Munsters before finding his true calling as the center square in The Hollywood Squares. Though clearly a homosexual, Lynde, like Liberace, existed in a glass closet where no one talked about the pink elephant mincing into the room.

Lynde was also a notorious alcoholic, fueled by his insecurities and the pressures of having to remain closeted despite fooling literally no one. In 1965, a young man fell to his death after spending a boozed-up night with Lynde in his hotel room. Instead of being a career-ending scandal, it was covered up and Lynde was still slinging tired zingers when this special aired a decade later.

Those zingers, much like Lynde’s famous one-liners from Hollywood Squares, were written, at least partly, by Bruce Vilanch. Judging from the quality of the writing on The Paul Lynde Halloween Special, Vilanch may have snorted an eight-ball, grabbed a dirty napkin, and feverishly scribbled down whatever fell out of his nostrils. How else can you explain the hodgepodge of ideas, limp half-jokes, and truly questionable stylistic choices?

Within the first 15 minutes, Donny and Marie sneak in a wordless cameo, Betty White bitches out Lynde, and Margaret Hamilton (the OG Wicked Witch of the West from The Wizard of Oz) gets back into her Elphaba drag.

And that’s not even the weirdest part—we haven’t even gotten to the first of three Kiss performances. Fucking Kiss. The Knights in Satan’s Service sold out so hard in the ’70s.

Next thing you know, Lynde, as an earring-wearing “chic sheik,” is phoning in a “passionate kiss” with Mrs. Brady herself, Florence Henderson, who later really commits to a discofied version of “That Old Black Magic.” After all, it was the ’70s, and if we weren’t pandering to the disco set, then really, what were we doing at all?

By the time Happy Days’ Roz “Pinky Tuscadero” Kelly (as she’s billed in the opening credits) starts up a spirited rendition of “Disco Lady” featuring the entire cast—including Kiss hanging out in the balcony and wondering just why in Satan’s name they agreed to this—you’ll legitimately find yourself wondering how this hot mess ever made it on television in the first place.

However, I, personally, was riddled with glee that it did mince its way into the zeitgeist.

Paul Lynde was such a homo, and that was evident to me even as a kid watching him exaggerate the gay hell out of Elizabeth Montgomery’s character’s name on Bewitched: “Sa-maaaaa-aaaa-haaan-thaaaaaa.” And what prepubescent queer doesn’t dream of being visibly drunk on television, wearing an ascot, and shouting, “Circle gets the square!”?

What, just me?

Gays have always existed in Hollywood—between Lynde, Agnes Moorehead (who played the fabulous Endora), and Dick Saregent (who played the second Darrin), Bewitched accounted for like 90% of the gays on television for nearly a decade. But gays like Lynde, who were out in everything but the word, and who were able to find their own fame, deserve some credit for making the unspeakable a bit easier to say aloud.

Now go watch this special and see for yourself just how ridiculous the whole thing is.

The post Paul Lynde’s Absurdly Gay 1976 Halloween Special (Video, Too) first appeared on We Got Bruce!.

The Paul Lynde Halloween Special is a Halloween-themed television special starring Paul Lynde broadcast October 29, 1976, on ABC. It featured guest stars Margaret Hamilton in the first reprisal of her role as the Wicked Witch of the West from The Wizard of Oz. Also, guest starring is Billie Hayes as Witchiepoo from H.R. Pufnstuf, Tim Conway, Roz Kelly, Florence Henderson, rock band Kiss, Billy Barty as Gallows the Butler, Betty White and, in an unbilled surprise appearance, Donny and Marie Osmond. The special aired only once.

Bruce Vilanch was one of the writers.

The post Video: Bruce Vilanch on “The Paul Lynde Halloween Special” first appeared on We Got Bruce!.

Player FM
Audio: Gilbert Gottfried’s Amazing Colossal Podcast – #220 Bruce Vilanch
By Earwolf and Gilbert Gottfried.
August 13, 2018

Gilbert and Frank welcome an old friend, legendary comedy writer Bruce Vilanch, who looks back at the “golden age” of TV variety shows and specials, including “Donny & Marie,” “The Brady Bunch Hour,” “The Star Wars Holiday Special” and “The Paul Lynde Halloween Special.” (all co-written by Bruce himself). Also, Margaret Hamilton makes her move, Robert Reed channels Carmen Miranda, Jack Benny does “The Match Bit” and Gilbert takes over “Hollywood Squares.” PLUS: Jack Palance! Bob Hope’s filing cabinet! “Wayne Newton at SeaWorld”! Bruce hangs with Tallulah Bankhead! And the Oscar joke that never made the air!

The post Podcast: Gilbert Gottfried’s Amazing Colossal Podcast – #220 Bruce Vilanch first appeared on We Got Bruce!.