Classic Media Reviews

qsmpc 1 (1) pp. 123–128 Intellect Limited 2016 queer studies in media & popular culture Volume 1 Number 1 © 2016 Intellect Ltd Miscellaneus. English language. doi: 10.1386/qsmpc.1.1.123_5 cLassIc medIa ReVIews Bewitched, created by Sol SakS (1964–72) Culver City, CA: Screen Gems Television Reviewed by Bruce Drushel, Miami University Ordinarily, the reviews section of an academic journal provides an opportu- nity for colleagues to share informed perspectives on recently released books and other current works relevant to the interests of its readers, and Queer Studies in Media & Popular Culture will be no different. But just as this journal sets itself apart in terms of the focus of the scholarship it publishes, its editors hope readers similarly will find a certain distinctiveness in the range of its reviews. The classic media reviews in this and future issues, therefore, are intended to consider anew what their authors regard as being particularly influential offerings in queer culture. For the scholar who focuses on queerness in media, the task of selecting a single text as a favourite is something close to choosing a favourite child. At the very least, the text should be one that is formative in shaping the lens through which that scholar will view future encounters with queerness. Although openly lesbian and gay characters were all but missing from the television portion of the cultural landscape in the United States until the 1970s, queerness abounded, from the tailored efficiency of Miss Hathaway (played by Nancy Kulp) of The Beverly Hillbillies (1962–71, CBS) to the over- the-top hysterics of Dr Smith (played by Jonathan Harris) of Lost in Space (1965–68, CBS). But ground zero for televised queerness of the immediate pre- and post-Stonewall era was Bewitched (1964–72), which for eight seasons on ABC television weekly sent our gaydars into the red zone. According to Alexander Doty (1995: 71–84), texts like Bewitched become queer in three ways: (1) through the influences of queer people in the proc- ess of their production; (2) through reading them from a queer reception position; and (3) through the period-specific uses self-identified queer people 123 QSMPC_1.1_Classic Review_123-128.indd 123 10/9/15 10:09:46 AM classic media Reviews make of them – what I like to refer to as their status as icons of queer culture. Bewitched’s scorecard on each of the three was amazing for its time and remains impressive even by more contemporary standards. Among its production influences was a leading and supporting cast of not-quite-out-of-the-closet actors embodying characters at the very heart of most episodes’ plots. There was Agnes Moorehead’s Endora, the matriarch of a family of witches and warlocks, ever scheming to undermine the series’s signature happy heterosexual couple, daughter Samantha (played by Elizabeth Montgomery) and mortal son-in-law Darren (played by Dick York and Dick Sargent). Moorehead is thought to have been lesbian (although she never identified publicly as such) and brought to her performance a career filled with roles of powerful female characters out to disrupt heteronormative pairings. There was Maurice Evans as Samantha’s father, whose relationship with wife Endora was never specified, though it might best be characterized as distant and based upon either mutual respect or mutual fear. Evans never married and was widely thought to be gay. There was Paul Lynde as Uncle Arthur, the wisecracking and always-trendy warlock, who was given to theatrical extremes such as appearing as Canio from the opera Pagliacci in one episode to sing lines from ‘Laugh, Clown, Laugh!’ Lynde also was a closeted gay man, but he eventually acknowledged that his sexuality was an open secret in Hollywood and beyond. And there was also Dick Sargent, the ‘new Darren’, who replaced actor Dick York in the role for the final three seasons. Sargent eventually acknowledged being gay following his outing by a supermarket tabloid in 1991. Although they identified as a heterosexual couple, Bewitched star Elizabeth Montgomery and series director William Asher must be considered key elements of the queer production influences in the show. The couple were particularly close to Lynde; they promoted pilot series with him as the star and reportedly negotiated ABC-TV’s pick up of The Paul Lynde Show (1972–73) as a replacement for Bewitched when it left the air in 1972. They also were friends with Dick Sargent and his partner; in a gesture of support of Sargent’s coming out, Montgomery agreed to serve as co-grand marshal with Sargent of a gay pride parade in Los Angeles. Montgomery herself is credited with succinctly describing a queer reading of the series as the ultimate coming-out story: a woman must renounce her special powers and conceal an essential part of her identity that gives her pleasure and imbues her with a unique cultural herit- age – but that will engender irrational public hatred against her if it is discovered. Beyond that, queerly positioned audiences may readily read Bewitched as a queer-positive story because, week after week, crises are averted and domes- tic tranquillity is restored, not through the subjugation of Samantha’s witchly identity and powers but specifically because she relents and employs them. The iconic value of Bewitched to the generations of LGBTQ people who grew up during the period of its original run or who have discovered the show in reruns or through its DVDs is more difficult to specify. Individual members of the cast, particularly Lynde and Moorehead, have their own queer followings. Articles occasionally surface that celebrate its queerness, including Taylor Cole Miller’s (2015) recent entry in the Huffington Post’s queer weblog, titled ‘Remembering Elizabeth Montgomery: Nine queerest moments of Bewitched’. The mere recognition of the concentration of queer talent that contributed to the show’s production (to say nothing of those who remained closeted and undiscovered) would be enough. And certainly Montgomery’s Bewitched-as-coming-out-metaphor would have powerful resonances for LGBTQ audiences. 124 QSMPC_1.1_Classic Review_123-128.indd 124 10/9/15 10:09:46 AM classic media Reviews To those attributes I offer two further considerations. First, Bewitched shares the plot underpinnings of superhero stories, whose tales of virtuous common folk repressed by the need to conceal their secret identities have instinctive value for queer adolescents just coming to terms with their own distinctiveness. While evidence of the popularity of these stories in broader culture has been subject to the ebbs and flows of most popular media genres, the dura- bility of their hold on public consciousness is undeniable. Second, the timing of the production of Bewitched situated it as something of a bridge between the rising tensions in the gay communities that led to the riot at Compton’s Cafeteria and the uprising at Stonewall, and the realization of the potential for lesbian/gay power that followed those momentous events. Situation comedies of the period, Bewitched among them, were both utopian and escapist. In this case, the hopeful world they gestured toward appeared to be within reach. referenceS Doty, Alexander (1995), ‘There’s something queer here’, in Corey K. Creekmur and Alexander Doty (eds), Out in Culture: Gay, Lesbian and Queer Essays on Popular Culture, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 71–90. Miller, Taylor C. (2015), ‘Remembering Elizabeth Montgomery: Nine queerest moments of Bewitched’, HuffPost Gay Voices, 18 May, http://www.huffing- tonpost.com/taylor-cole-miller/remembering-elizabeth-mon_b_7289652. html. Accessed 29 July 2015. contributor detailS Bruce Drushel is an associate professor and director of the film studies programme in the Department of Media, Journalism and Film at Miami University as well as the founding co-editor of Queer Studies in Media & Popular Culture. His research and teaching interests include media represen- tations of LGBTQ persons, media policy and media economics. He currently is Vice-President for Programming and Area Chairs of the Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association and chairs its Gay, Lesbian and Queer Studies area. Contact: Department of Media, Journalism and Film, 140 Williams Hall, Miami University, Oxford, OH 45056, USA. E-mail: [email protected] hedwig and the angry inch, directed by John cameron mitchell (2001) Los Angeles: New Line Cinema Reviewed by Shelley Park, University of Central Florida Identifying just one instance of queer media to foreground as a ‘classic’ for this inaugural issue of Queer Studies in Media & Popular Culture was difficult. It seems, however, that any archive of queer popular culture must certainly 125 QSMPC_1.1_Classic Review_123-128.indd 125 10/9/15 10:09:46 AM Classic Media Reviews include the cult classic Hedwig and the Angry Inch. Directed by and star- ring the fabulous John Cameron Mitchell as its title character, Hedwig was a crowd favourite from the moment of its release in 2001, winning Audience Awards at Sundance and at the San Francisco International Film Festival as well as numerous acting and directing awards in the United States, Canada and Europe. Notably, it won the Best First Feature Film Award from the San Francisco International Lesbian and Gay Film Festival and the Teddy Award for the Best Gay/Lesbian Feature Film in Berlin, where the film’s story begins, prior to the end of the Cold War. The story about a genderqueer East German singer with a Farrah Fawcett flip wig and ‘a one-inch mound of flesh where [his] penis used to be, where [her] vagina never was’ clearly foregrounds questions about gender and sexual identity. Hedwig begins his life as the East German Hansel, ‘a slip of a girly- boy’ with an obsession for US glam punk.

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