This week, we're going back and taking another look at Say Gay Seventies, Eighties and nineties Queer TV with Matt Baum, originally launched June seventh, twenty twenty three.

I wanted to rerun this episode back in June for Pride Month, but we had so many episodes to get through for season three and we were already overscheduled.

So I figure every month Cannon should be Pride Month.

Sharon couldn't agree more.

I'm so glad Matt said yes to coming on our show.

We're big fans and he's such an amazing creator, so smart, knowledgeable, and fun.

Please enjoy the summer rerun of Say Gay Seventies and Eighties and nineties Queer TV with Matt Baum.

Welcome to Eighties TV Ladies, part of the weirding Way Media Network Eighties.

Day, So Pretty Eighties Day through the City.

Hey, I'm your producer Melissa Roth, and here are your hosts, Sharon Johnson and Susan Lambert HadAM Welcome to.

Eighties TV Ladies, where we love to celebrate female driven television of the nineteen eighties and beyond.

I'm Sharon Johnson and I'm Susan Lambert.

HadAM.

We are so excited to look at an important part of retro pop culture, the representation of the LGBTQ community in television history.

We were sparked to this discussion when we visited with the Rainbow Remix podcast and started talking about these issues and episodes with JD.

Danner and Denise Warner.

And in researching for these episodes, I came across our next guest who is an expert on queer representation in pop culture and a fantastic storyteller.

Our guest today is Matt Baum, a Seattle based writer, podcaster, and video map whose work focuses on queer culture, geeks, and all things strange and wonderful.

He is the creator of the queer podcast The Sewers of Paris and the Glad Award nominee journalist and writer.

His first book, Defining Marriage, tells personal stories of the people who fought for decades for marriage equality, and his latest book, Hi Honey, I'm Homo explains how subversive queer comedy and TV creators transformed the American sitcom Welcome Matt down to eighties TV ladies.

Thanks so much for having me.

We're very happy to have you on the show.

You're kind of a renaissance man, podcaster, writer, video maker, journalist.

What's your story.

How did you get started?

Well, yeah, it's true.

I do a little bit of everything, but basically I make content for the Internet.

I make podcasts, make videos.

I write often about pop culture from a queer perspective, but you know, I tell stories about the making of iconic TV and film and about the incredible people behind some of the most interesting stories and interesting pieces of entertainment out there.

And I guess, you know, I guess I got started.

You know, my origin story twenty years ago.

So I as a film student and went to Emerson College in Boston.

Studied film, a little bit of television in there, and these are these are the olden days when we were actually like cutting pieces of celluloid on a bench.

And so after that, you know, my interest was really in you know, every aspect of movies and TV.

And you know, from that, from we got a great foundation of history stuff.

And then I went into the you know, moved to Los Angeles, was working in the industry, worked for Jim Henson Productions.

I worked for Lucasfilm up in San Francisco.

So it's really embedded in all that, and somewhere in there I really started to get interested in, as a total side thing, some of the political stuff that was going on around gay marriage or marriage equality, because there was a lot of you know, litigation and legal stuff happening, and I was like, well, how can I use what I know how to do in my interests in you know, media production to try to advance equality in some way.

And this was just around the time that YouTube was taking off.

So my partner and I started making videos about the you know, we interviewed same sex couples about why they wanted to get married, started making videos about the importance of civil rights.

And what that kind of turned into was a realization that one of the ways that culture moves and one of the ways that people connect with each other is through entertainment and stories and often through comedy.

And that really became a focus for me, especially you know, I'm jumping ahead, way ahead a couple of years now, but in the last few years I've really been focusing on movies and TV and making YouTube videos, writing making podcasts.

How that stuff connects us as people, how we come to understand what's going on around us and with each other, and so that's what kind of got me to the point of that I'm at now where I make YouTube videos about some of the most you know, groundbreaking episodes of television films, actors, people behind the scenes.

And now I've got a book coming out about the history of queer characters on sitcoms.

So it really it's become an obsession for me.

And I guess, you know, another place that it started is just I really love this stuff.

I really love television.

I really love movies.

I love acting, you know, actors and producers and writers, and I just think they do amazing work.

They bring us joy and happiness.

But also there's a lot of you know, important stuff going on just under the covers, behind the scenes that the entertainment that we love reveals about us and about each other.

So anyway, that's a very long winded explanation.

No, but a great explanation and kind of exactly why we're doing eighties TV ladies, Like I was curious about looking at representation of women and how that shifted from the eighties to now.

But we kind of cover, you know, we go into the seventies, we you know, just television history in general is really interesting because and you know, it feels like you might be a little bit younger than I.

But I also went to film school when there was still film cutting and the very beginning of video editing on from VHS to VHS that's what.

We had, Yeah, I remember, Oh, yeah, that was fun.

Yep.

Those decks you put one tape in, you put the other tape in.

Yeah, it was pretty amazing.

But the representation matters, as we've learned so many times over and over again.

But I'm fascinated, you know, by gender and our explorations of gender now, but also looking back at the time of the eighties, which was my childhood and young adulthood and kind of wondering how we got here from there, but also recognizing how much television taught us, Like we forget that pre internet, television was definitely a form of information, even in a sitcom.

Right, yeah, very much.

You know, that was kind of a window to the world, right Like, you know, for me, I think I might be just behind you because eighties was was my childhood and going into the nineties.

I was a teenager in the nineties.

But you know, I do remember, like you know, learning stuff from for better or for worse from sitcoms about other cultures and other people.

And you know, I grew up in a suburb in Connecticut, and so there was not a lot of exposure to the great, big world out there, and so you know, sometimes it might be something as simple as like, oh, that's what life is like in a big city, you know, when I'm watching Seinfeld, or it's something you know, more important where you know, I vividly remember Linda Ellerbee had a special on Nickelodeon about HIV, and I'm pretty sure that was the first time I'd ever heard that topic discussed on television.

That's where we learned that stuff, you know, so I'm always so curious to hear like what it was for other people like that.

You know, I can pinpoint some of the shows that kind of shape me as a person, and I think everybody has those stories, like, oh, that was the show that really taught me something valuable.

What was your TV diet like as you were growing up and you know, through adulthood, what were some of the things you remember watching.

You know, I was in an interesting position because I think my household, my parents really respected the power of television to shape a person and so there was a lot of deliberate care put into what appeared on the screen.

So there was there were some guardrails.

There was a limit on what hours we could watch.

Television did not come on until six pm, and then there was a lot of parental monitoring of stuff, which you know, looking back on, it was very frustrating for me at the time because I'm like, I want to watch after school cartoons, and this could be why I became so obsessed with this medium later on as an adult.

But you know, as a kid, BBS, Sesame Street, Mister Rudgers, Neighborhood Square One, a little bit later, The Muppet Show, for sure.

Fraggle Rock.

I really cite Fragle Rock is a show that really imbued a lot of the are you know, imparted the values that I just kind of internalized as a kid, you know, getting along multiculturalism and pluralism, being kind to others, understanding that there are other, you know, other entities and cultures out there, curiosity and exploration.

Star Trek was also a huge part of my childhood, which again, you know, it's maybe a little weird to compare these two things, but I think Star Trek and Fraggle Rock actually have a lot in common in their ethos.

Well, they really do.

Yeah, I'm a big Star Trek fan.

So the prime directive, if you will, that Jean Roddenberry went into as this was going to be a world where a lot of the things that we're still fighting over today have been resolved and it is a kinder, gentler world that people live in.

At least that's what they're striving towards as part of the Federation.

That's what they're expected to do as part the Federation.

So I totally understand that.

Do you have a favorite Star Trek series or I love this question?

You know, it's very hard.

I feel like a parent.

I can't pick a favorite, But I can't pick a favorite.

But Next Generation just came along at the right time, in the right place.

We watched that as a family, We talked about it as a family, We look forward to it as a fan.

You know that cliffhanger where Picard's been captured by the Borg was, you know, defined that summer from from Part one to Part two and the other on the other end of it.

So I think Star Trek the Next Generation was the one that really hit for me.

But you know, but if you asked me in public, I'd say I love all my star treks equally.

We won't tell, we won't tell.

Well, what was it for you?

I'm so curious, like what we're what is your star trek and who are your captains?

My favorite star trek is Deep Space nine.

I watched all the syndicated I have not watched all the animated, and I'm still catching up on some more streaming episodes.

But Deep Space nine was and still is definitely my favorite.

I have no problem saying.

I mean, I like them all, but if I had to pick one, deep Space nine is the one is my favorite.

I'm kind of an original like because those I rewatched.

I know those better than almost any of the other ones because just because they were in reruns.

Right, But I'm a captain Janeaway.

You know eightyes TV ladies, I mean or ninety TV ladies whatever.

Deep Space nine had a lot of strong women on that show.

I mean, yeah, that is true.

We got to interview Nana visitor from Pep Space one, and she was fantastic and it was really quite spectacular.

And that's so we're going to do a whole series.

On the Ladies' Eighties TV Ladies of Star Trek, which will go from the sixties to whenever.

Now someday we're not sure exactly when that's going to happen, but it is going to happen.

We're going to make it happen.

That gives me chills.

What a great idea.

I love everything about it because there's so many oh my goodness, so many fantastic actresses and writers and like people behind the scenes.

You know, Gates McFadden has a podcast that I just I just adore.

She's so interesting to listen to.

And yeah, and the non visitor just an incredible woman in Kate Mulber, Like, oh my goodness, yeah, yeah, anyway, yeah, wonderful.

Lots of good stuff there.

Well, we could just kind going down this path I want to talk about.

So we were invited onto a podcast, the Rainbow Remix Podcast, and that got me thinking down this path of representation and queer representation and or the lack thereof, and then you start diving in and I felt it was an important aspect of eighties TV ladies to look at the sort of how that representation evolved.

And so that's how we found you and wanted to sort of talk to you about, So I guess we can leave Star Trek even though Star Trek has some good queer representation.

It does, Yeah, particularly in the later evolutions.

If we can certainly talk about DS nine and the intriguing lesbian kiss episode, the uh John Zia's whole approach to sexuality.

So I'm fully prepared to discuss that topic.

But also, you know, if we're if we're sticking to the eighties, yeah, there's there's a lot going on there too.

Gosh, well, I want to kind of start from beginning if we can like just a little bit of a like a you know one oh one on early gay representation on television.

You know, the one on one on early gay representation on television is really that it's that animated gift, that meme of John Travolta in pulp fiction looking around and like where is everybody?

It's because there's not a lot of it.

Television is about one hundred years old, you know, depending on where you start counting, and basically for that first half of the century, there was not a lot going on because television was governed by a code that was adapted from the you know what the movies were using that referred to had a pretty firm prohibition on what we're called sex abnormalities.

Not a great not a great label, but if you wanted to find anything queer, either on radio or television, you really had to go searching and basically look for either subtext or occasionally, if you're really lucky, if you tune into the right time, you might see something pretty derogatory without you know, without the people getting to without characters getting too explicit because they couldn't.

You know, Bob Hope might tell a joke about Christine Jorgenson or something like that, and if you know what he's talking about, you'd get it, but it would go over everybody else's head.

And so when you would really start to see what I think of as the beginning the Inklings is probably around the nineteen sixties, around more activity around civil rights.

Civil rights movement in real life is when you might see tele and pushing the boundary just a little bit, just a tiny bit, and not really talking about anything gay too much, too explicitly.

Mostly you might see some subtext, which is why I start my book with Bewitched, a show that never had any openly gay characters on it certainly never talked about that kind of thing, but had a pretty queer cast, a pretty socially progressive cast, and also a lot of subtext that I think is not difficult to connect to either a queer liberation or to civil rights in general, to other marginalized groups, to religious minorities, to ethnic minorities, to people with disabilities.

I think Bewitch is a show that is, you know, it's just a thing of beauty for people who might feel like outsiders.

And when you go back and watch through that lens, you know, it's already a very funny show, but it really becomes something beautiful when you consider that.

And this was their intention.

They knew what they were doing, you know, behind the scenes.

When you think of it as a show that is giving comfort to people who feel like, you know, they don't have a place in the world, gosh, it's such a beautiful show.

Wow.

Yeah, you know, I haven't rewatched it, but I have, you know, heard that aspect of it and want to.

So it's on the list.

Yeah, it would be a big long list.

But that's really interesting.

Is there anything significant, like is there an episode or is it just the whole tenor of the show and some of the characters.

There are some very significant episodes.

One of the very first, I think it's episode five or six or seven in season one, is called The Witches Are Out, which is so close to an allegory for homosexuality.

So it begins with Samantha, and if you're not familiar with the premise of the show, it's about a witch, a woman who's secretly a witch who marries a mortal and this couple, this sort of you might think of them as interfaith couple, is how they were often thought of.

They attempt to move to the suburbs and blend in and live a quote unquote normal life, which means that the witch Samantha is often called upon to hide who she is.

Well.

At the start of this episode The Witches Are Out early in the series run, she's hanging out with some other witches and they are lamenting how unpleasant Halloween is for them because there are all these stereotypes about them, all these misunderstandings about their community.

One of the witches says something like, I don't see why we don't just come out and show people who we are, and then they can see what lovely people witches can be.

And it's such a mirror of the conversation that was happening in you know, the proto queer liberation groups, that Matachine Society, Daughters of Beliitis, groups like that in real life.

In fact, the episode has a scene where Samantha confronts her husband Darren.

Darren is an ad executive and he's running an ad campaign that features witches stereotypical, you know, ugly looking warts, green skin, the hair, and Samantha directly confronts him.

She says, when people like us see images like that, don't you understand how it hurts?

Wow, what an incredible conversation to be having in nineteen sixty someeve they've probably nineteen sixty six or so, nineteen sixty six or seven.

And then at the end of the episode, the witches stage a protest.

They have big signs.

They pick it and because they're witches and because they can't reveal themselves for their own safety, they do it in the dreams of a executive.

They invade his dreams holding these signs.

Explained him the harm of stereotypes and that you know this, these myths about them aren't true, And he comes around and he decides not to use those stereotypes anymore, holding these signs.

And what's incredible about this episode is that it aired just a few weeks after what is generally recognized as the first in real life public protest by queer people.

It happened in New York.

It happened outside an army recruiting station.

And we're talking like sixish people, not a huge crowd, but they're holding signs that says, you know, messages about we demand sexual freedom and homosexuals died for the US two Because they're protesting army recruitment.

It just it looks like the signs are from the same event.

Now, obviously Bewitched was not pulling from that, but they're both affected by what was going on in the in the air and the zeitgeist at the time, which is minority groups getting a little tired and feeling like, hey, maybe we can actually come out those of us who have the ability to come out safely.

Let's let's see what happens if we ask for more.

And so yeah, So I think I often cite that episode of The Witch.

There are others, but I think that is that one is just remarkable.

Wow, that Okay, we're adding Bewitched to our eightiesevy ladies, We'll just do a sidebar.

Yeah, well, Elizabeth Montgomery was still working in the a.

I mean, I know that's true.

She's right.

Yeah.

It is interesting how in the writing in the sixties, and certainly I think more so in the seventies and eighties, there was almost this subliminal effort, whether it be for gay rights or for civil rights or others, to try to get that message through.

For a lot of people, it just went right over their heads, I'm sure, but it did manage I'm sure to get through to some.

Yeah.

Yeah, just imagine like how comforting it would have been as a queer person or any marginalized person to see like people talking about that.

Just you know, if you need to hear that message, there it is.

You know, television is so great with the metaphor, you know, like it really is, like you know, from Buffy.

I think about Buffy a lotah and how much the metaphor of that show was resonant to so many people.

Wow, all right, So some of the stuff that I saw in my little research was really like one off, like it would be episode episode things like that.

What were some significant moments that were like, Okay, here's a huge you know, this is this goes on the timeline.

Yeah, in terms of you know, yeah, well the big some of the big milestones.

Obviously All in the Family, you know, Norman Lear did a ton for representation.

I would say it's nineteen seventy two.

I believe All the Family premiers also the last year of Bewitch, So it's just incredible to think, like those two shows overlapping a very different approach, very different vibe.

Anyway, so All the Family in their first season, they had an episode called Judging Books by Covers, which featured a queer person.

They never say the word gay.

The gay character himself does sort of evasively talk around who he is around coming out, but he is also presented as a big, bold, macho guys.

He's not the stereotype that people might think of.

Part of the point of the episode is that you cannot judge people based on appearances.

And then a little bit later in the run, I think one of the most memorable characters that All in the Family did was a character named Beverly LaSalle.

She was a character who the show presents her variously as a drag queen.

She also uses the word to transvestite.

You know, the terminology was really not solid at that time, but I was fortunate enough to ask Norman Lear.

I interviewed Norman Lear for my book and asked him, how should we think of Beverly LaSalle And I'll describe the character in a moment, and he said, essentially, the performer that they hired, they got out of that person's way and let them just do their thing, and they're basically playing themselves.

And so Beverly LaSalle as she appears on screen on All in the Family, is a drag queen who comes to the bunker house because Archie, the patriarch, who is rather conservative and set in his ways and very you know, right leaning, he has saved the life of what he believes is a big, tall, classy broad.

As he calls her, she fainted and he gave her mouth to mouth, and she now comes to the house to thank him, and in so doing reveals that she is actually a female impersonator is the one of the words that terms that she uses, and there's a great moment with theirs.

Archie continues to misunderstand what this means.

He says to her, well, let me just say thank you, miss, unless you use ladies likes to be called mis and you know, he thinks he's being so like ry, like oh miss haha, and Beverly says, why don't you call me mister and pulls off the wig, and you know, the episode is hysterical and wonderful and presents Beverly as a real hero.

Beverly comes back a season later.

She comes back a season after that.

She becomes a recurring character.

The family's relationship with her deepens.

She really becomes a part of the family, which I think is significant.

Our show called All in the Family, like that family refers to and includes Beverly Edith.

At one point, Edith is Archie's wife, says to Beverly, to me, you're like a sister, well brother, well both rolled into one, and it's just it's very sweet.

There's another episode where they discover that they have a lesbian cousin named Liz, who they only learn this after Liz passes away and they meet her partner, and there's a lot of drama around whether to recognize this partner as a member of the family.

And that episode's very significant because the partner.

The lesbian partner is a teacher, and part of her alarm about people learning that she's a lesbian is that she could lose her job if the wrong person finds out.

And this episode happened to be rebroadcast one night before of a real life vote in California on whether queer people should be you know, barred from holding jobs in schools.

It you know, went down in a landslide.

And I really think that this episode of All in the Family was a contributor to that, not certainly not the only factor, but putting a sympathetic, lovely character on the screen that shows the consequences of bigotry, I think I think that went a long way towards changing people's minds.

So I would put All in the Family like Up on the Board is one of the most important shows.

I love all that And you know, for listeners, you've got to go check out Matt's videos on All in the Family because he really breaks down the episodes quite beautifully.

All in the Family so groundbreaking, so important, not a lady's show, and a show that I appreciated, Like I was like, this is better than other shows.

I could appreciate that, and yet because the two female characters were not women, I aspired to hold positions like at the time, there wasn't really a way in you know, for me as a young viewer, And yet I also recognize it now as just brilliant friggin writing.

Man, did you have access to Maud?

Was that on when you were watching?

So?

That was on?

Again?

I was much younger, right, so I was not really like my mom also kind of watched what I watched, and like, in some ways Maud felt too sophisticated for us to watch.

Mad's a tough one.

I think for kids, Mad and Three's Company were kind of forbidden from us.

Now again, you know, Maud was talking about sophisticated stuff, you know for sitcoms for a young person.

Oh for sure.

Yeah.

But the All in the Family it's always been a struggle for me because it's like, okay, but the center always comes it's Archie Bunkers, right, Yeah, it always comes back to Archie Bunker and he is.

So it's a very conflicting show for me because I understand its groundbreaking, but I also find at its core it's so misogynist that it's really as many times as they made Archie have to face his prejudice, and he's sort of shifted by listening to Edith.

He's sort of also never really changed.

No, No, I you know, I think that that's that character's role, and I think that's something that went over a lot of viewers' heads too, is that he's Archie's not the hero, or at least he's not intended to be.

But I think the show is also kind of a Rorshack test in that if you want him to be, or if you're afraid that he is, it's very easy to see him that way, to sympathize with the quote unquote wrong.

But you know, the character is not intended to be the hero, just to be like, yeah, sure I'm taking this.

I'm taking him at face value.

Archie, Yeah, he's the good guy here, not how the show meant, but I do think that's how a lot of people received it.

Yeah, I sen you recall reading well after the fact that it was one of those shows and Archie is one of those characters where people who tend to lean towards his way of thinking think he's a great guy.

People who don't think he's an idiot and of affoon and everybody is watching the same show.

Yeah, and yet they're taking out of it something completely different.

Yeah, and in a lot of ways, that's the brilliance of the show for me, I think.

A little bit.

Yeah, I agree.

I think that really indicates like how good the writing is that you can take so much away from it.

And I do think that there is absolutely there's just some misogyny baked in, in part because of the time.

There's a story about Norman Lear when he met Susan Harris, who wrote for Maud and then went on to, among other things, Great The Golden Girls.

When Norman Lear met Susan Harris, reportedly he said to her, no one can look like you and also write, and she says to him, well, that's an appropriate remark for a man who's making a show about a bigot.

So I love that she put him in his place in that way.

But also it sure was different times.

Yeah, yeah, that's great, so that we can segue into Golden Girls.

Yes please.

Yeah, incredibly groundbreaking show we haven't yet covered, and immensely it sort of always comes up, but we were holding it.

It may end up being.

My last, you know, our last series, just because it's it's got so much, you know, like it almost feels like, well, that's just the low hanging fruit.

We got to wait do that show.

Yeah, I agree.

I think the Golden Girls and Designing Women are the two.

Like what I think of is the iconic women led ensembles of the eighties on television.

Nurses is in there, and you know, there's other shows, but yeah, gosh, Golden Girls is.

How could I not write about that and how could I not like extensively cover it my videos.

One of the most important TV shows ever made.

I think, So I was curious about sort of the video that you made that was about the gay fandom and the gay fandom around Golden Girls and how it became such an important part of that community.

I mean, can you talk a little bit about that.

Yeah, you know, I first discovered that in college.

Golden Girls I just kind of missed for my whole childhood, my whole teenagerhood.

But when I was in college, I lived with a guy who was the head of the musical theater society, a gay man if you can believe that, who was pretty obsessive about catching episodes of Golden Girls.

I think when they aired on Lifetime and it became you know, in our little social group, it was really mimetic.

You know, we would quote lines from the show.

You know, never somebody said something foolish, it was no rose.

So we really, you know, made that part of our lifestyle as gay college students.

And I found it amazing that as I discovered a gay community as an adult, that it was a real Rosetta stone, Like it was a real point of connection.

You know, if you meet another queer person you don't really know how to connect, you can at least talk about the Golden Girls.

And that was kind of a mystery to me for a while, like, how how is this the thing that we've all come to.

I think there are a lot of factors there.

I think one of them is that behind the scenes, off screen, all of the actresses and a lot of the people involved in that show were involved in gay projects.

So you would see them in other things, and so you know, you knew that they were an ally.

B Arthur in multiple episodes of Maud, you know, the tackle gay issues.

Rue McClanahan was in a TV movie about Leonard Mattlovich, who is a you know, real queer pioneer in real life, they're just stell Getty of course in Torch Song trilogy.

So these are folks who had a lot of you know, they had a lavender pedigree, I would say, coming into The Golden Girls, and then the show itself.

Of course, they had a gay character in the pilot.

They had gay characters frequently on the show, some of them were even recurring, still pretty rare in those days.

So that was it was not something that we were you know, shy away from.

I know, they had a lot of gay people working, you know, queer people behind the scenes working on the show, and it made like a lot of waves like this was a show that talks about marriage equality, it talks about gay members of the family, talks about HIV, just you know, unflinching at a time when it was pretty tough for shows, to especially comedies, to talk about anything gay because in part, you know, HIV epidemic made it something that was deeply stigmatized as a topic.

But they were not scared of it.

So yes, I think that's a real part of the queer appeal of The Golden Girls.

Were that any episodes I'm curious because again we haven't I haven't looked at all the episodes I know there were a lot of gay male characters on the show.

Were there gay women on the show?

Yeah?

Actually, there's an episode where one of Dorothy's college friends comes to visit, a woman named Jean and so she's played by Lois Nettleton, a fantastic actress who appeared just millions of things.

She had actually even played a lesbian, I think on Medical Center or another show prior to this.

Anyway, So Dorothy's friend Gene is coming.

Dorothy and Sophie know that Gene is a lesbian, and they are kind of iffy on whether the other women should know about it, and so, you know, it's it's sort of a do we out her to them?

Do we let her make that decision?

And you really see the thought process and then beautifully Sophia, you know, Dorothy's kind of dancing around it, and Sofia just goes up to her and she's like the lesbian thing, do you keep it under your hat or what?

The episode progresses with the girls gradually coming to an understanding about lesbianism.

Rose, you know, towards the end of the episode, is annoyed that she wasn't told, and Dorothy's like, I wasn't even sure if you'd know what it is, and Rose says, I could have looked it up.

Uh, And anyway, it's just a it's a wonderfully beautifully written show.

It was actually it was written by Jeff Dutilh who's a gay writer.

He sent it in as a spec script because he had to know one of the producers, Winfred Hervey, and she loved it.

They wanted to do a gay episode.

They bought the script from him, put it into production and yeah, that that really that helped establish Jeff Dutiel as you know, really helped establish his writing career because he was just doing a lot of work for higher up to that point.

Wow.

So yeah, he's just a great a great story about getting that on the air.

That's why I wanted to focus on sitcoms because there's a quality to them where you know, you can an audience I think is more likely to warm to a topic if they're laughing along with you know, the method by which it is delivered.

That's the great thing you point out about All in the Family, as how carefully crafted the jokes and the revelations are about these characters, and so that both the studio audience, right, which is an important part of what the reaction is going to be, and the home audience is brought along, you know, and that that typically Archie is always the last to know, yes, always, always, so that the audience can fully enjoy his reactions.

Yeah, And in rewatching All in the Family, I was noticing because with our kid, we're rewatching the office pretty much constantly.

But how much Michael Scott and Archie Bunker are a little match set in many ways, it's really interesting.

It was like, oh my gosh, I bet you he watched Archie Bunker like at some point.

That's such an interesting observation.

Yeah, Carol O'Connor is so specific in so many of his moments of revelation and understanding when you you was just it's so enjoyable to watch him get it and react and then react and then react.

That the cousin Liz episode of All in the Family is wonderful because there's this tension and it's something that you see across decades that I refer to in my book as and in my videos as I can't believe it's not heterosexual when there's this assumption that a character that all characters must be straight, and the audience gets sit a little bit before the characters, and part of the pleasure is watching for that moment when they figure it out.

And in that All the Family episode with cousin Liz, Edith gets it in like in a moment she, you know, Veronica is kind of talking around the topic and there comes a moment when Edith stops midward and her face completely transforms.

And then later in the episode she has to explain it to Archie and Archie doesn't get it, and then he does and his face completely transforms.

And you see that happen from show to show to show, episode to episode, decade to decade.

It happens on The Golden Girls when Gene Lows Nolton's character says in that episode she's explaining herself to Rose, and you see Rose's face just transform when she gets to that moment.

And then in the nineties on The Simpsons, on the John Waters episode when Marge is talking around it, you know, he prefers the company of men, and Homer says, who doesn't.

She's struggling to get him to understand, and then and finally he gets there and he screen.

There's just such a great magical tension.

There's an episode of The Designing Women where the same thing happens.

Susan goes looking for lesbian is the episode she has a friend who's going to a meeting of an organization called Daughters of Sappho and one of them says to her, what did you think Daughters of Sappho it meant?

And she said, I don't know.

I thought it was a laundry detergent anyway.

Yeah, I just I love those moments, those discovery moments.

And I love that it's got a theme like it's the what do you call it?

The I can't believe it's not heterosexual.

I can't believe it's not heterosexual.

That's perfect because that is the norm, right, the you know American norm.

Yeah, white male heterosexual.

H how very interesting that that's where we all and we all spin off of.

It, right Yeah.

And I you know, I think I actually will cite Glee as a show that found a new twist on it.

There's a gay reveal on an episode that I think is genuinely shocking, and I think there's a lot that can be critiqued about the show and about that scene and about storyline.

But I think Glee still found a new way to approach a surprise, and yet it fascinates me how those sort of little coming out moments have evolved from decade to decade to decade.

It actually shares a bit with the early seasons of Ellen in that there is something that seems so obvious, something that we ought to be talking about, something that is so clear to everyone.

You know.

There's an episode of Ellen where Janine Garofolo is on and sparks really fly.

So it's a great episode, and boy boy, it just seems clear, get these ladies together.

But they also have to be really careful and downplay that stuff at the time because they were so scared of what would happen if they actually used the one thing that could really set the show apart.

You know.

Instead, we're gonna pretend it doesn't exist.

Well, I don't know how many people are fooled here, So it just feels weird.

You know.

And I'm curious if, in your research and looking at these shows, if there was backlash to any of these particular episodes.

Were the networks right to be afraid?

Yes and no.

So there are some episodes that they you know, they really took a gamble on you know, I'm thinking in particular of soap.

ABC was terrified of what was gonna happen when they put soap on the air, but the reaction was generally pretty positive.

Critics were like, you know, there was this huge controversial build up to it over months before that episode aired, because it was going to have a gay character and a priest who has sex in a church, and a nympho maniac character, and you know, oh my god, there's everybody's sleeping with everybody else, and so ABC was just terrified.

They put a warning message before the episode.

When it aired, they put these ads on the air that showed people coming out of test screening saying like, yeah, it was actually pretty good, Like they're just trying so hard to reassure the audience.

And then it airs and critics are like, oh, yeah, that was okay, that was fine.

Same thing happened, you know, even decades not decades, but years earlier in nineteen seventy two, when they aired that certain summer on ABC, pretty groundbreaking made for TV movie that featured a same sex couple.

You know, the ABC's poised for the you know, switchboards are like ready for the angry calls to flood in.

Well, calls were actually pretty positive with The Golden Girls when they had a episode about I believe it's the episode where Blanche's brother plans to marry, or it might be one of the others with a queer theme.

Anyway, the bulk of the feedback was actually about be Arthur's hair, so people who wanted to weigh in on that topic.

So generally speaking, the public backlash from most viewers pretty limited.

That having been said, there is an awfully loud, small but very vocal backlash from groups like you know, when Ellen was coming out, the Southern Baptists organized, you know, these colossal boycotts, and so there would be you know, essentially interest groups on both sides who would make as much noise as they possibly could, and they didn't represent by and large, the millions of people who are watching.

You know, the Traditional Values co Delish, you know, had a small but very loud membership.

On the other side, Glad had you know, I would say, not a huge membership, but they were pretty savvy about making their voices heard.

So you know, you got a couple of people with megaphones.

But generally speaking, the viewing public was mostly just interested to see what the fuss was about and couldn't be bothered to write angry letters until there was something truly egregious, which was pretty rare.

You know.

I'm thinking of made for TV movie called gosh, what was the name of it, Born Innocent with Linda Blair in the mid seventies, that really does I think it was seventy four or seventy five, just completely crosses a line.

It's about a fourteen year old girl who is in a detention facility.

She's sexually assaulted.

There is, you know, some pretty derogatory depictions of lesbianism and broadcast in primetime, you know, at the same time as Happy Days, and it just it went beyond the pale, and people were I think justifiably outraged by that.

Generally speaking, though, you know, people are just like, Okay, that's on television.

Sure, I'll watch that.

It made me laugh twice, you know, I'm good.

Yeah, exactly, And so let's talk.

About lesbians on television because you know what I'm going through, and we're looking for these episodes of queer representation.

It's even slimmer if you're looking for women representation.

Yeah, yeah, it's a real shame.

I think part of that is because, generally speaking in terms of like what you might see in newspaper headlines, a lot of the activists and public figures were men.

Obviously not all of them, and that doesn't actually represent what was happening on the ground.

But I think a lot of the attention was paid in real life to male activists and you know, spokespeople.

And also, you know, I think that's just the misogyny of the television industry, that they are more interested often in male characters than women.

That haven't been said.

I think there's a phenomenon where shows saw lesbian characters sometimes as safer than gay characters, and so you'd see this phenomenon, especially in the nineties, of the lesbian kiss episode for Sweeps Week, and I think that that felt perhaps less threatening, you know than a gay kiss episode, because you know, on La Law, on Roseanne, on Deep Space nine, I think they were quicker to show women kissing, but also then to sort of erase the lesbianism by saying, oh, it was just experiment, Oh it was just a one time thing.

Oh that characters is getting written off the show.

You know, we just did it for sweeps a week and now they're gone.

So it was La Law the first lesbian kiss.

Do we know that.

I'm pretty sure it was.

There may have been, Yeah, Picket Fences was in there somewhere, but I'm pretty sure La Law was the first one.

And then it was literally a scene.

Yeah yeah, and then nothing happened.

Yeah there's there's a kiss, and then it's like, well that was weird any way, moving on, Yeah, yep, very much.

I think Deep Space nine was a little better about it.

Picket Fences I think was pretty disastrous.

They actually shot a lesbian kiss seen and then the network made them reshoot it in the dark with the lights turned off so that you couldn't see what was happening.

I think it actually makes the scene infinitely seedier to have like to this darkness.

But yeah, that's exactly it will be portrayed as like just a little fling that's this isn't real, is it?

Like?

Okay, it's just best for those guys that like to say, too women kissing.

I think that's part of it too.

Yeah, that it's you know, considered utilating and exciting perhaps to a male audience, where as you know, we get one of the male characters on screen to have a kiss.

It's something far more I don't know, dramatic or threatening.

You know, there was an episode of I think thirty something that had two male characters just sit next to each other in bed, not even touching, and you know that it's a catastrophe.

Oh there's an episode of not Sex in the City, but Tales of the City.

Oh yeah, and again on TVs.

That was I don't know if there's a specific episode or it's just like overall people were upset about it.

But there's there's a kiss, there's a there's a bathhouse scene.

There's clearly gay lovers in that show.

And again that was pretty early on I remember that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, that was I want to say, like early ninety two or ninety four or so.

But men, men in love, that that results in congressional hearings.

Women in love woo the audience.

The audience gasps and wants to see more.

And yet and yet it's just a tease.

It always has to be a tease with a little fake out of like we didn't really mean it, just kidding.

Yeah, it was just that that character's gay, not the main character.

That other yeah, but you know that they've moved on.

But I do want to give credit to the show Roseanne, because that one actually did feature a recurring character.

I think her name was Nancy, played by Sandra Bernhard, who had partners.

She was persistently queer.

You know, it wasn't like it's a phase.

That was a show that I think was a lot bolder about featuring queer character.

Also Martin Maule's character, you know, the recurring, recurring gay character.

So you know, there were those shows and you know, for better for worse Friends with you know, the Carol character.

You know, they to their credit, showed a lesbian couple getting married on prime time.

Not bad, not bad.

Yeah, so we're going to take a break.

We'll be back in a moment.

Welcome back.

So anyway, I wanted.

To talk about the Designing Women episodes, particularly Killing All the Right People.

Yeah, because it was such an important episode.

Can you tell us a little bit about that.

Yeah, it's an astonishing episode.

So a young man comes to the Women and says that he wants to hire them to design his funeral, that he knows that he is going to die.

He has HIV and you know, this is like the mid eighties, treatment was pretty rudimentary at that point.

It was generally considered a death sentence.

And so the women have this incredible scene where they talk about the reality of living with HIV at that time, which is very different from you know, how how we understand it today.

And there's also a scene that really confronts the stigma where a character says about AIDS.

You know, one thing that it has going for it is it's killing all the right people.

An incredibly chilling thing that you know, when I hear that, I think, how could a person say that?

And yet that line was pulled directly from real life.

It was something that that Linda Linda Bloodworth Thomas, is that her name, Lenda Bloodworth Thomas.

Yeah, blood with thomasin something that you heard in real life in a hospital while she was there, her mother was ill and I feel like it just it makes your blood ron cold.

So and her mother was dying of AIDS.

Oh yeah, from a transfusion.

She has, Yes, what's crazy?

It had just happened.

Yeah, Like it was like less than a year before that her mother had passed away, having gotten HIV through blood infusion.

That she wrote this episode, Yeah, and just amazing, just amazing.

And I can't imagine, you know, I'm putting myself in her position, the incandescent rage I would feel at somebody expressing a sentiment like that and channeling it into art.

In a way, that episode is educational.

It informs the audience in a way that does not sound like you know, a very special episode PSA.

You actually do learn something.

It humanizes an issue.

There's also there's a bat plot with anti pots about condoms, about educating you know, people about condom usage.

So and this is a time when the government was not doing a whole heck of a lot when it came to educating the public.

And so here you go, here's television.

I mean, talk about the life changing power of television.

Here's a television show that's stepping in to be like, people need to know about this.

Government's not doing it.

We're going to do it.

I'm noticing that so much, particularly for like seventies and eighties television, how much television was teaching us how to do things.

Yeah, and imparting in for and usually in a very clever way.

Right, Sometimes it felt like, you know, PSA kind of thing, But talking about designing women talking about breast cancer, Cagney lay also looking at breast cancer, talking about abortion, talking about rape and date rape, you know, and obviously they're able to take a more serious tag.

But it's really pretty amazing how much information you know, pre Internet that was like oh, yep, this is what HIV you know, and tying the HIV to high schoolers being able to access condoms or hearing about sex education basically huge, right, like.

Yeah, yeah, and you know, if you know, for an audience that's living in a major city, this stuff is not going to be breaking news probably, But the thing that's amazing about television is, you know, it breaches everywhere.

You know, almost one hundred percent of households have a television set.

And even then, and you know, if you're you don't have billboards about you know, the local clinic or something in your town because you happen to live in a small farming community or whatever, you can still just turn on the TV and get exactly the same information that someone in New York City is getting.

Yeah.

Yeah, So I'm also curious about trans representation.

Yeah, and I don't know if you've looked at that, it's you know, this is this is an area where television is uh still has some ways to go, and you know, it's it's been, it's been slow.

You can really see the evolving understanding public understanding of trans issues, you know, over the decades, and you know, this is this is something that I'm not speaking about from a position of you know, personal knowledge, so it's not quite my story to tell.

But what I can see is that you have this problem, particularly in the sixties on new shows.

It would be news shows that were discussing you know what.

At the time, there was really no concrete language around, so it might be you know, transsexualism or something like that.

Then into seventies there's a real misunderstanding of gender identity and sexual orientation where it's just assumed that, you know, gay men, you know, if you let them go far enough, all gay men just want to be women.

That's not exactly how it works, but that's kind of the understanding.

And then eventually you get into a somewhat better understanding into the eighties and I actually think, you know, you start to see a few characters like I can't remember the name of the show, but it was actually it was Annie Pots and Alfred Woodard were.

On a show one fine day.

Yes, there's an episode in which RuPaul plays a transgender woman, and you know, again they didn't hire a transactress.

But also your choices were pretty limited back then, so gradually into the nineties you might see there's as public understanding was sort of coalescing.

Gradually television got there, but it was it was slow.

You know, I'm thinking of Friends.

Friends had a I would say, pretty faulty depiction of the character as the chandler's parent.

And it's really difficult to know how to refer to this character played by Kathleen Turner, alternately referred to as a drag queen.

Sometimes it's character is a drag queen, sometimes it's a trans woman.

Sometimes it's a topic that people just don't know how to talk about it all.

And Marta Coffin, one of the co creators of the show, said that they just didn't understand the issue at the time.

Looking back, they would have done it differently.

Kathleen Turner said that in retrospect, she wouldn't have taken that role.

She would have given it to, you know, allowed it to be cast with a actual trans person.

So, you know, I think progress has been made since then.

But boy, boy, sometimes you really have to drag television kicking and screaming too to do the right thing well.

And to reflect people right, Like yeah, Like, that's the interesting thing is it feels like, you know, the loud megaphone voices notwithstanding these were not by the time it's on television.

The question is is television leading culture?

Is culture leading television?

I think on that issue absolutely, television was lagging way behind, you know, even you know, if we go back to the you know, early days of this being a public conversation in nineteen fifties, when it was you know, just a wacky news item at best.

You know, of course, there were people who this was their lived experience.

They understood it better than anybody else because it was their life, and those voices were just not allowed to speak up.

They were not given you know, a microphone.

So yeah, gosh, it's just it's it's sometimes very frustrating to watch the show and be like all you had to do was ask, All you had to do was ask somebody, you know, are we doing a good job, what's your experience?

What are we getting wrong?

You see shows do that now, and I think that's great.

Generally, so, you know, it is it is a shame to see that there was an opportunity here.

Television had an opportunity, you know, mass media in general, film like at all, it could have been doing so much more, and and yet we held back.

And for what why?

Why?

What was the point?

Well?

I mean, I think it almost inevitably comes down to the gatekeepers, and particularly at that time, there were very few, right, it was a very you know, there wasn't seventy eight streaming channels and YouTube, and so the assumption would be that no one would be interested in that because they weren't interested in that that was not their lived experience.

I think that's so much.

You realize that so much of television, when you hear about people's behind the scene experience, you realize like it just wasn't interesting to whoever had the power to say yes or no.

I think that's absolutely true.

Could it also, though, have been a certain amount of lack of understanding.

It feels to me like in the last maybe ten years or so, when it's come to things related to the trans community, that there's just been so much more information that we've all been provided at least that I feel like I've been provided.

I did not talk about it really before then I didn't know and I don't even I don't even think now I know somebody who's trans.

But at least I feel like I have a better understanding of how I would approach that if I had to talk about it, discuss it, right about it, and either there wasn't the information, or there wasn't a curiosity, or there just wasn't enough visibility that forced people to confront it and try to make an effort to understand it.

And at the end of the day, TV is about making money, and if the powers would be as Susan said, didn't understand it and thought it affected their ability to keep sponsors or get sponsors, and.

Boy, they were going to run in the opposite direction from that as well.

Yeah, why risk it?

Right, Like, I think that there's a lot of risk adverse behavior at that level.

But I am also very curious in watching these seventies and eighty shows to watch languageable.

Yeah, both the langue.

I mean, like all in the family you're like, well, please, don't you know, Like, oh my goodness, he said, continuing to say it right, like, oh yeah, there's a lot of words that you're like, oh, that wouldn't be on television right now.

Even shockingly, and season one of Will and Grace there's an episode that makes pretty liberal use of the f slur, and I think intelligently, I think they do a really good job of it.

It's a real critique of internalized homophobia, and yet it is shocking when you hear it.

This is like ninety eight or ninety nine when it airs, long past when you would expect to hear that on television.

They lost advertisers, you know, sponsors dropped out, so it was a real risk to talk about that.

Also, you know that I haven't said that was the same year.

It was nineteen ninety nine that one of the major thesauruses, I think it's Merriam Webster, it's one of the big ones, dropped that word as a synonym for homosexual.

It was until then that it was still in there.

So yeah, I think and that's the that the same year that Will and Grace episode airs.

So I think that's a really good example of the evolution of language, you know, happening in a lot of different media and sometimes being a lot slower than you might expect it to have been Yeah.

Then you know, it's like we have trans, we have non binary, we have you know, so many different words that I think are still evolving.

Right So I'm curious what you think is coming next.

That's a great question, you know.

I think we're in a really good place where we've reached some sort of I want to say, equilibrium maybe about certain terminology.

You know, transgender is certainly understood you know more or less what that means, I think by most people in an audience in a way that you know, twenty thirty years ago there was a lot of like flipping and flapping around.

But do you know transgender, transactual female impersonator?

You know, what do these things all mean?

And so I wonder if you know, it feels like that's actually one area where you could kind of kind of make a check mark and say like, Okay, we got it, we we understand the terminology now.

And I think linguistically, I think right now we're actually in a pretty good place.

However, I think there is also an opportunity for new harmful terminology to come along along.

I'm thinking specifically of the word groomer and the way that that has been weaponized to mean something other than you know, there's a there's a real clinical meaning for that word, and there's an actual meaning that it has, and then there is the meaning that conservatives might want it to have and might use it in a way that that's not intense, you know, in the same way that the word woke has been mutated by you know, a bigoted right wing.

I think we've got to watch out for language being turned around to you know, words that are either innocuous or meant something else being turned against us.

And you know, I don't really know what to do about that, other than to you know, I think the language is less important than the depiction.

I think what's important is the representation.

Both are important, but what is really important is the representation of real lived experiences, and that happens through people in real life living their lives.

And if they're in you know, if they're privileged enough to be able to do this safely, to be a role model and an example.

Not everybody can do that.

Not everybody should have to do that.

But if you're in a position where you can, great I think another aspect is being really annoying, and again, not everybody should have to do this.

Not everybody should, But I think progress happens when activists are noisy, demanding, insistent, persistent.

You know, I'm thinking of the protesters in the nineteen seventies who when something aired that they didn't like, they would invade television offices and refuse to leave until they were listened to.

Sometimes you gotta be real annoying.

And also what that requires is some bravery on the part of people who are inside the belly of the beast, and you know, whether they're at the top of the pecking order of the bottom, using their position within the industry to advocate for change to the extent that they are able to.

And sometimes I take some courage.

Sometimes it means taking a risk, and sometimes it means taking a calculated step back so that you can live to fight another day.

But it you know, basically, this is a very long way of saying that progress requires people operating at all different levels, with all different strategies, all pushing in the same direction.

I believe that we're all working in the moving in the same direction, which is liberation.

Very well put, I mean, and I think it also has to do as you sort of reference in some of your videos, and I'm sure in your books that it's also people have to be represented that are developing these stories, that are putting these stories out, and having different voices in the room for that means that those conversations will just come out differently, right.

Like they'll be better, They'll be better.

Absolutely, Yeah, you know I'm thinking of in the book.

I spoke to writer and producer Richard Day, who worked on a ton of shows Ellen, Drew Carey, Garry Shandley, Show, Arrest Development, and he shared a story of being in a writer's room.

This is in the nineteen eighties, I believe, or maybe early nineties, and one of the writers there's tosses off a comment about how they could never have a gay person in the writer's room because they wouldn't be able to tell gay jokes anymore, and he said Richard said that what he took away from that was like, Wow, they are willing to exclude an entire group of people from their profession just for the sake of being able to tell their terrible jokes.

And so yeah, like what can you do about that?

All you can do is make noise, be out, let them know that they're wrong.

Something that Cleve Jones once said to me.

I worked with him on some marriage equality stuff about ten years ago.

He said, if you don't demand everything immediately, then you'll never get anything eventually.

And I have really made that.

I put that into practice.

I demand everything immediately, expecting to get something eventually.

Oh my god, that's my One of my best friends from high school, who was a lesbian in the South, said, ask for one hundred percent of what you want percent of the time, because you're only ever, at the most get fifty percent of what you want fifty percent of the time.

So it's true.

I'm glad to hear that.

I'm glad to hear lesbian wisdom behind that.

Lesbian wisdom is behind that.

Thank you, Laurie.

Two more things.

One, we should find out where people can find you and your stuff.

Yeah.

So I've got my book about the history of queer characters on American sitcoms.

It's called high Honey.

I'm Homo.

Orders now open at Gaysitcoms dot com.

I'm also going to be doing some live events around that in New York and Chicago, Seattle, Portland and some other cities.

So those events are on the website Gaysitcoms dot com.

And then I continue to produce a lot of YouTube videos about those milestones of television.

So my next video is about George d.

Kay his incredible life.

I think a lot of folks might be aware that he was incarcerated one of the you know, a concentration camp with his family during World War Two in the US, and then after that, really pigeonholed is some terrible roles, you know, a lot of minority actors were continue to be and how he basically, you know, I've done all this research into his life and his career, was able to use the lessons that he learned from his father, in particular, to overcome all this injustice, to fight against it, to win reparations for other Japanese people who are incarcerated in those camps, to advocate on behalf of civil rights, and for queer people after coming out.

Just what an incredible life he's had and how inspiring he's been.

So yeah, I've been doing a lot of research into George's life and career, and it is a real joy to research someone who is just an unqualified, lovely human being.

It is just a real pleasure to talk about George's from every angle.

It's just like he's a lot of fun.

He's very kind, he's so gracious, and he's incredibly wise for you know, all the stuff that he has experienced in his life.

So yeah, anyway, those are on my YouTube channel.

You can find those at Matt bound dot com if you just search my name.

And I've got a podcast called The Sewers of Paris where I chat with folks were folks about the entertainment that has changed their lives, and you can find that at Sewersofparis dot com.

I love it.

I'm so curious about your process and because you produce a lot of content across a lot of thanks.

I yeah, I'm very fortunate.

My partner James is a huge help.

So we're kind of a pop and pop production company, Okay, churning out, churning out the content.

It's very impressive because it's all very very excellent.

Thank you so much, Thank you so much.

Absolutely pleasure.

Really enjoy talking about this time.

Say really appreciate your time today.

Take care bye, it's time for audioography.

You can find all things Matt at Mattbaum dot com.

That's m A T T B A U M E dot com.

His podcast is the Sewers of Paris, and the new book is entitled Hi Honey, I'm Homo.

Sitcom Specials and the Queering of American Culture.

Thank you so much for listening to Abies TV Ladies.

If you're liking our show, please rate and review us on Apple, podcast, Spotify, good Pods, or wherever you listen.

And if you're really liking the show, consider supporting us on Patreon.

You can help us make more episodes and you get videos, perks, and ad free episodes.

Go to patreon dot com slash EIGHTIESCV Ladies.

There's a seven day free trial going on, so try us out for free.

Be sure to tune in for our next episode.

We're going to continue our dive into queer representation on seventies, eighties, and nineties television with the ladies from the Rainbow Remix podcast.

We Hope Eighties TV Ladies brings you joy and laughter and lots of fabulous new and old shows to watch, all of which will lead us forward toward being amazing ladies of the twenty first century.

So pretty to the City, had board, money, bamber anything, Laters,