Bonus! Ian McKellen Versus Dick

You could say that Sir Ian emphatically stated "I SHALL NOT PASS"!

I swear, more than once in that interview, I was sure Sir Ian was going to say something along the lines of "Oh, for fuck's sake, do shut up!"

Man, he was always so balanced for most of his career with his interviews. He apparently just got sour and self-important as he got older, how weird.

This particular insanely long comment (I am still very willing to stop doing these if you'd rather not have your Patreon vids clogged up like this, btw) is about a bunch of stuff in no particular order, but all of it is somehow relevant to my current goal of trying to provide material for a possible video on Sidney Cole and Hannah Weinstein's work. Okay, so the Epic of Gilgamesh! Oldest surviving long-form story. About Gilgamesh and his friend Enkidu fighting monsters, etc. Or maybe “friend” Enkidu, because before Enkidu meets Gilgamesh for the first time, G’s mother, who has the gift of prophecy, predicts E’s arrival in the following words: “Like a wife you’ll love him, caress and embrace him” (I’m using the Penguin Classics translation by Andrew George, by the way). Now, obviously we don’t know much about ancient Mesopotamian culture of this period, so it’s possible that male friends often talked about each other like this, in much the same way as men in the Elizabethan era could talk about loving each other without anyone thinking there might be something funny going on. But still, explicitly specifying the “like a wife” thing… that seems pretty interesting to me. Also, it’s worth noting that after E’s death, G a) goes into a state of complete emotional collapse, and b) builds a huge, incredibly lavish statue to his dead friend. Or “friend”. It's possible that the culture of the time was perfectly okay with same-sex relationships, but frankly, I doubt it. I know that some people like to talk airily about there being lots of ancient cultures that were okay with gay people, but that’s never really sat right with me, because if you take a closer look, what these cultures were generally okay with was essentially child abuse. There are several ancient cultures where there’s significant evidence that they were okay, or at least okay-ish, with fully adult, high-status men having barely pubescent teenage boy-toys (as well as probably a wife and maybe a concubine or two); there are, to the best of my knowledge, no ancient cultures where there’s significant evidence that they were okay with two fully adult men, or (shock horror!) two fully adult women, getting together and staying together lifelong. Also, when Enkidu sleeps with a woman, it is fully explicit; we are left in no doubt that sex has in fact happened. So the fact that E and G’s relationship is implied rather than stated gives the impression that this might have been something that had to be hidden. So basically what I’m saying here is that I think the earliest surviving example we have of deliberate queercoding might be the same as the earliest surviving example we have of long-form story-telling, meaning the origins of queercoding and the origins of story-telling itself are oddly intertwined. Anyway, here is a link to a video by someone who talks about ancient cultures for an actual living, and who completely agrees with me about G and E being boyfriends: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-yJDbC_a2c It’s always reassuring when I’m not the only one who sees it! Also! When I was going on to you about Marlowe I forgot to mention that, in his unfinished Hero and Leander epic poem, there’s a scene (lines 180 to 190) where the sea-god Neptune is… kind of groping Leander? And while Leander isn’t exactly into it, he doesn’t seem to be grossed out or horrified either. Given that the story of Hero and Leander ends with Leander drowning, I do slightly wonder whether Marlowe might have intended to end the poem with Leander voluntarily surrendering to Neptune in the end, thus making it kind of a gay love story with a happy ending, rather than a straight love story with a sad ending. Maybe the reason he ultimately gave up on it was that he’d realised that, even for him, this would be pushing things too far and could get him in serious trouble? But that’s just another one of my entirely unproven theories, sadly! Also also, I found another American TV show, besides My Little Margie, that has hints of queerness prior to Sidney Cole and Hannah Weinstein’s collaborations. This one is technically a kids’ show, but apparently at the time it actually had a lot of adult fans, and the male characters in it will often do things like kiss each other or sing love-songs to each other, but in a playful way so that it comes across as jokey rather than romantic; but also it could be seen as romantic, maybe? Anyway, the first two and a half minutes of this episode should provide a good example of what I’m talking about: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=houzbZnQieA&t=151s I think they get away with it at least partly because they’re puppets; I find it hard to imagine two obviously adult human men doing that kind of thing on TV in the 50s and everyone being okay with that. Something else which occurred to me: I think that maybe Sidney Cole and Hannah Weinstein injected a dose of queerness into British kids’ tv which lingered for decades. When I think about the shows I loved as a kid, I remember things like Rainbow, which, even apart from the name (and the theme song, which urges us to “paint the whole world with a rainbow”), featured a pink male hippo with long eyelashes who has a gentle, not-exactly-masculine approach to things, plus Zippy, whose face was an actual gimp mask and I am not even kidding about that. And yes, I know that straight people can be into kink too, but queerness and kink have been strongly associated in popular culture for a while now. Rainbow also had a bit of a reputation for being keen on working innuendo into the show; here’s a video which collects some clips from one of the most famous/infamous episodes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T_XXMFf13bo Some of this is hetero, but some… is not. I also have fond memories of Galloping Galaxies (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WspM4jwq7lc), which featured Kenneth Williams as the very obviously camp voice of SID, the ship’s computer. And Willo the Wisp, with Kenneth Williams as absolutely everybody (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3KYCNgJf9fg); but I don’t think anyone on WtW, even Willo himself, was as camp as dear old SID (by the way: yes, the villain on WtW is a witch who is also a television; no, I don’t know why; sometimes you just have to go with these things). Then there’s Pigeon Street, an ensemble show in which one of the female characters (Long Distance Clara) was a professional lorry driver; not exactly queer, perhaps, but certainly gender-non-conforming. But when I think about the imported American shows I was also watching around that time, I don’t remember any of those hints of queerness there; except for a few queercoded villains, of course! Finally, have you ever come across Mrs Shufflewick? Just an interesting bit of random queerness that was around at the time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mX7nEIZhM6w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HVlVy0TygwM (bit of casual racism in this one) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tn9JW-E17MI

I have never seen Cavett go off the rails like this. He was one of the most incisive interviewers of the 60’s sand 70’s. What happened here?

Auntie Mame! 👀 I love Lucille Ball and I love Auntie Mame, but I am really not a fan of Lucille Ball *as* Auntie Mame. It's Rosalind Russel for me. But I'll listen to people talk about Those Old Scientists all day long.

Wow. Cavett does come off as quite the prick. It's even more cringy, because he obviously thought that he was being some sort of ally. It's an interesting mental exercise to consider what type of people are ultimately more damaging in the long run. With people who openly use slurs and preach hate, you know exactly where you stand with them. You can fight them or avoid them, and your path with them snap into quick focus as soon as they reveal themselves. With pricks like this guy though, they couch their distaste with passive aggressive comments and backhanded compliments. They don't really want to empower you, or understand you and even know you, but they fake that they do, and they fake that they care. In comparing the two, the first ones are definitely more dangerous overall, but I think that the second ones are more damaging long term, particularly given that the first ones seem to be slowly petering out as the second group only continues to proliferate.

I imagine myself in Ian's position. At that time, I would have felt uncomfortable and not listened to. But now, I want to squint at Dick and record his bon mots for posterity as the intellectual anachronisms they actually represent.

In the late 60’s/early 70’s Dick Cavett had an afternoon talk show and I thought he was funny and cute. “I ate at a German-Chinese restaurant last night, and an hour later I was hungry for power!” They had a nice peppy band and light banter. It was much later when he turned into a pompous blow hard. I remember him once saying that homosexuals just adored him. Good for Sir Ian for handling himself well.

"Makes me squirm" is a good description of the second hand embarrassment I experienced watching this. Thanks for breaking it up into manageable chunks.