This! I was in my 30’s and had long since forgotten Hollywood Squares (heh), saw a random picture of Paul Lynde, and a light bulb went off - “OMG - he was gay!”
The Dealer: Crazy Larry was gay?
Gene: [contemptuous] Crazy Larry was never ‘gay’.
Gene: He had his way with too many straight lads.
Crazy Larry: [flashback] Fucking females is for poofs.
[right]-- Layer Cake[/right]
Stranger
How about Allan Sues on Laugh In? I loved that show as a kid and never in a million years figure out he was supposed to be gay. Years later, it was like… Wow, that guy is so gay it’s crazy. How could we not have known???
Of course, we didn’t think Liberace was gay, either. Or did we?
Yes. Liberace was a clever plot intended to distract us from all the other gay men in popular culture.
Ah, Paul Lynde. He contained multitudes.
The British didn’t develop gaydar until the Falklands war, where it was instrumental in detecting Argentine “bayonet charges”.
Modern gaydar is calibrated with anatomically correct David Soul replicas.
LOL – this is so true! It never, ever occurred to us back then. Hell, we thought the Village People were just goofy guys in costume. Elton John’s sexuality was never a topic of conversation, Charles Nelson Reilly was just campy (I thought he was a riot, actually), and yeah, everyone and his brother knew Liberace was gay, but it was one of those things you never discussed with any woman old enough to be your grandmother.
I was in junior high when Starsky and Hutch came out. they were real dudes and badasses. It was not camp gay in disguise.
Next people will start harping about Bruce Lee kicking 7 kinds of ass as being a guy metaphor. ynot that there’s anything wrong with that 
)
His full name was David R. Soul. Was there any snickering about that in Britain at the time?
And that was only Saturday night!
Not just gay, but drunk! I saw a rerun of Match Game recently and realized that they all were absolutely toasted. Richard Dawson was practically sprawled over his desk.
Really? I remember him doing that, but it never, ever occurred to me that he might have been drunk 
Really? Dawson was three sheets to the wind on every Family Feud he ever hosted.
I laughed. I’m appropriating this for my own purposes.
Freddie Mercury struck me more as a not-cutting-himself-out-of-half-the-fun-sexual than a homosexual.
Really. I was a kid when he was part of the panel, and even though he was quite silly then, I never equated it with his being drunk. Ditto when he was hosting it.
So, everyone knew that Liberace was gay. Hmm. I didn’t. Not that I spent very much time thinking about or anything.
It was very hush-hush, sort of on the same lines as Rock Hudson. The only difference being that Liberace wasn’t forced to marry a woman for appearance’s sake as Hudson was. I remember my mother, aka “The Font Of All Things Hollywood Confidential”, telling me the story years ago.
No mention of the tons of S&H slash fan fiction that used to rival in volume Star Trek slash on the net?
I didn’t even think about that! Apparently there’s slash fic for just about every male “couple” in print or film.