I remember this being a joke back when, along with similar jokes about other buddy combos. On Cagney and Lacy a few years later the jokes were about lesbians.
It’s kind of weird, but the 60s on TV was all about hippy memes and the like, not really reflecting reality very well. But the actual 70s seemed to be following the image portrayed on TV. People really were wearing polyester leisure suits and crap like that.
Aaron Spelling was television’s Beethoven and the 1970s were its Bromanticism period.
Partners that drive around San Francisco in a flamboyant red car in the 70’s and would rather solve crimes with a theater arts degree instead of guns.
It honestly never occurred to me back then that it looked gay.
Aquadementia - There were plenty of guns in S&H. And I don’t think it was set in SF - at least it’s never used any of the famous SF locations.
StG
zombie or no
gay.
so was Huggy Bear.
it was fictional Bay City, California.
I didn’t really intend to post that but it went off anyhow. I didn’t have the safety on. Stupid touch pad.
They weren’t shy about drawing guns, but I remember then more for their undercover antics. Been a long time since I’ve seen the show.
I kind of thought Bay City was a supposed San Francisco. That’s the magic of television. Like how so many things are filmed in Vancouver yet almost no show takes place in Vancouver.
Yes, Starsky was oblivious to the fact that Det John Blaine was gay, as he seemed the quintessential family man with a wife and all. (He had been the young Starsky’s mentor as well, teaching him how to fight. This did not equate to gayness, as far as Starsky could figure.) Starsky was very uncomfortable with the revelation by Hutch, as he is a very conservative character. Hutch has the more open and aware character. It has been speculated elsewhere that Hutch is at least bisexual to the extent that he’d like to take the relationship with Starsky further, but only Starsky, but that Starsky is not ready for the approach.
Of course, this is all 2013 analysis, but in the original airings, they were just two regular straight guys with a great partnership and a great friendship.
S&H was cutting-edge in some of the topics it handled in the day: child abuse, feminism (to a degree), drugs, gayness, and of course the expressing of emotions - Hutch tells Starsky at least twice ‘I love you’ but it was contextually suitable so it was just a nice confirmation of the fact of their warm relationship, and we all knew that, anyway.
Look at those two guys. There’s some Ho Yay goin’ on between them. 
Slightly older than you, but I too missed the Freddie Mercury / QUEEN connection, the symbolism of the Village People until 1982, when I lost a friend who had come out of the closet to AIDS.
And I thought that Liberace, Elton John and Little Richard were just over the top flamboyant…
As my father said after meeting the high school drama teacher, “He’s not gay, he’s just theatrical.”
Pitch: TV buddy cop series.
Catch: Set in Vancouver where four different buddy cop series are being filmed. The four pairs of buddies represent different call-backs to previous buddy cop series. Only this time, the four productions are constantly butting heads and interfering with each other to film in Vancouver as actual murders take place and the four pairs of buddies use their TV cop ‘training’ to work to solve the murders.