Mundane and pointless celebrity gossip I must share:
David Ogden Stiers, bka Major Charles Emerson Winchester and for a thousand episodic guest shots, is officially homo now.
I’ll admit he pinged my gaydar when he was on MASH, which I noticed because one of my high school nicknames was “Charles” because it was said by classmates I reminded them of him. But even though he was a lifelong bachelor I assumed he was straight because… well, for one thing he said it in interviews. Example:
And for another his imdb bio says he has a son. Also, he was on a list of D-list male celebrities (along with James “Roscoe P. Coltrane” Best and Jimmy “Sausage guy” Dean) whose names were found in Bonnie Lee Bakley’s effects of semi-famous men she’d met at some function or other and planned to hook up with if possible before she finally snagged ladykiller Robert Blake (and Christian Brando), though she was so star obsessed that the mere glimpse of a celebrity would make her papers and it doesn’t mean they ever actually spoke.
Anyway, he’s officially out now and lookin’ for love. Excerpts from his Coming Out interview:
He also said that Cogsworth the Clock (the character he voiced in Beauty and the Beast) would have been more flamboyant if he hadn’t been gay.
The above should read “When next pictured in a gay magazine expect to see me with my arms around a 22 year old trick named Bruno who I’ll swear is ‘an old soul’.”
Irks me that he lied about his sexuality in interviews, but let he who’s never been in a closet cast out the first Birkenstock I suppose. I’ve lied about it in past times myself, so, c’est la vie.
Oh, and he’s gay too. It’s nice that’s becoming not such a big deal. I hope future celebrities won’t have to lie about it at all, or better yet, not even be asked in these celebrity interviews. I never heard about Mr. Stiers (Ogden Stiers?) involved in any gay bashing, which is really my only problem with closeted gays, so what he did is fine with me. Sometimes it’s not possible to simply dodge a direct question.
I had the same reaction to this as to George Takei’s coming out: He was supposed to be in?
On the other hand, I didn’t realize Charles Nelson Reilly was gay until I read about him recently,* so I can hardly claim great gaydar. (I know, I know. I just thought he was Charles Nelson Reilly, a singularity. I mean, how can anyone who was on Lidsville be thought of as a sexual being? But I digress.)
I do think it’s a shame people feel they have to lie about who they are. At the same time, I don’t think just because you make a living as an actor entitles everyone to know everything about you (a radical idea, I know). In this case, declining to answer would effectively be answering in the affirmative.
Charles Nelson Reilly is about the only person my gaydar has ever been accurate on. I’m still reeling over Dusty Springfield! David Ogden Stiers is a total surprise to me.
In the late '60s and early '70s, when I was a kid, I simply thought that Charles Nelson Reilly and Paul Lynde were wacky guys. What did I know from gay at age 7?
Now, I watch old repeats of “Match Game” or “Bewitched” and see those two, and they totally peg the needle on the gaydar.
David Ogden Stiers being gay doesn’t particularly surprise me, but I never looked at him and said, “oh, man, must be gay.”
And, thankfully, it seems to matter less and less, at least in the entertainment world.
“Testicles in my mouth, Jerry O’Connell is attached… I’ll work for scale and cab fare!”
Yeah he is. I’ve heard several of his and he really imbues each character with a different voice and personality. I think the best I’ve heard was his reading of Tom Wolfe’s A Man in Full, though even with his talent it was hysterical hearing Winchester’s voice read an imprisoned Hispanic gang member talking about prison rape.
PS- Ironically I was watching him last night on an episode of Frasier. He played a former colleague and good friend of Frasier and Niles’s mother and Martin becomes increasingly suspicious that he is their biological father due to their shared taste, mannerisms, resemblance, etc… (A couple of really funny moments include Martin finding him reading Frasier a bedtime story and what looks like Niles taking his first tottering steps into DOS’s arms [both had a set-up of course].) At the end of the episode Martin is delighted to learn that DOS’s character is gay.
Gandalf is, for all intents and purposes, asexual though. You’d be a lot less likely to see Rupert Everett playing the lead in a Hugh Grant style straight romantic comedy or Ian McKellen in As Good as it Gets.
Not much more so than every other character in the film with the exception of Rosie Cotton. The point being that Gandalf kicked some serious butt.
They have Hugh Grant for that, but Rupert has playedwomanizers. McKellen would have done amazing things playing Nicholson’s character in “As Good As It Gets”. He was playing an obsessive/compulsive and had it all wrong - they do these things out of fear, Nicholson was doing them out of obligation.
