Oh, and his wife’s name? “Peg.”
Straight as an arrow, that guy.
Real-time conversation:
Me: “Apparently David Ogden Stiers is gay.”
Mr Kitty: “Charles Winchester?”
Me: “Yup.”
Mr Kitty: “Well who the hell didn’t know that? Even Ellis* knew that.”
- Widely recognized as the stupidest member of the dog pack at Chez Kitty.
So I wonder if he really does have a son “from a relationship in the sixties” as reported on imdb and wiki. (Not that this has anything to do with whether he’s gay at all, just curious.)
As a COMPLETELY gay friend of me described his first hetero sex act, “Once you have the pump primed, it doesn’t care where it pumps.” Okay, he didn’t say it just like that, being a guy who’d just been laid.
:Sigh: Well. How annoying that he just confirms the stereotype. Not that the real DOS is as fussy as the roles he usually plays, but it’s about appearances. The pop culture needs some gay slobs & straight fussy men.
Tony Randall?
Don’t forget Rip Taylor.
He was straight and fussy enough to play a gay guy on TV. Back when teh gay was just implied, but never even whispered (if I recall correctly).
If you’re talking about Felix Unger, he wasn’t gay. I don’t think it was even implied – he was divorced, dated, and I think even remarried at the end of the series (could be wrong about that last bit). Sure there are plenty of people who automatically assume that any neat, whiny man MUST be gay, but they’re wrong.
As for DOS setting off someone’s gaydar … another example (like Kelsey Grammar) of playing a cultured, neat, non-sports-loving CHARACTER when the actor is nothing like that. DOS could put on Winchester like a tailor-made suit, but his normal speaking voice and mannerisms are much less patrician than Winchester’s.
Randall also played Sidney Shorr, who was definitely gay in a TV movie but basically asexual in the subsequent series.
And Liberace.
That’s who I’m talking about. Love, Sydney.
Randall actually wanted the character to be openly gay but the networks had problems with it and he was not a happy camper. He was primarily a theater actor where gay characters were de rigeur, but TV was a frontier to things like that and he had so many gay friends he thought he owed it to them to let them “see themselves” on TV. As mentioned he was gay in the TV movie/pilot- though never actually seen with a man (he’s just broken up from a LTR at the beginning) since the network probably would have gone berserkers over that.
The show was fascinating to me because it was the first to have a positive (but at the same time far from perfect) gay character, and I pieced together parts of interviews that make it seem Randall himself was all for teh gay in the show. He refused to do more than the occasional banal gay joke because he hated Three’s Company (referred to it in a couple of shows as the nadir of television writing) and was irritated by the fact they couldn’t actually say Sidney was gay in the series. There was one gag that, according to an interview I read with Swoosie Kurtz (who played the mother) Randall himself added to an episode; the child (Kaleena Kiff) is given a huge stuffed animal and asks “what should I name it?” and her mom (Kurtz) says “Well, I don’t know. Is it a boy or a girl dog?” The kid then turns the big stuffed animal over and looks (huge laugh from the audience) and says “It doesn’t seem to be a boy or a girl… I’ll name it Sidney!”
Randall pitched a fit when Sidney became infatuated with a young female colleague in one episode, referred to as Sidney’s “change of life”. Randall actually threatened to quit the show over it until they re-wrote the episode (in which it turns out that the attraction is not at all romantic but because she wears a cologne that holds memories for him). By that time they’d yanked it around on the schedule so much that it was already damned anyway- pity, because while I haven’t seen it in 25 years I actually remember it as being a good show at its best.
ETA: There were lots of gay rumors about Randall himself of course. Only he knew for sure. His widow said that the gay rumors never bothered him, but the reports that he used artificial insemination to have his kids made him ballistic and he threatened to sue papers that reported it. (He wanted it known that in spite of his age his kids were conceived the old fashioned way.)
I assumed he meant Sidney rather than Felix (who was straight).
Actually, I thought of Tony Randall, but a lot of people probably assume he was gay when he was younger, per the stereotype (he married & had a child quite late in life).
On the other hand, I also thought of Frasier; Dan Butler, who played “Bulldog,” is gay but played macho pretty well, & Kelsey Grammer seems mostly straight & plays fussy pretty well.
Another effeminate man coming out, yep that shock us. 
So, he didn’t care who people thought were ‘shaking hands with Little Tony’, but he wanted to make sure people knew Little Tony worked?
I like him even more, now.
Stiers, like Takei, fits in that relatively narrow band where, when they came out, I wasn’t the least bit surprised, but I would never have called it.
Reilly and Lynde, on the other hand…
Well, I suppose I can see refusing to believe any real gay man could possibly be so camp…
Randall was a guest on “the Tonight Show” shortly after Jay Leno took it over. He told an anecdote about checking into a hotel with his wife. One of the bellboys confessed to him “You know I always used to think that you & Jack Klugman* were…y’know.”
Leno asked “Did you tell your wife what he said?”
Randall: My wife?? I ran right up to my room and called Jack!
Randall’s “Odd Couple” co-star.
Such a sad irony that Randall, the rabidly non-smoking excercise afficianado, was outlived by Klugman, the 4-pack-a-day smoker and self-confessed beer and nachos slob. (Klugman has long since quit smoking, but not before cancer cost him his voicebox; he also survived sex with Brett Somers.)
Randall got married at the age of 22 - hardly late in life. He was married to his first wife Florence until her death fifty years later. Then three years after Florence died, he married his second wife Heather.
Tony and Florence never had any children. Tony and Heather had two who were conceived when Tony was 77 and 78.
As long as I’m on the subject, Jack Klugman’s marital history is also a little unusual. Klugman married Brett Somers in 1953. The couple seperated in 1974 but never actually got divorced; they were still legally married when Somers died in 2007.
That actually worked to his advantage during a big palimony suit a few years back. A lady he’d lived with on and off for a number of years claimed that he frequently promised to marry her and provide for her for the rest of her life. When they split up she sued him for some ridiculous amount (tens of millions). It was argued that if he’d been serious about providing for her like a wife he’d have divorced Brett, who he actually said (and I think to some degree was serious) that he never divorced because it made him unable to marry again. His ex girlfriend got a fairly piddling (compared to what she was suing for) six figure settlement that probably mostly went to pay legal fees, and a few months after Brett died he married his current longterm girlfriend.