Amen's Closeted Sitcom Star Smackdown
Gayest Episode Ever
Gayest Episode Ever
4.8 • 568 Ratings
🗓️ 22 May 2024
⏱️ 118 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
"The Courtship of Bess Richards" (October 4, 1986)
The second episode of Amen concerns Sherman Hemsley's Ernie trying to land his choir a new singer in Nell Carter's Bess, and the result is a comedy of errors in which both he and she perform romantic interest that neither is capable of actually feeling. The result is a WWF-style wrestling match between these two iconic sitcom stars, and we're joined once again by Dr. Alfred L. Martin to discuss how this is rendered all the stranger because Hemsley and Carter both were closeted and therefore all too accustomed to acting out hetero identities different from how they lived privately.
This episode mentions a TV Guide article about Sherman Hemsley's private life that I now cannot find online. However, I bought the issue on eBay and will post as soon as it arrives. You can see Zach Wilson's posting of it on Twitter. Thanks, Zach!
Buy Dr. Alfred's book, The Generic Closet: Black Gayness and the Black-Cast Sitcom.
Listen to Hemsley in the performance of Purlie that Alfred mentions.
Watch a clip of Hemsley's gay villain turn in 2000's Screwed.
Listen to Dr. Alfred's previous episodes:
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Give me a break I sure deserve it. |
| 0:10.0 | It's time I made it to the top. |
| 0:14.0 | Turn on the light from heaven low. |
| 0:18.0 | Shine on it. |
| 0:20.0 | Turn on the light. There's no place like from heaven, Shine on me, Shine on me |
| 0:21.3 | Turn on the light! |
| 0:22.9 | There's no place like home |
| 0:25.6 | With your family around you, you're never alone. |
| 0:30.6 | Every hour, I can't make it without you shine, shine, shine, shine, shine. |
| 0:42.3 | Hello, and welcome to gayest episode ever, the podcast where we discuss the LGBT episodes of classic sitcoms. |
| 0:44.2 | I'm Drew Mackie. |
| 0:45.1 | I'm Glenn Lakin. |
| 0:46.0 | This week, we are discussing the NBC series Amen, which is about the communities surrounding |
| 0:50.6 | a black church in Philadelphia, and that might seem like an unlikely place to find queer |
| 0:53.9 | content, but queer people are everywhere. Here to discuss this show with us |
| 0:57.7 | is a returning guest, Dr. Alfred Martin. Welcome back. Thank you much for having me. I asked you to do this |
| 1:02.8 | episode for a few reasons, and we're going to get into all of those. One of them is sort of giving us another |
| 1:10.0 | crack at Sherman Hensley's legacy, which we kind of touched |
| 1:13.5 | on when we did the Jeffersons, but I sort of hedged what I was saying in a way that, like, |
| 1:19.3 | I wanted to go back and- Hedge some more. |
| 1:21.7 | Heds, no, I'm going to be a lot more forthright because I think it was being silly. |
| 1:25.3 | But good for us. |
... |
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