Listen: Podcasts keep me sane on the road. Gay Pimpin’, Fresh Air, Savage Love and Studio 360. So imagine my surprise when the voice issuing forth from my little box-speakers was that of Justin Bond (he of Kiki, as in Kiki & Herb, Fame). He was talking about I Love Lucy… here’s what he had to say…
From Kurt Andersen’s Studio 360:
“I think [my friend and I] could relate to Lucy’s double life, because we were just, you know, miserable. Miserable teenagers in this wasteland suburban neighborhood, and yet my responsibility was to look happy. My responsibility was to be a positive reflection on my family.
The ‘Martian Episode‘ encapsulates the thing that I liked the most about Lucy being a sort of transgender queer kid. And that’s the one where Lucy and Ethel are hired to dress up as martians. When Lucy and Ethel come in with their deeliebobber antennae, and their outfits are sort of like wrestling outfits. They had their own language, which was amazing. They see the bourgeois sightseers and dance around them, and look at them, and inspect their clothing and their hats and sort of just smacking this middle age man. They become the freaks. They become the aliens, and Lucy and Ethel are, for that moment, in charge. I just was tickled. I thought it was a great example of friendship, and of how you can pull one over on simpleminded people.
It portrayed queerness, as far as I’m concerned. It portrayed outsiderness, otherness. And so it gave people a blueprint on how to, if they were paying attention and they cared, of how to deal with otherness in a respectful, loving and rational way.“
So here are this week’s Blingees: Two of them. One of dear sweet Justin Bond. And another of Lucy & Ethel as Martians.
This article appears in October 22 • 2010.