1931-1942 and 1946 - Myrt and Marge
Myrt and Marge was a popular comedy/drama serial about theater folk. The title characters were a mother and daughter who performed in Broadway musicals and revues.  Their best friend and confidant - played throughout the run by Ray Hedge (center) - was a high-strung, effeminate young costume designer named Clarence Tiffingtuffer.  He was probably the first gay regular character on a network series, though the scripts could never come right out and say Clarence liked guys. 

He was a forerunner to what has since become a cliché: the possibly celibate, nonthreatening gay man, portrayed as "a girl's best friend."  Later examples include the radio detective series Candy Matson (1949-1951) and such TV sitcoms as Love, Sidney (1981-1983) and to a lesser extent Will & Grace (1998-present).

This publicity photo is from the early 1940s, when the leads were played by writer/creator Myrtle Vail (left) and Helen Mack (right).

• AUDIO CLIP: 1946 - Clarence announces new costumes
• AUDIO CLIP: February 2, 1937 - A Swedish maid tries to help Clarence
   

1940s-1960s - Suspense
For more than twenty years, Suspense's weekly broadcasts presented big-name Hollywood stars in stories of murder, passion and... well... Suspense. A few episodes used implicitly gay sissies as comic-relief supporting characters.

In "Make Mad the Guilty," Hume Cronyn plays an out-of-work stage actor who frames his unfaithful wife for murder.  In the scene excerpted below, he stops into a San Francisco flower shop to send lilies to her jail cell.  Predictably, the character we're interested in is a lisping, swishy florist.

The hour-long Suspense episode "The Kandy Tooth" includes at least two implicitly gay roles.  It's a sequel to Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon, though Hammett had nothing to do with the script.  It stars Howard Duff (pictured) as Sam Spade, a role he usually played Sundays in the half-hour series The Adventures of Sam Spade, Detective.  His client (heard in this clip) is a "sensitive" San Franciscan dentist named Lawrence LaVerne, who thinks Sam is hot stuff.  Meanwhile, the villains from The Maltese Falcon - perfumed Joel Cairo and mastermind Casper Gutman - may or may not be long-time companions, with Joel tearfully lamenting, "Why on Earth do I stay with him?!"

• AUDIO CLIP: June 5, 1947 - "Make Mad the Guilty"
• AUDIO CLIP: January 19, 1948 - "The Kandy Tooth"
   
   

1947 and 1950 - Theatre Guild on the Air: "Lady in the Dark"
Gertrude Lawrence starred in the original 1941 Broadway production of Lady in the Dark.  This lavish musical deals with a magazine editor trying to stave off a nervous breakdown.  The surreal musical numbers dramatize the dreams she describes to her therapist.

Lawrence reprised her impressive performance twice on the Theatre Guild radio series.  Both times, Keene Crockett played the supporting role of Russell Paxton, a screamingly gay fashion photographer.  Here was an unusual example of a radio character who went beyond simple sissydom into clear intimations of same-sex desire.  This audio clip is from the 1947 production.  Theatre Guild's 1950 production, using the same script and much of the same cast, has been released on CD.

In the original Broadway production, pictured, Danny Kaye (right) played Russell.  Getrude Lawrence is at center in the photo.  See also the 1954 TV production, in which Carleton Carpenter played Russell.

• AUDIO CLIP: October 19, 1947 - Russell gushes, as usual
   

1940s and 1950s - The Bing Crosby Show
Bing Crosby's successful comedy/variety series ran from the 1930s to 1950s on a variety of networks.  Especially in the late 1940s and early 1950s, the show occasionally used heterosexual-reversal comedy.

The first clip contains brief excerpts from a Christmas show.  Bing asks shy newlywed Jimmy Stewart how he worked up the nerve to propose to his girlfriend, Gloria.  The two men reenact the scene, with Crosby as Gloria.

In the 1950-51 season, he show aired from a different city each week.  The second clip below, broadcast from Los Angeles, humorously tells how Bob Hope's radio series got picked up by Crosby's sponsor, Chesterfield Cigarettes.  The pseudogay jokes were considered safe because Crosby and Hope were major stars with longstanding heterosexual credentials.  The following week's show, from San Francisco, had guest star Judy Garland perform a tongue-in-cheek wedding between Hope and Crosby.  "You boys go ahead [and dance]," Garland quipped.  "I'll stay here by the light switch in case the Law breaks in."

• AUDIO CLIP: December 14, 1949, with James Stewart
• AUDIO CLIP: October 11, 1950, with Bob Hope
   

1949-1951 - Candy Matson, YUkon 2-8209
Announcer Dudley Manlove (honest) introduced the breezy adventures of sexy "girl detective" Candy Matson: a brainy blonde bombshell whose swank apartment sat atop San Francisco's Telegraph Hill.  Her male best friend, sidekick and all-around mother figure was Rembrandt Watson: an effete, tea-sipping, cello-playing photographer.  As radio historian John Dunning put it, Rembrandt was "not much in the down-and-dirty department, being something of a creampuff."  Candy's jealous fiancée didn't mind her friendship with Rembrandt at all... and anyone with the slightest imagination knew why.  Compared with similar characters, Rembrandt was one of the more naturalistic, well-rounded depictions of gayness on the air.

In this episode, Candy has agreed to serve as queen of a military ball.  Rembrandt jokes that with Candy so busy on a murder case, he might have to take her place as queen.

Candy Matson was produced for NBC at KGO in San Francisco, and was one of many network series that aired only on the West Coast.

• October 9, 1950, "Murder in F#" (aka "The Fort Ord Story")
            Clip #1
            Clip #2
   

1960s - Round the Horne
Kenneth Williams (left) and Hugh Paddick (right) played campy Julian and Sandy, two classic, much beloved characters of 1960s British comedy.  Each week on Round the Horne, series star Kenneth Horne would wander into a travel agency, a gym, a BBC office, or other professional setting and find that Jules and Sand were working there.  "Hello, I'm Julian," Jules would explain, "and this is my friend Sandy.  Oh!  Hello, Mr. Horne!  How bona to vada your dolly old eek!"

That cryptic last sentence (which means "How good to see your beautiful old face!") is an example of Polari, the centuries-old show business slang adopted by some gay men in mid-twentieth-century England.  Polari combines elements of English, Italian and Romany with various forms of argot (rhyming slang, pronouncing words backward, etc.)  Scriptwriters Barry Took and Marty Feldman sprinkled Polari liberally throughout the Julian and Sandy skits.

The scene excerpted here finds the duo running a language school that uses the "Polari-phone Method" (a reference to the Parlophone Method language LPs of the 1960s).

Kenneth Williams had played a variety of camp (and other) characters on film, radio and television for years.  Aside from his performances on Round the Horne, he is best remembered as a mainstay of the comedy troupe that starred in the Carry On... films.

• AUDIO CLIP: Excerpts of "Bona Language School" skit