Forgotten Queers

Gary M Thoren Jr

This is Forgotten Queers, a show about the queer figures history pushed aside. They were once stars, leaders, icons — but time, shame, and prejudice buried their names. We’re here to remember them, to honor them, and to say: you don’t get to forget us. Cover art photo provided by Alexander Grey on Unsplash: https://unsplash.com/@sharonmccutcheon?utm_source=spreaker&utm_medium=referral Cover art photo provided by Shannia Christanty on Unsplash: https://unsplash.com/@shanniacy?utm_source=spreaker&utm_medium=referral Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/forgotten-queers--6719466/support.

  1. Oct 4

    Richard Chamberlain

    Richard Chamberlain was famous famous. For decades, he was one of those actors almost everybody recognized, even if different generations knew him for completely different reasons. To some, he was the impossibly handsome young Dr. Kildare. To others, he was the romantic hero of The Thorn Birds, the adventurer of Shōgun, or the leading man who seemed perfectly designed for the television miniseries. For me, though, Richard Chamberlain came into my life through disaster movies. And yes, that probably tells you quite a bit about me. I knew him from movies like The Towering Inferno and The Swarm—big, ridiculous, star-filled spectacles where something was always burning, collapsing, exploding, or, in the case of The Swarm, attacking in enormous numbers while Michael Caine tried very hard to convince us this was all terribly serious. Somewhere in all of that, I noticed Richard Chamberlain. I was young. I didn’t have the vocabulary yet to explain exactly why I noticed him. I just knew I did. Years later, of course, I understood. In this episode of Forgotten Queers, I look back at the extraordinary life and career of Richard Chamberlain—not simply as an actor, but as a gay man who became one of Hollywood’s biggest romantic idols during an era when being honest about who he was could have destroyed everything he had built. Born in Beverly Hills in 1934, Chamberlain became a household name in the early 1960s as the star of NBC’s Dr. Kildare. Almost overnight, his face was everywhere. He wasn’t merely a successful television actor; he became a heartthrob. And Hollywood knew exactly how to sell him. Handsome. Sensitive. Romantic. Available. Especially, supposedly, to women. Behind that carefully constructed public image was a much more complicated reality. Chamberlain was gay at a time when Hollywood didn’t simply discourage actors from coming out—it could make openness virtually incompatible with being marketed as a romantic leading man. So he did what many queer performers of his generation believed they had to do. He kept that part of himself private. His career continued far beyond Dr. Kildare. He worked on stage, in movies and television, and eventually became known as the King of the Miniseries. Centennial. Shōgun. The Thorn Birds. These weren’t small productions tucked away somewhere on cable. They were enormous television events watched by millions of people. Richard Chamberlain became one of the most recognizable romantic leading men in the world. Think about the contradiction in that for a moment. A gay man was being sold to America as the ultimate heterosexual romantic fantasy while knowing that telling the truth about himself might cause audiences—and more importantly, studios and networks—to see him completely differently. That contradiction is at the heart of this episode. But I also wanted to be careful about something. It’s very easy, looking backward from 2026, to ask why someone didn’t simply come out earlier. Richard Chamberlain himself eventually spoke about the fear and shame that kept him closeted for so many years. But the world he entered wasn’t our world. Careers disappeared. Queer actors were whispered about, threatened with exposure, or quietly pushed aside. Survival sometimes meant silence. Chamberlain publicly came out in 2003 with the publication of his memoir, Shattered Love, when he was nearly 70 years old. And something happened later in his career that affected me far more deeply than I expected. I saw him on Brothers & Sisters, playing a gay man. I cried. Then I saw him on Will & Grace, where he got to be wonderfully funny playing a straight character. And I cried again. I’m still not completely sure I can explain those tears. Part of it was happiness. Here was someone who had been an influence in my life since I was young, still working, still funny, still interesting, still vital. Part of it was sadness because I understood why it had taken him so long to live publicly as himself. And part of it was pride. After spending so many years watching Hollywood tell queer actors which parts of themselves they needed to hide, there was something beautiful about watching Richard Chamberlain reach a point where his sexuality no longer had to determine which characters he was allowed to play. He could play gay. He could play straight. He could simply be an actor. That shouldn’t feel revolutionary. But considering the world in which his career began, it kind of was. Richard Chamberlain’s story also raises one of the questions I keep returning to with Forgotten Queers: What does courage look like when simply being yourself carries consequences? Sometimes queer history gives us people who kicked open doors. Sometimes it gives us people who marched, protested, shouted, and demanded change. And sometimes it gives us people who survived long enough to finally walk through a door that earlier generations never believed would open. Richard Chamberlain’s story belongs to that history too. He wasn’t perfect. He didn’t pretend to be. And his eventual openness doesn’t erase the decades he spent hiding, any more than those decades diminish what it meant when he finally stopped. That’s what makes him interesting to me. Not because he was secretly gay while playing romantic heroes. But because there was a human being underneath that carefully manufactured Hollywood image—a man trying to balance ambition, fear, love, expectation, privacy, and eventually honesty. And somewhere along the way, he also happened to become part of my own story. Long before I understood what gay representation meant, before I knew anything about closets or Hollywood publicity machines, there was this handsome guy running around disaster movies who kept catching my attention. Funny how sometimes we recognize something before we have the words for it. So this episode is about Dr. Kildare, Shōgun, The Thorn Birds, The Towering Inferno, The Swarm, Brothers & Sisters, Will & Grace, and an extraordinary career that stretched across generations. But more than that, it’s about the distance between the person Hollywood wanted Richard Chamberlain to be and the person he eventually allowed the world to know. It’s about what it cost queer performers to become stars. It’s about getting older and realizing that some of the people who quietly mattered to you when you were young were carrying stories of their own. And it’s about finally being seen. Join me for this episode of Forgotten Queers as we remember Richard Chamberlain—not simply as Hollywood’s handsome doctor, romantic hero, or King of the Miniseries, but as a complicated, talented gay man whose life tells us something important about how far we’ve come…and why remembering the world he had to navigate still matters. Because queer history isn’t only about the people who were able to live loudly. Sometimes it’s also about the people who spent years surviving quietly—and eventually found their way into the light. Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/forgotten-queers--6719466/support. Please follow me on Facebook, BlueSky,TikToc,Twitter at Gary Thoren. We must never forget our Forgotten Queers This episode includes AI-generated content.

  2. Sep 24

    BobMackie

    Forgotten Queers: Bob Mackie — Sequins, Camp, Cher, and a Curtain Rod This week on Forgotten Queers, Gary is joined once again by guest cohost Sion to celebrate the life, career, and absolutely fabulous legacy of Bob Mackie—the legendary costume designer who understood that sometimes more really is more. Mackie, who died September 14, 2026, at the age of 87, spent more than six decades transforming fabric, feathers, beads, sequins, rhinestones, and occasionally an entire set of curtains into unforgettable pieces of entertainment history. Born Robert Gordon Mackie in Southern California, Mackie entered Hollywood in the early 1960s as a sketch artist. He worked around some of the great names in costume design, including Edith Head and Jean Louis, and quickly demonstrated that he had an extraordinary eye not simply for fashion, but for performers. That distinction would define his career. Bob Mackie wasn’t interested only in making someone look beautiful. He wanted the clothes to help tell the story. Television proved to be the perfect playground. During the golden age of the television variety show, performers needed an astonishing number of costumes. There were musical numbers, comedy sketches, guest stars, dancers and elaborate production numbers—sometimes all within the same hour. Mackie thrived in that world. His work with Mitzi Gaynor helped establish him as a designer in his own right, and in 1967 he became the costume designer for a new television variety series starring Carol Burnett. He stayed for all eleven seasons of The Carol Burnett Show. Mackie’s contribution to the series went far beyond dressing Carol beautifully. His costumes helped create characters. Mrs. Wiggins, Eunice, Nora Desmond and countless others became funnier because Mackie understood exactly what Carol Burnett needed the moment she walked onto the stage. And then there was the curtain dress. For the show’s legendary 1976 parody Went with the Wind!, Burnett played Starlett O’Hara in a send-up of Gone with the Wind. The script called for Starlett to fashion a dress from the curtains. Mackie decided simply wrapping Carol in drapery wasn’t funny enough. So he left the curtain rod in. Burnett descended the staircase wearing an enormous green velvet creation—with the rod extending across her shoulders—and television history was made. The costume became one of the most recognizable comedy costumes ever created and eventually entered the collection of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. It demonstrated something essential about Bob Mackie: underneath all those rhinestones was a wicked sense of humor. Then came Cher. Mackie’s collaboration with Cher would become one of the great performer-designer partnerships in entertainment history. On The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour and later Cher, Mackie helped create a visual identity that was unlike anything else on television. Cher’s long dark hair, impossibly glamorous gowns, feathers, beads and strategically placed sheer fabric challenged conventional ideas about what a woman could wear on American television. Their partnership continued long after the variety-show era ended. One particularly memorable moment came at the 1986 Academy Awards. Cher had received acclaim for her performance in Mask but had not been nominated for Best Actress. When she arrived to present an award, she did so wearing one of Mackie’s most outrageous creations: a black ensemble with an enormous feathered headdress, exposed midriff and plenty of sparkle. Whether it was intended as revenge, rebellion, humor—or some combination of all three—the message was impossible to miss: You didn’t nominate Cher? Fine. You’re still going to look at her. Two years later, Cher returned to the Oscars in another Mackie creation, this time to collect the Academy Award for Best Actress for Moonstruck. Mackie’s influence, however, stretched far beyond Cher and Carol Burnett. He designed for an extraordinary collection of performers including Diana Ross, Judy Garland, Liza Minnelli, Tina Turner, Bette Midler, Ann-Margret, Barbra Streisand, Elton John, Madonna, Bernadette Peters and many more. And if you grew up during the age of television variety shows, chances are you saw Bob Mackie’s work even when you didn’t know his name. His career eventually expanded into ready-to-wear fashion, collectible Barbie dolls, QVC’s enormously successful wearable-art collections, stage productions and more. The industry recognized him as well. Mackie earned nine Emmy Awards from 32 nominations, received three Academy Award nominations for costume design, was inducted into the Television Academy Hall of Fame, and received the 2019 Tony Award for Best Costume Design of a Musical for The Cher Show. That Tony was especially fitting. Decades after Mackie helped invent Cher’s visual image, Broadway was celebrating both Cher’s life and the clothes that helped tell her story. But Bob Mackie’s legacy is about something larger than awards. He understood something about entertainment that can sometimes get lost when we talk about fashion seriously: Clothes can be fun. They can make us laugh. They can make an entrance. They can transform a performer into someone—or something—completely different. They can also give people permission to be bigger, louder, stranger, sexier and more fabulous than they thought they were allowed to be. That’s one reason Mackie’s work has had such a lasting connection to queer culture. His designs embraced theatricality, exaggeration, glamour, camp and transformation without apology. He didn’t ask his performers to disappear into their clothes. His clothes helped them become more of themselves. And generations of drag performers and queer artists understood exactly what that meant. Bob Mackie once imagined a world filled with sequins, feathers, laughter and spectacle—and then spent more than sixty years creating it. So join Gary and Sion for this special episode of Forgotten Queers as they remember Bob Mackie: the man who dressed some of the biggest stars in entertainment, helped define the look of the television variety-show era, turned Cher into a fashion icon, gave Carol Burnett one of the greatest sight gags in television history—and proved that when you’re wondering whether an outfit needs a few more sequins, the answer is probably yes. Because sometimes subtlety is overrated. Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/forgotten-queers--6719466/support. Please follow me on Facebook, BlueSky,TikToc,Twitter at Gary Thoren. We must never forget our Forgotten Queers

  3. Sep 15

    GeorgeNader 2

    What happens when one of Hollywood’s most handsome leading men is gay in an era when being honest about it could destroy everything? This week on Forgotten Queers, Uncle Gary takes us back to 1950s Hollywood for the story of actor, writer, and certified heartthrob George Nader. And honestly, this episode started exactly the way some of the best Forgotten Queers stories start: completely by accident. While researching something for a Forgotten Sci-Fi post, Gary stumbled across a television series from 1959 called The Man and the Challenge. The star was George Nader—a tall, dark-haired, broad-shouldered leading man who looked like 1950s Hollywood had decided shirts were merely a suggestion. Naturally, more research was required. And that’s when the story got much more interesting. George Nader was born in 1921 and built a successful acting career during the 1950s, appearing in movies and television at a time when Hollywood was manufacturing handsome leading men by the truckload. But unlike most of the carefully constructed romantic images being sold to audiences, Nader had a secret the studios absolutely did not want moviegoers to know. George Nader was gay. Even more remarkable, this wasn’t simply a series of hidden Hollywood affairs. George shared his life with Mark Miller, his partner for an extraordinary 55 years. Their relationship is at the heart of this episode because George Nader’s story isn’t simply another tale about a closeted Hollywood actor. It’s about two men who managed to build a life together during decades when their relationship had to exist largely outside public view. Before becoming a television leading man, Nader also earned himself a place in wonderfully strange science-fiction history. In 1953, he starred in Robot Monster, one of those gloriously bizarre low-budget movies that has developed a cult following precisely because there is nothing else quite like it. Yes, this is the movie featuring an alien that basically looks like a gorilla wearing a space helmet. George somehow survived that and kept his career going. By the middle of the decade, he was working at Universal and moving into increasingly prominent roles. He also became close friends with another extraordinarily handsome Universal star: Rock Hudson. And this is where Hollywood history, gossip, and legend collide. The notorious scandal magazine Confidential was threatening the careers of celebrities by publishing—or threatening to publish—details about their private lives. Think of Perez Hilton at his nastiest, except this was the 1950s, when outing a gay actor could end his career almost overnight. For years, a story has circulated that George Nader was essentially sacrificed to protect Rock Hudson—that information about Nader’s sexuality was allowed to surface so Hudson’s secret could remain protected. It’s a great Hollywood story. It also isn’t nearly as simple or as firmly documented as it is sometimes presented. Rather than turning the legend into fact, Forgotten Queers looks at what we actually know, what has been repeated over the years, and why the story became so believable in the first place. Because whether or not there was ever a literal studio bargain exchanging one gay actor’s career for another, the danger surrounding both men was very real. George’s American movie career began changing. But George Nader didn’t disappear. In 1959, he became the star of the television adventure series The Man and the Challenge, playing scientist and adventurer Dr. Glenn Barton. The series ran for 36 episodes and put George right at the center of the kind of rugged television adventure that was enormously popular at the time. And when Hollywood opportunities became more limited, George did something else queer people have been doing forever. He adapted. He went to Europe. There, Nader found a new audience starring as FBI agent Jerry Cotton in a successful series of German crime films. He ultimately appeared in eight Jerry Cotton movies, becoming a recognizable star to European audiences even as his name gradually faded from American popular culture. But George Nader had another act waiting for him. He became a writer. And this may be the most fascinating part of his story. In 1978, Nader published the science-fiction novel Chrome. At a time when mainstream science fiction was hardly overflowing with positive gay representation, George wrote a futuristic story involving love and desire between a gay man and a male android. Think about that for a moment. The Hollywood leading man who had spent much of his career in an industry where openly acknowledging his own relationship could have destroyed him eventually created a future where queer desire could actually exist on the page. There is something incredibly moving about that. George couldn’t completely rewrite the world he had been born into. So he imagined another one. And through everything—the movies, television, Europe, writing, and decades of enormous cultural change—Mark Miller remained beside him. Their lives also remained closely connected to Rock Hudson. When Hudson became ill during the AIDS crisis, George and Mark were part of his world during a period when fear, cruelty, misinformation, and homophobia surrounded people with AIDS. Their friendship adds another deeply human chapter to a story too often reduced to Hollywood gossip. George Nader died in 2002. But his life leaves us with something much bigger than the question of whether Hollywood once sacrificed his career to protect Rock Hudson. George Nader was a working actor who became a television star, a European movie hero, a science-fiction writer, a lifelong friend, and a man who shared more than half a century with the person he loved. That’s why he belongs on Forgotten Queers. Because queer history isn’t only about the people who were able to stand in front of the world and announce exactly who they were. Sometimes it’s about the people who found ways to live, love, create, and survive inside systems that demanded their silence. George Nader did all of that. And along the way, he gave us a gorilla in a space helmet, 1950s Hollywood scandal, German crime movies, a gay science-fiction love story, Rock Hudson—and one hell of a life. Join Uncle Gary for the story of George Nader, a Hollywood leading man whose most remarkable role may have been the life he managed to build when the cameras weren’t rolling. Listen to Forgotten Queers and discover another piece of the queer history they tried to erase. And, as always… I love you. And don’t forget your fiber. Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/forgotten-queers--6719466/support. Please follow me on Facebook, BlueSky,TikToc,Twitter at Gary Thoren. We must never forget our Forgotten Queers This episode includes AI-generated content.

  4. Sep 8

    The Lord Won’t Mind

    What if I told you that decades before Brokeback Mountain, before Heated Rivalry, and long before queer love stories became something publishers actively went looking for, one gay author proved that a love story between two men could sell? Hey, queers and weirdos! This week on Forgotten Queers, Uncle Gary is digging into the life and work of Gordon Merrick—a writer who was once enormously successful, widely read, and pretty damn groundbreaking…and yet somehow managed to slip out of our collective queer memory. And that needs fixing. Gordon Merrick was born in 1916 into a wealthy Pennsylvania family, and his life took him through Broadway, journalism, World War II, international travel, and eventually a writing career that would put unapologetically gay men at the center of popular romantic fiction. Not hidden in the background. Not coded so carefully that only queer readers knew what was going on. Not punished simply for being gay. Merrick wrote about gay men falling in love, having sex, fighting, screwing things up, getting jealous, wanting each other, and trying to build lives together. You know—basically all the messy shit straight characters had been allowed to do forever. His breakthrough came with 1970’s The Lord Won’t Mind, the first book in what became known as the Peter and Charlie trilogy. The novel told the story of two beautiful young men and their complicated romantic and sexual relationship. And people bought it. A LOT of people bought it. The Lord Won’t Mind became a bestseller, and Merrick followed it with One for the Gods and Forth into Light. At a time when mainstream American culture was only beginning to acknowledge gay people openly, Gordon Merrick was putting gay romance right there on the bookshelf. Were the books perfect representations of gay life? Hell no. His characters tended to be gorgeous, wealthy, privileged, and living lives that most queer people could only dream about. Critics sometimes dismissed his books as melodramatic, escapist, or overly sexual. But that criticism misses something important. Gay readers deserved escapism too. We deserved beautiful men falling desperately in love. We deserved romance, sex, jealousy, ridiculous decisions, happy moments, heartbreak, and happily-ever-afters—or at least the possibility of one. And Merrick proved something else that mattered enormously to the publishing world: People would buy it. One gay love story could hold its own. That might sound obvious today, when queer romance is a thriving genre and stories about men loving men can become international publishing and television sensations. But somebody had to help prove there was an audience in the first place. Gordon Merrick was one of those people. In this episode of Forgotten Queers, we’re looking at the man behind those books: his privileged but complicated beginnings, his early theatrical ambitions, his experiences during World War II, the relationships that shaped him, and the long road that eventually turned him into one of the most commercially successful gay novelists of his generation. We’ll also talk about why success didn’t necessarily earn him respect. Because queer history has a funny habit of deciding that only certain kinds of art are worthy of remembering. Sometimes the books that actually reached ordinary queer people—the books hidden under mattresses, passed between friends, discovered accidentally in bookstores, or read by someone who desperately needed to know there were other people like them—get dismissed as trash. And maybe some of it WAS trash. Who cares? Sometimes trash can save your f*****g life. For a gay reader living in a small town in the 1970s, seeing two men presented not simply as tragic victims, villains, or punchlines but as people capable of desire and love could mean something enormous. Representation doesn’t always arrive wearing a tuxedo and carrying a literary award. Sometimes it shows up shirtless on the cover of a paperback. Gordon Merrick understood fantasy, romance, sex, and longing—and he gave gay readers plenty of all four. So why don’t we talk about him more? That’s exactly the kind of question Forgotten Queers exists to ask. This week, we’re pulling Gordon Merrick back off the forgotten bookshelf and giving him another look—not because he was perfect, not because every book has aged beautifully, and not because he single-handedly invented gay romance. He didn’t. But he was part of the generation that pushed open a door. And once that door was open, other writers could push it farther. Eventually those stories moved beyond the paperback rack. They appeared in bigger novels, movies, television, streaming series, and bookstores filled with entire sections of LGBTQ+ romance. There’s a long road between Gordon Merrick’s The Lord Won’t Mind and the queer love stories we celebrate today. This week, we’re going back toward the beginning of that road. So grab your coffee, pour yourself something stronger if the day requires it, get comfortable, and join me for the story of Gordon Merrick—a bestselling gay novelist who helped prove there was an audience hungry for stories about men loving men. Welcome back to Forgotten Queers. Queer history tried to forget him. We’re not going to. I love you—and don’t forget your fiber. Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/forgotten-queers--6719466/support. Please follow me on Facebook, BlueSky,TikToc,Twitter at Gary Thoren. We must never forget our Forgotten Queers

Ratings & Reviews

5
out of 5
4 Ratings

About

This is Forgotten Queers, a show about the queer figures history pushed aside. They were once stars, leaders, icons — but time, shame, and prejudice buried their names. We’re here to remember them, to honor them, and to say: you don’t get to forget us. Cover art photo provided by Alexander Grey on Unsplash: https://unsplash.com/@sharonmccutcheon?utm_source=spreaker&utm_medium=referral Cover art photo provided by Shannia Christanty on Unsplash: https://unsplash.com/@shanniacy?utm_source=spreaker&utm_medium=referral Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/forgotten-queers--6719466/support.

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