Once, I went to a history museum and read a letter from 1620 that powerfully changed my view of the transatlantic slave trade. Maybe I should say “deepened” instead of “changed,” since I was already pretty soured on it. Regardless, standing there, ruminating on those 405-year-old words and waiting for museum security to swap shifts so my part of the heist could go off, I quietly had my standard for basic human decency raised. See, this letter was written by a white ancestor – already a colonizer, already complicit in a genocide – reacting to the first slave ships from Africa reaching their shores. Disbelief and rage still sang in their handwriting four centuries later as they relayed the news to some inland cousin that people were going to be displayed in chains and sold as property later that week.
And folks? THEY WEREN’T HAVING IT. I’m not an expert at old-timey lingo unless I pretend to be for the purposes of a column, but as I recall the gist was something like:
Something like that. The point is, there is no excuse to disregard another’s humanity. There never has been. No being is so important they can usurp the rights of another – not because your boss told you to, not because it’s just business, not because you were only following orders, not because everyone else is doing it. We knew that in our bones four hundred years ago and we’ll know it four hundred years from now, even when we pretend we don’t.
See? And although I first absorbed that Noble Truth from an old letter in a glass case as a museum heist fell hilariously apart behind me, it’s far from the only cultural artifact showcasing the simple respect for one another we seem to find and lose again so often. Four centuries ago, that letter-writer found it. Four decades ago, it was Burt’s turn.
This is Burt Reynolds. In the 1970s and ’80s, he represented the absolute PEAK of mainstream masculinity. He starred in movies with words in their titles like “cannonball” and “smokey” and “sharkey’s” and “gator” and “Texas” and “whorehouse” and “run!” His most notable characters had names like The Bandit, Hooper, and Stroker Ace. He starred in one movie about playing football in jail, then another movie about murdering some guys for forcing gay sex on him.
Do you understand what I’m trying to tell you? Burt Reynolds shone upon the face of the Earth like a great testicle rising over a vast field of erections, bathing them with endless waves of cowboy-grade sperm, runoff T, and motorcycle-peeling-out sound effects. His hair was easy to get a secure grip on, and his leathery face caused moisture to bead and wick away naturally. In short: one of our premiere mustache rides.
Somewhere in there, Mr. Reynolds also starred in a sitcom called Evening Shade for four seasons and exactly 100 episodes. In case the name Evening Shade sounds too feminine, please note that Burt plays an ex-pro High School football coach named Wood Newton. A “newton” is of course a unit of directional force, making his character’s name essentially “Coach Dick Pushpower.”
The show’s intro sequence does nothing to dilute Burt’s formidable All-American Coach/Man/Dad status. Within the first fifteen words of the theme song, the lyrics have name-checked “front porch swings,” “glasses of lemonade” and “a baby on my knee.” In classic sexist fashion, every single member of the cast is depicted with a photo from their youth except Marilu Henner, who’s seemingly not allowed to appear in any non-bangable context.
Literally everything about Evening Shade is in tonal lockstep with the cultural mores of middle America’s “TGIF Belt” of the early ’90s. It’s uncontroversial, funny but not too funny, and puts a phenomenal cast essentially to waste. As was the style at the time, casual homophobic jokes are absolutely not off the table. Not hatefully homophobic, per se, but the kind of sitcom joke where the punchline is “what if you were gay, imagine that – huh.” Aunt Frieda might say “I found Ponder the perfect woman” and Wood will reply “Oh good, I hope you two are very happy together.” Big laugh.
Or the Beta-coded comic relief character will burst in and Wood’ll lay him out with “What are you doing, trying out for The Village People?” HUGE laugh right underneath the “Written By” credit because that was the money line!
Even the final shot of the intro is a classic case of “straight dudes accidentally stuck being naked together is always funny!”
And yet…on the off-chance you recognize that credit, it’s probably because Linda Bloodworth-Thomason also wrote and created a much bigger show called Designing Women. Danny Zuker would go on to Executive Produce Modern Family fifteen years later. Both shows have been credited for making strides for Queer representation on television, but even way back in ‘94, Linda and Danny and Burt and the whole Shade crew were already doing for Trans Rights allyship what that letter in that museum highlighted for me so long ago – THE BARE-ASS MINIMUM.
That’s right, I’m talking about “The Perfect Woman,” a campy mid-’90s sitcom episode about Ossie Davis getting set up with a trans woman! But the weird thing is? It all goes FINE. Her name is Ginger and Burt Reynolds gets her pronouns right the whole time because he BARELY GIVES A SHIT and readily acknowledges that it’s NONE OF HIS BUSINESS!! This is about as nonplussed as he gets in the episode, and it works whether you define ‘nonplussed’ the one way or the opposite way:
I’m aware that most folks reading this column already understand the way political interests pick randomly-selected out-groups to scapegoat whenever they need to get dumb people to be mean to each other instead of rebelling. Even going in with that mindset, it’s no less shocking to watch this whole Evening Shade episode unfold and never get offended. Check this fucking scene out:
It was fucking that simple! This aired on CBS at 8pm and almost no one gave a single, solitary shit! And the few who did give shits were free to give them in whatever restroom best suited their gender identity, and again – no one else murdered them over it or even cared! Like a good, detached ’90s dad, Wood simply compliments Ponder on being so secure in himself and goes back to banging on footballs with pipes in the garage.
Here’s Wood kissing both his kids because that’s a Fine Upstanding Alpha Male thing to do.
Here’s Ossie’s character, Ponder, explaining that the great thing about ketchup is that it can meet a burger, meet fries, meet some mayo and turn to thousand island dressing – “the important thing,” he says, “is that the possibilities are unlimited!” It’s literally a lecture on fluid identity using the most American fluid you’re allowed to show on cable TV.
There’s even a B-plot designed to mirror the main plot in which two hamsters named after famously gay Vegas stage magicians Siegfried and Roy navigate a maze of ducts only to discover that Siegfried is a girl!
Crucially – and perhaps most surprisingly – they also nail the scene of Ginger explaining her own situation. Here she is being played by Diahann Carroll, a legendary model, actress, singer and activist in her own right. The scene goes…
And that’s it. Respect for one another; that’s the bar. It’s very low. In fact, if someone you know chooses not to clear it, maybe punch them in the fucking mouth and show them this letter, then this episode of Evening Shade.
Like all episodes of Evening Shade, “The Perfect Woman” ends with a little narration from Ossie over the closing credits. This time around, he says…“Life can be full of surprises, and one of the nicest of them is discovering a friend you might never have met or even recognized, except in a place called Evening Shade.” I’ll add only that evening is the time of twilight, when day and night dance and melt together, and the universe demonstrates once more that almost everything is a spectrum, and nothing as separable as it seems.
Except for the main wife lady Marilu plays, who’s an insufferable giggly TERF the whole time.
Like I said, for 1994? Prescient.
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Michael is proudly Queer, as well as the host of a new podcast about The Simpsons you can check out right now in audio or video form. The two facts are largely unrelated.
This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Moexu, a master of pronouns and respecting the shit out of people. Moexu wrote a thank you note for this dedication and mailed it out before this article even went live. Just a complete class act all the way.