M.A.S.H. ahead of its time

Loretta Swit, who played "Hot Lips" Houlihan
then, with Alan Alda, and at 80, with Jamie
Farr, who played cross-dresser Corporal Klinger.
Loretta will turn 84 in November.

For those of you interested in the history of the LGBT movement, I just came across a marvelous contribution to that important evolution in thinking and change in social attitudes, a video by a journalist/blogger/pop culture critic named Matt Baume:  Watch it even if LGBT history isn't your thing for a jolt of nostalgia for the years when M.A.S.H. was the most popular thing on television.

I was in the army before M.A.S.H. came out.

In applying for the Army Security Agency, I had to fill out a form. Question #15, I believe it was, was "Are you a communist, fascist or homosexual?"

I used to joke that I answered "no" because I thought two out of three was "close enough for government work." But at the time I genuinely believed I could honestly say no to that question, because nobody would ever be able to prove otherwise. And besides, I wasn't all that sure. I might have ever so slight an inclination to be a communist sympathizer.

When I first got assigned to the Russian barracks at the Army Language School, everybody was reading a new best-seller that had just come out, Joseph Heller's Catch 22. Another story of the absurdity of military life.

We were an unusually unorthodox bunch, given to exposing hypocrisy and mindless bureaucracy and arbitrary cruelty. A popular expression was "RF". It expressed the cynicism of the day. RF would one day come to mean"rat fuck," after Woodward and Bernstein popularized it in connection with the Watergate Affair. But in those days it stood for "random fuck," the possibility that bad things could come down on you at any moment and you wouldn't be able to do anything about it. It was the early 60s, still, and the anti-Vietnam War protests were several years in the future, as was fleeing to Canada to protest the draft. I simply went into the army without any awareness that I had an alternative.

The whole time I was at the Army Language School, I never came to terms with being gay. That had to wait until I got to Berlin and started having nightmares, which forced me to come to terms with the fact that I was keeping a terrible secret, even from myself.

It would be many more years before M.A.S.H. would come out, and many many more yet before Stonewall and the beginning of the American LGBT movement.

So this example of resistance to homophobia, which Baume describes as an image of the 50s seen from the 70s with an eye to the 90s, would probably have embarrassed me if I had seen it in 1962. Instead of saying, "How progressive!" I might well have come out with, "I wish they wouldn't make such a big deal of such things."

But that's before I got to live through the era of Harvey Milk in San Francisco, and way before I got to watch Obama publicly acknowledge the contribution of Frank Kameny, one of my true heroes.

In any case, have a look at the video.

And if the photo above whetted your appetite, have a look at this video of the characters, then and now here

photo credit