Ask the Flying Monkey! (October 21, 2008)

Q: Daytime actor Joel Crothers (Edge of Night and Secret Storm) died of AIDS early on, shocking the daytime community. Was he gay? Speaking of daytime, knowing that Dack Rambo and David Oliver of Another World also both died from AIDS, I am wondering how many other current daytime performers are openly gay, and what's the environment like for them in daytime? -- Keyboardman

Joel Crothers (left) & Dack Rambo

A: Crothers, who also appeared on Santa Barbara, was gay. Rambo was reportedly bisexual, and the Monkey doesn’t know Oliver’s sexuality, though he did die of AIDS. Thom Bierdz, who appeared on The Young and the Restless, is openly gay, as were several actors who appeared on Dark Shadows, including Louis Edmonds and Keith Prentice.

Thom Bierdz

Out actor Chad Allen is now appearing in a multi-episode arc on General Hospital: Night Shift as the love interest of the gay character played by Adam Grimes (who is straight), but that doesn’t really count, does it?

Adam Grimes (left) and Chad Allen

Other than that, the Monkey knows of no out actors appearing on daytime television. Closeted actors? Well, that’s a whole other story, but as readers of this site know, AfterElton.com doesn’t out actors who don’t publicly identify as gay. 

But the fact that there are so many closeted actors says something about how the industry is right there. Could it be even more conservative than the primetime television industry in that regard? Perhaps the genre is just too closely associated with heterosexual romance for actors to be comfortable coming out, or maybe it’s that it often employs actors who are at the beginning of their careers. It also doesn't help that soap actors are considerably less famous than their prime time counterparts, so they are given far fewer opportunities to talk about their personal lives.

That said, many (but not all) of the actors on the here! TV gay soaps Dante’s Cove and The Lair are openly gay.

Q: What happened to Tom Robinson, the English singer who had a moderate hit with "Glad to Be Gay". I hear he has been married (to a woman) for a while. What gives? Is he straight? – Sheldon

Tom Robinson

A: “I'd always been open in interviews about having had experiences with women as well as men,” Robinson says. “In those days [in the 1970s], people often used the word ‘bisexual’ as a cop-out, so I always preferred to identify as ‘gay’ rather than mince words. But then in the mid 80s, I inconveniently fell in love with a woman and incautiously said so in a small interview. The Sunday People seized on the story and turned it into a center page spread — a brief period in tabloid hell ensued.”

For the record, “Glad to be Gay” is a great song, interspersing lyrics about the brutal anti-gay discrimination in the U.K. at the time with the chipper chorus: “sing if you’re glad to be gay, sing if you’re happy that way.” It was banned by the BCB upon its release in 1978, but it reached number 18 on the UK charts anyway.

Next page! Revisiting the Brokeback Oscar controversy.