I was looking for a tuna salad recipe this morning. I took out my Better Homes and Gardens New Cook Book, the classic binder one with the red-and-white plaid cover. Mine is the fourth printing. My mom gave it to me when I moved out of the dorm at Marquette. Stuck inside, I found her pasta sauce recipe neatly written in her nun-like handwriting on the blank side of an old Christmas card. On the front side, around a picture of a red stocking stuffed with ornaments, she wrote a “P.S.” about adding sweet Italian sausage or “Snow’s clams.” I’ve had some formal culinary training but my most vivid memories of cooking lessons take place in my mom’s kitchen. It seems a budding gay boy’s rite of passage to help mom prepare dinner, peeling carrots, perhaps, or tearing up stale bread for Thanksgiving turkey stuffing.
Anyway, I watched a “Lost in Space” marathon recently. Yes, I know. But, it was a lazy Saturday afternoon and I got lost in the nostalgia, again. As you’ll recall, “Lost in Space” is a modern take on The Swiss Family Robinson, that 1812 novel of a family sea voyage gone awry. It was 1965 and the space race was on. The stuff of science fiction had become a reality. So, the Robinsons blast off, veer off course and crash on some unknown planet. As it turned out, it was also a lesson in pre-Stonewall gay history.
Also on board is Dr. Smith. Reminiscent of my gay Uncle Arthur, he’s highly intelligent, nattily elegant, condescending to idiots and cleverly witty. But, unlike Uncle Arthur, Smith is evil and nefarious. He even plots to kill off the Robinsons so he can return to earth (later in the series he mellows and is merely bumblingly effete).
In the second episode (it was still in black and white), in the midst of some mayhem, Dr. Smith busies himself in the rocket ship’s galley kitchen. The mother (June Lockhart, remember?) reassures her skeptical (and snippy) teen daughter, Penny, who rightly thinks Smith’s culinary fussing is merely a diversion to avoid fighting alien enemies with the other men.
Mother: “Dr. Smith is a very good cook.”
Penny: (petulantly) “Of course he is!”
Right, because he’s gay. Considering the targeted audience is the nuclear family, the scene provides a convenient vehicle for homophobic indoctrination. Slaving over a hot stove was woman’s work back in the day. Mind you, the great chefs were all male but the thought of a man cooking in a working-class household, even in outer space, was pure sedition. So, to avoid any doubt regarding Dr. Smith’s guise as a suspiciously single older male outsider, he was cast emasculated as well.
I don’t recall seeing the original broadcast of this particular “Lost in Space.” Had I, I’m sure I would have understood its not-so-subliminal message. After all, Penny was right. (Uncle Arthur was a great cook, too.)
Speaking of nostalgia, I found that tuna salad recipe on page 282. It’s the one with walnuts, apples and Mandarin orange segments…very ’60s and ungay.
