Deborah had mentioned that she can’t wait to see Sal after Stonewall. Which got me to thinking… will it really break him out? Or will he stay a miserable, closeted queen for the rest of his bitter, unfulfilled days?
One of the interesting things about this show is the careful attention to individuality. No one is a caricature. Midge, the bohemian, won’t run off spontaneously to Paris. Peggy, the smart girl, carries a baby without knowing it. Harry cheats with Hildy. Betty cheats with a washing machine. Nobody is predictable.
So if the show were to go all the way to 1970, who will change?
Weiner, I think, and Hamm, I’m sure, have mentioned, (in response to the notion of 1970 Don with mutton chops) that Don could be the guy who never changes his hairstyle.
(I have an uncle like that. Still uses hair grease. Kind of totally gross. But I think he might have been hip once.)
It will be interesting to see. Certainly, we will watch each person faced with realities they’d not before encountered. And how each person reacts to these will inform their future.
Pete, I suspect, will glimpse what an asshole he is. It will smack him in the face, and it will cause him pain, to see the pain he’s caused to others. And he will have a choice, in that moment, to continue on as he has been, or take a step towards being a human being. And that moment will be something to see.
But really, the question we’ve all got to be asking ourselves is, will Harry ever stop wearing that bowtie?
20 Responses to “Ten years–what will and won't change?”
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Seems that in every photograph of that era, there's that one guy with dark hair, horned-rim glasses, short-sleeve dress shirt, bowtie. Like a uniform.
With the exception of the bowtie, that was my dad in every picture I've ever seen of him from college.
Good point about individuals – no one is two-dimensional (another relief from most other tv shows).
Sal in particular seems kind of doomed in the sense that so many gay men that came of age before the 1980s just knew they had to stay in the closet. Sal seems to be in his later 30s, maybe even 40s … so he's already been living this way as an adult for years. By Stonewall he'll be pushing 50 – no time to start wearing biker shorts.
There's nothing sadder than an old queen.
George Takei coming out last year was so touching for just that reason. Closeted before Stonewall. And after. And protecting his acting career. Forty plus years of the closet and then finally, in his 70s, comes out, and now gets married, and I tell you I cried.
But the interesting thing about old queens, is that even if Sal "officially" stays in the closet, all of a sudden everyone else will have developed or fine tuned their gaydar. Now I can remember back to knowing that my 7th grade music teacher, or one of our family friends was "different" even though I had no real concept of "gay" until I was 14 or 15.
Howard Stern (who's a big Trekkie) used to snark on George Takei all the time- not necessarily in a mean-spirited way, but in a "everybody knows, so just admit it" way. After George came out, he became a guest announcer on the show a few times a year, and calls in often.
I'm 30 years old BTW- very post-Stonewall.
When I was in high school, I had a couple of gay friends. And I was slow to recognize or comprehend. This was around 1981. By ’84 I was performing at Rocky Horror, which shows what a quick study I was. But my point is… gays weren’t mainstream identifiable until way after Stonewall. Emphasize mainstream. I think that tragically, it took AIDS.
Oh myyyy. George is the BEST on Howard!
If I were to guess, Salvatore might be running that agency (or a rival agency) by 1969. He's tortured, but smart. Clearly, he's not destined to have it all, but I would be disappointed if the showrunners made him a stock tragic figure.
I think Stonewall would scare the hell out of Salvatore, but I still like to think that he'll find a nice man and a small community, settle down and live a happy, if mostly-closeted, professionally, life. But then I love Sal.
I think Weiner said in the NYT Magazine interview that he could see Don ending up at a place like Esalen. That would be something.
And Betty has to find feminism in her 40s, or she's going to be miserable.
Sal would not be scared by Stonewall, but tut-tutting at the young kids who don't understand the way the world works. His life would go on as normal. People would realize that Sal is gay in the late 1970s and early 1980s as people developed gaydar, but he would not publicly admit it until he had to. He cares about his career more than his social life, as evidenced by dinner with Elliot. He put on the breaks once he realized the implications it could have on his career.
I had wonderded, based on how old I think he is, and the fact that he speaks Italian fluently, is he the child of immigrants? Is Sal the first generation to be born in America?
I think I would have spotted him in the eighties.
Well, maybe not as I didn't peg Richard Simmons immediately. Hey, I was young!
It's true that we as a society didn't have "gaydar" until fairly recently. It wasn't in most people's heads as much. We look at Liberace and say, "of course," and certainly some people did get it at the time, but not perhaps the instant recognition that we have today.
I'm not sure people were completely oblivious though as Rock Hudson married a woman for a reason — so people wouldn't suspect. Paul Lynde starred as a father, and presumably straight, while not changing his demeanor at all though.
But because being closeted was the norm, there was no way for someone to make the vital connections. Also, I think because it was so associated with deviancy, a lot of people just didn't think that way about people they liked or respected or, perhaps, wanted.
I'd like to see Sal find romantic happiness. I don't really like the thought of people treating him poorly. I guess that makes me with Inanna.
Neil Patrick Harris plays a straight man on a tv show and a webisode and he gets Emmy nominations. I'm not even hinting society is "fixed" on this issue, because that would be laughable, but we've made progress.
I doubt anyone would recognize Sal as gay until the 90s.
The timeframe of the show is such that we’ll see women and blacks on MM realize greater advances in human rights, but not homosexuals. Gay men and women are at least 2 decades behind other in that department, unfortunately.
When Elliott says to Sal, "what are you afraid of?" the look on Sal's face before he says, "are you kidding?" suggests to me that he's terrified, not merely that he values his professional life more than his social life. That's the way I read the scene anyway.
I love that we as a contemporary audience can spot Sal as gay from his first appearance, but that his contemporaries couldn't. I think Bryan Batt plays it brilliantly.
I agree with Inanna: Sal could get arrested for an assignation with Elliot, publicly humiliated, ostracized from his community and family… the risks go well beyond losing his job.
I remember seeing an interview with Shirley Maclaine in The Celluoid Closet about making the film of The Children's Hour (1961). She spoke about how she and Audrey Hepburn never once discussed homosexuality vis-a-vis their characters and the role it plays in the film. Because there was no mainstream dialogue at the time, no context in which to discuss the subject. She was incredulous about it, because now actors playing gay characters would obviously have that dialogue about it. Very interesting.
It is funny about 'gaydar' today, and its relatively new development as a concept. As Inanna said, I too love how we as a contemporary audience picked up on Sal and the art director at the McCann straight away, but how the 1960s folks wouldn't even consider it, it wasn't in their realm of thinking.
Laura, I think I posted that clip in here at one time… somewhere in a Salvatore discussion, only now I can’t find it. Fascinating. Celluloid Closet is a brilliant and insightful movie, one that has had lasting impact on me.
Sal–if he doesn't get married this coming season, I will eat my hat. Judging from the scenes with the switchboard operator, having a girlfriend or wife "for show" is clearly a temptation for him, and I feel like he really likes women much more than the "straight" men do, so it will be an easy mistake for him to make. I'm not saying it will last–just that it will happen.
Pete–I haven't fished around much yet in these forums so I don't know yet if I am alone in this, but I really like Pete. In fact, he is my favorite character! Sure he is immature, obviously damaged by a cruel upbringing, and capable of doing and saying some pretty shocking things. But if you look a bit deeper, I think you will see a real human being! He is more sensitive than the other men, MUCH more perceptive in meetings and aware of coming trends, and I feel like he is drawn to more "modern" viewpoints and philosophies almost without being aware of it. My favorite scene in the whole show is the scene where he tells Peggy about his hunting fantasy–even though it's essentially patriarchal, the fact that he is compelled to share his deepest feelings with a woman seems very post-feminist to me, very now, very "Iron John." He wants to have a more equal relationship with a woman, but he has never seen that and has no idea how to go about it–and when he tries (as with the chip and dip) he becomes a figure of public scorn. Anyway, I am guessing he will be the hero of the series in the end.
Hi Lori,
I like Pete, um, sometimes, but I can't go with you on his feeling towards women. He took back the chip and dip against his wife's wishes, and from her level of upset, I don't think they'd really received two. He used the money to get a gun, and then he aimed it at the secretarial pool.
A guy does that today and not only is he out of a job, he's on some couch somewhere discussing his issue with women.
His "date" at his bachelor party had to tell him to quit, tell him he was hurting her, and threaten to leave before he chilled, and he only backed off so the other guys didn't throttle him for ruining the night. MW used the words "date rape" in the commentary, and while he was being humorous more than literal, the message was that Pete was being inappropriate.
Trudy — go to your old boyfriend and convince him to publish my story or I'll make your life miserable.
His hunting fantasy contained an unnamed woman. Talk about objectification. And he looked at Peggy, saw she was happy at her small success, and said that he didn't like her that way. What way? Happy? Confident? Creatively fulfilled?
Not to mention he didn't want Peggy on the Clearisil account. Why not? The affair is behind them, she has never indicated she would cause him problems, and a man who wants a more equal relationship should have no problem with a woman who has proved her worth twice.
I don't see him as an irredeemable villain, but other than the douche nozzle at the party in Marriage of Figaro, the one who told the dead wife joke and found it funny that Don skipped out, Pete is probably the biggest misogynist on the show.
I think Pete does have some finer feelings in him, but he has a lot of growing up to do.
He did more than threaten Trudy with 'I'll be miserable', he basically told her to go back to Charlie and have sex with him for a better publication.
I find Pete a fascinating character, and Kartheiser's portrayal no less then brilliant, but no, I can't get behind him as good to/for/about women.
Maybe I was too kind in glossing over Pete's acts by just referring to them as "some pretty shocking things." The events you mention are disturbing. But, I can't help but feel that they are usually motivated by an attempt to act the way he THINKS men are supposed to act (much like Sal when he makes sexist comments) and because he doesn't really feel that way, he goes too far. I really felt like he went to Peggy in the first episode because he WAS ashamed, and she fell in love with him because she saw that he was, and recognized him as a fellow misfit. I feel like the Trudy incident was motivated by the same desire to act the way men "should" as well as anger that he can't impress his father, as was the gun incident. The aiming of the gun at the secretarial pool–again one of my favorite scenes–was incredibly childish, but you have to remember that, again, he was with the guys when he did it, and was trying to impress them. Personally I found Ken's behavior at the Nixon party MUCH more disturbing than anything Pete has ever done, and Paul–what excuse can there be for HIS behavior? And as for him being upset when Peggy got the Clearasil account–well, I wouldn't be happy either if I was told I was going to have to work closely on a pet project with someone I had slept with, and who had later laid out all of my character faults to me plainly for all the world (and worse, myself) to see.
I have to say, as much as I love Pete in the show, I'd certainly never want to work with him (much less be married to him!). And I'd never say that at this point he is good for women in any way–NONE of the men in this show are!!! All I really want to say is that I see more potential in him to change and eventually BE good, a few major social revolutions down the road. But I am undoubtedly biased by thoughts of my own dad, a member of this same generation (and now dead, so forgive me if I sentimentalize him a bit) who over the course of a few decades went from actually walking out on my mom (briefly!) when she asked him to pick up his socks one night, to actually enjoying cooking dinner for his family on nights when my mom had to work late. Probably just my own weird perspective–but I can't wait to see what happens!