68: Too Close for Comfort Does an Episode About Male Rape

“For Every Man, There's Two Women” (July 20, 1985)

Content warning: In this episode we talk about sexual assault. RAINN is an online organization that offers both information about sexual assault and counseling. You can chat live with a counselor here.

This week, we’re not talking about an explicitly LGBT-focused episode of TV. No, we’re talking about the episode of Too Close for Comfort in which a male character, Monroe, is sexually assaulted by two women. No, really. Jim J. Bullock, the actor playing that character, is gay in real life, and because Monroe is coded as queer as well, this episode serves as a bizarre example of not just how a sitcom can handle a sensitive topic but also how some actors’ offscreen sexuality can color the way their performance is received and even how their characters get written. Jeffrey McCrann joins Drew and Glen to try and make sense of this strange, strange bit of TV history.

Have a listen to the episode of the Drew-Tony podcast You Have to Watch the Movie that Jeffrey guested on back in 2018. We talk about Fright Night. Much in the way Bullock’s offscreen sexuality informs this episode of TV, the queerness of Fright Night’s cast really changes the way that movie plays out.

This 2012 A.V. Club article on this episode is pretty much the best text trying to make sense of this episode. It also brought us to this interview with Jim J. Bullock on the website Guy Spy. Check out Old Time TV, without whose help we would not have been able to do this episode.

Here’s an explainer for how the movie Streets of Fire may have “inspired” elements in the video game Final Fight, which BTW is one of the most homoerotic games ever.

The outro for this episode is “Number of the Dancer” by Al Monroe, which isn’t on any of the online music services, but it is on YouTube if you want to hear it.