Was Richard Simmons American Medias First Affable Gay Friend?
If you want a hipster breakfast* in any large city, anywhere in this great land of ours, chances are you’re going to end up in a region called “midtown,” at a place with lots of ironic 1980s lunchboxes, ironic black velvet paintings, ironic VCRs, and all manner of other vintage/retro kitsch from decades gone by.
*By “hipster breakfast” I mean menu items of a more interesting nature than, like, plain eggs/bacon/pancakes. For example, in the anecdote below I got jalapeno grits topped with beef brisket – both of which were absolutely delicious. Hipster breakfast places employ the aesthetic flourishes of the classic diner (like formica tabletops and mediocre coffee) while in no way being a classic diner. They’re more like commentaries on the classic diner.
I was at such a place recently while attending (ironically) the Southern Baptist Convention which is maybe the least hipster thing there ever was, aesthetically-speaking. The provided entertainment at this breakfast place was a 1980s version of Richard Simmons “Sweatin’ to the Oldies,” but projected in larger-than-life-size on an entire breakfast-place wall. It was perhaps the most ironic thing I’ve ever seen, inasmuch as nobody has wanted to watch “Sweatin’ to the Oldies” since my mom’s generation aged out of aerobics in the mid-1990s. Here’s a brief synopsis, for anyone south of 45 years of age:
Simmons, an otherwise unremarkable** man with my mom’s haircut, donned leotards and leg warmers and led a roomful of middle-aged ladies through an aerobic workout which featured lots of clapping and dancing and Simmons basically acting like he was “one of the gals” (as it were). It’s right about now that I should note that Simmons has never publicly addressed the issue of his sexuality – which tidbit I unearthed over the course of 35 seconds of cursory Internet research. My mom, who is heterosexual and very conservative as these things go, loved “Sweatin’ to the Oldies” unironically, as no one in her generation “did” irony. Unfortunately that would come later, thanks to my generation.
** Simmons’s own weight loss was actually pretty remarkable, but I say “unremarkable” because he wasn’t ripped or especially muscled-up as per the fitness-influencer anti-aging-clinic aesthetic of today.
In all of this, Simmons was basically a forerunner of the “gay character***” that would start appearing in sitcoms in the mid-to-late 1990s and appears in nearly all shows and movies to this day.
***This character is good at shopping and interior design and always says that you look nice in whatever it is that you’re wearing, and is also always very good at gossiping and storytelling and making the whole group laugh uproariously “with” him as opposed to “at” him.
It would be easy here to do the normal conservative thing and talk about how this was the beginning of the gay agenda in media and all that, which I’m not going to do because that has already been done a whole bunch and is really obvious to anyone who has been paying attention to media for the past three decades.
What was more interesting to me as I ate my hipster-priced jalapeno grits was the fact that, for my mom’s generation, Simmons was basically just a guy their age who was nice to them. He talked about his feelings and “listened” (as much as you can while jumping up and down off a six-inch plastic step), and could always be counted on to say encouraging things to them. None of these are bad things and in fact they are actually good. They’re things that men in her generation weren’t really encouraged to do, and probably weren’t especially good at.
The fact of the matter is, watching Simmons on the breakfast-place wall actually made me think about my mom, and how good she was at being a person in the 1980s. She sang at church, read her Bible, “did” the bills, took me to the pool, taped my ankles before football practice, was a good friend to her friends, and probably had lots of hopes and dreams that were similar to some of the hopes and dreams that I have now. Basically, she ruled.
In the aggregate, the Richard Simmons experience (which was a thing I hadn’t thought about in 30 years), made me think warm, nostalgic thoughts, and made me want to be nice to my wife, which is an unqualified good thing. While no part of me wants any part of the Richard Simmons aesthetic (though you could probably make an argument about my glasses), my wife probably needs this (me being nice to her) more than she needs me to start another side-hustle or write another book.
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