At 12:54 PM -0400 3/2/98, Scott Hutchins wrote:
>Jamie Farr said Klinger on _M*A*S*H_ was supposed to be a "silly fag," but
>I didn't follow the show enough to know if the character was actually gay
>or just liked to wear dresses.
 
Actually, he was wearing dresses in order to get released from the army on
a "section 8" -- the insanity discharge.  Klinger was never gay, at least
in my recollection (he married a Korean woman in the last season of the
show, and the two of them became the central characters of the blessedly
short-lived "AfterMASH").  But it's nonetheless interesting to remember
that cross-dressing, and thus, on some level, non-heterosexuality, was
still in the late 1970s popularly encoded as insanity.
 
Kathleen
 
*********************
Kathleen Fitzpatrick
Department of English
New York University
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