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 [log in to unmask] ********************* ---- To sign off SCREEN-L, e-mail [log in to unmask] and put SIGNOFF SCREEN-L in the message. Problems? Contact [log in to unmask]