"You'll excuse Gopher, he has so much to learn about women" as a line goes so hard if you assume Doc overheard the conversation. Perfect man, would flirt with awkwardly.
as a gender diverse person and a 3rd mate, I was so happy to see this, and not just because "BOAT!? TRANS!" but because it shows a trans girl in a maritime environment having a not terrible time, and it's nice to know that that's possible
It's my headcanon that the doctor knew the whole time. Not in a "I can tell by looking at her" kind of way, but a, "I recognize this kind of thing and have seen it before and I'm just going to let her explain to him because it's not my place to tell her life story" kind of way. Because he comes off to me as someone who is... not unfamiliar with the queer community. At all, lol.
Same. It also helps with the trans positive reading of the "you have a lot to learn about women" line. He suspects she's trans and doesn't care either way
This episode came up in a conversation I had yesterday and I said "I'm waiting for that Lily Simpson video" I WAS JOKING, LILY YOU DIDN'T NEED TO MAKE IT THAT QUICKLY
I know technically she was afab but there are so many times where people are like "oh back when she was a little boy growing up" or "Ozma used to be a boy but she was actually a woman the whole time, she just didn't know it." And then she's ALWAYS described as the peak of beauty, the most beautiful woman you could imagine, and she's a kind, sweet, and just ruler. So I choose to believe that she's trans even though technically it's not 100% accurate.
Princess Ozma is my favorite character from the Oz books, and yes, she is totally trans. She also kisses Dorothy a LOT, so she's probably a lesbian too. It's a shame that the only big budget movie she's in, 1985's Return to Oz, they leave out the trans part of it. However she is shown as trans in the TV Show Emerald City.
@@MarkCalise lots of old books have this problem where they say character a kisses character b but they don't specify where lol. Personally I wouldn't ship her and Dorothy because one of the things I really like about Wizard of Oz is that there's no/minimal romance. I love that Dorothy as the main character never has any sort of romantic attraction or love interests or anything. I'm quite sure that the kissing was meant to be on the forehead or cheeks. that doesn't mean you can't headcanon though, lol.
I'd argue that Mombi did assign Ozma as male as an infant. I would say it's maybe closer to an intersex person who is assigned to be male in infancy and later decides to transition to being a girl, or the case of David Raimer (though things turned out much better for Ozma than poor David Raimer)
People forget that Renee Richards was a very famous trans woman starting in the late 1950s. So many people probably remembered her when this Love Boat episode aired
Another older TV show that had a surprisingly good trans episode was The Jeffersons. The main character, George, gets a letter from his old Navy friend asking to meet up. When they do meet up, instead of his old Navy pal, he's approached by...a woman? Gasp!
It's not a surprise, as it's a spinoff of All in the Family, which had a beloved trans character. In fact, I actually remembered that plot line being on All in the Family. I do wonder what Lily would think of Beverly LaSalle. She's played by a drag performer, but the character actually lives in society as a woman the majority of the time, thought not always. So she's clearly at least genderqueer. And (SPOILERS?) (SPOILER SPACE) she does die, protecting one of the other characters, for the character development of another character, Edith (and also, to a lesser extent, Archie). So you could say it was the "bury your queers" trope. On the other hand, that character development is that Edith questions the existence of God. The audience is 100% supposed to identify with her, and not care in the slightest about Beverly's gender. And it very much succeeds. You never saw anyone thinking bad of Edith for feeling that way, or treating it as anything other than sad. (Edith is also why I use "she" for Beverly, not "he." Archie used "he" when he was being his jerky self.)
@@ZipplyZanethat episode, the episode that deals with antisemitism, and the episode that deals with (*pauses to have a trauma flashback*) SA have always stuck with me, for many reasons, kind of like the last episode of MASH.
I just realized what I was remembering on All in the Family. They did an episode with Archie making fun of queer people only to find out his very butch friend was gay. I watch a lot of Matt Baum's episodes. He's similar to Lily in covering gay episodes of shows--but he specialized in older shows and throws in a lot of history. He also may focus on a single person thoughout their life instead. For a while, I think he actually called the show a gay cruise. I know he wore a sailor hat. And I'm sure he covered the Love Boat.
I like to think my dad's love for The Love Boat played a part in him accepting me coming out as trans to him decades later ❤️🚢 Edit: he did remember the episode! He said it stuck with him for a long time because he couldn't dismiss it despite not agreeing with trans people at the time. He also asked for the link to this video and enjoyed it for the nostalgia.
This clip going viral on social media actually helped me reconnect with my mom. She did not react well when I came out and we didn't speak for a while. I knew she watched the show growing up so when I saw the clip I sent it to her. It sparked a productive conversation and helped us understand each other better.
That line about Gopher having a lot to learn about women, I refuse to read that as anything else but Doc being THE SMOOTHEST DAMN MAN ON THAT BOAT. Like, damn, a combo of understanding the tension of the moment and defusing it with his unfettered _game_ is the best way to interpret the scene, and I called out "Daaaamn!" aloud under that pretext.
You're talking about NBC's answer to "The Love Boat" called "SuperTrain". It was a luxury train where a murder took place weekly and the crew had to find out who the killer is before the train reached its destination. It was NBCs most expensive flop at the time and nearly bankrupted the entire network.
i basically spent my whole life assuming the love boat was some kind of weird game show. this is probably the best possible way i couldve found out what it really is
@MacronsKitten yup it was a very coordinated attack on broadening tolerance. I can't remember the name of the video, but Matt Baume has talked about it a few times. The Norman Lear video might be the most comprehensive.
Lol the way you just called it "Reagans" without any apostrophe or follow up descriptor makes it sound like a disease or something, like measles. "Yeah things would pretty great until everyone started dropping from Reagans... kids, neighbors, even our pets came down with Reagans" 😂
In the UK context we often talk of Section 28 and its aftermath, especially censorship in schools, but also notable is that it was part of a Local Government Act. That wasn't just a random place to shove it in, it's specifically there banning public spending because …during the 70s local governments had started spending. Several places even had council funded community centres, specifically for queer people. Things that today would have to be non-profits with corporate sponsors or entirely dependent on donations, were being out-right publicly funded. And of course conveniently by the time Section 28 was repealed, local governments had been gutted to the point they couldn't restart those programmes even they'd wanted to.
Seriously. That guy did about as much damage as the destruction of The Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (Institute of Sexology) at the hands of the NAtional Socialists in the 1930s.
I remember watching a movie in film class back in high school called Some Like It Hot. I believe it was about two men in witness protection in an all female jazz band. It’s been years since I watched it but I still remember the final scene with an old rich chaser on a boat where one of the main characters exclaims “but I’m a man!” And he responds “Well, nobody’s perfect dear”
it's true the show and good representation didn't change this - i think it's more fair to say the episode was a reflection of where the trans and queer struggle was at the time. progress is not a straight line. we've gained a lot but also lost a lot. love boat having a trans positive episode is a reflection of the work of activists and trans folks who had an impact on the tv industry at the time.
Reactionary movements love to portray themselves as the silent majority, taking it for granted that not only do the majority of people agree with them in the present but that almost everybody have agreed with them throughout all time, while presenting queer people and identities as this radical new thing that no one had every heard of before the current generation. But even a cursory look at history shows neither of these things to be true. It is valuable to remember that people can and have done better. At the same time, it is sobering to remember that 'progress' is not a fixed constant and things can get worse instead of better.
70s shows are either wildly bigoted and surprisingly open-minded. there's no in-between but the odd thing is that, in my experience, the older generation talks about them all with equal love and nostalgia.
That's because we lived in a better America than you do. I could easily explain why it's different...but feelings would get crushed by cold hard facts. Social media police would swarm and post "fact check" banners and then delete my comment. 24 hour ban. Fascism things. We can't have that. ❤ Boy do I miss the 70s.
@@Sage_the_Turt Is that supposed to be an insult? My super powers are moving away from ghettos in a single paycheck and leaping over social obstacles with my intellect. I'm WYT GUY!
As a gen x latchkey kid and tv junky i had to have seen this! I don’t remember it but thank you for bringing this back into the light. It likely helped 11 year old closeted me on my journey to self acceptance.
This was really nice to watch. I actually remember watching that episode (probably as a re-run) sometime in the early 80's. I recall it so clearly because I am also trans - but I wanted to counter a little bit of your glowing analysis with how this affected me at the time. Primarily, it made me think that there was no chance what-so-ever that I could ever transition specifically because she was so beautiful and feminine and I was none of those things. I also had to put a lot of other things into context along the way; not just from this episode, but general life, how LGBTQ people were treated from as far back as I can recall, and perhaps most damning from a psychology course I took at university which spent a short segment describing transgender people to us. I was told that a trans person was only trans if they wanted to be heterosexual after transition. That one could not transition unless one already had a very feminine body. (Trans men were not even mentioned!) This all made me think that while I'd really like to transition, it wasn't an option for me. And quite honestly, my cross-dressing forays were never very successful and I most definitely did NOT appear very feminine. But, as these things do, over time one realizes that these things never go away, and I never felt right. Always out of place and always carrying a secret that I felt very much like a woman but couldn't do anything about it. That Loveboat episode was perhaps the _only_ positive depiction I managed to find for many many years. And in the intervening time there were so many other very negative things:-( I'm really sad often to think about how much time I missed before transitioning. But then I remember what the 70s and 80s were like, and indeed the next 30 years after that before I finally decided that I couldn't keep going on lying to myself. And I also am 99% confident that most of the things that are good about my life wouldn't have happened had I transitioned earlier. So, it's a mixed bag. Young trans people need these positive role-models and the loveboat episode was really, really good. But they also need them to be realistic or we don't believe that it actually applies to us.
I brought this up in a psych class once, in the mid-90s. The TA/lecturer was trying to explain that a trans woman who only dated men would view herself as straight. Unfortunately, the way she worded it seemed to imply that all trans people are straight. I’d seen that one Phil Donahue episode with a trans lesbian, so I raised my hand to say trans people can also be gay. She seemed annoyed at first, but then she explained her point a bit better.
That's interesting that you saw her as beautiful and feminine because at the time a lot of people thought MacKenzie was kind of boyish and on the plain side. Maybe because she didn't fit Hollywood's extremely limited standards.
When I started seeing some positive rep in the early 00s, just around college for me, similar general issue, there was some variation but it was very limited (e.g. knew at 5, or at puberty, or once they got out of their parents' house kinds of things), so it was just super super interesting but I didn't even consider and reject the possibility, it just clearly wasn't me which had a feeling of relief lol. Ironically meant much later when I started having somewhat clearer signs that I didn't even think about it.
It's a shame that AGP vs HSTS was being taught as fact in psych courses back then. Even down to the "most HSTS-es have feminine bodies already" thing!! Crikey. Sigh. This pseudoscience has harmed so many.
Don’t get me wrong I really love you’re videos but this one was a breathe of fresh air. I understand and deeply appreciate that your videos often point out how things in popular media that our current society thinks is normal can be bigoted but I’m also super depressed and would really enjoy some more surprisingly positive trans episodes 😁
Holy shit... I hope someone will read this, because it's a lot lol... First of all, DISCLAIMER: I'm going to be quoting some 40 year old language (not slurs, just terminology and ideas that have evolved since the early 1980s) so if you don't want to see that, don't continue. Anyway: for most of my life, I've had an extremely vivid memory. I was watching Three's Company with my mom, and Larry was on a date. It was getting on good, and then she told Larry "I used to be a guy." So I asked my mom what that meant. And she said (here's some more outdated terminology, with weird pronoun usage, but it's what was said) "sometimes a man feels that he is really a woman, so he has an operation and then she is a woman." So yeah, definitely some clumsy wording that most of us wouldn't use today; but for a person in 1982 describing gender dysphoria to a seven year old, I suppose it could have been a lot worse. Anyway, I have tried to find this episode. But I can't. To the point that I'm pretty sure I made the whole thing up, and the episode doesn't exist. Um... this might be it. Like, this might be the episode. Gopher kinda looks like Larry to a seven year old? Maybe? I watched Three's Company more than The Love Boat, so maybe I just slotted the memory in that box. And I know Gopher and Rachel never hooked up (like unquestionably Larry Dallas would have) but it's kinda close.... So um... if this is indeed the TV episode that prompted my mom to tell me that trans people exist and that's perfectly fine, then thanks, The Love Boat!
‘How will I explain it to me children’ well Mrs Concerned Citizen, this person's mum seems to have it covered! The emphasis on surgery isn't ideal of course, but especially in the context of random presumably cis person talking to a child I think is mostly fine really.
@@ohpurpled no, it's certainly not perfect; but it was the early 80s. Cis people in general were still very hung up on the idea of bottom surgery being the point a trans person "becomes" their gender. But yeah, even though it wasn't a perfect description, I'm definitely grateful to have been brought up with the knowledge that people are different and live different lives, and that's ok.
I ran across this episode of the Love Boat a few months ago. Through this whole video, I was saying "Yes! Yes! Yes!" I am old enough to remember what TV and movies were like back then. It was not a liberal Golden age by any stretch , but I still feel like we have moved backward in a lot of ways. Your conclusion, that there is only so much media can do, checks out. Media matters, of course. But there are other forces, inside and outside of media, that are pushing back. Thank you for this. Very well done.
there are like 5 fans of whatever happened to robot jones but it's so important! i've mentioned it before but i'll throw it out there again since you explicitly asked and i doubt a lot of other people are asking for it but the robot jones gender episode is actually so awesome i would be so happy to hear your take on a positive portrayal of queering the gender binary in an early 2000s kids cartoon that i feel is really special and rare
I actually did kind of waltz down to my doctor and ask for hormones and got them. I'm in a deep blue state in the US though. Also, some of your viewers ARE old enough to remember the Love Boat!
you might want to look up the film Better than Chocolate. It does fall into the cis male playing a trans character trope (in this case, Peter Oldring), but the character is unambiguously positive/a protagonist in the film that doesn't fall into the "bury your gays" trope, which is especially surprising considering that the movie came out in 1999. Plus, I think you'd like Oldring's musical number in the movie... :)
"Are you happy" was also what my mom asked me when I came out to her. And she's my biggest supporter now, too. She grew up with this show so I'll need to ask her if she remembers this episode.
"Appreciated this as 40 minutes of background noise while you played games" -- Damn, called me out! But it was genuinely nice to see you cover a really positive example of trans rep.
Lily your videos are a comfort to me right now. Not the content, of course sometimes that's unpleasant, but your videos and voice and the consistency is getting me through some hard life stuff so thank you Lily 🎉
WKRP had a somewhat similar episode. Also from the 70's. It's been a while since I saw it, but it clears the bar set by those 90's and 2000's treatments.
Oh boy, what a fabulous video to go with my morning coffee! Kind of blew my mind seeing the thumbnail, because I’m your (presumably only, lol) really old subscriber-as in, I happily watched the beloved pair of shows, The Love Boat and Fantasy Island, every week during their original airing. But I didn’t remember this one (well, tbh, I don’t really remember any specific episode-did I mention I’m old?), and wow, color me impressed! Handled so much better than lots of stuff way more recent, for sure. I was really touched that no one misgendered Rachel, as well, something I brace for in any depiction even now. And I adored Mackenzie Phillips back in the day ☺️. Fwiw, while I’ve been (mostly) out as queer since my late teens (yes, the 70s did indeed have significant pockets of representation- Rocky Horror was a big part of my young adulthood 💋), it took me until I was nearly 60 to figure out how to express and come out as nonbinary and transmasc (and now I’ve been on T for a little over a year!). I know I would have faced different challenges back then if I’d done it sooner, but the public viciousness now is so disheartening. I’m still happy to be me, though. Thank you so much for doing this one!!
Thanks for the video, gotta explain to my grandma why I'm not coming to easter cause the family doesn't respect me because I'm trans. This helped me word it right, thanks Lily.
I remember watching this episode as a kid. It was one of the first times I heard about trans people. I was a little afraid that it wouldn't hold up, but it seems like it mostly did
To add to your Sisyphean task: Crowley’s Nanny Ashtoreth from Good Omens (the show ofc). It’s such a small part of the show, but Crowley’s canonically genderfluid, and diving a little bit more into just how nonchalant everyone is about it in universe would be interesting I think! :3
As a big GO fan and a trans person myself, I see where you are coming from, however GO has a lot of trans and GNC characters (Belzeebub uses neopronouns and is referred to by they/them in the show for example) other than Nanny, and according to Neil Gaiman all angels and demons are genderless and ageless, so saying they are trans in a canonical sense is not really true (headcanon is fine and I totally support it! #transmanaziraphale for life). They’re definitely queer by definition, but only because humans assign a gender binary to their characters. It also doesn’t seem entirely fair to be to assume that everyone in the show knew that Nanny is “trans” simply because she has a deep voice/is played by Tennant. She is trans in the same way that masc-presenting Crowley is trans. The show has a lot more interesting trans material (notably a lot of metaphors/things more up to interpretation) outside of Nanny, who is just supposed to be a coolass goth woman and an excuse to put Tennant in an awesome wig.
@@r22755 That too! I never said Ashtoreth was trans lol? I'm just saying that Good Omens is a show that definitely could be fun to look into regarding how it handles LGBTQ+ characters and such. I could have worded my previous comment better for sure tho lmao. I agree with ur comment and thanks for pointing all that out! PS: Beez for life, we love them here and I'm a little mad that I forgot abt them ngl
I think that freeze-frame is decent enough if taken as dramatic irony. We've seen these characters work through a lotta conflict and resolution, so for those who hadn't been privvy to those developments to be snapped from one endpoint to another compared to the journey the audience has been in on, there's some humor in that.
I'm 46, and I watched many episodes of The Love boat with my grandma when I was a kid. I really appreciated this episode. I did not remember seeing this trans episode of The Love boat come out, but It's nice to see a recap and analysis of it. Thanks.
You should do a video on the trans storyline in Ugly Betty. I started watching it recently and I don't think it's anything like any storyline you've covered prior on your channel!
Orphan Black trans episode (S02E08). With positive trans masc representation. Probably the only time when cis actor playing trans character is 100% justifiable.
I'm still waiting for you to get to "Best of Friends", the trans Night Court (original series). As for Love Boat, yer dredging up memories here. Who knew a dumb**s show was something that really helped my adolescent self in the way-back of the 70s!
@@alyssestephens7726 it was the “that sinking feeling” episode, where Baljeet’s friend from India was visiting and he needed help wooing her so phineas and ferb hosted a romantic cruise and there was a similar opening section to this show. It was in season three iirc. Had titanic references too but I guess they drew from this show for that musical number
Really enjoyed this video! I'd be interested to see you review the episode " A Boy Named Sue " from Dexter's Lab. While I wouldn't exactly call it outright good representation, it was pretty much my trans awakening as a kid.
I put together part of a floor foundation for a diorama I"m making for a literature class that's due in two days while watching this video. I hope gopher would respect my commitment to cutting popsicle sticks with wire cutters as much as he would respect rachel's commitment to living truly as herself
Every time I see one of these videos I make a point to watch the show first, so I can draw my own conclusions. I did not expect much from The Love Boat but when I sat down and watched this, I cried. It was so well done and I’m amazed this came out of the 80’s.
For further positive depiction of a trans woman character you might want to check out the short lived series “The Education of Max Bickford” starring Richard Dreyfuss. Here is a blurb I found online: “Helen Shaver plays the first transgender character not to be treated as the butt of cruel humor. Like the premise, this unique character was Dreyfuss' idea.”
I always love seeing your videos! I was actually reminded of you randomly last night when watching a show called 9-1-1: Lone Star. I think it was a new episode set during pride? It's mostly stuck out to me because it showed trans people in a good light, while also somehow entertaining my very transphobic mother. I'd love to see you cover the show one day, you have a very fun spin to how you read representation :-).
Actually… (*sorry!*) not really. I mean, sort of, but when folks associate that with the 60s, it’s really just the last few years of that decade. But the 70s-oh yeah, chock full to the brim with free love and drugs and all that counter culture stuff. I know because I was there! 😎
So there's an episode of WKRP in Cincinnati (It's actually the *second* episode, I believe) that's technically about homosexuality but also hard to call a gay episode or a trans episode. One of the characters is accused of being homosexual, which because of the time could end his entire career. He's not, he's just effeminate. There's a whole ongoing sexual harassment played for laughs thing (because of fucking course there is) with one of the male characters and the lead female character. In an attempt to get him to leave her alone he gets told she used to be a man. He then goes through this whole thing about questioning himself because he now believes he's attracted to someone who used to be a man. This whole setup sounds really bad, but this guy later delivers two separate morals that hit well. To the guy who was accused of being gay: Being gay is absolutely a fine thing, but if you're not gay people shouldn't be going around saying you are. And on the subject of his attraction to this woman, he comes to the conclusion that what someone used to be isn't worth a damn, if she's a woman she's a woman. Now, once again I want it to be pointed out that this woman is cis, and this entire episode is based on people having false information, but they still used it to deliver that message and I have a lot of respect for it.
Absolutely made my day! Love to binge these videos, and such a refreshing episode after watching the Orville one. It's good to see a show so lovingly affirm its trans characters.
So glad to see you talking about this episode!!! I used to watch The Love Boat as a kid, weirdly enough. Briefly lived in a rural area with no internet and very very little around to do. We only got like two channels, and one of them only played older shows. So I watched a lot of MASH, Gilligan’s Island, Twilight Zone, Columbo, etc. It’s crazy how well this subject was handled, especially when compared to more modern day examples.
I dunno if you've done it already, the back archive is huge, but there is the trans episode of Rab C Nesbitt with one of David "gender fuckery is my jam" Tennant in one of their first roles on TV as a transwoman. It is a mixed bag in terms of representation. Episode "Touch" from Season 3 of the show. Also, New Ticks did a surprisingly, for a middle class BBC copaganda show, well done episode called A Delicate Touch. IT was the Season 2 opener, and the soft reboot of the show after a rocky first season.
14:07 the way that he slides in made it seem to me like doc was hovering over the conversation waiting for his chance to dance with a beautiful lady, and after eavesdropping on the conversation, he finds a way to step in and dance with her. "gopher has so much to learn about women" is trans positive rizz !
I unfortunately don't have enough energy to leave a more thoughtful comment right now, although I will leave a comment to help with engagement. Yes I was playing a game while watching like you said, and before that I was making a magic deck lol. Great video,
If you wanted an idea from a film, I just rewatched Ghost (1990) and wondered if the love scene in the later part of the film could be analyzed with a trans lens, the movie was so popular and no one was really questioning the gender complexity of that scene, everyone just loved the romance of it all 🤷♀️
Back in like the 50s to 70s trans people were widely viewed as something cool and a marvel of technology. In many ways at least on this issue we have regressed.
Is it possible that the last joke about "left tackle" was a play on words? Left like leaving and tackle like fishing bait and tackle. Sort if as an innuendo fir bottom surgery? Maybe I'm looking too far into it. But I feel like it was specific enough of a position that it had to mean something. Aside from that, thanks for all the work. Lovely stuff. Best wishes.
