Matt Baume

I haven’t been across the whole internet, but I bet there’s no one more dedicated to excavating the history of queer representation in twentieth century American sitcoms than Matt Baume. In his Culture Cruise series, he shows that as long as there have been gay people, there have been gay people on TV, and often more progressively than we remember (though always with a “for its time” caveat). If you watch a bunch of the episodes, you start to see how TV shows both pushed the envelope and reacted to societal changes in the acceptance of queer people. And he’s managed to dig up some truly obscure shows. The first line of this episode pretty much sums it up: Hey, did you know that there was a married gay couple on television in the 1970s and no one seems to remember them?

Mental Floss

Mental Floss does lists of random trivia. That’s…pretty much it. And lately they’ve started doing histories of 1980s children’s ephemera, cause they know exactly the demographic their audience is. (Guilty.) If you ever wanted to know a full history of the Garbage Pail Kids...