It seems that Mister Rogers, America's favourite neighbor, has all the time been the bisexual icon we didn't know we needed.
It appears like Fred Rogers — better known to most as Mister Rogers, everyone's friendliest adolescence neighbor — is having something of a resurgence thank you to Morgan Neville's award-winning Won't You Be My Neighbor and the impending biopic that may megastar Tom Hanks as the previous minister became TV character.
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But as you'll have spotted, his title has been all over social media this week because individuals are coming to learn that Mister Rogers would possibly have actually identified as a member of the LGBTQ neighborhood.
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Unsurprisingly, Mister Rogers never referred to himself as explicitly "bisexual," however terminology aside, Twitter seems to have dug up an interview by which he declared he fell right in the course of the sexuality spectrum, finding both men and women of equal enchantment.
The discovery followed from a dialog between a queer YouTuber and her grandma.
It was a recent Twitter thread that spurred on the discovery of Mister Rogers' bisexuality. YouTuber Cece Ewing posted about a fresh dialog she had along with her grandmother, during which the grandmother was surprisingly the one to destroy the news.
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"Wildest thing that's happened to me lately is when I went to talk to my grandmother and she was like, 'Did you know Mr. Rogers was bisexual?'" Cece's thread started. "And my gay ass, gay of the family, Miss Family Homosexual had to be like 'he was WHAT?'"
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"After she watched the new documentary, she read the Mr. Rogers' biography," Cece continued. "Apparently he never used the word but in an interview where he was asked if he was gay, he said something like 'I'm not gay, but I suppose if you look at attraction as a kind of line ... I would probably be somewhere in the middle' and like. WHAT.'
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It's well known to fans of Mister Roger's (and who isn't a fan?!) that he was incredibly tolerant and open-minded with his thinking, so much so that many of his views were considered groundbreaking at the time.
If you happened to catch Won't You Be My Neighbor, you'll remember Officer François Clemmons, one of the first African-Americans with a recurring role on a kids' TV show, first appeared in Mister Rogers' Neighborhood back in 1968. Together, François and Mister Rogers made a bold statement by sharing a foot bath at the height of desegregation.
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Mister Rogers celebrated people for their differences and lived by the motto of liking people for being "simply the way they are." He taught audiences that a person cannot be defined by merely one quality and according to director Morgan Neville, "What I think was really unique about what Mister Rogers was doing is that he embraced other folks's area of expertise."
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"He had people on who you did not see on TV. Not just racial range, however ... particular needs youngsters, which [he had on] all the time," he advised ABC News. "He celebrated people for his or her differences."
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Here's what Mister Rogers said about his sexuality.
Because of his sensitivity and dedication to children, in addition probably to the way he didn't subscribe to the mainstream presentations of masculinity in that era, Mister Rogers was often labeled as "homosexual" or a "sissy." He himself told the New York Times back in 1975 that because he's "no longer John Wayne," people have trouble seeing him as "the fashion for the man in the home."
But what he did concede was that sexuality was more of a spectrum, and in a conversation with the openly gay Dr. William Hirsch, the two discussed something like the Kinsey Scale (or Heterosexual-Homosexual Rating Scale). Mister Rogers was quoted as saying: "Well, you understand, I will have to be proper smack within the middle. Because I have found ladies sexy, and I've discovered males sexy."
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The internet is ecstatic they've found a bisexual icon in Mister Rogers.
As you can probably imagine, queers, bisexuals, and really all of the other letters that make up the LGBTQ community were proud to discover Mister Rogers was actually a bisexual icon. "I will be able to't believe Mr. Rogers is if truth be told the Saint of Bisexuals," tweeted one particular person, "the kindest bisexual, the bisexual we all aspire to be as sort and loving as."
Another wrote, "That sound you pay attention across Twitter is the shrieking of 1000 bisexual adults overjoyed to to find out a adolescence hero, Mr. Rogers, is one in all our own."
"MR ROGERS IS THE BISEXUAL ICON THAT WE NEED IN 2019!!!!!" added anyone else. This Pride, let's no longer put out of your mind to rejoice everyone's favourite neighbor.
Won't You Be My Neighbor? is streaming free of charge on Hulu.
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