‘Visible: Out on Television’ Is Missing One Major Queer Icon: Charles Nelson Reilly

Visible: Out on Television is a remarkable docu-series, the first truly must-watch event in the Apple TV+ lineup. The series comes from the team behind Netflix’s The Keepers, and it’s a vital, comprehensive archive of seldom-seen footage and important artifacts from queer history. Queer record-keeping is scattershot at best, through no fault of our own. Decades of queer culture were dismissed as trivial or even perverse, our stories are kept out of schools, our trailblazers were forced to keep a foot in the closet out of self-preservation, and AIDS silenced generations of storytellers. Visible: Out on Television does the hard work, telling the history of LGBTQ community through the televised era from the Lavender Scare to Pose, complete with eye-opening footage of the struggle as it was depicted in panic-driven news specials, well-meaning sitcoms, damaging daytime talk shows, televised protests, and more. As far as comprehensive and compelling queer history tomes go, Visible might just be the new go-to.

That’s why I can’t let the Visible moment happen without mentioning Charles Nelson Reilly, the Tony-award winning performer and director most known for camping it up on sitcoms and beaming positive queer energy into millions of households five days a week on the ’70s game show Match Game. He is a towering icon of queer history and a pioneer of gay visibility, and he barely gets a mention in Visible’s Episode 2 (“Television as a Tool”). I am here to do my best to fix that. I owe that much to Chuck, after all his onscreen antics have done for me.

But first, let me just say that this is not a dig on Visible. Despite what angry conservatives think, queer people have actually been around a while and do have a deep, expansive history. Compressing 70 years of history into five hours is a noble yet unenviable task. Things are going to get left out, and when it comes to the game show gays of the ’70s, it’s impossible to squeeze them all in. I don’t know what Visible could or should have cut in order to make room for CNR in a segment that was clearly going to be dominated by Paul Lynde. That’s why I needed to write this, because the idea of life of Reilly being just a footnote in this important work was—and this is actually not hyperbole—too much for me to bear.

None of this, by the way, is a dig on Paul Lynde, either. I love Paul Lynde. And I hate pitting the two against each other, but… honestly, that’s the space they occupy in pop culture. They’re forever linked, as Broadway gays (Lynde in Bye Bye Birdie in 1960; Reilly in How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying in 1961), as sitcom gays (Lynde in Bewitched in 1965; Reilly in The Ghost and Mrs. Muir in 1968), and as game show gays (Lynde on Hollywood Squares starting in ’66; Reilly on Match Game starting in ’73).

Their resumes are almost mirror images of each other, with Lynde always getting there first. Maybe that’s why Lynde always seems to get the spotlight at the expense of Reilly, as if there’s never room to write or talk about both. And I’m not even getting into the other pioneering sitcom/game show gays of the ’60s and ’70s, like Hayden Rorke, Richard Deacon, Dick Sargent, Maurice Evans, Dick Clair, Jim Nabors, Robert Moore, Fannie Flagg—I could keep going!

But by only talking about Lynde, a hilarious performer who brought queer-coded comedy into living rooms across America, Visible ignores the equally massive, possibly more profound impact that Reilly had on Match Game viewers. Visible doesn’t understate Lynde’s importance; Lynde was a beacon of light for gay kids as the mischievous warlock Uncle Arthur and as the center square. But Visible also doesn’t shy away from Lynde’s dark side as a rather angry drunk. Lynde was fabulously funny, but he was also cold, snarky, and distant—and he was taken from us way too soon.

Reilly played a similar role to Lynde’s as Match Game’s resident gay, but the similarities stopped there. Reilly was warm and open, sometimes a playful grump and sometimes a gregarious weirdo. It’s impossible to think of a show more suited to Reilly’s personality; whereas Hollywood Squares kept celebrities physically isolated and provided some pre-written zingers, Match Game had a free-wheeling format that kept all six panelists together, close enough to clink their always overflowing glasses. That allowed for Chuck to form an iconic, Karen and Jack-style duo with legendary hag Brett Somers, and it also let him mix it up with the rotating cast of macho athletes, mild-mannered character actors, kooky ingenues, ladies men, and Eva Gabor-types (of which there is only one, Eva Gabor) that populated the panel. Match Game’s gay archetype wasn’t confined to a singular box. Reilly was a free-range gay, allowed to run amok with extremely little censorship (for the time).

Keep in mind, Chuck got to be his bawdy, authentic, neckerchief-sporting, toupee-wearing, pipe-smoking, sock-less self on the highest-rated daytime show of the ’70s—higher rated than Hollywood Squares. This endearing yet edgy (for ’70s daytime) man was a best friend to a generation of stay-at-home parents and latchkey kids—multiple generations if you factor in the hours of reruns that still run to this day.

What Reilly accomplished on Match Game, maybe a solitary pinky still in the closet, was remarkable and, at times, political. Take, for instance, the time host Gene Rayburn gave the panelists a prompt about notorious bigot Anita Bryant, whose story is also told in Episode 2 of Visible:

Reilly did have an actual answer (he wasn’t going to deprive the contestant from the opportunity to make a match, after all), but you can’t deny the straight-up badass-ness of a not-allowed-to-be-out comedian sticking it to Anita Bryant on daytime TV in front of evangelical moms.

Now, take all of that and put it in this context: when Reilly interviewed with an NBC executive around 15 years prior, that exec told him to his face that “they don’t let queers on television.” Reilly, who starred in around 1,500 episodes of Match Game from 1973 to 1991, got the last laugh by making millions laugh.

Killing it on Match Game is nothing to be ashamed of, but Reilly did so much more than that (no matter what that one sketch wants you to think). For my generation (I think we’re called Old Millennials right now, but I also don’t care), Reilly’s turn as the quirky sci-fi novelist Jose Chung in the X-Files episode “Jose Chung’s From Outer Space” means almost as much as him making a match.

That off-kilter masterpiece is a fan-favorite episode for its blend of horror and humor, a mixture the X-Files excelled at, but it’s Reilly’s turn as the inquisitive, hunched over, ascot-wearing interrogator that takes it up a notch. It’s a calmer, quieter side of Reilly, a performance that shows just how much character he could convey with a turn of his head.

Reilly’s list of accomplishments doesn’t begin or end with Match Game or X-Files. He made a name for himself as a Broadway legend. He won a Tony Award for How to Succeed… and scored two more nominations (one in 1964 for Hello, Dolly! and one in 1997 for directing The Gin Game). He was a highly sought after theater director and teacher, and he often turned down acting gigs if it would take him away from his students. He studied under the legendary Uta Hagen where he was classmates with Frank Langella, Hal Holbrook, Jerry Stiller, Anne Meara, and Harvey Korman. He was literally best friends with Burt f’ing Reynolds and, I’m not making this up, he was a survivor of the infamous Hartford circus fire of 1944 that killed 167 people. The man lived.

In the early ’00s, he turned his remarkable life into an acclaimed one-man storytelling show, Save It For the Stage: The Life of Reilly. His final performances in 2004 were documented by the film The Life of Reilly, which premiered at South by Southwest in 2006. He passed away almost a year later, in May 2007.

This, all of this, is why Charles Nelson Reilly needs to be remembered, but none of these reasons compare, in my own heart, to what he means to me. Queer history feels like personal history, and that’s what Visible communicates so clearly. It feels like since we, as queer people, have been denied these stories, heroes, these points of connection all our lives, we relate hard to them when we finally get them. That’s why it feels appropriate for me to editorialize a bit more, like I was a talking head in Visible.

Seeing Charles Nelson Reilly on Match Game for the first time in a rerun on the Game Show Network, it gave me—a deeply-closeted 17-year-old—a feeling of direction. Like, after spending  17 years spinning around in circles, magnetically repelled from sports and guns and dating girls and whatever else boys did in Tennessee, seeing Chuck just absolutely living in his skin pointed me in a direction that I’m still walking (I mean, I’m writing this article 18 years later). He made me want to be bigger, grander, and gayer years before I was ready to accept the fact that I’m a friend of Dorothy. And when I did accept that fantastic fact about myself, I proudly became a friend of Charles.

Queer people, we have to preserve our history and tell our stories. Visible does a tremendous job of that, and it’s an invaluable resource for future generations. But I had to make sure that Charles Nelson Reilly, my gay guardian angel, was more than a name in a list of ’70s gays. I owe it to him, after all he did for us, and all he did for me.

Stream Visible: Out on Television on Apple TV+