America’s radical gay lawyer
As Perry Mason, Raymond Burr tries to teach you to see
My ultra-Christian dad used to take long lunch breaks to watch re-runs of a T.V. show about an ultra-sharp trial lawyer who never lost a case.
When I heard the star, Raymond Burr, was gay, I had to laugh. But I started to think about Perry Mason in a new way. The character’s personal life was never referenced. Wasn’t Perry Mason a closeted gay man?
It was a strange plot point to give Perry no private life of any kind.
He has no girlfriends, no dating history. He also has no ‘beards’, women who seem like odd covers for a man of doubtful heterosexuality.
He just shows up for work, day after day. As I think about the show, considering Burr’s own homosexuality, it’s hard not to conclude Perry was presented as a closeted gay man—hardly an anomaly in 1950s America.
But he had something he wanted America to know: reality is more complex than they understand. Perry reads clues and codes. He reads motives and senses misdirection, and in the process he solves mysteries. But he was really teaching the world ‘queer reading’.
