Julia Child: homophobe

I mean she was from the old old school. Very traditional in gender roles, etc

She went through quite a transformation.

That's disappointing to hear because the series is very good. It's also interesting because Julia had a man-in-drag vibe - or a woman trying too hard to be feminine.

She also single handedly saved God's Love We deliver when they were almost out of options, first with all the cash from her and her sister Dorothy's purse and only days later with a huge check.

"Those poor boys should not go hungry."

Pluto TV has a channel dedicated to her shows, it's fascinating to watch.

Julia was also a virgin until she about forty. I mean, we gotta grade on a scale here...

watching as i type this r5!

Repressed dyke.

[quote] She particularly disliked effeminate men.

I genuinely don’t understand this. Too much has been made (in sometimes harmfully stereotypical ways) about shared interests between straight women and gay men. I’m not trying to be too broad here like that. But as a frau who loves beautiful things, camp, ironic art, high culture, and lots of other DL subjects of interest, my first reaction to an effeminate man is gladness, not repellence. I especially don’t get this because I’d assume many straight men acted like she didn’t exist at all, given her looks.

Was Julia protesting too much?

I actually didn't know Child grew up in Pasadena and west to Poly. Pretty snobby and it could help explain her homophobic feelings.

Weren't most people homophobes back then? Hell, even now, looking at the population of our world, most people are homophobes. So, just go to a history book of folks that lived before 1960 and randomly point to a name. You can be pretty damn sure that he or she at least spoke like a homophobe, if not believed as homophobic people believe. How do you know the homophobic words or actions in pre-modern times was due to fear of LGBT people or fear of not conforming in public?

How come the actress playing her didn't try to sound like her? Meryl Streep nail with the Voice.

Lavender marriage, using slurs to deflect from themselves. I mean, look up “butch” in the dictionary and you’ll see Jules’ picture.

She was a woman who was raised in a homophobic world, like most were of her time, but she eventually evolved.

[Quote]David emphasizes that Julia eventually changed her views on homosexuality after losing a friend to AIDS. She eventually became a passionate AIDS activist. David says it’s important that the chef “had the ability to change and see us as human beings"

She also would've made an excellent DLer.

[Quote]I find myself drawn to Julia’s use of the term “homoviper.” I googled, and I can’t find an instance of anyone else using it. This leads me to believe that the French Chef was literally making up her own gay slurs. Wrong? Yes. Creative? Also yes.

^explains the hissing

She certainly wasn't homophobic in her later years. She was neighbors with my clients, who were a very successful and wealthy older gay couple, and she came over to their house all the time for coffee and dinner. I'll never forget walking in the kitchen one morning and seeing her sitting at the counter drinking coffee. Huge and imposing woman.

This was in Santa Barbara during the 90s.

R17, Sorry, during the late 80s.

And how many of our white parents, grandparents and great-grandparents were racists and homophobes because they didn't really know anyone of a different race or any gays? I think we'd be close to 95%.

It was a different time. Gays were not talked about and were actively demonized by government, churches, military - everyone.

I love Sara Moulton for saying she was an egotist and a klutz. Dinner would often have Julia cutting herself and she would put on a tape of Dan Ackroyd doing her for her guests while she was taken to the emergency room.

A klutz or sloshed while cooking?

Yes, but if you looked through most peoples personal correspondence, you would not see many mentions of gay people, let alone a thesaurus of terms .

Since she was a big closet lesbian her objectified "one man, one woman jigsaw puzzle" isn't surprising.

It just took her a while to realize the jigsaw-puzzle theory of relationships does allow that piece do fit together in pleasant and interesting ways outside her peculiarly Victorian notions.

I have said this before but my father's experience with her was completely different. They were friends and would get drunk and cook together and she had no issues with his (obvious) gayness.

She evolved.

It is incredibly difficult to let go of established beliefs you acquired from childhood. Homophobia is a good example. When you are gay yourself, homophobia expresses itself as self loathing and you either face your struggle with your sexual identity or lead a miserable, self loathing life. For straight people, there is less of a motivation to tackle such an established belief, it just stays around while leading your straight life and whenever some gay person crosses your path, you get the "disgusting!" knee-jerk reaction looking for validation and confirmation that the established belief "gay = bad" still applies, shutting yourself off from changing the established belief "gay = bad" until someone really meaningful enters your life who makes you face that "gay = bad" established belief and change it to "maybe not all gays are bad" and later on to "gays are just like us".

The actress IS doing her voice, she is not doing her PERFORMANCE voice the Meryl exaggerated.

Julia was NOT homophobic, she just used bad language, which was common at the time from people of her generation.

Her generation was raised to be homophobic. They managed to change their established beliefs by being exposed to decent Gays, changing their opinions about gay people in the process.

I love all the elder gays and their pathological lying, coming out the woodwork saying the knew they bitch.

I was reading the Variety review of the show and surprised to know this:

[quote] The real Paul Child was questioned during the McCarthy era under suspicion of Communist ties and homosexuality, before he was forced into early retirement.

She was a homophobic bitch. There’s NO justification for it. The fact that she was from an older generation, which was homophobic, is not an excuse. Many people of her generation were not homophobic. They rarely, if ever, discussed it. Julia was outwardly cruel with her remarks.

Julia particularly did not like gay effeminate men. She was very dismissive of them. She could handle masculine gay men, because they fit her idealized image as “real men.”

Yet, she redeemed herself, during the AIDS crises. A gay friend of hers was dying from the disease. She became an AIDS activist, which was wonderful. I think she was instrumental in helping with God’s Love, We Deliver. She deserves credit for this.

I’m not sure, however, if she embraced the gay community. I think she tolerated them, as a whole. Individually, she was more accepting of gay men, as friends and colleges.

R32 here. The word should be “colleagues.” I apologized for the typo.

Eldergay here who hid in the closet for decades so as not to get lynched. EVERYBODY was homophobic till approximately 2010...

Ackroyd's and Streep's Julia are no match for Candy's...

It's a great series. Loving Bebe as well

Well, for what it's worth, my dad was closeted and he would whip out nasty homophobic slurs at the drop of a hat, obviously trying to prove something, and mom, who I believe was aware of said closeted-ness, would join in. I had an art teacher who everyone thought was in a lavender marriage and I still, 30 years later, remember the absolutely vile things my parents said about the couple, for no reason other than I mentioned I was taking an art class.

Since Paul Child was thought to be gay, I never really thought Julia's homophobia was surprising, considering what I witnessed in my own family.

Her work with the government may have also influenced her, as intelligence agencies were very much opposed to homosexuality because they felt it would make someone an easy target for enemy spies.

Oh please. My Father was born in 1912 and my Mother in 1914(my Mother was 42 when she had me). Both parents were artists. Neither was homophobic or racist. Never any derogatory names for anyone. My childhood home was a safe space for everyone. Leonard Thiessen artist was a friend of my parents and they both kept his secret of being gay. Leonard would invite people to lunch and tell my Mother to not eat the appetizers. Leonard put bowls of cat food(cat chow) out for his "guests" to eat. I adored him. When I was three and in an accident where I got 3rd degree burns. He had the Nurse hold me up to the window at the hospital and he drove his yellow Isetta(car) around and around to make me laugh. I have some of his artwork. Red Grooms would come around with his GF who was a Lesbian. Oh the stories. Edward Everett Horton was my Father's cousin and those stories are hilarious.

I think Julia is a fun series and the acting is wonderful.

The way Stanley Tucci played Paul Child he did seem HOMOSEXUAL. Their marriage reminded me of that early episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation where on that planet the women were large and domineering and the men were small and passive.

The show seems to play them as they were - two late-blooming people who were very affectionate with each other, maybe because it took them each so long to find anyone who felt that way about them?Whether they were late bloomers because of sexual preference they didn’t feel able to express, or just general awkwardness and not fitting in, is the open question.

Stanley Tucci seems a bit gay in ever role eh plays and super gay on his Italy show.

Some men are just like that.

R41- Some GAY men are just like that

Just watched the first episode. I loved it!

Don't know much about Child and only watched it because of this thread. You bitches always steer me in the right TV direction...

R24 Your dad was gay, Rescue Chick?

my father was out and proud r44.

LOVE this series! Finally something on TV made for adults.

Nonetheless, in 1992, she was once hit with a $3 million lawsuit by Daniel Coulter, a San Francisco man who alleged that Child thwarted his appointment as director for the American Institute of Wine and Food because he was gay.

“The lawsuit was settled out of court because it would have cost us so much more to bring the case to trial,” Child explains during a phone interview from her home in Connecticut. “That fellow got something like 30 to 40 thousand dollars. So it was probably worth his while. I've nothing against gay people. I work with them all the time. It doesn’t make any difference to me what you are.”

R45 That’s so cool, especially for back then!

David Hyde Pierce is a 62 year old sex symbol? I had to read that three times to make sure I read that correctly.

YES, BARFOLA WITH ALL THE ELDER-SEX!!!

R49- I've heard that there are some who still describe Robert Redford as handsome and he's 84 years old.

NO ONE is handsome or good looking at 84 years old anymore- not even straight men

All they can look at best is WELL PRESERVED.

No one is handsome or good lucking at 84, ESPECIALLY straight men R51

Looking ^^

she just called potatoes queer on pluto!

bitch

I just finished watching the HBO Max series about her - it was marvelous. the episode with James Beard and the drag queens, especially Miss Coq Au Vin, was making me applaud midway through the episode. It was lovely to see the openness of society being so prevalent in early 1960s San Francisco. The beatniks really did put a start on good social change, for such a stuffy time in American society.

Sarah Lancashire, who portrays Julia, did an excellent job with her mannerisms but I do not like her voice impression. Julia was much more 'brisk' and honestly more masculine. She was not a dainty old flower, as the show portrays her. She was a tough cookie who went through WWII in the OSS. It was great television, I've been watching Jamie and Julia so I've been on a huge Julia Child kick. I'm going through depression and for a little while, my own problems both disappear and manifest before me. That's what makes good watching. Very excited about season 2.

Watching season 2 and admiring the production values. The story is a little siloed in Boston and France. Isabella Rossellini’s scenes are some of the best. Some plot devices feel more obviously factionalized. I know they have to do that to build a script, but it feels irritating and phony. Stockard Channing is always good.

Wasn’t she a spy?

R57, she worked for the OSS in ww2. Her job was developing some sort of shark repellent to be used when sailors had to abandon ships. The stories about shark attacks on sailors is beyond horrifying.

R58 I also think she was also a spy and so was her husband. That’s how they met. The shark repellent she developed led to her cooking career. She looks a bit like Stephen Fry in the pic below.

Wasn’t it confirmed that she was a spy?