“Bewitched,” the classic ‘60s-era TV sitcom starring Elizabeth Montgomery, featured a twitchy-nosed witch named Samantha Stephens hiding in plain sight of her neighbors in an American suburb.
But when she hid her magic from all mortals, was Samantha also sending a message of solidarity to other marginalized groups, particularly the LGBTQ+ community?
That’s the question Hammond Castle Museum in Gloucester invites the public to think about on Saturday as part of its first-ever Pride celebration with showings of “Darrin on a Pedestal,” an episode partly shot at the castle in 1970.
In the episode, Samantha’s mortal husband, Darrin Stephens, is turned into Gloucester’s famed fisherman’s statue. Screenings will be followed by a family-friendly talk about the queer history and subtext of the ABC sitcom that ran from 1964 to 1972. Screenings are free with reservations and showtimes are on the hour, from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m.
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“One of the things that people don’t know about ‘Bewitched’ is it has long been read by members of the gay community as an allegory of being in the closet,” said Caleb McMurphy, the museum’s director of visitor services & education. “Samantha can’t be who she is, openly, and has to repress it.”
The smash series, seemingly playful and silly about a witch who marries a mortal advertising executive, was premised more deeply on keeping secrets and blending in with mainstream society. The gay allegory was compounded by the cast — many of them either gay, believed to be, or viewed as gay icons — and the unconventional characters they portrayed, according to contemporary analysis.
Robert Thompson, a media professor at Syracuse University, categorizes “Bewitched” as “queer television that wasn’t explicitly queer television,” and believes it helped pave the way for more express representations of the LGBTQ+ community.
“‘Bewitched’ is filled with all of this coded, queer imagery and queer sensibility, including a lot of actors in it who were gay or lesbian,” Thompson said in a telephone interview. “But the coding was pretty obvious, I think, and it became more obvious to people as consciousnesses were raised.”
The show ran before television was friendly to issues of gay rights and characters coming out, and functioned as a vehicle to slip in those subtexts, said Thompson.
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The Stonewall uprising in New York City on June 28, 1969, which sparked an international gay rights movement, occurred during the height of the show’s popularity.
“Back then, entertainment and television was really not allowed in any significant way to deal with what was actually really happening in the real world and the news, so it often had to be disguised,” said Thompson, who teaches about television and popular culture.
Shows like “The Twilight Zone” and “Star Trek” would “sneak in stories about race” by disguising them as “otherworldly” encounters, Thompson said.
“Bewitched” did the same thing with queer themes, he said. “You can’t come out and say it, but you have to say it, because that’s what’s happening in the real world.”
In one episode, titled “The Witches Are Out,” a coven of witches considers coming out of hiding to reveal how harmless they really are but quickly remember that the last time they did that, they were burned at the stake.
In another, Samantha sees a doctor because repressing her magic is having ill effects. He tells her she’ll always be a witch and to stop feeling guilty about her true self.
Montgomery, who was married to the show’s creator, Bill Asher, told The Advocate, a publication devoted to the LGBTQ+ community, in 1992 that they were aware of the show’s social themes.
“We talked about it on the set, that this was about people not being allowed to be what they really are,” she said. “If you think about it, ‘Bewitched’ is about repression in general and all the frustration and trouble it can cause.”
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“It was a neat message to get across to people at that time in a subtle way,” Montgomery said.
The show’s cast and the character’s they portrayed furthered the metaphors.
Dick Sargent, the second actor to play Samantha’s husband, long was a closeted gay man. When he came out in 1991, Montgomery showed her support by serving as his co-marshal of the Los Angeles Pride Parade.
Samantha’s mother, Endora, was an unapologetic witch who spoke like a feminist and dressed like a drag queen. And then there was Uncle Arthur, flamboyantly portrayed by zany actor Paul Lynde, who was in real life flamboyant and stereotypically gay.
Thompson said many viewers, like himself, didn’t pick up on the gay themes until later, but he is certain there were many in the audience who found “comforting recognizability” in the show.
“If there are no other examples of you in television, to speak of, except for bits and pieces here and there, you took it where you could get it,” Thompson said.
Showcasing the changing attitudes about gay-friendly television is fitting for Hammond Castle, McMurphy said.
John Hays Hammond Jr., a pioneer in the study of remote control technology who had romantic relationships with both men and women, died in 1965. He regularly hosted gatherings of avant-garde artists, actors, writers, and musicians, and befriended the era’s equivalent of “out” personalities, McMurphy said.
“It became evident that we have a huge and very interesting amount of queer history concentrated here,” McMurphy said. “We’re very excited to move forward with a whole slate of Pride events.”
For a listing of Hammond Castle Museum’s Pride Month offerings, click here.
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Tonya Alanez can be reached at tonya.alanez@globe.com. Follow her @talanez.