Gays loved Bea Arthur’s Dorothy, Maude and Vera

As I scrolled down updates on Facebook and Twitter last night, I was struck by the outpouring of affection from my gay pals for Beatrice Arthur who died Saturday at the age of 86.

Some Facebook status updates:  “Goodbye Dorothy … sleep well … see you in heaven … miss you … pussycat”  – Mario. “R.I.P. Bea Arthur. Tonight the Rainbow is dim” – Ant. And my favorite from Jim Colucci who wrote that he “felt funny asking for it at the time, but now is glad he got that hug from Bea Arthur. God, I loved her!”

People are posting all kinds of videos featuring Miss Arthur, most from her two series but also other gems like the Sex and the City parody (see video below) she did on the TV Land Awards a few years ago.

Since she was never a star who showed up on every talk show to talk endlessly about herself, we mainly knew Miss Arthur from her iconic roles and I wonder if that’s why we feel such a loss. It’s so hard to believe that Maude Findlay has been silenced or that Dorothy Zbornak isn’t going to deliver any more zingers. Or that the actress will never sing “Bosom Buddies” from Mame with her pal Angela Lansbury again (video posted below) or tell an audience at  her one-woman show – in that wonderful husky voice, how to make lamb (You must buy a CD of her one-woman show to hear that!).

Of that fabulous one-woman show, the Tony-nominated Bea Arthur on Broadway: Just Between Friends, she had said: “I simply wanted to see if I had the guts to just come out and be myself which is something I never felt comfortable doing.”

The stage was her first love and we may have never have known her outside of that medium had Norman Lear not discovered her singing the song “Garbage” in the off-Broadway show The Shoestring Revue. She also starred on Broadway in The Threepenny Opera, Fiddler on the Roof and, most memorably, was the sharp-tongued Vera Charles opposite Angela Lansbury in the Broadway production of Mame. She won a Tony Award as Vera and went on repeat the role in the movie version. Unfortunately, a miscast Lucille Ball was chosen to portray Mame over Lansbury and the film was a major bomb.

Still, Miss Arthur was delicious in it!

But she leaves behind all of that delicious television – those Golden Girls episodes that never get old. And the revolutionary Maude that I watched as a kid but did not really understand. It was not until I watched the DVDs of season one recently that I really appreciated the brilliance of that series and why Maude the feminist was so appealing to we repressed gay men. She was, as one critic wrote: “A savagely witty, cynical and serpent-tongued woman who is at once a terror, a scourge, the relentless voice of truth and a pleasure to have around.”

Beatrice Arthur made those characters indelible and has left such a mark on pop culture. I hope she knew how much people admired and appreciated her.