My Brief Little Crush on Rudolf Nureyev

The type of people who read my blog aren't likely to be the type of people who ask stupid and disingenuous questions like "wHy IsN't ThErE a StRaIgHt PrIdE mOnTh?" But the latter are probably dumb enough to stumble here by accident while looking for Trump porn, so just in case that happens, I'll explain it again. Pride Month and Pride parades evolved from the Stonewall riots, which were a backlash against police doing what police do best: harassing and bullying marginalized people for no reason. Gay people decided they didn't want to live as third-class citizens anymore. They decided they should be allowed to exist in public and love themselves. If straight people had literally just not persecuted them, Pride Month wouldn't be a thing. So everyone who never lifted a finger to defend their rights or dignity but now has a problem with Pride Month existing ought to shut the hell up. The more you bitch and moan about being forced to notice that LGBTQ people exist, the more you prove that Pride Month needs to exist, and the more you motivate people to Pride even harder. Derp.

I'm not gay, even though I was called "faggot" five times a day in elementary school, but in honor of Pride Month, I decided to share the time I was attracted to Rudolf Nureyev when I saw him on the Muppet Show as a kid. It wasn't like the crushes I had on girls whom I thought were pretty. He just had some kind of charisma that I couldn't define. He just fascinated me in a different way than the other guest stars. When I looked him up and found out he was gay, I concluded that gayness must be contagious. I think a lot of straight men have historically thought that being gay was contagious. I think that's why they've used slurs and committed hate crimes against gay men instead of being grateful to have less competition. Today in 2024, morons still think that their children will become gay if they're allowed to see gay people existing, so we still have a long way to go in conveying to Republicans a basic understanding of how the world works. So anyway, that frightened me a little. The fact that he died of AIDS also reinforced my perception that gay people were sexual degenerates. He had fewer partners than Donald Trump, though. And a lot fewer than Joseph Smith.

I've been watching The Muppet Show from start to finish this year to make the most of the overpriced Disney+ subscription that I share with a friend. When I got to the Rudolf Nureyev episode, I realized that people may be skeptical of me saying that my attraction to him wasn't physical. In one scene, he wears tight white pants that leave little of his ass cheeks to the imagination.

In another, he wears a towel in a steam room. This scene revolves around Miss Piggy sexually harassing him, singing "Baby It's Cold Outside" (which really wasn't a sexual harassment song in the cultural context of the 1940s, but is in a very different context here), and (spoiler alert) eventually pulling his towel off. I guess it was extra funny because of his sexuality, which was an open secret. Besides the obvious problems with this scene, I'm a little sad that they didn't sing "Rudolf the Red-Faced Russian" instead.

Watching the show as an adult has made me realize that Miss Piggy is a straight-up sexual predator. Even in the 1970s, people wouldn't have laughed at the dynamic between her and Kermit if the gender roles were reversed. She's worse than Pepé Le Pew. At least he was sincerely oblivious and never karate-chopped Penelope into a wall for refusing his advances.

But on a more positive note, I was also astonished to learn that the Great Gonzo has been canonically bisexual since 1979. I can't believe I've never heard anyone mention that before. In the Leslie Uggams episode, Gonzo is smitten with Big Bird. I thought the punchline would be him realizing that Big Bird is a boy, but the actual punchline is Camilla getting jealous and dropping a flowerpot on his head. It's never implied that the same-sex aspect of this attraction is weird or degenerate. (Technically Big Bird has the mind of a young child, but Gonzo didn't know that, so give him a break.) In the Roger Miller episode, he finds Kermit attractive after the latter turns into a chicken. Since the film "Muppets in Space" established that Gonzo is an alien, my hypothesis is that all the aliens in the finale were male, and the females of his species look like chickens.

Nureyev feared for his safety and defected from the Soviet Union in 1961 in part because of his sexuality. If he were alive today, he would still have to avoid Russia, because it's still an extremely homophobic country. It's a country that arrests journalists for interviewing gay people. No wonder Republicans think Ukraine is the bad guy.