Center Square: The Paul Lynde Story

by Steve Wilson and Joe Florenski

 

Center Square: The Paul Lynde Story

Steve Wilson and Joe Florenski

Advocate Books

 

He was the original bitchy queen, and he did it at a time when you almost couldn’t say the word gay on television. Paul Lynde showed mainstream viewers that a gay man could deliver the jokes, not just be the butt of them. In doing so, he helped make homosexuality more palatable to unwitting viewers, who simply saw him as a stylish, funny man.

Center Square is the culmination of a lifelong obsession with Lynde on the part of co-writer Joe Florenski. The book is made up of interviews with people who knew Lynde from his high school days, up to his death, including close friends Cloris Leachman, Phyllis Diller and Charlotte Rae.

In an age when celebrities have turned the act of coming out into an empowering media event, Lynde seems like a campy relic of less liberated times. But, this view of Lynde as an out-of-step, self-loathing queen of queens overlooks the man’s great, if accidental achievement: getting away with being gay on TV on an almost daily basis for years.

(as published in Family & Friends Magazine, November 2005)