Was mr rogers neighborhood gay

Multiple generations of Americans grew up watching Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood, the long-running children's television show () hosted by the cardigan-wearing Fred McFeely Rogers, who died in. In any case, Long successfully demonstrates that Rogers, who had studied both theology and child development, had put a lot of thought and skill into the things he said to very young children.

People who say that are clearly operating out of a restrictive and toxic understanding of masculinity-as-domination that I reject entirely, so who cares about meeting their standards? I was surprised to learn that, during the first Gulf War, Betty Aberlin and Fred Rogers had a fairly serious dispute over how to make best use of the platform they had to address the peace they both longed for—with Aberlin wanting to take a much more radical stand.

SMB: Could you begin by situating the book a bit?

Was Mister Rogers Bisexual? : Even though Rogers’s family was relatively well-off, he had a

Compassion is the adjective Rogers used when asked how he wanted to be remembered, and it is the practice that he tried to instill in his viewers so that they would become peacemakers. So rather than donning cut-off jeans and angrily pumping a peace sign while marching in the streets, he quietly modeled compassion as the antidote to violence, This does not mean he rolled over in a namby-pamby way, as the folk singer Pete Seeger once described him.

Another major aim of the book is to present Rogers as a radical pacifist—not a wimpy milksop, but a man of great and countercultural conviction. Doing so Rogers felt, as he put it, strong. The strength of this conviction led him to create a program that sought to undermine an entire society poised to kill.

Was that a big surprise to you as well? Rogers' unfaltering kindness and compassion certainly extended to the LGBTQ community.

Was Fred Rogers Bisexual? : People are ecstatic about finding out that Fred Rogers, the star of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, was bisexual

Thankfully, the reader winds up getting a lot more than a hagiography. Instead, Long offers us moments of Rogers being human—and that includes conflicts with cast members, decisions that were not as prophetic or consistent as one might wish in retrospect, and even some insecurities.

I confess that this got my dander up at first. Long shows that Rogers himself worried that people might misunderstand his gentleness as wimpiness. Thich Nhat Hanh once said that marching in the streets does not create peace.

Here are the two big things I discovered: 1. Clemmons was a core cast member of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood until On his last show with Rogers (during which the pair recreated their iconic, color-barrier-breaking sharing of a kiddie.

Long was kind enough to engage some of these questions over email from Elizabethtown College, where he teaches. The model Rogers offers—one of being peace —is more closely aligned with Zen Buddhism than with the macho form of Christian pacifism that you so accurately identify.

But others have reported their experiences with him on the topic. Rogers didn't go on the record with specific opinions about LGBTQ people or the matters that affect them (at least from what I could find). As I was reading Peaceful Neighbor, I wondered whether it was part of a wider conversation on nonviolence… or maybe even a not-yet-conversation that needs to become a conversation.

Aberlin appealed to her Christian convictions, as Rogers elsewhere did to his. But those of us who grew up watching Mister Rogers may discover, in reading Peaceful Neighbor, that we were hoping for a hagiography. Is that fair?

All this from the man who kept blessedly telling kids that they gay documentary netflix acceptable just as they were. This article originally appeared on Religion Dispatches.

You seem to be offering a different model here—a Christian pacifist who is neither a conflict-averse fussbudget nor an aggressively overcompensating dudebro. Rogers might have sounded and looked wimpy, but he was fiercely dedicated to a pacifism rooted in human dignity for all.

We get Fred Rogers, the ordained minister, whose television persona was built on a scaffold of theological and pastoral conviction. Without that background, it would be easy to imagine that Rogers came across as he did because he just happened to be a peculiarly benevolent person who was very kind in the way someone else might be very tall, or very tone-deaf.