Father Knows Best, 1958: Bud flirts with dad a little, then heads out to the baths

     There were lots of good-natured gay winks in the scripts of Father Knows Best; the most over-the-top was when Jim and Margaret strong-armed Bud into getting gay-married, after a fashion, at a wedding rehearsal.
     Our favorite, excerpted and edited below, was Bud's outing to the baths — to try to rectify a wrong for his sister, of course. Only Dobie Gillis and his best bud Maynard provided more unwittingly homoerotic subtext in 50s television.
     Billy Gray, the talented, versatile actor who played Bud Anderson in THE classic American family sitcom, was busted for weed (seeds and stems) in the early 60s and, branded as a dope fiend, didn't work in Hollywood for years. He, though straight, later revealed to Howard Stern that he fooled around enough with one guy to be disqualified from the 60s draft.
     During Vietnam, so many guys discovered that truthfully answering question 20 on the pre-induction medical history questionnaire (Do you have or have you ever had homosexual tendencies?) was a get-out-of-the-draft card that the Pentagon decided to remove the written question and instead had it asked verbally at induction centers, hoping to publicly intimidate inductees into lying about incidental gay episodes in their past so they could still be drafted.