Fred Rogers - Blog Posts

“ In August, 1968, the country was still reeling from the assassination of Martin Luther King four months earlier, and the race riots that followed on its heels. Nightly news showed burning cities, white flight, radicals and reactionaries snarling at each other across the cultural divide.

“A brand new children’s show out of Pittsburgh, which had gone national the previous year, took a different approach. Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood introduced Officer Clemmons, a black police officer who was a kindly, responsible authority figure, kept his neighborhood safe, and was Mr. Roger’s equal, colleague and neighbor.

“Around the first anniversary of Martin Luther King’s death, Mr. Rogers invited Officer Clemmons to join him in soaking their tired feet in a plastic wading pool. And there they were, brown feet and pasty white feet, side by side in the water. Silently, contemplatively, without comment.

“25 years later, when the actor playing Officer Clemmons retired, his last scene on the show revisited that same wading pool, this time reminiscing. Officer Clemmons asked Mr. Rogers what he’d been thinking during their silent interlude a quarter century before. Fred Rogers’ answer was that he’d been thinking of the many ways people say “I love you.”

- Carl Aveni’s FB page

I was just watching the video of Mr Rogers talking to that senator and now I think if Horrid Henry were to watch Mr Rogers’ he’d really like it.

Cause clearly his parents aren’t teaching him about emotional regulation and the boy clearly needs it. Maybe then he wouldn’t be so “horrid” if he had a healthy outlet for his rage.

[First image description: text reading:

Rogers himself was often labeled "a sissy," or gay, in a derogatory sense. But as his longtime associate Eliot Daley put it: "Fred is one of the strongest people I have ever met in my life. So if they are saying he's gay because...that's a surrogate for saying he's weak, that's not right, because he's incredibly strong." He adds: "He wasn't a very masculine person, he wasn't a very feminine person; he was androgynous."

In a 1975 interview for The New York Times, Rogers noted drolly: "I'm not John Wayne, so consequently, for some people I'm not the model for the man in the house.

In conversation with one of his friends, the openly gay Dr William Hirsch, Fred Rogers himself concluded that if sexuality was measured on a scale of one to ten: "Well, you know, I must be right smack in the middle. Because I have found women attractive, and I have found men attractive.

Michael Horton, the voice of Neighborhood puppets and a close Rogers-family friend for decades, notes that he is always asked first about Fred Rogers: "Was he really like that?" End first image description.]

[Second image description: Fred Rogers in a red cardigan and patterned tie, smiling, with the bisexual pride flag photoshopped in behind him as backdrop. End second image description.]

ya’ll were really gonna let me live my life in ignorance thinking mr. rogers was straight???