Back in May, in honor of Mother’s Day, I did a post about my mom who pretty much raised me solo. My father died when I was eleven, but before that, he wasn’t around much. He was on the road a lot driving tractor trailers (bringing home small trinkets from time to time), moving trucks (sometimes on local runs, he’d take my two older brothers and I to help. I was in charge of sofa cushions which were almost as big as I was), and a tour bus for Milton Berle (I was brought on stage to do a skit with him when they were in town, yes I am THAT old and sadly that is where I blew my 15 minutes of fame). My dad was only home permanently once he was diagnosed with cancer. Most of my memories are of him laying on the couch or in a hospital bed. With June comes Father’s Day, and since I didn’t really know my dad, I thought I would write about the men who made a difference in my life…TV DILFs. Lets take a trip down memory lane and visit the hottest dads in the history of TV, at least in my gay opinion.
Growing up there weren’t hundreds of TV stations to choose from, only the major networks. I don’t think we had cable until I was in my teens. The first TV we had was a hand me down with a faulty picture tube. The only way to fix the blackened screen was to put on a cooking mitt and punch the top of the TV until it flickered back into focus. I would watch reruns of Leave It To Beaver and Brady Bunch for hours on end. Ward Cleaver and Mike Brady weren’t much to look at but they molded my moral compass. When the 80’s came, I developed a love for feathered hair thanks to Shaun Cassidy and had a crush on Joel Higgins the dad on Silver Spoons. Weekly he rescued Ricky Schroder from crazy antics without a hair out of place.
Then puberty hit and everything I learned from Hugh Beaumont and Robert Reed flew out the window when Greg Evigan and Paul Reiser walked in the door. The premise of My Two Dads was that two single men discovered that one of them is the biological father of a 12 year old girl. Not knowing which one is the dad (this was before Maury could run a paternity test), they decide to live together and raise her together. As a horny teenager, I wasn’t buying that they were just living together to save on the bills.
Then the early 90’s brought a hot dad drought and DILFs were scarce, Tim Allen and Bob Sagat just didn’t do it for me. Was this the end of an era? Had DILFs gone extinct? Luckily not, queue the discman to Paula Cole’s smash song “I Don’t Want To Wait”, John Wesley Shipp had brought sexy back on Dawson’s Creek. I wasn’t Team Dawson or Team Pacey (that’s like asking me to choose water or air? Tiffany or Debbie Gibson?); I was Team Mitch. He could paddle me on the creek anytime.
With the dawning of a new millennium and reaching an age where I could be a dad (not that I ever wanted to be, unless they have fur and walk on all fours) so my tastes had matured, fortunately I hadn’t. However, I had advanced, and so had social norms. There were now gay characters on TV and they had hot dads for me to drool over, like Mike O’Malley (Chris Colfer’s dad on Glee) and Jay R Ferguson (Noah Galvin’s dad on The Real O’Neals). These were the dads I wish I had as a young gaybie.
Now that we’re on the dawn of a new decade with hot TV DILFs, like Younger’s Peter Hermann and Splitting Up Together’s Oliver Hudson, I want to thank all those TV dads who paved the way. As with all great eras in history, how can anyone chronicle such a wide chasm of studliness without missing a few? So I open this up to anyone reading this to leave a comment with any TV DILFs you feel deserve an honorable mention and why you think they are worthy. Long live the TV DILFs.
