Had July 13, 2024, been the slow-news day it first seemed, it would have been the moment to remember two greats whose deaths were announced on that date: celebrity sex therapist Dr. Ruth Westheimer (who passed away on Friday) and fitness impresario Richard Simmons (whose body was found by his housekeeper Saturday morning). Instead, someone had to go and attempt to assassinate Donald Trump.
This was also bad for other reasons (political violence, not good for democracy), but let us take this moment to remember the other two so that they not be forgotten for having gone and died on the wrong day. The alternative is to do as a woman on my Toronto streetcar was and watch video of the assassination attempt with an intensity that suggested maybe this lady was going to figure it out on a level that exceeds what forensic experts are capable of.
Dr. Ruth and Richard Simmons seem somehow of a piece. It’s the kitchy wellness angle that was integral to the 1980s—to the point where both got their big breaks as the decade dawned. The corny infotainment of it all. It’s that both are remembered at least as much for their concrete additions to the culture as for their cameo-ready personas. For myself, being born in 1983 means I had given neither of these “gurus” (how obits remember both) much thought, but simply by consuming enough late-20th century pop culture, I could instantaneously summon who they were and what they were all about.
And both had similar gimmicks. Shticks. They seemed like they would not be experts in the thing they were there to teach you about. A little old Jewish refugee lady (she was 4-foot-7) in conservative attire was going to speak openly and knowledgeably about oral sex?! An outrageous, gender-nonconforming (in the sense once referred to as effeminate) man was going to advise on how to fix your physique?!
It seems a bit silly to type this now, in an era when frank-talking therapists and advice columnists look all different ways, and when if anything gay men are more associated with fitness than their more gym-lax hetero brethren. Is it really surprising that immigrant women have sex, or that flamboyant men work out? But to a general public that associated sex with being young and voluptuous, fitness with machismo, these twists allowed for the development of what would today be called personal brands.
Dr. Ruth was a German-born Holocaust survivor who would go on to fight for Israeli independence. She only started in the public-facing advice business in her 50s, first with a syndicated radio program, then on television, in books, and in public appearances. Here is where I could offer up an additional sentence about how she was Jewish but I sort of think this much was implied by the paragraph’s first. Oh and there is a Canadian angle: her son Joel has been a professor at the University of Ottawa since 2002—and she was honoured by the school during its convocation ceremonies last month.
What Dr. Ruth pioneered went beyond shtick: she was the original sex-advice purveyor to mass audiences, of the sort who speaks of the body and its contortions as they actually are. She was thus a precursor to everyone from Dan Savage to (want another Canadian angle?) Sue Johanson.
But what she said kept getting overshadowed by how she said it. The shtick required audiences being a bit surprised a lady so prim-seeming would even know where the genitals were located. This was in some sense admirable—a reminder that women don’t need to look like supermodels to be sexual. But the way it was interpreted as humorous that she knew about sex, this was less uplifting. Not a comment on her, but rather on how she was received.
Dr. Ruth is somehow blurred in my mind with Sophia, the Estelle Getty character on The Golden Girls (1985-1992). Also tiny, also Jewish but old-country (the character is Sicilian Catholic, except written as quasi-Jewish, while the actress herself was Jewish, as was the one playing her daughter; it’s complicated), Sophia regularly gets laughs for knowing what sex is and what “lesbian” means (she is an icon of acceptance, ahead of her time) despite being the oldest of the bunch (she plays the 80-something mother of a 50-something) and, going by her attire, one would guess the squarest.
If Simmons were a sitcom character, it would have to have been Mr. Humphries on 1972-1985 Britcom, Are You Being Served?, crossed with George Costanza on Seinfeld. Neither, to be clear, made their own line of workout videos. The connection is that each is a persona evoking identities that are not in line with the ones being stated outright.
Simmons said he was bullied in his youth, and while this was ostensibly for his weight, two additional qualities schoolyard bullies have been known to pick on also come to mind. He was a fat kid, evidently, but also gay and Jewish, right?
Not exactly.
Like David Suchet’s Poirot, the Richard Simmons public persona had a Jewiness to it, despite the real-life person being a practising Christian of (half, in Simmons’s case) Jewish ancestry. I suppose as I see it, Jewishness is multiple things, one of which is reading as Jewish to the outside world. This doesn’t mean Jews get to ‘claim’ people who insist they’re not Jewish. It does mean that such individuals have a place in the bigger Jewish story. If you’re feeling nostalgic for the “Golden Age,” I think you’re allowed to include a beloved curly-haired fitness pro if you’re so inclined, and to do so without casting doubt on his Catholic faith.
The gayness angle is similarly complex. Was he someone whose sexual orientation was an open secret? It’s possible, but also possible is that he wasn’t gay and was a feminine man of a different sexual orientation (straight, bi, asexual, indeterminate…)—something that should not be that hard for people to wrap their heads around today, in this era of differentiating, on a granular level, between various forms of sexual and gender identity. Maybe in some other environment he’d have been openly gay, non-binary, or something else entirely. Or maybe not. We have before us the undeniable fact that he presented himself in a manner diverging from expectations of staid masculinity. Maybe that can be enough?
For more original Jewish culture commentary from Phoebe Maltz Bovy subscribe to the free Bonjour Chai newsletter on Substack.
The CJN’s senior editor Phoebe Maltz Bovy can be reached at [email protected], not to mention @phoebebovy on Bluesky, and @bovymaltz on X. She is also on The CJN’s weekly podcast Bonjour Chai.
