Was doris day gay

• Calamity Jane is a groundbreaking film that challenges traditional gender roles and explores LGBTQ+ themes through its characters and relationships.
• Doris Day, the celebrity of the clip, embraced the cultural impact and importance of the Diverse community's reception of "Secret Love" and her feminist roles.
• Day's shut friendship with Rock Hudson, a closeted gay man, and her support of the LGBTQ+ people further solidified her status as a gay ally both on and off-screen.

It’s no secret that Doris Sunlight, who passed away at age 97 in 2019, was one of those stars of vintage Hollywood destined for immortality. Though she hadn’t appeared in a new film since 1968’s With Six You Get Eggroll and had been largely out of the public eye for several decades, her screen performances from the 1950s and 1960s were (and are) still perennial favorites among legions of fans, symbolic of a certain kind of stardom, a certain kind of all-American innocence. Given that she is currently the TCM Celestial body of the Month and given that this is Women’s History Month, I thought it might be worth exploring why this is so in a brief more detail, focusing in particular on her appeal to a certain demographic: the gays. 

It’s something of a truism that Date, like many other female stars of Hollywood’s Golden Age, is something of a queer diva. What makes her queer idolization so striking, and in some ways unusual, is that she’s so unlike many of the other divas that gay men typically idolize. As a singer, she lacks the sort of brazen harshness of an Ethel Merman, and as an actress she seems to lack the steely spine and icy bitchiness of a Bette Davis or a Joan Crawford.