What’s the connection between two gay dinosaur hunters of the early 1900s and the bizarre Jim Henson sitcom Dinosaurs of the early 1990s?
Hold onto your hats, because it’s a wild, wild ride.
Related: If Kermit & Miss Piggy are a couple, why can’t Bert & Ernie be gay?
You may remember Dinosaurs as the strange ABC show featuring giant animatronic dinosaur puppets. It was a weird entry into the TGIF lineup, an attempt by the network to imitate the success of The Simpsons, and the showrunners injected plenty of timely political commentary into the show.
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That’s what led to the curious 1991 episode “I Never Ate for My Father,” where one of the dinosaurs confronts homosexuality – albeit through a sometimes-oblique metaphor.
I became interested in the show while doing research for Culture Cruise, my YouTube series about LGBTQ milestones on TV and film. The episode shows one character, the teenager Robbie, grappling with the knowledge that he might be an herbivore. It’s an obvious stand-in for homosexuality, with lines like “how long have you known” that seem lifted straight from a Very Special Episode about a gay teen.
I was curious if there’s any connection between real-life dinosaurs and homosexuality, so I dug a little deeper. And I found something amazing – articles about Franz Nopcsa, a flamboyant Transylvanian baron who lived in the late 1800s and early 1900s.
Early in his career, he met and fell in love with another scientist name Bajazid Doda, and the two men went on countless adventures and expeditions together, serving as spies during World War I and touring the continent on a motorcycle looking for dinosaur fossils.
At one point, they were captured by bandits in the mountain, and Bajazid’s father came to rescue them with a bunch of armed guards. That’s noteworthy because it indicates that the family was on good terms with the couple – hardly a guarantee at such a homophobic time.
The close family relationship was echoed in Franz’s work on dinosaur behavior. He theorized that dinosaurs took care of their young, and even though that’s commonly believed to be correct today, it wasn’t a widely-held belief at the time.
Strangely enough, it’s a theory that’s echoed on this episode of Dinosaurs. The parents are initially angry at Robbie for being an herbivore. They insist that it’s important that everyone eat meat, but then Robbie is eaten by a larger creature and they realize that their old-fashioned rigid beliefs could be harmful to the family.
The mother Fran points out that another important tradition is that parents should protect their young (the Nopcsa theory!) and ultimately Robbie is rescued from the creature’s stomach and the family sits down to a meal of meat and vegetables.
So what are we to learn from all this? Well, for one thing, our gay forebears were fascinating individuals (Nopcsa was also the first person in history to hijack an airplane), but also the show offers a gentle warning that humans ought to be more like the dinosaurs at their best, rather than the dinosaurs at their worst… unless we want to wind up the same way they did.
