Dick Van Dyke turns 100 on Saturday, and I’m surprised by how much the milestone has stirred something deep in me and others. It’s not just nostalgia, though there’s plenty of that. It’s something more reflective, something shared, I suspect, by many gay men of a certain age.
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Whether we may have realized it or not, Van Dyke unknowingly helped so many of us make sense of ourselves when the world around us didn’t quite know what to do with boys like us.
Growing up in suburban Pittsburgh, I had a small black-and-white TV on an aluminum TV tray, which sat at the end of my bed in a tiny room I shared with my brother. Every afternoon after grade school, I’d turn the dial and wait for the familiar music of The Dick Van Dyke Show, then in reruns. As a kid who was mature for his years, I loved that program.
I was too young to have a crush on Van Dyke, or at least too young to understand what that meant, but I was mesmerized by him. Who wasn’t? He was handsome, funny, limber, and quick, fluid in a way that felt effortless. I once heard someone say his whole body was a smile.
Then I remember watching him in Mary Poppins, and more memorable, at least for me, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, which I must have watched a hundred times. I’m convinced the title song has been looping in my head since childhood. It’s been a lifelong earworm. I am humming it now. In both of those magical movie musicals, Van Dyke danced and sang with aplomb.
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The reason Chitty stuck out was that his character, Caractacus Potts, fascinated me. Eccentric, whimsical, a singing, dancing widower who built impossible machines and floated through life with a kind of buoyant joy. It seemed like a joy or an attribute that I was forced to repress, yet Van Dyke expressed it supercalifragilisticexpialidociously, that word forever fabulous.
And in that confused pre-teenage way you have when you’re quietly wondering who you are, I remember thinking, Is Potts different? I suppose I meant gay, but there was an element of Potts that seemed to telegraph to me, “I am you!”
It wasn’t because the storyline suggested it in any way, but because in the 1970s, everything felt like a clue. Gay, as we, or at least I, understood it then, meant musical, flexible, expressive, traits I recognized in him and feared a little in myself.
I remember watching a flamboyant parishioner appear in a church production of Mame. The stout man danced and sang in a way that made me feel embarrassed. Yet when he performed, I felt that same message, “I am you,” and it terrified me. With Van Dyke, it gave me some comfort. So I tried to emulate Van Dyke in a way only a 10 year-old boy could do.
In our basement, I had a small “office” I set up for myself. I had one of my dad’s old hats and rehearsed Van Dyke’s sly flourishes, his shuffles, the way he bent his back as though gravity made a special exception just for him. I sang, in a low voice, that Chitty theme song, doffing my cap along the way.
And yes, I even re-created the ottoman gag from his TV show. We had an old stool that I pretended was the famous Petrie ottoman, and I’d hum the theme and topple over it exactly the way he did or skip around it. What he did during the opening, fall or circumvent, was always a surprise.
I had other hobbies too, sketching weather maps and forecasting pretend storms as a TV weatherman, and managing imaginary baseball and football teams with elaborate statistics. But when the numbers got frustrating or the weather turned gloomy, I’d slip back into being Rob Petrie or Caractacus Potts. It was my reprieve. My permission to move through my little world with a lightness that didn’t always feel available elsewhere.
Examining that behavior now, I see that Van Dyke offered a loophole and a shield. A way to be expressive and joyful without it signaling anything dangerous. “I’m not being girly like the guy from church. I’m doing what Dick Van Dyke does.”
I don’t think I could have articulated that at the time, but now I understand just how powerful that quiet permission was.
Life went on. My attention drifted. When I saw reruns as an adult, I found myself laughing more at Alan Brady’s bombastic genius. Van Dyke became a pleasant memory. A childhood melody. And then, out of nowhere, he reappeared last year in a way that felt almost cosmic.
There he was, at 99, dancing barefoot in a Coldplay music video. And not just dancing. He was moving effortlessly, light, joyfully, with the same playful energy that had enchanted me decades earlier. I watched that video a dozen times. Maybe more. And here’s the thing: I needed it and so did many of us.
It was right after Trump’s election, a time when everything felt darker, heavier, meaner. The air felt thick with dread. Friends were anxious. I was doubly anxious. The future felt uncertain in ways that were painfully familiar to queer people of a certain age. And then suddenly there he was again, Dick Van Dyke, cutting through the heaviness with uncomplicated joy.
He wasn’t just dancing. He was reminding us that light exists. That playfulness survives. That the world can still move with grace even when politics makes everything feel brittle. And he also made me think of those playful days in my basement “office.”
And now he’s turning 100. I texted a group of my gay friends, all of us around the same age, all of us presumably raised on the same afternoon reruns, and suggested, jokingly, that we throw a birthday party for him. The responses came back almost instantly, yes, yes, yes! Everyone also said something to the effect of “I love Dick Van Dyke!”
It made me think that he belongs to us in a way we never quite articulated or appreciated, but always felt.
Many gay men talk about female icons of their past, like Judy, Liza, and Cher, and rightly so. They were our torchbearers with their torch songs. But Dick Van Dyke was different. He was subtle. Safe. He showed little boys like me that a man could sing and dance and swoop and tap and be silly and soft without sacrificing anything.
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He made movement feel masculine and joyful and private and free. He gave us permission to be light before we knew how heavy the world could get for us.
And now he’s still teaching me, and I’m on the other side of 60. If he can move like that still, and if he can reach 100 with that same spark, then maybe age really is just a number. Maybe playfulness doesn’t expire.
And as I write this, I’m glancing at my ottoman in our living room. I think I’m going to grab a hat, hum a familiar tune, and give myself permission, once again, to stumble over it. For him. For me. For all of us who found our first glimmers of self, safety, and supercalifragilisticexpialidocious in the way one tall, limber man moved across television and movie screens.
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