Richard Simmons, the ebullient paterfamilias of aerobics instruction who died on Saturday at 76, never publicly addressed his sexuality. But during his long run as a leading figure in American cultural life, the way he defined himself for others was perhaps less important than how he presented himself.
More than 20 years before the fashion stylist Carson Kressley dispensed tips to finance bros on “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy” and Tim Gunn rescued aspiring designers from nervous breakdowns on “Project Runway” with the instruction to “make it work,” Mr. Simmons guided the average and the out-of-shape toward a loving embrace of the bodies they already had.
In the process, he navigated the end of disco culture and the advent of the AIDS epidemic by making himself as nonthreatening as possible.
“Confidence is contagious,” Mr. Kressley said in an interview on Sunday. “That was his brand.”
Mr. Simmons became nationally famous with “The Richard Simmons Show,” a syndicated daytime program that combined sketch comedy with celebrity interviews, cooking segments and fitness routines.
At a time when Clint Eastwood and Sylvester Stallone were top male stars, Mr. Simmons baked cakes with Betty White and did kooky exercise segments in which shopping carts doubled as fitness equipment. Although he wasn’t open about his sexuality, he managed nevertheless to “really be himself on camera, and people could take it for what it was,” Mr. Kressley said.
Mr. Simmons had grown up in New Orleans, La., where he said he had been a “fat kid” who avoided sports and kept mostly to himself. In the mid-1970s, he opened an exercise studio in Beverly Hills, Calif. The idea, as Mr. Simmons wrote in his 1993 book, “Never Give Up,” one of his many best sellers, was that weight loss should be fun.
“They came, they laughed and they lost,” he wrote of his first customers.
Never mind that Mr. Simmons lacked the vein-popping biceps of his contemporary Arnold Schwarzenegger and the perpetual firmness of a previous fitness guru, Jack LaLanne. The clownish striped shorts and bedazzled tank tops that left much of his utterly average body exposed were part of his appeal, even as they turned him into the butt of barely veiled homophobic jokes.
Eddie Murphy lampooned him in a sketch on “Saturday Night Live” in 1981, just as “The Richard Simmons Show” was gaining popularity. Mr. Murphy’s character, a fitness instructor named Little Richard Simmons, was a hybrid of Mr. Simmons and Little Richard, the drag-loving, over-the-top rock ’n’ roll showman whose sexuality was referred to in the 1950s and ’60s by journalists in the same cloaked language that was later applied to Mr. Simmons. (Little Richard came to describe himself as “gay,” “bisexual” and “omnisexual.”)
The sketch begins with four women doing aerobics. Out comes Mr. Murphy, prancing to the front of the stage in a pink athletic jacket and tight matching pants. “Thank you, thank you! How are you today?” he says to the studio audience in a high-pitched voice.
Soon after, he insults the hefty cameramen (“You girls have really let yourselves go”) before launching into a rendition of Little Richard’s “Good Golly, Miss Molly” in which the lyrics have been changed from “Good golly, Miss Molly, sure like to ball” to “Good golly, Miss Molly, you look like a hog.”
Mr. Kressley, who watched the clip on Sunday, said that the early-80s “Saturday Night Live” audience seemed to be laughing more at the caricature Mr. Murphy embodied than anything else in the sketch.
“It’s definitely making fun of the gay guy, which was very much of that era,” he said.
Mr. Murphy, who used a slur for gay men in a routine on homosexuality in his 1983 stand-up film, “Delirious,” sent up Mr. Simmons once more in the 1996 comedy hit “The Nutty Professor.”
In white makeup and a curly wig, he dialed up the swish, wearing Mr. Simmons’s signature striped short-shorts while leading a group of women in dance-heavy aerobics to the Village People’s gay anthem “Macho Man.” In an interview with the TV show “Extra,” Mr. Simmons said he was “really hurt” by Mr. Murphy, but not because of the tone of the portrayal. “I was in the airport and five people told me how great I was in the Eddie Murphy film,” he said. “I just said thanks.”
(In 1997, Mr. Murphy was pulled over in West Hollywood after a person identified as a “transsexual prostitute” entered his car. The officers arrested the prostitute; Mr. Murphy was not arrested or charged, and his spokesman said that he was being a “good Samaritan” by offering a ride. “I’m not gay,” Mr. Murphy said at the time on Entertainment Tonight. “That’s what’s weird about this.”)
Mr. Simmons, a surefire talk show guest, was a frequent foil to David Letterman. In a 1994 segment filmed in Rutherford, N.J., Mr. Letterman takes Mr. Simmons to a uniform shop, where he persuades him to change out of his usual short-shorts and sleeveless top and into a pair of roomy work pants and a checked flannel shirt.
Once Mr. Simmons has made the switch to the more traditionally masculine garb, Mr. Letterman rewards him by taking him to a record store and buying him a Barbra Streisand CD.
“He’s definitely part of a long tradition of gay men who got an audience by turning themselves into an over-the-top caricature,” the comedian Billy Eichner said via text on the day after Mr. Simmons’s death.
American popular culture has made a place for gay men who flaunt their style, helping people (especially women) become better packaged, more stylish versions of themselves. The literary giant Truman Capote played the confidant to society women of Park Avenue, and André Leon Talley remixed that trope by becoming a Confucius for the high fashion set.
But Mr. Simmons triumphed thanks in large part to his appeal to everyday people in the middle of the country. He did not aspire, as Mr. Capote did, to dine at La Côte Basque or, as Mr. Talley did, to run around Paris alongside Karl Lagerfeld. He shunted aside snobbery, gaining success through daytime TV and his “Sweatin’ to the Oldies” series of home videos and DVDs.
Kindness, not shade, was his weapon of choice.
Consequently, the vicious queen of “The Little Richard Simmons Show” bore less resemblance to him than to the man he was being impersonating by.
Only occasionally did Mr. Simmons even refer to society’s ills, and while the ones he mentioned were no doubt real, they weren’t particularly controversial — not to the degree that homophobia and racism were.
“There are three groups of people in our society that have been shafted, that have been rejected and neglected,” Mr. Simmons told Oprah Winfrey during an appearance on her show in the 1980s. “That’s the overweight, the senior citizen and the disabled.”
What argument could straight society really have with a guy who demanded nothing for himself and asked only that it hold its own in slightly higher regard?
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