Article: No fruit in his basket.(Milton Berle sues over billboard portraying him in dress)(Brief Article)

What makes Milton Berle, notoriously heterosexual and in showbiz all his life, think being mistaken for gay could be more than a silly joke?

It is as bad to pose as a thing as to be the thing itself, according to the marquess of Queensberry, the man who, ironically, invented the concept of not hitting below the belt, in his 1895 attack on Oscar Wilde. The marquess was covering his losses. If by some chance he couldn't prove that Oscar was a "somdomite" (his own spelling)--and thereby get at Wilde legally--he could at least wound him socially by accusing him of posing as one. To pose as a homosexual was scandalous enough. Back then. In the Victorian age.

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