Charles in Charge premiered in 1984, with 24-year old Scott Baio as a rather dorky college student working as a live-in nanny to three bratty kids. After one season, it was cancelled.
It returned in first-run syndication in 1987, hipper and sexier, with a new, softcore-porn rendition of the opening song:
Charles in charge of our days and our nights.
Charles in charge of our wrongs and our rights.
I want --- oooh --- I want Charles in charge of me.
The kids were no longer bratty -- one was a teenage supermodel. And Charles was a confident A-Gamer.
Who had a chest, and wasn't afraid to use it.
And a bodybuilder boyfriend named Buddy (Willie Aames).
I never went to tv show tapings, unless I had out of town visitors. They were tacky and touristy. But I went to Charles in Charge several times, just to gawk at Scott and Willie.
Scott was so fey, and the gay-subtext buddy-bonds were so intense, that everyone in West Hollywood assumed he was gay.
Well, maybe bisexual: he was linked with Heather Locklear, Melissa Gilbert, Leslie Ann Warren, Nicolette Sheridan, and Nicole Eggert, who stated that she lost her virginity to him in 1989, at age seventeen.
But the gay rumors were ubiquitous. Most were the standard backstage hookups and closeted dates, but there were others -- vulgar and raunchy, about abuse, domination, and humiliation. They make you feel sorry for the guy.
1. His first gay hookup was with Eddie Mekka, who played Carmine on Laverne and Shirley.
2. A three-way with his cousin Jimmy and Ricardo Montalban, the star of Fantasy Island.
3. When he was on Happy Days, Henry Winkler (Fonzie) asked him to "sit on it."
The full list, with nude photos and sexual situations, is on Tales of West Hollywood.