Two's company, three's a crowd—but who doesn't mind a crowd?

Written By venus on Thursday, February 27, 2014 | 12:15 AM

Anyone remember a TV show called "Three's Company"? It ran for several seasons in the late 1970s or early 1980s. I watched it occasionally, but in retrospect the whole concept was wicked awful even though the audience seemed to love it.

The premise was that a young male heterosexual desperately needed an apartment but the only one he could find was occupied by two young, comely 20-something women. The landlord did not approve of the idea of sexual co-mingling, so the heterosexual guy pretended to be gay.

(Funny, though. It never dawned on the landlord that the two females might be lesbians.)

As it turned out, this faux gay guy must have been sorely disappointed by not having nookie with either or both of his female roommates. The situation was purely platonic.

This business dragged on for several seasons, with various permutations on how the three roommates outsmarted the landlord or found themselves in odd predicaments. In fact, the show went on so long that the original landlord left the series and was replaced by a new one.

(The newcomer was the inimitable Don Knotts, who previously played a bungling small-town deputy sheriff. One might have thought that he was the gay one, because he dressed in stereotypically gay attire: leisure suits, ascots and ersatz gold chains. Yuck.)

Eventually the series ended. I'm fairly sure I never saw the final episode, but it would have been nice if the four—the two women, the supposedly gay guy and the flamboyant landlord—went out in a sizzling orgy.

My main objection to the series was that it had no gay men in it. It merely was a long-running joke against gay men and confirmation of the stereotypes of that era. The series could have served as a counterpoint during at a time when Orange Queen Anita Bryant was demonizing homosexuals in Florida and across the nation. It failed. Well, that was then and this is now. We are on the ascendancy.

But enough of this seriousness. I present for your inspection some photos of this era's threesomes. All are far more interesting than the three in "Three's Company." Some of these fellows are bystanders or innocents; others are bound to do a lot more once the cameras are shut off. Enjoy.