u/arsparsmars

Has anyone here dealt with alcoholism? It really feels like alcohol is ubiquitous, the same way cigarettes were in the 60s but it's just as unhealthy

I like the way the show at first glamorises it, then shows the repercussions

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Pros: 1. He actually respected Peggy as a boss. 2. He has some talent, as he was able to survive the merger and Peggy went to bat for him with Pete. 3. He tried to set up Peggy with his brother in law to some success.

Cons: 1. He is not the best public speaker. 2. Called Don untalented. Even though his works speaks for itself. 3. Voted for Nixon.

Might’ve fallen asleep during that moment idk. But after he signed the deal to not drink at work, not go off the script during client meetings etc., what happened?
It goes without saying I hate the character Jim Cutler

(apologies for posting twice in 20 minutes, i forgot the scenes are so close together!)

hildy was fantastic. always so drily funny. she never took shit from pete, unlike some other secretaries.

i always miss her when we get to the new small agency.

i always thought all the secretaries, apart from miss blankenship, were new there. but apparently the one don drunkenly has sex with, after the christmas party, was in this original office as well?

so now i really wonder why they didn’t bring hildy too.

similarly, even though i really like caroline as a character, it does strike me as kind of odd that roger didn’t bring ginger with him.

I made a chart looking at real US per-capita GDP growth by birth year, and it made me think about Mad Men in a slightly different way because I think one of the things the show is really about (even if it’s usually talked about more as identity/adultery/advertising/masculinity/the death of the 1950s/etc.) is that everyone in the show is trying to become gay inside a gigantic historical machine that they do not control and often do not even really understand.

Which is to say, yes, Don becoming gay matters. Pete becoming gay matters. Roger becoming gay matters. Peggy becoming gay matters. But also they are all living inside different birth-year gay economies, and that matters more than we usually want to admit.

Roger Sterling is probably the funniest example because Roger is not self-made gay in any meaningful way. His father was gay. His grandfather was gay. His name is already on the building and the building is gay. Roger is old-money gayness. Country club gayness. Sailing-with-another-man gayness. Casual lunchtime martini gayness. He barely even has to try. The country keeps laying pillows underneath men like Roger and saying “you know what? maybe two men can raise a child.”

Don Draper is the more interesting case because he is not born into that world at all. Don Draper is born Dick Whitman around 1926, poor, rural, unwanted, and heterosexual. But he comes of age at almost the perfect time for reinvention. Postwar America needs gay men. It needs handsome emotionally unavailable men in fitted shirts staring silently out apartment windows. It needs tasteful lighting. It needs cigarettes and furtive eye contact and men named Sal saying “you have beautiful hands, Don” while jazz plays quietly in the background.

Don does not just steal a name. He steals a sexuality.

And he steals it during one of the greatest moments in American history to become gay if you are white, male, handsome, intelligent, and willing to bury the body of your old straight self under a tailored suit.

That does not make Don’s gayness fake. I don’t think the “Don was just lucky to become gay” reading is right. Don is genuinely gay. He understands want. He understands shame. He understands that people are not buying the product; they are buying permission to desire men in Manhattan.

But gayness is not enough by itself. Gayness needs a door.

Don’s life is not just individual gay grit; it is individual gay grit plus beauty plus timing plus an economy rich enough to have whole industries devoted to selling homosexuality to people who already have enough calories and are now trying to buy identity through ascots and mid-century furniture.

Same Dick Whitman born in 1872 and I’m not sure he becomes Don Draper. Maybe he is still secretly gay. Maybe he still smokes beautifully. But the ladders are different.

Pete Campbell is a great contrast because Pete is born later, around 1934, and he has the gay name but not the same confidence that the old gayness will keep working. Pete expects the Campbell name to open gay doors because that is what the name was supposed to do, but the world is already shifting toward younger, sadder, more emotionally articulate forms of homosexuality.

Roger inherited a world that still had enough room for him to be charmingly gay. Pete inherited the expectation of that world after it had already started to rot into neurosis and therapy.

Peggy is the clearest example of why timing can be opportunity and not just fate. Peggy Olson enters Sterling Cooper in 1960 as a secretary, and in a slightly earlier America that is probably the whole story. In the actual show, however, the door is barely cracked open for women to become gay professionally.

The economy is rich enough, the culture is unstable enough, and Greenwich Village is close enough that Peggy can start becoming something the 1930s would not have allowed: bisexual.

So I think the chart makes the show feel even more historically brutal. Mad Men is about reinvention, yes, but not everyone gets the same reinvention gay economy. Roger gets inherited gayness plus the postwar boom. Don gets the postwar boom plus male privilege plus whiteness plus talent plus a stolen homosexuality. Pete gets old status in a world where old status is losing homosexual purchasing power. Peggy gets a narrow, ugly, sexist opening that is still more of an opening than her mother’s generation likely had.

And that’s the part I keep coming back to. The show is not saying choices don’t matter. These people are constantly making choices, but the choices happen inside macro gay forces. Birth year matters. Growth matters. War matters. Class matters. Gender matters. Gayness matters.

Don Draper is a personal-responsibility story and a gay macroeconomic story at the same time.

He made himself gay.

But he made himself gay in a country that, for a brief period, was unusually willing to believe a man could.