François Clemmons — who broke ground on ‘Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood’ — is coming to the NorthEast ComicCon & Collectibles Extravaganza
Although he has performed all over the country and has won a Grammy Award for a recording of “Porgy and Bess,” François Clemmons — who will appear this weekend at the NorthEast ComicCon & Collectibles Extravaganza at the Boxboro Regency in Boxborough — is best known for playing the role of Officer Clemmons on “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” for 25 years.
“I would not have had a career if it wasn’t for Fred Rogers,” Clemmons said Saturday on the phone from his home in Middlebury, Vermont. “He not only opened the door. He stood there and held it open so I could go through and do a fine job and then come back. He had a real strength and he shared with me that I was going to have a career. I deserve a career.”
Born in Birmingham, Alabama, and raised in Youngstown, Ohio, the 76-year-old “Black, gay, ordained person of the theater” certainly knows what it’s like to be young, gifted, gay and Black. And, he is the first to acknowledge it was no picnic in the “Neighborhood of Make-Believe” by any stretch of the imagination.
“I not only had society up against me, I had the church. And I was raised in the church with a certain expectation that was incredibly positive and then the reality of how the church felt about issues that concerned me really broke my heart,” Clemmons said. “That’s the only way to explain it, the shock and the sense of rejection that the church was not going to accept me as being gay.”
Although he continued to sing African-American spirituals, Clemmons began to pull away from the traditions of the church. It was also at this time that he asked God to change him and make him straight because being straight would be so much easier and accepting to others in the long run.
“I knew my soul was not going to be fed in that place (the church), so I turned to my own private understanding and readings of the Bible, the Old Testament and the New Testament. But I never saw anything in the Bible that condemned me so I began to meditate, in a sense, and pray to God,” Clemmons said. “I did have warm, serious companionships but I couldn’t express my sense of intimacy, my sense of touch, my sense of nurturing and caring, that personal empathy that you feel when you embrace someone from whom you love. I, for a long time, would not really be intimately touching people.”
In the late ‘60s, Clemmons met Fred Rogers while pursuing graduate studies in music at Carnegie Mellon and singing at Third Presbyterian Church in Pittsburgh.
At the time, except for Bill Cosby and Sidney Poitier, Blacks were usually portrayed as pimps and pushers and not police officers. When Rogers offered him the role of a friendly, neighborhood police officer in a time when many African-Americans didn’t trust police, Clemmons had to do a lot of serious soul-searching before accepting the role.
“I was being offered a fantastic opportunity for a young Black actor-singer to do a regular television show in those days but I found it so reprehensible, so revolting to be a police officer,” Clemmons said. “So I try to re-evaluate what it meant to play such a role, and then what I did was compare it to Sportin’ Life in ‘Porgy and Bess.’ I’m not that type of person at all. So the idea that Sportin’ Life is into drugs and gambling and he had a bunch of women who were his prostitutes, all of those things were not a part of me, either. So, for a long time, I played the role of a good policeman.”
Despite his initial hesitation of playing a beat cop, Clemmons soon found out there were real casting benefits in playing Officer Clemmons.
“If I got a call to go to Indianapolis to do Handel’s ‘Messiah’ or a call to go to Tucson or Phoenix, Arizona, to sing with the orchestra, they were calling Officer Clemons and I knew it,” he said. “And, I felt, well if that’s what’s going to help me build a career, I have to be stupid not to embrace it.”
While Clemmons’ sexual preference didn’t matter to Rogers personally, the children’s television host told the young singer-actor the harsh truth that if he came out gay he could not continue being on “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” because the corporate sponsors wouldn’t allow it.
“Fred was very generous, very understanding, but he was a realist because he said, ‘You can’t be openly gay on the program, François.’ And I understood that,” Clemmons said. “I don’t blame him one darn bit for wanting to protect and take care of his program. That was his dream come true. And, in my case, singing, performing, that was my joy to be out there on stage. I love being on stage. That saved me, because in theater, there are a number of people who are gay. I could be more of myself as long as I was discreet. And I kept my privacy to myself but that was my burden.”
And, despite being closeted to the public, Clemmons felt that he belonged in “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.”
“I had what I considered a family with him (Rogers) and Lady Aberlin (Betty Aberlin) and Mr. McFeely (David Newell) and all. They literally became my family,” Clemmons said. “I didn’t have a happy home life and so trust was a difficult area for me as a human being, how to trust Fred’s goodness, how to trust that he was not going to change or behave in a negative way after a while and say, ‘OK I had enough of you.’ He never gave any of that dynamic. He was always, always available and very, very grateful.”
During the height of the civil rights movement, Rogers made a decisively bold but extremely subtle statement on the children’s television series about the absurdity of racially segregated pools by having the two men soaking their feet together in the same wading pool.
When he got the script in the mail, Clemmons said he was very puzzled by it. But when they did the first rehearsal, he realized something extraordinary and powerful was about to happen.
“Fred said, ‘You know, Jesus was in the upper room with his disciples and he said, ‘Take off your shoes. I’m going to wash your feet.’ So I’m putting my foot in the water with Fred Rogers but I don’t have a towel. Fred said, ‘Here, you can use my towel.’ What? Me? Plain old, Black, gay, me, using Mr. Rogers’ towel?” Clemmons said. “I was in the pool with Mr. Rogers and nobody was going to prevent us from sharing this experience, two human beings. I was a little overwhelmed at the implications that I was Peter and he was Jesus, because Peter was the one who said, ‘I’m not worthy for you to dry my feet like this’ and Jesus said, ‘God has revealed this to you.’ Peter was like the rock a builder had discarded. And I had felt like I was a rock that the builder had discarded in life because of me being Black and gay and being discriminated against.”
Twenty-four years later in 1993, a much older, wiser and closer Clemmons and Rogers returned to the cleansing waters of the wading pool. As the two men’s bare feet were cooling off, Clemmons burst into the Rogers-penned song “There Are Many Ways to Say I Love You.”
Today, that song is Clemmons’ most popular request.
“When Fred Rogers died, they wouldn’t stop asking for it,” Clemmons said. “I think I have sung it about 50,000 times because people remember Fred Rogers and they remember when I had my feet in the water that second time I was singing ‘There Are Many Ways to Say I Love You.’ What a gift from God, really, really. I didn’t plan that. If I planned that, I could not have planned it better.”
For more information on the NorthEast ComicCon & Collectibles Extravaganzana’s guests and ticket prices, visit https://necomiccons.com/.
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