‘Betty White was an angel!’: my wild weekend with the Golden Girls’ superfans

In the ballroom of the Sheraton Grand Chicago Riverwalk, beneath the glitter of a disco ball, a DJ is spinning Sisters Are Doin’ It for Themselves while hundreds of people dressed as sitcom characters laugh and scream.

It’s the costume competition at Golden-Con, a convention for fans of The Golden Girls, the Emmy-winning 80s show about the lives and loves of four women of a certain age living together in Miami in a house beset with rattan furniture. The “Blanches” are slinking across the stage in floral leisurewear and pastel negligees, doing their best impressions of the highly sexed fiftysomething southern belle played by Rue McClanahan, a woman who loves to draw attention to her “perky bosoms”.

The competition is fierce. “This is a bloodbath!” exclaims Jason B Schmidt, a member of the drag comedy troupe the Golden Gays, hosting the night’s event. Dressed in a voluminous green velvet skirt suit for his impersonation of Dorothy – the tall, stern teacher played by Bea Arthur – Schmidt barks at a contestant, “Just punch her in the face and she’ll leave!” It is flawless Golden Girls shtick – outrageous and comically offensive.

More than 1,000 people have come from as far away as Australia for these three days of celebration and homage. On the opening night, they enjoy a performance by another Golden Girls drag troupe – the Golden Gals Live!, starring Ginger Minj of RuPaul’s Drag Race – that is so funny you wish the youth of Tennessee could see it, and cheer a rousing duet of the show’s theme tune, Thank You for Being a Friend. For this, Cynthia Fee, the bluesy original singer, is joined by Aaron Scott, the young man who in 2017 became a social media sensation with his passionate gospel version.

Mingling with the fans are many of the show’s writers, producers and cast – though, regrettably, none of its leads. The death in 2021 of Betty White, who played the lovably empty-headed Rose, means they have all gone to the great houseshare in the sky: Estelle Getty, who played Dorothy’s mother, Sophia, in 2008, Arthur in 2009 and McClanahan in 2010.

This is the second Golden-Con. Last year, most of the attendees were women in their 40s and 50s, “and then of course gay men”, says the organiser, Zack Hudson, and this year’s demographic seems very similar. Hudson, 45, originally envisioned the event as a smallish gathering for superfans like himself and co-founders Brendan and Brad Balof, but after he sent out a press release, he says, “it went viral.” With tickets ranging from $35 to $400, and with the entire convention costing about $200,000 to put on, Hudson said he’ll be surprised if they break even this year, but “it was a labour of love.”

“The Golden Girls was ahead of its time,” says Peter Ower, 38, a Chicagoan who has come to Golden-Con with friends. “It’s all about acceptance and being who you are, and as a gay man growing up in the 90s, you didn’t get that message a lot. So it felt like the recognition we needed.” The show “was kind of queer-coded,” agrees David Cerda, 61, the artistic director of Chicago’s Hell in a Handbag theatre company and a member of yet another Golden Girls-inspired drag comedy group.

The Golden Girls famously tackled controversial subjects – homophobia, gay marriage, Aids, ageism, sexism, slut-shaming, single motherhood, erectile dysfunction and sexual assault, to name a few – with storylines that showed its characters sometimes being the victims of bias and other times confronting their own bigotry and overcoming it. Nevertheless, “we always maintained the mandate of being funny,” says Terry Hughes, who directed 108 of the show’s 180 episodes, on the phone from his home in California. “Susan Harris, the creator, gets all the credit for that.”

The Golden Girls wasn’t always as great in its representation of people of colour, however – not least in the 1987 episode The Housekeeper, in which the “girls” believe that a Black housekeeper that they fired has put a curse on them. “They had some highs and some lows,” agrees Catrina Parker, the Black host of the Quirky Pop podcast. “Like how they made Marguerite [the housekeeper] a voodoo priestess.” But as a fan she is willing to cut the show some slack. “You know,” she says, “it was the 80s, and I think we’ve learned a lot since then.”

Parker has come to Golden-Con in costume, as Rose, along with her three sisters as Blanche, Dorothy and Sophia. “We grew up watching The Golden Girls with our mother,” she says. “For her it was like a comfort watch.” (Speaking of which, in the month of April 2020, at the height of Covid-19 anxiety, Hulu reported that The Golden Girls was one of its most streamed shows, with nearly 11m hours of views.)

There are many mother-daughter pairs in the crowd, such as Jeanette and Sydney Schliesser, who have come from Bryan, Ohio, and are dressed as Dorothy and Rose. “I love how the characters talk to each other,” says Jeanette, 45. “They say mean things to each other, and they say the nicest things, and that’s real, because people love and hate each other.”

“I’ve been watching them my whole life, and I’ll watch them for ever,” says Sydney, 25.

How would the stars of The Golden Girls have viewed their enduring appeal? “They would be so, so gratified to see what they have wrought and the lovefest that they inspired,” says Dinah Manoff, who starred in The Golden Girls spin-off Empty Nest (as well as Soap and Grease, in which she played Pink Lady Marty Maraschino). “They would just love this,” agrees Kristy McNichol, Manoff’s Empty Nest co-star. “Bea Arthur seemed so stoic but she was really a teddy bear, and Betty White was like an angel.”

But did Bea and Betty like each other? Maybe not so much, according to the gossip at Golden-Con. “Those two couldn’t warm up to each other if they were cremated together,” says Marsha Posner Williams, The Golden Girls’ co-producer.

When it came to their work, however, they impressed everyone. “To watch those ladies between the two tapings every Friday night was to watch real talent,” says Isabel Omero, the show’s script supervisor (then credited as Robert Spina). “The number of adjustments the writers made in the two hours between the tapings [which were later edited together] was extraordinary, and the women processed the changes so quickly.”

“We knew if those ladies couldn’t make a joke work, drop it,” adds Stan Zimmerman, who was hired as a writer on the show when he was just in his 20s. “We knew we had the best of the best in comedy.”

Every Golden Girls fan seems to have their favourite line or scene, and for me it’s when the “girls” are in a pharmacy buying condoms. Dorothy and Rose are mortified when the cashier asks for a price check on the loudspeaker and the other shoppers start to snigger. “Haven’t you ever seen three vibrant, healthy, sexually active women before?” Blanche asks indignantly, grabbing the microphone. “We are embarking on a weekend cruise with some gentlemen friends and we will be prepared! … We will walk out of here with our heads held high, knowing that we have been morally and socially responsible!”

“I have no idea who this woman is,” Dorothy mutters before turning and leaving the store.

The winners of Golden-Con’s costume competition are three women dressed up as those same boxes of condoms. The crowd goes wild when they realise what they are. For these three days, it’s all about the inside jokes, and the feeling of camaraderie. In the world outside, hostile forces are mobilising to try to further restrict the freedom of women and LGBTQ+ people, but here there are no haters, and men in dresses are boogieing to Dancing Queen.

“The Golden Girls is about found family,” says Parker, “and that doesn’t have to be the people you’re related to – it’s the people who show up for you when no one else will.”