Roger is gay

"It had to do with the economics of the show."

Rogers urged him to stay in the closet, believing Clemmons' sexuality may alienate viewers. We had been communicating regularly, and he was going to finance a million-dollar project that I was going to manage.

It's what has helped enshrine my appreciation for him and his show.

He adored kids and relentlessly fought for their wellbeing.

They didn’t really know how the public was going to react to the show, but, as it turned out, they reacted well to it.”
Jim mentions that when he wrote his book Golden Girls Forever, he commented that the first regular gay character on television was in the short-lived sitcom The Corner Bar, which aired in 1972.

And this episode of All in the Family was before Soap with the groundbreaking character played by Billy Crystal — or anything else on TV. “So it was an issue that clearly existed in the world,” he says.
A question popped into my queer little brain right then, though, and I'm not entirely sure why:
Could Rogers have quietly been a homophobe?
He was a religious dude who grew up in a wildly different era than today.

And the gay community had started to find its very nascent voice, but it wasn’t being represented in mainstream media and certainly not on television.
“So that’s why it was so groundbreaking and gutsy of All in the Family,” he continues.
Even on queer issues, Rogers evolved as time went on.
As Long wrote for HuffPost in 2014, Rogers' perspective on Clemmons' sexuality shifted throughout the years:
"Rogers evidently believed Clemmons would tank his career had he come out as a gay man in the late 1960s.

Rogers could very well be the latest victim of my hero-worshipping, I warned myself, opening a Google tab with a preemptive cringe.
Here are the two big things I discovered:
1. Rogers' widow, Joanne, has said her husband had close friends who were gay, according to Slate.
He also stood strong against outside pressures to use his platform to condemn same-gender relationships, according to Vox's Todd VanDerWerff.

Zero.
‘All in the Family’: Inside the Early Episode That Challenged Archie Bunker’s View of Gay People
Insofar as series creator/producer Norman Lear was concerned, if an episode of All in the Family wasn’t pushing — if not tearing to little pieces — the envelope, then it wasn’t worth doing.
“So there was just so much that the show did,” Jim points out, “to give representation to a gay character, which would have been ground breaking enough, but it also showed multi-dimensions to what being gay meant. Because I have found women attractive, and I have found men attractive."
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The internet is ecstatic they've found a bisexual icon in Mister Rogers.
As you can probably imagine, queers, bisexuals, and really all of the other letters that make up the LGBTQ community were proud to discover Mister Rogers was actually a bisexual icon.

Which, of course, is the reason that the show went after some of the most controversial story material it could from the moment it hit the CBS schedule. In 1971 people probably thought all gay people were tiny, feminine, limp-wristed men with lisps — just all the stereotypes. I didn’t truly realize it at the time that history was being made.

Radio silence," he wrote (via Outsports). “The Sexual Revolution had started in the sixties with the hippies and that movement. Together, François and Mister Rogers made a bold statement by sharing a foot bath at the height of desegregation.
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Mister Rogers celebrated people for their differences and lived by the motto of liking people for being "just the way they are." He taught audiences that a person cannot be defined by merely one quality and according to director Morgan Neville, "What I think was really unique about what Mister Rogers was doing is that he embraced people's uniqueness."
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"He had people on who you didn't see on TV.

Not just racial diversity, but ... "He celebrated people for their differences."
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Here's what Mister Rogers said about his sexuality.
Because of his sensitivity and dedication to children, in addition probably to the way he didn't subscribe to the mainstream presentations of masculinity in that era, Mister Rogers was often labeled as "gay" or a "sissy." He himself told the New York Times back in 1975 that because he's "not John Wayne," people have trouble seeing him as "the model for the man in the house."
But what he did concede was that sexuality was more of a spectrum, and in a conversation with the openly gay Dr.

William Hirsch, the two discussed something like the Kinsey Scale (or Heterosexual-Homosexual Rating Scale).