Losing Malcolm

A Queer Man and Late Bloomer’s Thank You to Malcolm-Jamal Warner and Theo Huxtable

Where were you when Theo Huxtable donned a hideous yellow shirt, sewn for him by his television sister Denise?

The year was 1984, and the episode “A Shirt Story” featured Malcolm Jamal Warner as Theo, the 14-year-old lone son amongst five children on The Cosby Show.

I was eight years old, probably stretched out on the floor in my suburban Boston home surrounded by some assemblage of my own ten siblings and our parents, glued to the TV screen as millions were at the time, watching Theo try to convince his parents to let him keep the original $95 version of the shirt he’d bought to impress his new girlfriend, Christine.

His parents’ answer was a hard “no,” for a silk shirt whose price tag might seem less absurd in 2025, though it would still outprice most of my shirts today.

As my family laughed around me, I likely stared at the screen with an intensity unmatched by anyone else in the room, for I was in love with Theo Huxtable.

Warner was one of my earliest alerts, along with Ricky Schroder on Silver Spoons and Jason Bateman on The Hogan Family, that my interest in 80’s TV heartthrobs was pronounced, that I was much more a Theo boy than a Denise one.

Warner intrigued not only for his dreamy good looks (plus, scandalous, he was six years older than me) but also for his acting chops, going toe-to-toe with his dad over the importance of education versus popularity, girls, and having a good time, in the earliest seasons of the show.

In the show’s initial days, I devoutly spent Thursday nights laughing at Warner’s comedic timing, wishing for a coming out storyline that would have been a decade-plus ahead of its time. That plot twist never came, but another evolved for Theo.

Long had he struggled in school, long had he said he wouldn’t bother going to college and said he just wanted to be “a regular person.” In the show’s latter seasons, Warner’s Theo came to value education and attended New York University and learns he has dyslexia. Warner, the actor, rose to the occasion of Theo’s evolution, displaying a maturity that fit the character’s struggles with his new diagnosis.

By the time I reached high school in the early nineties, with Theo fixed to leave our TV screens when the show ended in 1992, his journey stuck with me. I was a high schooler who was certain, because of my rearing in a home where my father told his children they were stupid, of his own ineptitude. I hardly tried in school because, why should I bother? I was dumb, that message was deeply ingrained.

I was about sixteen, a sophomore in high school, when, for a class, I wrote an essay about Kate Chopin’s “The Awakening” that prompted my teacher to challenge my long-held belief of my own stupidity; she encouraged my writing and the thoughts within.

Her comments lit a spark in me that changed my trajectory, much like Theo’s shifted. Theo Huxtable was my first exposure to an academic late-bloomer, and I wondered, if Theo could do it—go to college, make something of himself using his brain—could I, too?

As Warner’s Theo grappled with his dyslexia, so did I struggle to overcome the years spent believing that I didn’t even have the capacity to learn. I started my junior year of high school trying, for the first time, in my classes, surprised that I could get the information from the page into my head, which I’d long thought was more like a sieve than a sponge.

I left high school with a transcript that looks like it might be a patch job from two different students, as the Fs and Ds of my first two years gave way to a smattering of Cs, Bs, and an occasional A by the time I graduated.

I was amazed when I gained acceptance to my dream school, Oberlin College—cut to me falling to my knees and crying when I got my acceptance letter.

As soon as I arrived at Oberlin, I felt out of my depth. My peers had long been the stand-outs in their schools, whereas I felt like I’d clawed my way there, or that the admission’s committee had made a mistake.

While many of my new friends spent time after class playing ultimate Frisbee in the quad, I ducked into the basement of the campus learning center, sitting with a reading specialist who taught me ways to skim my assignments, to look for the important bits, and to not get caught up in the maelstrom of insecurity that threatened to overtake me every time I didn’t fully understand a concept. He taught me to ask for help when I was confused, and frequenting professors’ office hours became a regular activity in my afternoons.

When I returned from my first semester with a C (and it was a generous C) in a biology class, I berated myself to my father, himself a graduate of MIT, and a different, sobered man since my childhood.

When I began trying to learn late in high school, my then-sober father immediately got on board, preaching the value of education just as they did on the Cosby Show. He supported my efforts to overcome what I’d long believed about myself, even if he’d been the one who’d put the idea in my head of my own stupidity.

As I bemoaned my C in biology, my father turned once again to the lessons of Theo Huxtable. While at NYU, Theo is disheartened to earn a B. The character’s transformation, from one who couldn’t care less about grades to a diligent student heartbroken over a B, highlighted the evolution Warner brought to Theo. As his TV father reminded him where he’d come from, and that he should be proud of what he called “a hard B,” one that Theo worked for, despite the odds, despite his history, so did my father call my grade “a hard C.” Whatever shame I felt about thee grade melted away as we thought of Theo.

My feelings for the always-handsome Warner evolved, too. Though he’ll always be a point of reference on my coming out journey, when news broke of his untimely and tragic death this past week from drowning while on vacation, my heart broke for the loss of Warner the artist, and what he might have done next as he continued to move beyond Theo Huxtable. He starred in dozens of shows after the Cosby Show, including a four-year stint in the eponymous Malcolm and Eddie, delivering on the depths of his characters, just as he’d done with Theo. As Tyler Piccotti noted in his Biography article, “Malcolm-Jamal Warner Was a Star Sitcom Actor. His Real Passion Was Directing,” Warner was also a Grammy-winning bassist, Grammy-nominated spoken word poet, and a director who paved the way for young actor-directors, first directing episodes of The Cosby Show ahead of episodes of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air and All That.

Warner will be a touchstone for many of us who met him in the eighties, wearing Denise’s botched recreation of the yellow Gordon Gartrell shirt, trying for many seasons to convince his parents that he didn’t need an education and could be, as he told his TV dad in the sitcom pilot, “a regular person.”

Theo and Warner were never destined to be just a regular person. I, for one, as someone who looked to Theo’s journey to buoy my own tumultuous journey through education, couldn’t be more thankful for that.