Mad Men: Sal Ramono Gets Caught With the Bellboy

In it’s third season premiere, Mad Men’s closeted gay art director Sal Ramono, played by Bryan Batt, gets some baggage out of the closet with a little help from a hot bellboy while on a business trip. Just as the hotel hook up really starts to steam, they’re interrupted by the fire alarm and Sal is subsequently outed to his boss, Mad Men’s protagonist Don Draper, a role filled by the much admired Jon Hamm.

The critically acclaimed AMC series takes painstaking efforts to subtly recreate the period piece with details appropriate to the social and professional worlds of the early sixties.

By that notion, the delicate coax of a closeted professional out of a cover life is one that cannot be compared to a modern day telling. The shows theme of lies and secret identities is repeated in all the characters, so when staying in a hotel for a business trip, Sal isn’t the only character partaking in an adulterous travel tryst.

After catching a telling eyeful from the fire escape, (there’s that sixties realism again, the fire escape was the actual means of exit in the event of a fire back then) Draper later implies to his colleague Sal the secret of his sexuality is safe on their return flight.

But is that reaction true to the television series’ retro-times? Fans are abuzz as to whether or not Draper’s reaction was realistic in the realm of the ol’ boys club at the ad agency. Some say Hamm’s Draper routinely displays a non-judgmental outlook, citing his reaction to Peggy’s ‘condition’ in season 2, while other’s think there definitely would have been some homophobic repercussions once Sal’s sexual preference came to the surface in the conservative climate.

What do you think of Sal Ramono’s first steps out of the closet and Don Draper’s reaction on the new season of Mad Men? Is it a delicate story unraveling or a modernly liberal misrepresentation?

Regardless, it’s a rarity to see an LGBT perspective included in a historical reflection at all, and it’s one more element that layers viewer’s fascination with Mad Men.