Like many a gay child, I spent hours alone in a living room, watching old movies. It was something of an uncanny room—perfectly neat, with bizarrely open stretches of floor. Somehow, it became more comforting because of how strangely it failed to evoke an ordinary home. It wasn’t actually anybody’s living room, but it belonged to Robert Osborne, who I somehow can’t imagine living anywhere else. Osborne died three days ago, at age 84. For 23 years, as the marquee host of Turner Classic Movies, he brought strange babies like me into his home through a television set.

“He was an angel of reason coming through a hotel television,” remembers my friend Greer Sinclair, a film presenter herself with Film Noir Foundation’s Noir City. “His manner told me gentlemen still talked about movies.” Greer and I belonged the same species growing up—awkward children, a little too old-fashioned and precise in our speech. Then we were little freaks, and no wonder we grew up into big freaks, watching that man gently deliver trivia about Bette Davis from under a perfectly salt and pepper coif. “I wanted to be wherever he was,” Greer says, “on that safe sound stage. I thought that was a place where movies were real, if that makes sense.”

It makes perfect sense to me: I remember thinking something similar. Not surprisingly, so did Robert Osborne, in a way. In 2006, describing his own childhood escape into the world of film, he told The New York Times, "I'd see Clifton Webb and Gene Tierney in Laura and Bette Davis in All About Eve, and I'd think, 'Those people are so much more interesting than what I'm living around in this town.’”

This remark has been quoted frequently in the aftermath of Osborne’s death—but to a queer reader, it carries a special valance, much like the movies he adored. As Bette Davis cries out to her cruel mother in Now, Voyager, “I didn't want to be born, you didn't want me to be born! It's been a calamity on both sides!” For decades, movie queens rejected by a hateful and mystifying straight world have carried Bette’s reclamation of self close to their hearts. And for decades, Robert Osborne was there, a custodian of the trivial and glamorous, with his living room open. These people, he seemed to say, are so much more interesting, and kind, and understanding, than what you’re living around in that town.

When I say he was a custodian of the trivial, I’m referring to the kind of trivia so often praised by the movie queen. Queerness itself is often considered trivial—how many times have you heard a homophobe demean our basic civil rights as “special?” The movie queen adores the special, the excessive, the unnecessary but utterly delicious. Osborne didn’t just dispense endless trivia in his presentations on TCM, he also reached out to stars declared unnecessary by the youth-fixated movie business. “They were cut off like people on a desert island,” he told The Times. “Paulette Goddard, I got to know. Hedy Lamarr, I got to know really well. Nobody gave a damn about Hedy Lamarr back then.”

Both as a presenter and as a writer of film criticism and history, Osborne distinguished himself with his love of small facts and anecdotes, which he prized over and above personal taste. In 2013, he told the Los Angeles Times about a book of film criticism he’d read once. “Whoever wrote it said Singin' in the Rain was the best movie musical ever made. I thought it's great, but what if I like The Band Wagon better? I found it insulting.”

Who cares what the canon is? Movies are about that trivial, gay thing: Pleasure.

We were just talking about Now, Voyager—the studio refused to cast Paul Henreid after his first screen test, and Bette Davis herself had to wipe the pancake makeup off his face before he could look his best and land the part. Did you know that? I did. Do you know when Peter Jackson read The Lord of the Rings and imagined it becoming a movie one day? I do. It was in 1978, on a long train ride in New Zealand. Did you know that Sue Lyon was too young to be allowed to attend the American premiere of her debut film, Lolita? I did. (They let her in at the London one.)

I know these things, of course, because I grew up watching Robert Osborne.

And so, of course, I was not surprised when I read in the L.A. Times that his male partner survives him. It isn’t that I always knew that he was like me—although I did. He wasn’t obliged to be known like that by me or anybody else, and it’s not as though anyone was clamoring for information about the private life of a TCM presenter. Besides, he didn’t need to tell me he was like me. I watched old movies next to him in that safe living room for all those years, and I knew.