I recently acquired a copy of Dustin Diamond's "Behind the Bell" autobiography, a book which was published in 2009. In the book, Diamond complained that the writers of Saved By The Bell: The New Class wrote storylines about Screech and Mr. Belding being gay! Here are some select passages from the book:
I was still playing Screech in SBTB: The College Years when SBTB: The New Class began production, so there was a brief gap in time when I was still part of the original SBTB and hadn’t yet transitioned all the way with [Dennis Haskins] into the new format. When I started with The New Class, that’s when all the weird scripts started getting handed down to Den and me—scripts with all sorts of blatant homosexual innuendo between Mr. Belding and Screech. It was clear that the writers were either getting bored or had a bone to pick and were taking it out on us. Den was the first to vocalize his objections to whoever would listen. Stage directions started to be inserted into scripts that said things like, “Screech and Mr. Belding embrace and stare into each other’s eyes.” Weird shit like that. Look, I don’t care anything about people’s sexual preference. As far as I’m concerned, people can hit any hole they choose. But in the context of the long- standing relationships and backstories that had been established over years of creating the characters in SBTB, the shit they were handing us was totally inappropriate, and they knew it. Maybe it all was to get back at Den, who seemed to always be up in the writers’ room lecturing them on how he wanted Mr. Belding to be written. Maybe Den had told each of the writers that he was from their individual hometowns, and they’d finally compared notes with each other, deciding he was full of shit. Den was telling them how to do their jobs, and they were like, “Okay buddy, we’re the writers; you’re the actor. We’ll write the lines, you memorize them, and everybody will be happy.” I think Den just got on their nerves after a while, and they started taking it out on us in the scenes we had together. They’d write action like, “Screech gets scared and wraps his arms around Belding for safety.” It was a comedy show with a number of slapstick, cartoonish set pieces, so that wasn’t so bad. But then when scenes weren’t coming off as the writers envisioned, they started getting more graphic.
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Later, Ron Solomon and Brett Dewey’s partnership ended after Ron went on to other projects. Brett stayed with SBTB, sitting up in the seats of the darkened studio during rehearsals, uncorking that high-pitched, Revenge of the Nerds laugh of his whenever we performed one of the overtly gay gags he’d written into the script. You always knew which writers had written which jokes by who laughed the loudest. Den started mumbling, “It’s fucking Brett. He’s the one who thinks this shit’s so funny.”
