Ron Palillo, the actor and G-Star arts school teacher who died last Tuesday at age 63 in his Palm Beach Gardens apartment, was remembered by fans and fellow actors with an outpouring of sadness and sweet memories.

The Welcome Back, Kotter star was cited for playing one of TV’s first great iconic nerds, the nasal-voiced Arnold Horshack. Palillo’s death also served a quiet coming-out for the actor, who was survived by his longtime partner Joseph Gramm. Some commentators said they had long surmised that Horshack was meant to be a gay character.

Here’s what people are saying about the actor and his beloved TV character:

His ‘Kotter’ co-star John Travolta: “Ron was a wonderful person and talent, and helped catapult Welcome Back, Kotter to great success. We will miss him.”

‘Kotter’ star and co-creator Gabe Kaplan: “I think everyone had a Horshack in their school, and there’s also a little bit of Horshack in all of us.” He fondly recalled how perfectly Palillo embodied the nebbishy character he’d been developing for some time in his stand-up act: “When Ron walked into the audition and did his first line, ‘Hello, how are you, I’m Arnold Horshack,’ I said, ‘That’s him. That’s the guy I’ve been talking about for five years.’”

Horshack’s distinctive hyena-like laugh: According to Welcome Back, Kotter co-creator Alan Sacks, that famous guffaw was entirely Palillo’s creation. “We had in the script ‘laugh,’ but we didn’t have the strange sound that came out,” he said.

Was Horshack gay? Even before Palillo’s death, fans had speculated that Horshack, with his love of movie musicals and exuberant mannerisms, was meant to be a gay character. In a blog post for the San Francisco Chronicle, David Wiegand argued that Horshack “was an important point in the timeline of how LGBT people are depicted on TV.” It’s a claim Sacks denied - sort of. “That was never in our minds,” he said, adding, “If we did it today, maybe we would have said that.” He also said that at one point he and Kaplan were developing a Welcome Back, Kotter film in which Horshack was out of the closet and working as a beautician.

While Wiegand admitted that the show was never explicit about Horshack’s orientation, “the undercurrent ran through the character as written and how Palillo played him,” he wrote. “It’s no small irony that if Palillo had played Horshack as he did 15 years later, there might have been an outcry from the LGBT community that Horshack’s over-the-top mannerisms smacked of gay stereotyping. Mostly, of course, Palillo was funny.”

Finally, five things you might not have known about Ron Palillo:

1. His last name is actually Paolillo. He dropped the first ‘o’ when he went into show business.

2. Palillo was more than Horshack — he toured in Shakespeare productions, performed off-Broadway, did animated voice work and often returned to the stage in his native Connecticut.

3. He illustrated two children’s books - The Red Wings of Christmas and A Gift For The Contessa.

4. He definitely had a sense of humor — who else would have fought Screech from Saved by The Bell on Celebrity Boxing 2? By the way, he lost.

5. By all accounts, he loved teaching at G-Star for three years, and relished the irony of a Sweathog essentially becoming Mr. Kotter. Before his death, Palillo was preparing for another year at the Palm Springs charter school and had been scheduled to be back in class this week.

The Los Angeles Times, Associated Press and other wire reports contributed to this story.