In the spring of 1995 Joyce Millman, TV critic for the San Francisco Examiner, wrote a prescient column on “The Sitcom That Dare Not Speak Its Name.” The program was ABC’s Ellen, which, while performing well in the all-important ratings contest, was having difficulty finding its identity. Based on the wry, self-deprecating persona Ellen DeGeneres had developed as a standup comedian, Ellen was one of many sitcoms spawned by the success of comedy club circuit graduates Roseanne and Jerry Seinfeld. Along with Asian American Margaret Cho (All American Girl) and southern working-class Brett Butler (Grace Under Fire), DeGeneres was swept into prime time by television’s unquenchable thirst for imitation. Seinfeld and fellow NBC hit Friends were also models for the bunch-of-twenty-something-friends-hanging-around format of Ellen (originally titled These Friends of Mine). But as Millman perceptively noted, something was off-key in the lead character’s ambivalence toward those staples of sitcom plotting, dating and romance. “As a single gal sitcom, Ellen doesn’t make any sense at all, until you view it through the looking glass where the unspoken subtext becomes the main point. Then Ellen is transformed into one of TV’s savviest, funniest, slyest shows. Ellen Morgan is a closet lesbian.”
Millman’s insight was likely shared by many in the media, as well as in the audience, but she also wondered, “If Ellen were to lay all its cards on the table, so to speak, could it still be a hit? Well, the pro-gay attitude of Roseanne hasn’t hurt that show. The pressure to be a role model, though, coupled with the inevitable conservative protests, might squeeze the life out of an up-front Ellen.”
For her part, Ellen DeGeneres (who noted in a November 1995 interview with Entertainment Weekly that she wanted more women writers on Ellen, because the male writers were “focusing on me dating all the time. … There are lots of women who don’t date this much”) stubbornly refused to be drawn out on her private life. Even though the publicity for her best-selling book, My Point… And I Do Have One, promised “strange but true stories from her own life,” she insisted that “the book was never intended to be confessional. I never talked about my personal life in standup. I never talked about it before. And suddenly, it’s become this huge issue. And I don’t have anything to say about it anymore. I really don’t.”
Others were not necessarily as discrete. Rumors about DeGeneres’s lesbianism, long familiar in gay circles, began to break through the media’s veil. In January 1996 New York magazine’s “Intelligencer Column” snickered at the coyness of New York’s Daily News gossip columnist, who “oddly neglected to mention” that the fan Ellen DeGeneres was spotted “soul-kissing and pawing” was a woman. In the summer of 1996 DeGeneres began conferring with her publicist regarding the implications of coming out. Pat Kingsley, president of PMK, the powerful Hollywood PR firm that represents Tom Cruise and Jodie Foster, told her that she “didn’t know because it hadn’t been done before.” What followed was viewed by many PR professionals as a triumph of placement, and by much of the public as a feeding frenzy of hype.
The story began with a press release from TV Guide in advance of its September 28, 1996, issue, reporting that the producers of Ellen, as well as ABC-TV and Disney Television (which owns ABC), discussed having Ellen Morgan come out during the 1996–97 season. While that story, and others, noted that no decision had been made by the network, DeGeneres and the producers were loading the dice by dropping hints throughout the season’s opening episodes (which ran, by strange coincidence, just as the story broke). In the very first show, Ellen Morgan serenades herself in the bathroom mirror as she prepares to brush her teeth: “I feel pretty, I feel pretty, I feel pretty and witty and …”—at which point she notices that the faucet isn’t working and instead of completing the lyric as written—“gay”—she says “Hey!” Other moments were even less subtle, as when Ellen Morgan steps out of a closet in her new house, saying “Yeah, there’s plenty of room, but it’s not very comfortable.”
The flood of publicity that followed TV Guide’s press release demonstrated both the appeal and volatility of the issue. Although Disney Television’s response was a tight-lipped, “We don’t comment on rumors and speculation,” neither gay organizations nor their enemies were restrained in their responses. Alan Klein, communications director for GLAAD, said, “If the character Ellen does come out, it would be a milestone for network television because never before has a lead character been out of the closet.” In the other corner, Pat Robertson promised protests by religious groups and expressed skepticism at the idea of Ellen as a lesbian, “because she’s such an attractive actress.” Donald Wildmon’s American Family Association warned that advertisers on a show with a gay lead would “reveal their true allegiances to themes which gnaw at traditional family values” (AFA Action Alert, 10/2/96).
As the season progressed, the story continued to build. Ellen DeGeneres fueled the flames with appearances on Regis and Kathie Lee and David Letterman’s and Rosie O’Donnell’s talk shows, joking that her character would be revealed to be Lebanese or that they were adding a new character, Les Behan, to the show.1 As newspaper and magazine stories proliferated, complete with polling data—Entertainment Weekly commissioned a survey, reporting that 72 percent of respondents would not be “personally offended if a lead character on a TV program were gay” but that only 31 percent thought that “the trend towards more gay characters on TV” is good, while 44 percent thought it was bad—the real question for ABC and Disney was probably the reaction of advertisers. In a widely quoted assessment, network advertising buyer Paul Schulman advised, “I don’t think they would have any sort of major problem if she comes out of the closet and has a girlfriend. But if the two of them are in bed together, I think that would cause some advertisers to be squeamish.”
Pressure from lesbian and gay viewers and organizations—egged on by GLAAD’s “Ellen Watch” Web site—and media curiosity kept the issue on the public agenda. ABC executives admitted a coming out episode was in the works but remained publicly uncommitted to airing it. In the words of ABC Entertainment president Jamie Tarses, “We are very seriously considering about going in the direction that everyone’s speculating on.” Meanwhile, as Ellen Morgan’s sexuality was being debated in ABC’s and Disney’s executive offices, Ellen DeGeneres was facing a similar question: If Ellen Morgan came out, could Ellen DeGeneres continue to refuse to discuss her private life? As lesbian comedian Lea DeLaria asked, “What, is she going to say ‘I’m not a lesbian, but I play one on TV’?”
From the start of DeGeneres’s conversations with her publicist, it was obvious to them that both Ellens would have to come out, and it was here that the PR campaign orchestrated by PMK and ABC was especially effective. Once the decision was made to proceed with the coming out—and the flood of publicity unleashed back in September 1996 really left the network no choice—ABC set the date for the episode for the spring sweeps and began to organize the publicity (it also moved the program from its early prime-time slot to a later hour). As the taping date neared, stories appeared with clockwork regularity, heralding the growing list of guest appearances on the hour-long episode: the roster eventually included Oprah Winfrey as Ellen’s therapist (who better to ease audiences across this emotional threshold than our national media empath?), Laura Dern as the woman Ellen falls for, and cameos by k. d. lang, Melissa Etheridge, Demi Moore, Billy Bob Thornton, and Dwight Yoakum. At the same time, DeGeneres’s publicists at PMK executed a spectacular media coming out for the star, limiting her to three interviews, but what interviews! Beginning with a cover story in Time—a photo of DeGeneres with the bold headline, “Yep, I’m gay”—and continuing with a two-part interview with Diane Sawyer on ABC’s 20/20, one segment airing the week before and one immediately following the coming out episode.2 The publicity grand slam was completed with an appearance on Oprah the afternoon of the coming out episode.
The Oprah appearance was more than just another round in the PR barrage; it opened a whole new front in the cultural war that Ellen/Ellen had come to represent. In a sidebar interview accompanying the Time article, DeGeneres answered a question, “Are you involved with anybody now?” saying “I just met somebody. This appears to be something I want to last forever, if it can.” As viewers tuned in to Oprah on April 30 learned, that somebody was rising Hollywood star Anne Heche.
Anne Heche’s coming out had not been foreshadowed in the flood of publicity surrounding Ellen/Ellen, and it was a first of a different kind for Hollywood: the coming out of a female star (or star-in-the-making) who was identified with romantic roles. Ellen DeGeneres had never been typed as a romantic lead—critics had often noted her “studied absence of man-catching glamour”—but Heche had recently been seen sexually entangled with Alec Baldwin and Johnny Depp, and was about to appear in the big-budget Hollywood film Volcano, playing a scientist with a romantic interest in Tommy Lee Jones.
Previous comings out—or exposures—had occurred after a star was past his or her “media prime,” as in the case of a 1955 Confidential exposé of Marlene Dietrich, Johnny Mathis’s 1982 coming out interview in US magazine, or the later revelations by or about TV actors Raymond Burr, Nancy Kulp, Dick Sargent, Dack Rambo, among others.3 But Heche was just entering the ranks of Hollywood’s A-list as an attractive, (hetero)sexual young woman and had recently been signed to play opposite box-office heavyweight Harrison Ford. The director of that movie, Ivan Reitman, at first seemed worried but quickly backed down: “Harrison and I want to emphasize that Anne is definitely in the film … and that both of us are enthusiastically looking forward to working with her.” The journalistic consensus seemed to be that Heche’s career could survive coming out because she somehow wouldn’t threaten women and would appeal to male viewers’ fascination with lesbian sexuality, as long as she eventually ended up with a male lover.
Heche’s declaration that she hadn’t ever considered herself a lesbian until she spotted Ellen DeGeneres across a crowded room also unsettled the lesson that Oprah and her audience had been taught by previous queer guests. As one woman in the audience put it, “We’re led to believe that people who are gay tend to know from birth, and you kind of disputed that.” Oprah quickly scheduled an emergency session the following week, bringing on a pack of scholars and lesbian/gay activists of all persuasions, attempting (unsuccessfully) to regain a secure position on the issue.
What seemed to go unnoticed in the commotion was the eerie resemblance between Anne Heche’s revelation that she loved Ellen DeGeneres and Ellen Morgan’s discovery that she loved the character played by Laura Dern on Ellen: fiction and real life converge on the road to Damascus. In some ways the nouveau dyke experiences of Ellen Morgan would necessarily be more familiar to Heche than to DeGeneres, who had, after all, come out nearly twenty years earlier. Ellen Morgan, in turn, deflected attention from a question that might have dimmed the glowing adulation DeGeneres was basking in: why had it taken her so long to come out publicly? As columnist Dan Savage pointed out, Oprah and Diane Sawyer seemed to be interviewing Ellen Morgan, not Ellen Degeneres.
The coming out episode of Ellen drew the largest audience of the week and, along with the 20/20 interview, propelled ABC to the top of sweeps heap. Across the country Ellen parties were held in homes and fund-raisers filled halls from Manhattan to Kansas City to West Hollywood. In Birmingham, Alabama, where the local ABC affiliate refused to carry the episode, a local group sold two thousand tickets for a closed-circuit showing at an auditorium. Although some regular Ellen advertisers (Chrysler, McDonald’s, Coca-Cola and Domino’s Pizza, among others) stayed away, ABC easily sold the commercial slots for upwards of $300,000 per thirty-second spot (up from the usual $150,000 to $200,000) to such sponsors as Volkswagen, the Gap, Warner Brothers, and Burlington Coat Factory. Treading warily, ABC refused to sell air time to Olivia Cruise Lines, a lesbian travel company. The Human Rights Campaign (HRC) produced an ad explaining that lesbians and gay men were vulnerable to employment discrimination in forty-one states, but ABC turned them down. However, HRC did succeed in placing the ad on approximately thirty ABC affiliates around the country.
Critical reaction to the episode was enthusiastic—it eventually won a screen-writing Emmy and a Peabody award—spilling out of the media columns into the news and editorial pages. The New York Times ran an editorial (May 1, 1997), praising the show’s “wit and poignancy” and the star’s “brave decision,” but also chastising DeGeneres and Heche for their “ostentatious display of affection … in front of President Clinton at the White House Correspondents Dinner” (the “display” apparently consisted of hand-holding that would have been unremarkable for a straight couple) and sternly warning that, “As the first openly gay lead character on and off television, Ms DeGeneres faces a special challenge—keeping her show fresh, funny and free of special pleading.”
The next episodes of Ellen didn’t come close to the blockbuster ratings of the coming out show, but it still led its time slot. However, ABC waited until the last moment before renewing the program for the 1997–98 season. The network, like the New York Times, seemed uneasy at the prospect of a sitcom that might be accused of “special pleading.” By the start of the 1998 fall season, Ellen DeGeneres and ABC were conducting a semipublic tug-of-war over the direction Ellen Morgan’s new life would take.
In her coming out interviews DeGeneres emphasized that she did not wish to be an activist: “I never wanted to be ‘the lesbian actress.’ I never wanted to be the spokesperson for the gay community. Ever. I did it for my own truth.”4 Yet, quite predictably, caught in the headlights of unrelenting media attention, attracting both adulation and hostility, forced to negotiate every script line with corporate executives concerned with boycotts and bottom lines, Ellen DeGeneres found herself sucked into a public role.5 Being catapulted into the public arena as a famous lesbian did not, however, transform the long-closeted performer into a politically astute activist. In April 1998, appearing in England to promote the U.K. broadcast of the coming out episode, she was still insisting, “I don’t see it as being political, but everyone else does. I was just searching for my own personal freedom.”6
Despite earlier disclaimers that Ellen would not become the “lesbian dating show,” the new episodes did focus on Ellen Morgan’s exploration of her new identity, eventually falling in love with another woman, kissing her, and heading off with her to the bedroom at the close of a November show. ABC countered by placing parental advisories before these episodes and giving them a TV-14 rating (“Parents Strongly Cautioned”) under the new television rating system introduced in 1997. Ellen objected over the advisories, as did GLAAD and other gay organizations, noting that no such cautions were placed on programs with much more explicit, but hetero, sexual content. Both ABC and DeGeneres were willing to use the conflict to promote the show, however, as when a promo aired during Monday Night Football (10/28/97) featured the star saying, “Hi, I’m Ellen DeGeneres. I can’t tell you the plot of this week’s show, but it’s titled ‘Ellen Kisses a Girl and Upsets the Network.”
The “new” Ellen was popular with gay audiences, and the critics generally approved of the direction taken—especially successful was an episode in which Emma Thompson “comes out” as a lesbian (and an Ohioan)—but the ratings were not high enough to protect the show from accusations of being “too gay.” The issue erupted in flames when GLAAD’s entertainment director Chastity Bono told an interviewer from Daily Variety that she felt Ellen was in ratings trouble because, as she later put it, “the subject matter had become too gay-specific for Middle America.” Variety’s front-page headline, “Ellen Is Too Gay,” probably cost Bono her job at GLAAD, and it certainly helped grease the skids on which Ellen was sliding toward cancellation by the end of the 1997–98 season.
Ellen Morgan didn’t survive as a lesbian lead character on prime-time television, but her coming out was a milestone in American cultural history: a narrative punctuated by media events that represented and reinforced transformations in the social climate. Despite Gil Scott-Heron’s 1960s–era pronouncement that the revolution would not be televised, it has long been clear that television serves as the platform on which the drama of our common culture is played out. Social change is a gradual and uneven process, which may be why highlighting signifying moments is attractive. As different groups demand their place in society, their claim is partly demonstrated through media representation, even fictional depictions.
The drama of white America’s reluctant embrace of African Americans can be traced from the caricatures of Amos ’n’ Andy in the 1950s, and the flap when British singer Petula Clark touched Harry Belafonte’s arm in the early 1960s, to Diahann Carroll as Julia (long before she got to play a “soap opera bitch” opposite Joan Collins in Dynasty), and culminating in the career of Bill Cosby. Long before The Cosby Show topped the ratings, Cosby broke new ground as the first African American to star in a TV series, as Robert Culp’s partner on I Spy in the mid-1960s.
Norman Lear’s All in the Family introduced a variety of hot-button topics throughout the 1970s, and its spinoff, Maude, featured the first—and still the only—lead character to have an abortion. When Dan Quayle focused on the fictional Murphy Brown in order to criticize single mothers, the story, complete with a photo of “Murphy Brown” (as opposed to Candace Bergen), ran on the front page of the New York Times.
Thus, Ellen Morgan took her place in a long line of television firsts, frightening the horses of the Christian Right; heartening the spirits of many, such as the woman who wrote to a New York Times reporter that “Ellen’s decision to come out has indeed spurred me to tiptoe out of my own closet”; and evoking ambivalence in others, such as lesbian cartoonist Alison Bechdel, who told the Los Angeles Lesbian News,
The Ellen thing’s got me all in a twist. I feel like if you take this quest for visibility to its logical extreme and we end up on network TV and in every other book, people won’t have the same need for this rich subculture that we’ve built. … That’s kind of sad to me, even though in a way it’s progress. It’s sad because I like being on the margins. I think you have a richer life that way. I don’t want to see queer life turned into a commodity on network TV.
Just as the saga of Ellen’s coming out was reaching its climax in late April 1997, a vastly different sort of story began its journey to the headlines. A gay man named Jeffrey Trail was killed in a Minneapolis apartment, followed within a few days by the discovery of the body of another gay man, David Madson, near Chicago, and then the stabbed body of Lee Miglin, a wealthy Chicago businessman, was discovered in his garage. Almost immediately, the suspected killer of all three men was identified as Andrew Cunanan of San Diego, who had known both Trail and Madsen. The multiple killings set off a manhunt for Cunanan, who apparently fled East in Miglin’s car, which he abandoned in New Jersey after killing a cemetary caretaker and stealing his truck. At this point the trail went cold, and although the FBI issued alerts there was no visible trace of the suspected killer. Although America’s Most Wanted labeled Cunanan “Public Enemy Number One,” and the gay press ran stories with Cunanan’s picture to warn that a killer was on the loose, the manhunt seemed stalled until July 15, when Andrew Cunanan burst onto the world’s front pages by shooting and killing renowned fashion designer Gianni Versace on the front steps of his South Beach, Florida, mansion.
The killing of Gianni Versace turned the previously obscure story into one of the biggest news events of the year, putting Andrew Cunanan at the top of network news and on the cover of Newsweek.7 The tidal wave of the story swept aside lessons slowly learned by the news media, as they rushed to judgment about the killer, the victim, and the circumstances of the tragic events. When a normally careful journalist like Tom Brokaw refers to the “homicidal homosexual” who killed Versace, it’s hardly surprising that the sleazy ones, like the New York Post, kept using phrases such as “bloodthirsty gay serial killer” and engaged in homophobic speculation.8 The saga of Andrew Cunanan, entangled after the killing of Gianni Versace with the glamorous world of high fashion and the South Beach party scene, triggered journalistic conditioned reflexes that associate gay with sex, and especially with promiscuity, decadence, and AIDS.
Within a day of the Versace murder the media were promoting the theory—soon taken for granted as fact—that Cunanan was HIV-positive and that, as a New York Post headline put it, “AIDS Fuels His Fury” (a hypothesis disputed by Joel Achenbach in the Washington Post). As it turned out, when an autopsy was conducted on Cunanan’s body (he committed suicide the week after shooting Versace), he was not HIV-positive and we will probably never know what motivated his murders. The media and the police also elaborated the hypothesis that Cunanan had escaped from Miami dressed as a woman. Reported sightings of a cross-dressing Cunanan were encouraged by broadcast and printed images of what he might look like in a wig and makeup.
Many media accounts delved into Cunanan’s past in an attempt to explain what had turned a shallow young man into a cold-blooded killer. Almost without exception the stories depicted Cunanan as a prostitute, whether an amateur gigolo or, as his mother was reported to have termed him, a “high-class homosexual prostitute” (his father told reporters that this was not true: “he was an altar boy”). In any case, there was no evidence that Cunanan was turning tricks, though it is quite possible that he was—or wanted to be—a “trophy boy.” Other stories, equally unsupported by real evidence, speculated that Cunanan was part of a sexual underworld of drugs and kinky sex. Journalist Maureen Orth, who wrote a long article on Cunanan for Vanity Fair and then a book on the case, told CNN’s Larry King that Cunanan “traversed a gay parallel universe in America today—traveling from the seamy, drug-addled underbelly of the demimonde to the cultured and privileged world of the rich and the closeted.” Orth allowed her imagination to take her even farther when she reported that Cunanan and Versace were acquainted—a claim that was never supported by evidence—with the implication that this somehow explained the murder.
If Cunanan was fair game for homophobic media speculation, it might have been expected that his victims would receive better treatment. But Gianni Versace was not exactly left in peace after his death. New York Post gossip columnist Cindy Adams lost no time in playing blame-the-victim, writing that Versace frequented “what the uptight might term dens of iniquity,” and the TV tabloid Hard Copy followed suit, showing topless men dancing in Miami, and promising to explore “Versace’s private playland … a world some say may have led to his untimely death.” According to Hard Copy of July 16, 1997, Versace threw “the kinds of parties that Cunanan reportedly trolled for fresh victims.” Newsweek even reported the (soon discredited) claim that Cunanan had attended a “small party” at Versace’s house two days before the killing. Maureen Orth also alleged in her book that Versace was HIV-positive, although his family denies this and, even if true, its relevance to his killing is nonexistent.
When it came to reporting Versace’s celebrity-studded funeral, the media went into great detail, offering pictures and descriptions of the mourners, with Princess Diana and Elton John receiving the most elaborate coverage, along with Versace’s sister, brother, and his nieces. Almost completely unmentioned was Antonio D’Amico, his lover of eleven years (also overlooked was Elton John’s lover, David Furman, who was clearly visible, but never identified, in numerous photographs of the funeral). Not only did the media erase D’Amico, failing to mention him in obituaries or coverage of the funeral, but some went further in their eagerness to “in” a man who had never hidden his homosexuality. The wire services devoted much space to the funeral, informing us that “the men closest to the designer—his brother Santo, Sting and Elton John—all wore black crew necks rather than a tie under dark jackets. … Elton John stood in silence for 15 minutes. Then he burst into tears and had to be coaxed away by Versace’s brother” (St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 7/23/97). The London Daily Telegraph’s obituary (7/16/97) concluded, “Versace never married. ‘As a person, he is not very sexual,’ a woman colleague explained, ‘but there is plenty of suggestion.’”
The media do not require the drama of a serial killer as a pretext for lapses into homophobic coverage of gay men. Unearthing a tactic that was used by police before being curtailed in the 1960s, local TV stations in 1998 began sneaking cameras into public toilets in the hope of catching men engaged in sex.9 A Seattle TV station did a story concerning a Web site that lists places across the country where men meet for sex, and followed up by sending a reporter into a local mensroom with a hidden camera. The Seattle story was quickly imitated by ABC’s San Diego affiliate, in time for the February sweeps period, and the ploy was quickly picked up by other ABC affiliates. The standard practice in these stories is to electronically scramble the image to obscure the faces of the men depicted, but in at least one instance a San Antonio station screwed up and clearly broadcast the faces of two men. Also, as Detroit Free Press reporter John Smyntek noted (5/28/98), it is not known what happens to the original tapes; station executives might assume that all hidden camera footage is erased after the broadcast but, in fact, copies might well be kept by station personnel. The San Diego Union-Tribune, writing about the local angle, pointed out that the station in question appeared to violate California state law, which forbids such hidden filming in bathrooms, but also noted that “there will be no action taken against Channel 10 unless someone who was taped comes forward and complains to police that their privacy was invaded, said a spokeswoman for the City Attorney.”10 The newspaper also revealed that portions of the San Diego station’s report were taken verbatim from the earlier story broadcast by the Seattle station.
By the time the May sweeps loomed, the story gimmick had been written up in the Rundown, a weekly eight-page trade paper and tip sheet for TV stations, and spread across the country as local news directors exchanged ideas for audience-attracting sweeps stories. “If a station in a market finds a story that does really well, that story will make the rounds in every market,” the news director for two stations in Florida told a reporter. By November 1998, local TV stations in more than forty cities, including Boston, Charlotte, Cincinnati, Columbus, Detroit, Houston, Las Vegas, Miami, New York, Oklahoma City, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, San Antonio, and Syracuse, all ran such stories, heavily hyped—usually during sweeps periods. As the new general manager of New York’s Fox TV station admitted to the Village Voice’s Richard Goldstein, he was under orders to improve their ratings: “I’m here to stem the downturning tide,” and toilet-tryst TV might do the trick. WSOC in Charlotte, North Carolina, offered their videotapes to the local vice squad, who subsequently arrested eleven men.11
Gay leaders responding to the TV tabloid sensationalism were often eager to condemn public sex while decrying the media’s tactics. Karen Boothe, then president of the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association said in a May 11, 1998, press release that “NLGJA in no way condones illegal sexual activity in public places, but nor do we condone exploitative coverage that panders to sexual curiosity as a way of pumping up ratings.” Mark Segal, publisher of the Philadelphia Gay News, said he was “opposed to heterosexuals or gay men or anybody having public sex,” but that the local TV story was a “scare story,” not an investigation of public sex. At the same time, other gay leaders pointed out the double standard that views public sex between men and women, in parked cars or on beaches, as romantic and even amusing, while public (though much less visible) sex between men is seen as horrible and perverted.12
Although the stations typically focused on the so-called threat to children who might stumble on men engaged in sex, none ever turned up evidence of this happening. New York’s Fox station ran ads for several days that were typical of stations across the country: “Sexual deviants are roaming our local stores and malls, places that you shop, with your children. … Could you or your child be an innocent victim of cruising for sex?” In fact, as has been known at least since sociologist Laud Humphreys’ 1970 study, Tearoom Trade, “outsiders” rarely stumble onto such scenes, as the activities typically cease when newcomers enter the space, and only resume when the person either leaves or indicates an interest in watching or participating. Vice cops succeed in apprehending men engaging in “public sex” in restrooms only by giving clear signals that they are interested themselves—whether in watching or participating—and then arresting men who respond positively to their signals, as George Michael learned in a Los Angeles park restroom in April 1998.13 The reporters who fearlessly caught men in the act in shopping mall restrooms must have also “played by the rules,” in order not to have caused their targets to cease their activities.
When Philadelphia’s NBC affiliate WCAU-TV was preparing to air its version of this exposé during the November 1998 sweeps, local activists sought to persuade the station that its “Hidden Camera Investigation” was exposing a nonexistent problem: none of the places where the footage was shot had ever recorded even a single complaint about children encountering sexual activity in their bathrooms. In discussions with the station news director and the reporter who prepared the story, they kept asking, “What if a child walked in and saw these men?” It was explained that such activities cease when outsiders enter—and certainly if a child entered—and would only resume if the newcomer indicated interest. The reporter protested, “Well, they didn’t stop when I was there,” to which an activist replied, “You were showing interest!” The reporter, a good-looking young man, was wearing a pair of eyeglasses with a camera built into the nosepiece, which meant that in order to capture the shocking behavior on video he had to be looking directly and steadily at the men who were engaging in whatever it was—which certainly passes for interest and encouragement, under the familiar “rules of the game” for tearoom sex. One might well describe the reporter’s actions as video-entrapment. The local media establishment felt differently, apparently, as the series won a mid-Atlantic Emmy Award for “Outstanding Service News.”
Print media, which occasionally decry the sensationalism of tabloid TV, are nonetheless often willing to print the names and addresses of men arrested in “sting operations” by vice cops who stake out public parks and restrooms. In January 1998 the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette listed the names and addresses of twenty-four men arrested in a “3-day park sting” (in contrast to the paper’s discretion in not revealing the names of men arrested in an earlier heterosexual prostitution sting), and one of the men subsequently committed suicide. His suicide note said, “my name and everything is in the paper this morning.” The Columbus Dispatch followed suit in November 1999, reporting on “Dozens Charged with Indecency in City Park” and listing the names, ages, and addresses of forty-three men. The article singled out several clergymen, teachers, and a school board member, who promptly resigned his position. Sometimes the sting operations bite their instigators, as when an Elkhart, Indiana, vice cop arrested the president of the City Park Board, “the man who helped lead a task force charged with cleaning up lewd acts at Elliot Park,” when he “behaved in an indecent manner with an undercover male police officer.”
Writing about the 1950s and 1960s, Richard Dyer described the figure of the sad young man commonly employed to represent male homosexuality in popular culture. The image of a handsome young man poised on the brink of adulthood is here painted not with the glow of optimism, facing a bright future of possibilities, but tinged with a melancholy foreshadowing the sad fate in store for those condemned to the gay life. The sad young man is a very different image than the familiar stereotype of the lonely, aging queer, facing the bleak prospect of old age without the comfort and support of family and children. As Dyer notes, the sad young man is marked in terms of transition, “moving between normal and queer worlds, always caught at the moment of exploration and discovery.”
On American television the figure of the sad young man has become a favorite vehicle for writers and producers venturing onto the thin ice of gay-related characters and stories. The early 1990s saw a sudden spurt in gay-related episodes (two men on thirtysomething, a “lesbian” kiss on L.A. Law), and even in continuing gay characters (a central lesbian character on the short-lived Heartbeat, and secondary gay characters on Roseanne and Northern Exposure). Prominent in this flowering of gay themes was a veritable bouquet of sad young men. As an unambiguously out gay man, Matt Fielding in Melrose Place doesn’t quite fit the stereotype, although his inability to get laid might qualify him for the sad label. But there were plenty of others whose claims to the title aren’t in question.14
In January 1992 the NBC science fiction series, Quantum Leap, ran an episode by openly gay writer Bobby Duncan, in which the hero “leaps” into the body of a mid-sixties military cadet who must save a gay fellow cadet driven to the verge of suicide by homophobic harassment. Later that spring Fox-TV aired a movie of the week, Doing Time on Maple Drive, that might be described as a dysfunctional family Olympics. The Carter family, headed by a military officer martinet and a social-climbing bitch, includes three children: the older son, an alcoholic ne’er-do-well; a daughter who has disappointed her father by marrying a medical student who can’t afford the lifestyle daddy expects; and the younger son, star athlete and Yale student, who is engaged to marry a member of what seems very much like the Kennedy clan. The plot is predictable: golden boy brings his fiancé home to meet the family, she discovers that he’s gay (when she reads a note he’s left in a jacket pocket) and leaves after breaking off the engagement, whereupon he drives his car into a tree. He survives, but when he returns home, arm in a cast, his mother has found out that the engagement is broken—“How can you do this to me? The invitations have gone out!” He comes out to everyone, denouncing his mother (who already knew but denied it), and the movie ends on a somewhat uncertain note of possible reconciliation (with the father), but certainly nothing to deflect the sad young man label.
If still beset by melancholy and the hostility of parents and peers, the sad young man was growing a bit more militant, as demonstrated through the summer of 1992 by Billy Douglas on the soap opera One Life to Live (and several years later by another openly gay teen on All My Children). But in 1994 two young gay Hispanic men brought together real life and popular culture, redefining the image of the sad young man.
A new series in the fall of 1994 on ABC, My So-Called Life, centered on a 15-year-old high school student and her circle of friends. It didn’t take long for critical and audience attention to note one friend in particular, Rickie Vasquez, half black, half Hispanic, and bisexual on the way to coming out as gay. Rickie, who hangs out in the girls’ bathroom and wears eyeliner, encounters verbal and physical hostility from schoolmates and family that was both realistic and familiar to the young actor, Wilson Cruz, who played him. In an episode that aired just before Christmas, Rickie is beaten and thrown out of his house, and the actor recalled being kicked out by his own father after he came out to him on Christmas Eve.15 The actor quickly came out in interviews, and much of the publicity highlighted the similarities between the actor and the character. Cruz himself noted, “I can play him as honestly as I can to what I went through, how I reacted to these things.” He recalled the lack of support he found in the media: “I would turn on the TV and think, Please, give me a sign that I fit in somewhere, that I’m not alone out here,” and concluded, “I hope I can help kids see that they’re not the only ones in the world.” Despite critical acclaim and a cult following, My So-Called Life did not survive in the ratings jungle and was canceled after one season. It was picked up for replay, however, on another frontier of popular culture that has proven open to lesbian and gay realities, the rock-and-roll cable channel MTV.
In one of its most successful innovations, MTV introduced a series called The Real World that brings together a group of twentysomething strangers to live in a house and have their lives filmed by a documentary crew. From its beginning the program (one of whose producers, Jon Murray, is openly gay) has included gay cast members. The very first season, filmed in New York, included a gay man, and lesbian and gay housemates participated in six of the first eight seasons. The third season, set in San Francisco, quickly became the most dramatic of all, with the intrusion of a very real tragedy. One of the participants chosen for the San Francisco group was a charismatic 22-year-old Cuban American from Miami, Pedro Zamora, who was diagnosed with HIV at 17 and had been an AIDS activist and educator ever since. The series began with some of the housemates being put off and upset by Zamora’s HIV status and ultimately changing their attitudes. The show not only provided Zamora with a national platform for AIDS education but also chronicled his budding relationship with an African American gay man, Sean Sasser. The two exchanged rings in a marriage ceremony during one episode, bringing an actual gay relationship to television audiences. And, yes, they kissed, many times.
As the series progressed, however, Pedro’s health worsened. “My friend is dying and I don’t know what to do,” one of his roommates wept at one point. The fact that Pedro Zamora was a real person, his health monitored by the media from CNN to the Wall Street Journal (which ran a front-page article noting a phone call to Zamora in the hospital from President Clinton), made the final episodes powerfully moving to audiences who had come to know him and knew that he was dying.16 On November 10, 1994, millions of viewers watched as Pedro Zamora left The Real World at the end of the final episode, filmed months before in San Francisco. The next day, in a Miami hospital, Pedro Zamora died at age 22.
Four years after Pedro Zamora’s death, the death of another young gay man captured the attention of the nation, but instead of AIDS, it was antigay violence that was now in the spotlight. One morning in early October 1998, a cyclist out for a morning ride on the outskirts of Laramie, Wyoming, spotted what looked at first like a scarecrow hanging from a barbed-wire fence. When he realized that the figure was that of a young man, beaten and tied to the fence, the story of Matthew Shepard was on its way to the headlines. By the time Matthew Shepard died, two local young men were in jail, soon to be charged with first-degree murder. Although the local paper reported the assault, it was after two gay friends of Shepard’s at the University of Wyoming alerted the larger Casper Star-Tribune that the story made its way to the Associated Press as a hate crime attack on a gay student. The news media had been primed for the hate crime angle by the recent murder of James Byrd, an African American man dragged to death behind a car in Texas a few months earlier. Journalists descended on Laramie, covering Shepard’s death and funeral, delving into his short life and brutal killing, and the story leapt onto front pages around the world, dominating headlines for more than a week, even briefly eclipsing the presidential sex scandal.17
The attack on Shepard occurred just before October’s National Coming Out Day, and it was quickly drawn into the ongoing public debate over hate crimes legislation. A candlelight vigil on the steps of the Capitol in Washington featured Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-MA) and Congressman Barney Frank (DMA), as well as Ellen DeGeneres and Anne Heche, among others. President Clinton condemned the murder and called on Congress to pass federal legislation increasing penalties for bias-motivated crimes, and the governor of Wyoming asked the state legislature to “have a renewed discussion of what we might do to strengthen our laws.” In the end, however, neither the Wyoming legislature nor Congress would pass hate crime measures.
The media may have been united in outrage, and most politicians might have taken the opportunity to condemn murder, but not everyone was moved. As Matthew Shepard lay in a coma, members of a Colorado State University fraternity marched in a homecoming parade with a scarecrow tied to a fencepost, wearing a sign that read, “I’m Gay,” and the words “Up My Ass,” painted on its back. The incident was greeted by outrage and led to disciplinary action against members of the fraternity. To no one’s surprise, antigay crusader Rev. Fred Phelps, proprietor of the “God Hates Fags” Web site, showed up on the day of the funeral to gloat over the death of another fag.18
The cover of Time magazine for October 26, 1998, showed an image of the fence where Matthew Shepard had been tied, with the headline, “The War Over Gays.” The coverage there, as elsewhere, related the murder to larger issues surrounding the situation of gay people in America. Within a few months of the Shepard killing, the brutal murder of Billy Jack Gaither, a gay man in rural Alabama, garnered national media attention—and another statement of “grief and outrage” from the president, once more calling for passage of the Hate Crimes Prevention Act—and nearly all the coverage explicitly tied the story to the killing of Matthew Shepard.
Shepard might have been typecast for the role of a sad young man. Although he had come out to his family and his friends, his mother insisted “he didn’t put a sign around his neck saying I’M GAY. He was fearful.” And he had reason to be. Short and slight, he had been gang-raped in Morocco while on a trip during his senior year in high school, and had been beaten outside a Wyoming bar only a few months prior to his killing. But by most accounts Shepard was also outgoing and friendly, and it is known that he willingly left the Fireside bar with the two men who proceeded to rob and beat him. Although the truth will probably never be known—whether they approached him, implying or stating that they were gay, or he approached them, making a pass and triggering their murderous rage—most accounts of the killing erased any implication that Shepard might have had a sexual motive in going off with Russell Henderson and Aaron McKinney. The media, and the lesbian and gay organizations that understandably used the murder as a platform for raising the issue of antigay violence, preferred to concentrate on the image of a somewhat wistful and sad young man captured in an endlessly reproduced snapshot that became an icon of innocent victimhood.19
Matthew Shepard was not only a symbol for murderous hate crimes; he also represented the dangers that are all too familiar to young lesbians and gay men who encounter the enmity of their classmates and peers. At a time of steadily increasing visibility of gay people throughout society, in high school and college classrooms as well as on the news and in TV programs, young people also seem more open in expressing prejudice and hostility. The month after Shepard’s killing, Who’s Who Among American High School Students published its annual survey of attitudes based on a poll of 3,123 high-achieving teenagers. The results included much that was shocking to adults, such as 80 percent admitting cheating; but the news stories headlined the increase in intolerance, especially of homosexuality: 48 percent said they were “very” or “somewhat” prejudiced against homosexuality, up nearly 20 percent over the previous year. Males admitted greater intolerance, with 24 percent claiming to be “very” prejudiced, versus 11 percent of females. And it is young men in their teens and early twenties—like the 21-year-old killers of Matthew Shepard—who commit most antigay violence.
The survey would not have been news to a young man named Jamie Nabozny, but he made news of his own in 1996, when he successfully sued a Wisconsin school district for failing to stop the antigay abuse he had suffered for years. Other pupils realized Nabozny was gay when he was in the seventh grade. In later years a classmate pushed him to the floor and simulated raping him as other pupils watched; another time he was knocked into a urinal by one boy while another urinated on him. When he sought help from the principal, he was told “boys will be boys.” After the bathroom incident, the principal advised him to go home and change clothes. During another assault ten students surrounded Nabozny while a student wearing boots repeatedly kicked him in the stomach. Nabozny attempted suicide several times and, like many gay teenagers in similar situations, he dropped out of high school. But Jamie Nabozny also fought back in federal court, and won. The school district agreed to a $900,000 settlement.
The attacks on Jamie Nabozny and on many other lesbian and gay teenagers are not the whole story, because they also reflect the increasing willingness of gay teens to come out. In 1997 Time reported that up to 10 percent of U.S. teens tell pollsters that they are gay, lesbian, bisexual, or “questioning” their orientation, and Gay-Straight Alliances are springing up in schools across the country. The new openness is spurred by the solidarity and support provided through the Internet by Web zines and online chatrooms.
It did not take long for the new visibility of gay teens to be reflected on the TV screen. As the television networks began to eagerly seek high school and college-age audiences—the hot new demographic of the late 1990s—a slew of programs began appearing on the up-and-coming Fox and WB networks that focused on high school settings.20 After the success of Fox’s Beverly Hills 90210 in 1990 (still running in 1999), Fox introduced Party of Five, and WB launched Dawson’s Creek in 1998 and Felicity in 1999. These programs featured younger casts than previous programs, and their plots centered on the joys and pain—lots of pain—of the teenage years. Among the facts of life for these TV teens are the existence and experiences of gay people.
“It’s happening on TV because it happens in real life,” P. K. Simonds, a coexecutive producer of Party of Five, told TV Guide. “Kids who go to high school know kids who deal with this issue. Issues of identity are very important to young people: figuring who they are, what they are inside and how they fit in. These stories are especially relevant to young audiences because they’re about young people like themselves who are learning about themselves.”21
One character on Beverly Hills discovered that his mother was a lesbian, but that occurred many years into the show (an earlier episode included a gay friend coming out to a series regular, who got over it). Party of Five included a gay secondary character, played by openly gay actor Mitchell Anderson, and a brief appearance by a lesbian writing teacher. Felicity included a minor character, the gay brother of Felicity’s dorm adviser, in an early episode. But it was Dawson’s Creek that included a gay character among the main cast during its second season. Jack arrives at Capeside High School and takes up with Joey, former girlfriend of lead character Dawson. But soon enough Jack begins to realize that his true feelings lie elsewhere. When Jack reads a poem in his high school class that hints at an attraction to men, he quickly becomes a target for harassment, and someone spray-paints an antigay epithet on his locker. Jack wrestles with his feelings, first denying them to Joey and others, and finally declaring his homosexuality to his outraged father.
Jack is in many ways a familiar sad young man, accepting his homosexuality, but struggling and far from happy about it. But he is not alone—although his father reacts with hostility, his sister and his friends are supportive.22 What he did not have was a boyfriend, although Kevin Williams, the program’s openly gay creator, intimated that this would happen. When it does, it can be counted on to evoke controversy that the program had been spared. The Parents Television Council, a conservative media watchdog group, didn’t alert its members to the story. “To bring up the fact that there are homosexuals in society is not something to rant and rave about at this point,” said Mark Honig, its executive director, although he also noted that the group may feel differently if Jack starts dating men.
In the 1999–2000 season Jack met Ethan, an openly gay college student, and spent much of the year battling indecision over how far he could go. When, in the season’s final show, he finally got up the nerve to kiss Ethan, he discovered that Ethan had “made up” with his ex-boyfriend and he ended up crying on the kitchen floor, comforted by his newly supportive father. The season closed with the figure of a classic sad young man, leaving viewers to hope for joy and romance next fall.23
In the 1981 movie Only When I Laugh, James Coco played the best friend of the star, Marsha Mason. At one point she asks, “Why don’t we get married?” and he answers, “Because I’m gay and you’re an alcoholic, and we’d have trouble getting our kids into a decent school.” Around that time the TV sitcom Love, Sidney gave us an implicitly gay Tony Randall who takes in single mother Swoozie Kurtz and her daughter, thus creating a nonsexual nuclear family. The asexual gay best friend is a variant on familiar movie and TV standbys, such as the effeminate sidekicks played by Edward Everett Horton and Franklin Pangborn in the 1930s, and the wise-cracking but romantically unlinked women played by Eve Arden in the movies and on television, and it became a dramatic staple of films in the early 1990s—with the gay man often played by actors known for comedic roles, such as George Carlin in Prince of Tides and Nathan Lane in Frankie and Johnny (both 1991).24
Another favorite variant on the desexualized gay man appeared in the mid-1990s cross-dressing films To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar (1995, on the heels of the Australian Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert) and in Hollywood’s remake of La Cage aux Folles, The Birdcage, which topped the box office for several weeks in 1996. As Newsweek critic David Ansen put it, “Drag queens are the cinema’s favorite naughty pets, harmless if not quite housebroken.” Robin Williams and Nathan Lane play familiar versions of the swishy queens of earlier movies, and they are not required—or permitted—to show affection in any direct, physical form (they are portrayed, however, as a loving couple who have successfully raised a son). The three drag queens in To Wong Foo (played by certifiably straight John Leguizamo, Wesley Snipes, and Patrick Swayze) transform the lives of the residents of a small midwestern town, performing miracles of the sort wrought by (typically effeminate) angels in the Hollywood It’s a Wonderful Life genre.
In the late 1990s, however, the gay man–straight woman platonic romance suddenly seemed to be popping up all over. Three Hollywood movies in a row mined this familiar vein: the runaway box office success My Best Friend’s Wedding, in which (openly gay actor) Rupert Everett steals the show, dancing and wise-cracking with best friend Julia Roberts; then gay artist Greg Kinnear offers Helen Hunt the emotional support she can’t get from possible boyfriend Jack Nicholson in the Oscar-winning As Good As It Gets; and in The Object of My Affection, Jennifer Aniston and Paul Rudd are best friends even though they have sex with other people (and almost with each other on one occasion). A little lower on Hollywood’s radar screen, the Showtime cable channel broadcast the second installment of Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City, which had lots of gay sex but also had a friendship between a straight woman and a gay man close to its dramatic center.
After the cancellation of Ellen, the networks were caught between the desire to capitalize on the newly available chic of gay characters and the fear of falling into the parental advisory quicksand that swallowed Ellen. They were also feeling pressure from the growing number of openly gay writers and producers who wanted to march through the doors opened by Ellen, as well as Roseanne and Melrose Place. At this moment, apparently, the gay man–straight woman relationship was ready for prime time.
Conventional wisdom, as purveyed by journalists and even by then-GLAAD official Chastity Bono, was that Ellen became “too gay” after the momentous coming out episode. Despite Ellen DeGeneres’s own insistence that she wasn’t an activist, and despite the program’s unflattering depiction of gay activists as humorless PC-Stalinoids, it seems that a program centering on the experience of a newly hatched lesbian was too gay for TV. In the words of gay conservative columnist Dale Carpenter, DeGeneres forgot that “a serious discussion of gay issues has no intrinsic interest for mainstream Americans.” And Carpenter, for one, prefers “not forcing the issue on the unwilling masses.”
Enter Will & Grace. Packaged by a gay (Max Mutchnick)-straight (David Kohan) team of producers, Will & Grace combines familiar elements from TV’s armory of sure-fire devices with a new twist. An “odd couple” for the 1990s, Will and Grace are best friends who share an apartment, end each other’s sentences, commiserate over their recently ended relationships with other people, and generally center their lives around each other. But they’re not romantically involved. Unlike previous variations on the theme, they are not separated by distance, or class, or even other partners, but by sexual orientation. The dramatic “will they or won’t they?” tension of Moonlighting, Lois and Clark, and The X-Files is here dissolved in the sitcom laugh track possibilities of both chasing the same attractive man, or persuading her mother that he isn’t her daughter’s Mr. Right. Both attractive, professional Manhattan thirtysomethings, Grace is played by tall redhead Debra Messing with something of a Lucy flair for physical comedy; Will, the straight-acting lawyer, is played by straight actor Eric McCormack. But Will and Grace are graced with a matched pair of sidekicks, who provide the id to their ego (there’s no super-ego function in sitcom-land) and raise the out-rageousness ante.
Will’s other best friend is Jack (Sean Hayes, who is evasive about his sexual orientation),25 the flamboyant yang to Will’s yin, who provides the otherwise missing evidence that Will is indeed gay: focus-groups on whom the program was tested often failed to identify Will as gay, but never misread Jack. The quartet is completed by Grace’s dippy socialite “assistant” Karen (Megan Mullaly), whose rude, lewd self-absorption makes her a perfect match for Jack.26 When they first meet, he erupts, “Peter, Paul, and Mary, you are fabulous! Loving the boobs! Let’s touch stomachs!” whereupon they lift their shirts and do.
Jack’s over-the-top exuberance takes the weight of being the gay character off of Will, although Jack’s whirling dervish energy doesn’t quite disguise the fact that both Will and Jack are living in an essentially straight society, not visibly engaged in a gay community. However, with or without Jack’s campy bona fides the inescapable question all along has been, will Will have a love life or even a sex life? Sitcom characters aren’t generally known for steamy romance, even in the 1990s, but they certainly do date, and kiss, and have sex, if generally offscreen. In the Post-Ellen era that gave birth to Will & Grace, the issue pervaded discussions of the program. When journalist Stacey D’Erasmo set out to write about the new show in the fall of 1998, a publicist with whom she was arranging for interviews fairly screamed into the phone, “Just don’t ask me when anyone’s going to kiss! That’s so boring!” Despite the publicist’s efforts, what Entertainment Weekly described as “the burning question, What about will’s sex life—as in, will he ever have one?” could not be avoided. NBC president Warren Littlefield said, “We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.” The producers were quoted as hoping for “fireworks by the end of the first season,” though McCormack (who plays Will) demurred innocently that he didn’t want it to happen as a sweeps-week stunt. After the first season ended without that bridge being crossed, the tension (or hype) focused on the second season. McCormack told TV Guide, “We showed we could do a funny show without a boyfriend and be funny. To be true to what we started, Will’s got to go out there, get a really good dinner with a guy at least.” McCormack wasn’t the only one expressing impatience. GLAAD’s Scott Seomin told USA Today, “If Will doesn’t have some semblance of a romantic life in the second season, then the network has failed to realistically deliver the show’s premise of a life of a gay man. However, I have been told by the producers that GLAAD has nothing to worry about.”
As a new century dawned, audiences were still waiting for Will’s love interest to appear, but the cast of Will & Grace did make history of another sort when they taped a 30-second TV spot denouncing a California ballot initiative prohibiting same-sex marriage. The mingling of entertainment and politics is a familiar staple of our time, but it is unprecedented for the cast of a top-rated TV show to take such a public position, especially on a controversial topic. The network was quick to assert that this was “something that the cast chose to do personally and does not reflect NBC’s beliefs at all,” and an NBC executive said the network wouldn’t run the ad. The program’s gay producer, Max Mutchnick, who thought up the spot, noted, “I would imagine that people who support this initiative wouldn’t be big fans of the show.”
While American viewers were wondering when Will would get a date, let alone get laid, Britain’s Channel Four was making television history with something completely different. Queer us Folk, an eight-part series that began in February 1999 and was quickly set for a sequel, centers on three gay men in Manchester who spend most of their nonworking hours in the bars of Manchester’s trendy gay neighborhood. The three men include two 29-year-olds—Stuart, a sexy, heartless Don Juan who wants to “die shagging,” and Vince, his shy best friend, hopelessly yearning to shag Stuart—and Nathan, a golden-haired 15-year-old who is bursting out of the closet. In the first episode Nathan is picked up (or vice versa) by Stuart, and we are shown the boy being introduced to rimming and anal sex.
Although the show did provoke some outcries from conservatives, and from some established gay organizations—Angela Mason, director of the lobbying group Stonewall, thought “the explicit sex scenes with a youthful 15-year-old did smack of sensationalism”—the protests subsided as the hit series continued. Matthew Parris, openly gay columnist for the London Times, noted as a sign of progress that gay people had the self-confidence to “take representations that are not positive,” and went on, “It was widely suspected that the program makers made [Nathan] 15 to cause a row. … So there was a disinclination on the part of the press to give them the row they wanted.” Another London columnist even advised, “There is lots of homosexual rumpy-pumpy for those who like that sort of thing.”
At least as much as the explicit sex, Queer as Folk was a novelty for mainstream media because the dramatic lens was trained on the gay characters and their world, with only token straight characters, and no effort was made to explain things to, or wink at the audience. “Most of the gay drama we’ve had on British television has dealt with big statements: victimization, the political agenda, AIDS,” Channel Four’s head of drama Gub Neal said to the New York Times. “But this group of characters doesn’t think they’re victims at all. They’re not even aware that they’re a minority. They simply exist and say, ‘Hey, we don’t have to make any apologies, and we’re not going away.’ The series has given us a chance to simply reveal gay life, to some extent, in its ordinariness.”
Ordinary or not, Queer as Folk, in the words of gay writer-producer Richard Kramer, “jumps right past the border patrol that, basically, the American entertainment monolith sets up”—something Kramer knows about, as the author of the notorious thirtysomething episode in which two men were shown in bed. Kramer went on: “Tolerance and acceptance were never interesting points or subjects for drama. That’s the most interesting thing about Queer as Folk. It presupposes that tolerance and acceptance were achieved a long time ago.”
It didn’t take long for the series to attract Hollywood’s attention, and the Showtime cable channel entered into a deal to produce an American version, set in Pittsburgh.27 Showtime, whose advertising slogan is “No Limits,” was looking for ways to compete with the success that rival HBO was having with such adventurous and racy series as The Sopranos, Oz, and Sex and the City. Executives at Showtime told the New York Times that Queer as Folk would be as explicit in the United States as it was in Britain. “I thought this show was unique,” said Jerry Offsay, Showtime’s president of programming. “I had never seen characters like these on television. The characters were unapologetic, they lived their lives the way they wanted to. There were great twists and turns and reverses in the storytelling. This show will be as edgy as any television series has ever been in America.” Edginess has its limits, however. Unlike the British Nathan, who is 15, in the American version Justin is nearly 18. “The boy is on the cusp of being the legal age,” said Tony Jonas, one of the executive producers of the series. “The idea is, kids who are seniors in high school are being sexual. We can’t deny that. It’s the reality.”
Backed by a massive promotional budget, largely aimed at gay audiences, Queer as Folk attracted an enormous amount of mostly favorable critical attention and brought many new subscribers to the cable channel. The American version of the series, stretched from eight hours to twenty-two 45-minute episodes, faithfully reproduced the queer-centered, sex-drenched ambience of the original. Once again, a group of gay men occupy the center of attention while their attention mainly seems occupied by various sexual exploits, although these are mostly performed by “alpha gay” Brian (i.e., Stuart) and 17-year-old Justin.28 The resemblances to Boys in the Band are striking—another collection of friends with little in common besides gayness—but the differences are more important. These are not tortured, self-loathing gay men trading barbed witticisms; their plentiful angst has more to do with success or failure in the gay singles scene.
Daniel Lipman, openly gay executive producer (along with his longtime life and work partner Ron Cowen), said their goal was to “keep the integrity for the initial core audience while going after a more general audience.” Whether this more general audience would be there was a question posed by many critics. Although few reviewers predicted the series would appeal to many straight viewers, TV Guide warned those irked by the magazine’s favorable notice, “They’re here. They’re queer. Get used to it.”