9    A Worldwide Image Battle

On the small screen: a nurse who turns into a drag queen; a pickup scene in the bathroom of a federal court of justice; an orgy in a public park; a paradise that looks like the Castro; a lesbian orgasm with a female angel. And this sentence: “Only in America.”

The television series was called Angels in America. Title roles: Al Pacino and Meryl Streep. It was broadcast in 2003 in 6 one-hour episodes on HBO. And it was a turning point in the history of gay liberation on American television.

“Millions of people saw Angels in America on TV, and it was one of the most watched programs on cable that year,” says Tony Kushner, the author of the miniseries. Kushner is a gay writer who on his own sums up the vitality of American gay culture: he became one of its standard bearers. I meet with him at the Public Theater in New York City.

Before being a TV miniseries on HBO, Angels in America was a play, created in 1993. It received eighteen Tony Awards and a Pulitzer Prize. This “gay fantasia on national themes” straightforwardly addresses America’s ills: racism, the death penalty, addiction to psychotropic drugs, nonrecognition of gay couples, and especially the Reagan Right’s homophobia in the early years of HIV/AIDS years. Brimming with kitsch and queer humor, chock full of drag queens, the play daringly ventures to display fairy humor and coded allusions. “I’m a political writer, I am an committed writer, I’m a lefty, and what I want is for my texts to have an impact. For them to make people angry,” Kushner tells me. Mission accomplished: the hardcore Right of the Reagan and Bush sort denounced Angels in America. There were threats to ban it in Charlotte, North Carolina, and the Republicans dismantled the local cultural agency that produced it. Angels in America thereby joined the ranks of those works that American conservatives wanted to ban during what was called the “culture wars.” Despite himself, Tony Kushner therefore joined the list of banned artists in the 1990s in the United States. Listening to him talk, I sense the quiet pride you feel when you have been singled out. Kushner knows how to be a drama queen when the opportunity arises.

After his great gay opus, the playwright enjoyed another round of success with a play about the tension between blacks and Jews in America, Caroline or Change, and he wrote the screenplays for Steven Spielberg’s films Munich and Lincoln before returning to gay issues in an enigmatic play called The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures. He’s been a great supporter of same-sex marriage, and he married the writer Mark Harris. Kushner tells me about the event: “It was a totally normal Jewish wedding, with a chuppah and all of the Jewish wedding formalities. The rabbi was a lesbian, and all our friends were gathered. It was an extraordinary day.”

Angels in America is an example of American television’s growing interest in gay issues. From Queer as Folk to Glee, including The L Word and Queer Eye for the Straight Guy (which became Queer Eye starting with season 3), US television series that feature gay characters have moved ahead. Originally, and without going back to Dynasty, the phenomenon was born in a niche: pay-for-TV cable. HBO and Showtime as well as Bravo and the British satellite channel More4 (where Queer as Folk was first created) pioneered this trend. As these series became increasingly successful, the more mainstream networks (NBC with Will & Grace and ABC with Brothers & Sisters) and the more conservative (Fox with Glee) grew the movement. More and more often, gay characters started appearing in plots: in The Sopranos (the Vito Spatafore character in season 6), Desperate Housewives (Andrew, Bree Van de Kamp’s son, is gay, and there is a homosexual couple in the neighborhood), Sex & the City (Stanford Blatch), Six Feet Under (Edie, David, and Keith), South Park (Big Gay Al), Oz (Hanlon, Cramer), Melrose Place (Matt the nurse), Friends (Carol and Susan, the lesbian couple), Glee (the countertenor Kurt Hummel, children with two dads, and a lesbian couple), and many others.

More recently, many American TV series have even made gayness one of their main topics: The New Normal (NBC, written by Ryan Murphy, already known for Glee), Modern Family (ABC), Partners (CBS), The Neighbors (ABC), Girls (HBO), and even The Mindy Project (Fox). Shows such as Orange Is the New Black (Netflix) and Transparent (Amazon Studios) present lesbians in prison and a transsexual main character. According to a study by the gay organization GLAAD, there were thirty-one LGBT characters in the ninety-seven new television series scheduled for fall 2012. Nasty gossips claim that this proliferation of gay characters and plots can be explained by the great number of gay writers, actors, and TV series producers in the United States. Perhaps, but it mainly reflects the zeitgeist. After black visibility, homosexual visibility comes next. Even in Springfield in The Simpsons, on the very conservative Fox network, they opened a gay bar.

American television series are disseminated all over the world, including via satellite in countries where gay issues are completely taboo. A complete series is also often available on pirated DVDs on the black market in Shanghai, Tehran, São Paulo, and Cairo. Marina, a Kabyle lesbian activist from the Abu Nawas organization, whom I interview in Algiers facing the sea at the Tantonville Brasserie on Port Said Square, confirms this: “For me, the lesbian revolution was The L Word. In Algeria, every homosexual woman and often straight people, too, watched this TV show. We also discovered the more mischievous reality-TV version of it, The Real L Word. And the advantage is that here, now, everyone knows that lesbians exist. But there is a downside: now when you meet a woman, you can’t play on the ambiguity the way you could before. All women now know what homosexuality is, and if they’re straight, they’re more careful.” Marina is twenty-five years old. She tells me how Western television and movies were the engine of her coming out. Mixing the masculine with the feminine, she talks about gays and lesbians, who never used to be seen and who today seem so visible on screens as well as in the streets of Algiers. By now we’ve moved to Les Sablettes, a gay-friendly beach in the Bab-el-Oued neighborhood, near Algiers. According to Marina, TV has opened the horizon for gays and lesbians. As we sit there, Marina’s mood darkens: “Television is good. The L Word is fantastic. But I won’t hide from you the fact that I don’t want to live here anymore.”

“My mission is to entertain people. But I am also an activist. We participate in the gay movement by being visible and because our entertainers are; it’s the diversity of faces, tolerance, the different sensitivities of the gay community. We hope to contribute to breaking down prejudices, here in the United States and around the world,” explains Brian Graden, the head of the Logo channel, whom I interview in Los Angeles. In 2005, MTV launched Logo, an LGBT-specialized channel. Its slogan: “Fierce TV.”

In Graden’s MTV office, I notice on the table dozens of DVDs of gay TV series that Logo has aired. The network devised the most unexpected reality-TV programs: a program with a group of indoor florists; another focused on decorators specializing in gay marriages; a competition to find the ideal woman for artificial insemination; and even a television program dedicated to traveling in the small towns of America in search of signs of gay life. Graden explains: “We’re creating classic American TV using a gay prism.” He is also fighting against homophobic programs. In truth, there are countless conservative antigay talk shows on television and on the radio in the United States, with anchors and reactionary comedians who dream of returning to the America of the Founding Fathers—a white macho America devoid of gays. Their names? Glenn Beck, Bill O’Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity.… They shout angrily on cable or on Fox News, and their antigay shows are often syndicated throughout the country. Logo, MTV, the Oprah Winfrey Network, and even CNN, MSNBC (The Rachel Maddow Show), and NBC (The Ellen DeGeneres Show) attempt to counter this homophobic offensive by increasing gay-friendly programs.

As video clips grow commonplace on YouTube, as audiences shrink, and MTV’s economic model gets threatened, the media group Viacom, MTV’s owner, has diversified. Instead of focusing on a general channel, MTV decided to segment the audience into so many niches. At first, it bet on blacks and bought the BET network (Black Entertainment Television); then it turned to Latino audiences (MTV Latin) and Asian ones (MTV Asia). Channels specializing in country music, hip-hop, and videogames followed. With Logo, MTV then wanted to target LGBT audiences. “We believe in cultural diversity on television,” Graden tells me, citing Noah’s Arc, the famous Logo series depicting the lives of four gays in a black and Latino community. This sort of gay Sex and the City landed an audience, and a movie adaptation followed. How to explain this success? Young kids, be they Black, Latino, or gay, have become an essential prescriber of American culture. They are the ones who, in sneakers, with a skateboard, proud to be African American or openly gay, referee today’s styles, create what’s “hip,” and define what’s “cool.”

“This is where Queer as Folk was shot,” says an obviously proud Steven, a bartender at Woody’s. I’m at 465 Church Street, in the heart of Toronto’s gay village. In the American version of the television series, filmed in Canada (but supposed to take place in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania), the five gay characters grow in this gay neighborhood and regularly frequent Woody’s.

Today it is a popular bar. You enter a small vestibule on the mezzanine, over which a portrait of the queen of England reigns. This bar is huge and built lengthwise. Its mascot: a rhinoceros—and I see many portraits of horned mammals and miniature porcelain reproductions. We move in and out of different atmospheres from one room to another: a room with huge flat-screen TVs, a billiards room, then a room decorated with an impressive collection of photographs of sailors and early-twentieth-century ships. It makes for a strange mix, a continuum of totally Americanized rooms, English pubs, and a Canadian locale proud of its identity: on its walls, “CANADA” is spelled out in capital letters, and several national flags, recognizable by their red maple leaf, float alongside a rainbow flag. Another portrait of Queen Elizabeth II reminds us, had we needed reminding, that we’re not in the United States. “This is Canada: the queen of England, health insurance, no death penalty, Leonard Cohen, and Queer as Folk!” blogger Scott Dagostino explains to me a little later in a coffee shop in Toronto. Then he adds proudly: “We know why we do not live in the United States. The peaceful and consensual manner that was our way of adopting gay marriage distinguishes us from the US. But Queer as Folk gets us close.”

The next day I visit Inside Out, Toronto’s annual LGBT film festival, established in the early 1990s. Tens of thousands of people gather there every year in May to attend screenings. “With Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, we are the two essential institutions for queer culture in Toronto and Canada more broadly,” says Brendan Healey, theater director at Buddies, which also specializes in gay repertory.

This LGBT film program is not an anomaly in North America. There are similar festivals in most large cities in Canada—Montreal, Vancouver, and Ottawa—but also in the United States—New York, Boston, Seattle, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Philadelphia. I even discover gay film festivals in less-obvious cities, such as Kansas City, Houston, Durham, Atlanta, and all the way into the Arizona desert, where there is an event called Out in the Desert. “Homosexuals have always had a very strong relationship to gay images and movies. And here the festival is the biggest gay event of the year, with our Gay Parade,” says Matt Westendorf, development director of the famous Frameline festival in San Francisco. “Our goal is to show the gay community’s diversity. This year here we projected 270 films, including 77 feature films, and we sold about 80,000 tickets. That goes beyond the mere festival: it’s an event that brings in the whole community,” Jennifer Morris confirms. She codirects Frameline, and I interview her in San Francisco.

In addition to the American classics that almost everyone sees when he or she comes out (Milk, Brokeback Mountain, I Love You Phillip Morris, The Kids Are All Right, and even Brüno and the very arty Tarnation), these festivals’ programs are full of unsuspected international richness. Brazilian feature films (Do começo ao fim) alongside Israeli films (Haim Tabakman’s Eyes Wide Open and Eytan Fox’s wonderful The Buble), Egyptian films (The Yacoubian Building and all of the gay work of Youssef Chahine), South African soap operas (Egoli, which puts a gay couple in particular on stage, and Generations, which dares to have two men kiss), and productions from India, China, Iran, and Cuba. Then, closing night is the time to present an award to a Taiwanese or Guatemalan LGBT filmmaker who would otherwise have remained underground. The best feature films are also promoted at the gay film festival in Berlin, where they receive Teddy Awards. As for the countless documentaries, they revisit some of the darkest or less-known moments in the history of the gay movement worldwide. Such is the case of Call Me Kuchu, a film dedicated to LGBT activist David Kato, who was murdered in Uganda, and of A Jihad for Love, which describes homosexuality in Islamic areas.

“As long as gays and lesbians are not seen on the screen, they won’t exist,” says Nodi Murphy. “If you do not see yourself in the movies, you do not exist,” she repeats. For twenty years, Nodi has been running Out in Africa, the LGBT film festival in South Africa. The day I’m with her watching films she’s projecting in a multiplex in Johannesburg, Nodi is angry. She’s upset with a film critic who lambasted her film selection: “mediocre, terrible, old-hat,” he wrote. The evening certainly lacked professionalism: the 35-mm reel hadn’t arrived on time, and we had to settle for a video copy; the microphone used to present the film didn’t work; the short on “honor crimes” was disappointing; and when it was time for the Q&A after the film, the organizers had to apologize for having lost the director, before he finally arrived on stage—drunk. LGBT festivals are sometimes a whole story in themselves! Yet the two movies I saw on two consecutive nights were better than the critics said: Mixed Kebad, for example, is a beautiful movie about the coming out of a young Turkish exile in Belgium who has to confess his homosexuality to escape a marriage arranged by his father. “The coming-out scene is really a prerequisite for this kind of film,” says Nodi Murphy. This explains the difficulty she had finding African LGBT movies or even “positive films with people of color” (she is white). “Most of the films are independent, produced by filmmakers who fund them themselves,” she says. The quality of the films in the selection is getting better and, according Nodi, the origins of films are also growing in diversity. There is now an Out in Africa festival in four South African cities, and each year it grows into medium-size cities, universities, and military bases. Barracks? Seeing my astonishment, Nodi Murphy specifies: “Around the world, the army is a gay indicator. That’s a constant.”

Beyond South Africa, the phenomenon of LGBT film festivals is becoming global. In Tel Aviv as in Bangalore, in Mexico as in Sydney, protests are growing. In Shanghai and Beijing, LGBT film screenings still seem experimental—activists themselves are surprised at their own nerve—but in Jakarta, Indonesia, I sense that they have the hang of things.

John Badalu runs the Q Film Festival, the main gay and lesbian rendezvous in Indonesia, and I meet him for breakfast at the Social House, a wine bar in the Grand Indonesia shopping mall in the heart of Jakarta. He explains, “I organize the festival just before Ramadan. So the date drops down the calendar every year.” Eighty films are shown in five cities in Indonesia for an audience that reaches nearly 50,000 people each year. Across Asia, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Seoul, Taiwan, New Delhi, and even Vietnam, I meet the creators of these cultural and activist festivals.

“Today the MixBrasil festival is organized in twelve Brazilian cities; it has become a mature international event that moves from one region to another. We just celebrated our twentieth festival,” says André Fischer, the president of this important LGBT festival, whom I interview in São Paulo. Fischer adds: “Our priority is to show diversidade sexual.”

“My English name is Tony. That’s the one I use with foreigners. I borrowed it from West Side Story. Tony is easier to pronounce. Call me Tony.” Hong Seok-cheon (Tony) is a TV star in South Korea. I meet him in Itaewon, Seoul’s gay district. He owns several establishments there, bars such as My Chelsea, karaoke bars, but also restaurants, including Our Place, where I meet up with him. “Ten years ago you never saw gays on television in Korea; today, that’s all you see,” he enthuses. With a shaved head and a goatee, Hong Seok-cheon, not yet forty years old, is the most famous gay man in Korea ever since he came out live on TV in 2000. “It was not planned. I was asked the question. I answered.”

An actor and the owner of nine gay South Korean places, he’s a singular man. He was first spotted for the local adaptation of the American series Friends, where he played, he said, an “effeminate but not yet openly gay fashion designer.” After he came out, an intense debate took place, and he was sidelined for a while, although homosexuality was no longer criminalized. Time magazine made him its Asian Hero in 2004. So they started reinventing him, not so much as an actor but more as a social subject—he is all over the talk shows, including with his parents, Mr. and Mrs. Hong (in Korea the family name is always placed before the first name), who say they are proud of their son, Seok-cheon.

Beyond this particular case, South Korean television and cinema today seem to be experiencing major growth regarding gay issues. The blockbuster movie The King and the Clown revolves around the subject. “Dramas” especially, as Asians call TV series, are now addressing gay issues as an integral part of society. “Japanese dramas are often very imagined, very unreal, whereas Korean dramas play the realism card. That is to say, we try as much as possible to erase differences between fiction and reality. And to speak about reality in a TV series today means showing dysfunctional families [and] adultery and, of course, talking about gays,” explains B. J. Song, president of Group 8, one of the leading producers of television series in Korea. He adds, “At the same time, you’re still in the land of the unspoken, idealized love, and of course there is never any sex. Not even little kisses!”

John Noh, the editor in chief for Asia of the film magazine Screen International, which specializes in television series, shares the following when I talk with him in Seoul: “Korean dramas deal with all subjects, and the heart of the problem is the seon code, as the locals call it: that’s the time when the family decides to marry its children, around twenty-eight or twenty-nine years of age for young men, earlier for young women. It is an arranged marriage that takes place during a series of ‘match meetings.’ For gays, it is obviously a turning point. And what’s interesting is that dramas address this issue by showing how this creates crises of conscience for homosexuals. Bit by bit, society evolves.”

Series such as Family Humanity, Fairy Tailing, I Love Hyun-Jung, Life Is Beautiful, and especially Coffee Prince take an interest in these gay characters who are upsetting the rules of family play. “This greater visibility of gays on television doesn’t mean that the problem has been resolved. On the contrary. The subject is now visible, but so are its negative consequences because Korean companies are built around the family and its descendants. Lacking marriage and children, homosexuals just break that traditional blood lineage. A gay son is not a true son; a lesbian is no longer a real mother,” Hong Seok-Cheon comments. The young actress Mín-seon Kim, who joined us at Our Place, reacts: “Yes, but Koreans love the beauty of gay boys. To the point where all young straight actors now want to take on gay character roles. Things are going to change thanks to the beauty of gay boys.” Hong Seok-Cheon favors a different solution. He figures that “everything will fall into place in Korea” if same-sex marriage and adoption for homosexual couples are allowed.

Later that evening, my host and I and his friends, a crowd of budding young actors, go around the neighborhood. “I bought these restaurants with the money I made on the TV series,” Hong Seok-cheon tells me. We go into karaoke bars and Itaewon bars with American names such as “Why Not.” “South Korea is a major US military base, and at night in Itaewon bars you can see groups of GIs hanging and cruising,” Seok-cheon emphasizes.

We turn down a steep street that alone has a dozen gay clubs. A few rainbow flags flutter quietly. Again, a few karaoke bars and even some love hotels, which are not necessarily, as one might think, prostitution establishments but simply places, heterosexual and gay, where lovers can spend some time together because they can’t bring their partners to the family home. So Young-Sík, head of the Always Homme bar (not an invented name), receives us with great pomp: hugs, a glass of clear alcohol, smiles. “In Korea, we still have a long road ahead. Gay characters in dramas, that’s fine and good. It’s a first step. Now we have to change the family and traditions. That will be more difficult. Because the problem in Korea is not so much being gay or even openly gay. Only activists think it’s hard to be gay! The problem is the family, and gays simply don’t want to come out. Look at me, I’m the owner of two gay bars that are very well known here in Seoul, and I still haven’t told my parents I was gay.”

The new film and television Korean Wave—Hallyu—is not the only one to be sweeping Asia by addressing gay issues. Taiwanese and Indonesian TV programs, Bollywood movies, Vietnamese talk shows—all are beginning to look at LGBT issues, often for reasons that are more commercial than political. Indeed, the great novelty of the past decade is that the subject is now generating audiences. It sells.

“Homosexuality has long been banned here, then it was taboo, and today it has become cool,” says the young director Arunita Rachmania, a magnificent Indonesian woman whom I interview in Jakarta. Indonesia is a Muslim country, however. “Nevertheless,” says Heru Hendratmoko, president of the Association of Independent Journalists of Indonesia, “gay characters are increasingly popular in TV series.” King Oey, a leading Indonesian gay activist, is more careful: “There are no antigay laws in Indonesia, but Islamist parties call for actions against homosexuals, especially during Ramadan. They are leading a battle against images by asking—and often getting—TV shows censured that evoke sexualities they consider to be ‘deviant.’ And guess what? Homosexuality was classified with necrophilia, pedophilia, and zoophilia.” Others I ask about Indonesian television and audiovisual production companies are more optimistic. Such as Johandi Yahya, director of Oxygen Entertainment, whom I interview in Cibubur, a town east of Jakarta, “Indonesia is a young country. Things are changing. All of society’s changes show up one after the other on television: first tattoos, then piercings, and then we saw girls dressed in ‘see-through clothes,’ and lesbians and gays followed. Indonesians increasingly tolerate these images on TV.” Yet Hari Sungkari, president of MIKTI, the government agency responsible for promoting the creative industries, television, and the internet in Indonesia, confirms that censorship is inevitable: “We cannot allow images that are too sexually explicit. We are a Muslim country. But things will change.”

They are also changing in India—slowly. In this country of 1.2 billion people, activists place their hopes in television and Bollywood, the heart of the film system. “For a long time, the most popular films were also the most populist films. Bollywood was literally a kind of cinema that reflected the most trivial instincts of the Indian public: nationalism, pride, machismo, and often homophobia,” explains film critic Jerry Pinto, whom I interview at the BBC, one of the cafés in the Marriott in Mumbai. But in recent years mainstream films such as Dostana (Friendship) have addressed the gay issue, and Bollywood stars even play gay characters, which, according to Jerry Pinto, “would have been unthinkable just a few years ago.” In Dostana, the character played by the star, John Abraham, introduces his roommate, played by the very famous actor Abhishek Bachchan, by saying, “We are gay; this is my boyfriend.” (The film, shot in Miami, sparked an interesting debate in India, although it still glides over prejudices: the two protagonists pose as gay so that they can rent an apartment together; they hold hands and dance together, and the mother asks if she should call her son’s boyfriend her son-in-law or her daughter-in-law.) Interviewed in New Delhi, the critic Saibal Chatterjee shares this: “If the Bollywood industry wants to go global, it will not be able to continue to tell the stories it tells today.” Chatterjee thinks that to reach more international audiences, to meet the expectations of young people, and to fill theaters (currently a new movie multiplex opens every day in India), Bollywood will have to modernize and be open to subjects that young people discuss among themselves. And homosexuality is one of these subjects.

Mainstream television is moving more slowly. One soap opera, Maryada: Lekin kab tak, just became the first TV series with an openly gay character. Bollywood star Aamir Khan (best known for his role in the film Lagaan) launched a talk show on the Star India channel, where he took up, without taboo, India’s social problems. By explaining complex topics in a simple—his opponents say simplistic—manner, the alluring Aamir Khan, who is also Muslim, is becoming something of an Indian Oprah Winfrey, and his show, Satyamev jayate (Truth alone triumphs), has had some nearly 500 million viewers all told. And in 2014, Khan finally chose to broach the question of homosexuality, which gave rise to an intense debate and the unconditional support of the gay community. A turning point?

Some of those I speak with in Mumbai and New Delhi offer geopolitical analyses. According to them, India is seeking above all to be different from China, and freedom of expression is naturally a very buoyant theme. They would welcome anything to emphasize this distinction. And, just as in Taiwan and Hong Kong, in India filmmakers and television producers want to jump ahead on gay issues to differentiate themselves from Chinese broadcasting, so you can bet on seeing similar moves on Indian screens. I interview film critic Faizal Khan in New Delhi, and he makes a prediction: “I think Bollywood is not trying to be ahead of society. It’s a type of cinema that is still catching up on mores and is only interested in the lowest common denominator. As long as gays and lesbians were only an invisible minority, there was no room for a positive homosexuality in Indian cinema. But that will change. The subject is becoming mainstream, more visible, and in Bollywood they’re beginning to realize that there are tens of millions—yes, millions—of homosexuals in India. I bet it won’t be long before the first gay kiss.”

The club carries its name well: TV Bar. At a corner on Francisco Otaviano Street in a small neighborhood singularly set between the beaches of Copacabana and Ipanema in Rio de Janeiro, this gay bar is all images. There are screens everywhere: giant screens on which the best moments of Brazilian telenovelas of the season appear one after the other; smaller screens on which Latino stars sing; networked screens where customers interact on social networks; and, finally, dummy screens that decorate the club. Like something out of the TV Globo talk show, a beautiful and crazy black waiter offers me a drink. He kindly uses his beauty to push the envelope: Caipirinha or Batida. The atmosphere is festive. TV Bar is a miniature encapsulation of the influence of telenovelas on the country.

In Brazil, as elsewhere, gays enter via the small screen after being rejected too long on the big one. “Compared to Mexican or Venezuelan telenovelas, Brazilian telenovelas reflect reality: the gay issue announced its arrival on our programs as early as the mid-1970s,” explains Edson Pimental, the executive director of Rio’s TV Globo, the most powerful channel in South America. More recently, Insensato coração (Irrational heart), a TV Globo telenovela, included several gay characters and sparked a national debate about what may possibly have been the first gay kiss in the history of Brazilian television. “We hesitated a lot. The directors campaigned in favor of seeing the kiss on the screen, but viewers were divided. Our decision was made at the highest level. We were very divided. We do mainstream television; we’re not there just to provoke. We decided to wait for a better time to do it, and we decided not to show the kiss on screen,” comments Luiz Cláudio Latgé, one of TV Globo’s directors, whom I also interview in Rio. And when I ask the president of the TV Globo group, multimillionaire Roberto Irineu Marinho, about it, he replies laconically, “Yes, I know. We did indeed see the size of the gay community in Brazil! But I have to seek to limit the pro-gay prism of our teams instead,” also insisting that there are “many, many gays” at Central Globo de Produção, the famous TV Globo studios in a western suburb of Rio, something that I did in fact notice. André Fischer, president of the Brazilian LGBT film festival, whom I interview in São Paulo, quips, “We are somewhat ahead in Brazil, especially compared to Mexico. There is always a gay man in our telenovelas. On the other hand, we are lagging behind Argentina: gays kiss outright in their telenovelas, whereas here they’re not kissing yet.”

In Colombia, too, the gay issue has become commonplace on the screens in a country that sanctioned gay marriage in 2016. Telenovelas produced in Bogotá have explored LGBT issues for several years now and no longer hesitate to show gay characters. “For a long time, gays were caricatures. Today, they’re beginning to seem ‘normal’: they live as couples and adopt children. Lesbians, however, are more rare,” explains Omar Rincon, a specialist of telenovelas I interview in Bogotá. In the early 2000s, the Yo soy Betty, la fea phenomenon was a turning point. This Colombian telenovela portrayed several gay and transsexual characters. Thus, the young Marc St. James, the gay assistant, is Betty’s adversary in season 1 but becomes her friend after she helps him come out. The Marc and Cliff couple as well as the young Justin and Austin one also portray a commonplace homosexuality. “Betty, la fea’s success was spectacular. It is the best known of all our telenovelas. It was broadcast in a hundred countries and adapted into twenty languages. And the popularity of the homosexual character, Marc St. James, completely amazed us. He’s funny, flamboyant: he was extolled all over Latin America,” says Yolima Celis, one of the directors of RCN Television, the Colombian channel that produced Betty, la fea. In the United States, ABC picked up the series under the title Ugly Betty; in Brazil, it was picked up by the (albeit evangelical) channel TV Record as Bela a feia. Even in Mexico, where telenovelas are more traditional and where the gay issue is deliberately discarded, the giant company Televisa didn’t dare cut Betty, la fea’s openly gay characters. For now, the influence of the Catholic Church, the importance of advertisers, and society’s “family values” are still limiting these experiments in Mexico, as in other Latin American countries, but the success of this not so beautiful—but oh so gay-friendly—Betty was a turning point.

The Doğan Media Group headquarters is a huge complex located at the intersection of two highways in the northwestern suburb of Istanbul. One of the group’s directors, the affable, jovial Ferhat Boratav, who oversees CNN Türk and speaks perfect English, shows me around the premises. Here in the studios of Star TV and Kanal D is where dozens of news and entertainment programs, reality-TV shows, and TV series are produced. Including Gümüş.

“We are known around the world for Gümüş, the epitome of a Turkish soap opera,” Boratav says. The series was produced by Kanal D in 2005–2007, and it was a huge success—if not a worldwide success, at least a huge pan-Arab one ever since its release under the title Noor (“light” in Arabic) by the Saudi network MBC in the late 2000s. If you believe the most orthodox Islamists, who did not hesitate to declare their fatwas against it, this series was “demonic and diabolical,” a veritable source of “moral bankruptcy,” and a “war against virtue.” They even considered it legitimate to assassinate the directors of satellite TV stations that broadcast the series. “The first great transformation of the Muslim world, even before the internet, was that of satellite TV. Wherever you are, whether in Saudi Arabia or in Iran, you can now access all channels—it’s a true revolution,” Ferhat Boratav says. Why such an outrage, then, over Noor? Simply because the series shows Muslim men and women, sincere but moderate believers, living their lives, drinking alcohol at the dinner table, and sometimes even having sex before marriage. Like all Arabs.

“Noor was an event in Muslim countries because it showed modern women who aspired to work and be equal to men. And indeed, the hero of the series, Muhannad, gave his wife, Noor, her freedom and her own space and encouraged her to become a fashion designer. The series played around with traditional roles of Arab society and shattered taboos by advocating for the right to marry for love, portraying women without the veil, young couples kissing on screen, and children not necessarily obeying fatherly wishes. But although there was an abortion in the series, there was, for now, no gay character,” says the television critic of the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz, Benny Ziffer, who was one of the first to point out the success of this series in the Palestinian Territories. Some 85 million Arabs are said to have viewed the last episode of Noor when it aired on MBC in 2008.

Mazen Hayek, a spokesperson for the Saudi private media group MBC, whose offices are based in Dubai, where I meet with him, hails this success: “Noor was an event, and this soap opera did change the rules. We’re very open as far as sexuality goes here at MBC because Arab youth is itself increasingly free.” It is not insignificant that the series came from Turkey. This global and regional power is declaring its strategy to influence things through pop, audiovisual, and digital culture. We’re here at the border of East and West, in a Muslim country that wants to be secular, where a moderate Islamist party is in power, but where Gay Pride has been organized legally every year since 2003 (gay spots also flourish in Istanbul, although some organizations have had problems with the law). Might Turkey be a good filter, an intermediate step, to changing Arabs’ attitudes without making them balk, as American series sometimes have done? “We are hated when we broadcast these Turkish series,” Mazen Hayek admits. “Radical Islamists, the Muslim Brotherhood, Iranian clerics, and Hezbollah: all of them reject entertainment; they hate our series and our talk shows. For them, there can be no place for entertainment in Islam.” Several Arab television programs that were created using Western models (Loft Story in Bahrain; Star Academy in Kuwait, Lebanon, and Saudi Arabia; and Super Star in Lebanon and Syria) have resulted in the issuing of fatwas by religious clerics or have provoked hostility stigmatizing “Satan Academy.”

What’s next after the women’s issue: gay issues? At the headquarters of MBC in Dubai, Mazen Hayek now shows me excerpts from one of MBC 1’s most famous talk shows: Kalam nawaem (based on ABC’s The View). Four Arab women freely discuss current topics: Muna is Saudi and wears the veil (this is the first time a Saudi woman has hosted a TV show); Rania is Lebanese and the most “modern” of the four; Fawzia, Egyptian and older, embodies a form of maternal wisdom; Frarah, finally, is Palestinian. Watching this show (which a Lebanese woman translates for me), I am surprised to see four women calmly discussing masturbation, polygamy, violence against women, and, of course, lesbianism and male homosexuality. Their tone is not provocative but explanatory. Since this sixty-minute talk show started airing on Sunday evenings in 2002, its audience has grown to include millions of Arab viewers every week. As a precaution, it is taped in Beirut, not in Dubai, even though the latter, “media city,” is considered a “free zone” (export-processing zone, EPZ) with tax exemptions, alcohol, and freedom of expression and social mores. “Our most progressive talk shows are shot in Lebanon, which gives us more freedom,” Mazen Hayek, himself Lebanese, concedes. (I later learn that before each episode of Kalam nawaem is released, the program is recorded and thoroughly edited according to specific “guidelines” to avoid unvetted provocations, overly explicit wordings, and even curse words. Unlike what MBC sometimes argues, when the talk show creates friction, especially for Saudis, it is never by accident.)

At MBC headquarters in Dubai, I also meet Lojain Ahmed Omran, the star presenter of The Daily Morning Show, a sort of Good Morning, Arabs. She is Saudi—which is also an exception in the Arab audiovisual world—and does not wear the veil, another singularity. On the set, she wears just a simple scarf. She claims to be able to “speak freely about sensitive issues” and that there are no “taboo subjects.” But she adds: “Provided we stick to analysis, description, and expertise, without proselytizing. If I say that women can be lesbians, they’d shut down the channel!”

More recently, a Turkish television series, Kiliç Günü, produced by the competing channel Kanal D, ATV, aired its first gay couple: a man is in bed with his boyfriend when he receives a call from his boss asking him to come to the office. The scene doesn’t last longer than that, but it is explicit and shows a great deal while saying almost nothing. Will the gay Arab revolution come from Turkish television? Or maybe from Lebanese channels?

At the headquarters of the Rotana channel in Riyadh as well as in its decentralized studios in Cairo, Beirut, and Dubai, all of which I visit, you can clearly perceive the tension across this important Saudi media group owned by Prince al-Waleed. On the one hand, the group embodies faithfulness to the values of the regime that backs the most orthodox form of Islam; on the other, it attempts to meet the expectations of young people for the sake of modernity, for its audience, or just for its economic model. Obscurantism and postmodernism. Bedouins and parables. The veil-friendly and the gay-friendly.

While attending the filming of Rotana Café, a major Rotana channel talk show, north of Beirut, I note that the young people who are on the set—presenters, columnists, and critics—are amazingly outspoken. They’re dressed like Americans, wearing jeans and name-brand T-shirts (the young women without veils), freely talking about their experiences, current events, and the sexual lives of young people. Shot in Lebanon, this program can be seen everywhere in the Arab world, from Morocco to Syria, including Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, thanks to satellite TV.

One evening on the Redline talk show airing on the Lebanese channel LBC (of which Prince al-Waleed is also a shareholder), a young Saudi named Mazen Abdul Jawad spoke about sexual tribulations: how he was hitting on veiled young women using Bluetooth in shopping malls, how he approached them and then shamed them. “And to top it off he boasted about what he was doing,” Saud al-Arifi, the CEO of a major media group, points out to me in Riyadh. When the show aired, thanks to satellite TV in all Gulf countries, Saudi reactions were quick to come. The LBC channel was temporarily banned from the Saudi satellite ArabSat, and the young man was arrested. He was bailed out of five years in prison and a thousand lashes for “immoral behavior” (it sometimes happens that a person doesn’t survive more than a few hundred lashes).

Was this LBC program story an exception? Although Mazen Abdel Jawad was certainly an unfortunate symbol, it seems that the program’s release was not in the least fortuitous. “The show had been recorded; it was not live. It was clearly intended as a Lebanese provocation of the Saudis, with complex ulterior motives both geopolitical and economic. LBC was a Lebanese channel and was being pushed onto the Saudis, thanks to the rise of al-Waleed’s capital growth. This context explains such provocation,” confirms Saud al-Arifi in Riyadh. Other media professionals I interview in Beirut believe that LBC was testing how far al-Waleed, who has the image of a liberal Saudi prince, would go. Besides, more recently the same program, LBC’s Redline, gave the floor to four homosexuals, albeit with negative stereotypes and homophobic questions from viewers. Finally, some people point out that denominational Lebanese channels often play ambiguous games that evolve based on their political relations with Christian, Sunni, or Shiite majorities. Thus, the Christian Lebanese channel Murr TV, ironically mocked for being close to Sunni Christians (namely, Christians who in 2009 entered into a covenant with the Sunnis against Hezbollah, the Shiites, and pro-Syrians), denounced on a very homophobic talk show in August 2012 the clients of a gay pornographic movie theater in the suburbs of Beirut. The program resulted in the brief arrest of thirty-six people, who were subjected to degrading anal tests. The gay organization Helem in Beirut and Human Rights Watch strongly denounced these practices, challenged this talk show’s lack of ethics, and called for decriminalizing homosexuality. Michel Murr, the CEO of Murr TV, whom I interview at length, nonetheless asserts that he supports the gay cause, saying these “places closed down by the police and singled out by our reporter had nothing to do with homosexuality.” Murr adds: “These X-rated movie theaters feed vicious and dangerous relationships.” Finally, he says that the question of homosexuality is often debated on his channel’s programs, including on Tehkeek (Investigation), a program on which the journalist Claude Hindi “shows that homosexuality exists in every family and wonders whether it isn’t time to lift the veil and accept homosexuality in conservative Arab society.”

The story of the Saudi who was hitting on girls using Bluetooth and the story of the Lebanese gay porn movie theater are only two examples among others. There are countless tensions between Saudi Arabia and its neighbors owing to the satellite broadcasting of controversial issues. In the line of fire are MBC and Rotana (Saudi channels broadcast from abroad) as well as Dubai TV, LBC, Nessma (Tunisia), and Al Jazeera (Qatar). Time and again, these channels have scheduled shows on which sexual issues are discussed bluntly, not to mention talk shows that give voice to libidinous Saudis, nymphomaniac women, and gays.

Sometimes it is just simple clips, like those of the young Lebanese Hamed Sinno, the sexy singer of the rock group Mashrou’ Leila, an openly gay Arab whose beautiful songs are very pro-gay (in 2012 he got a large audience on Lebanese television and on YouTube with “Shim el Yasmine”). The Tunisian media group Karoui & Karoui also appears to be gay-friendly, whether through its pan-Arab television channel, Nessma TV, or through its TV productions (such as Star Academy Maghreb, its series, and its cultural programs). “Nessma TV is a very open general channel, very modern. It has gay hosts and clearly seems gay-friendly. And thanks to satellite TV, it can be viewed everywhere because there are no more borders in the Arab world,” comments Zoheir of the gay activist organization Abu Nawas, whom I interview in Algiers.

These Turkish series, these North African programs, and these Lebanese talk shows go far beyond mere entertainment: they undermine the very foundations of the Muslim world. They are a source of serious concern for Riyadh and Tehran, and they cause social disruption in patriarchal families. By bringing to the screen not only women without veils but also just women period, not to mention gays, they touch on family order and affect the separation of the sexes. This revolution under way is therefore a major fact.

“These are issues that make me profoundly uneasy,” Saud al-Arifi frankly admits when I ask him about it in Riyadh. He continues: “But we must look at society straight on. I don’t like these talk shows where gays loll around in their chairs, not to mention the Saudi guy who was hitting on the young veil women using Bluetooth! But if they talk and act in this way, it means thousands of others do, too, even if we don’t see them on our screen. We need to recognize what reality we are in.”

Al Jazeera is a more complex example. The Qatari channel has been very successful in the Muslim world. In recent years, I have followed its journalists and hosts in a dozen Arab countries, done research at its offices in Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Tunisia, and Egypt, and spent time at the group’s headquarters in Doha. And I have asked its employees about the gay issue. Their perspectives are varied and contradictory. “Al Jazeera is particularly bold in politics, but we have not had the same boldness looking at social issues,” says the Tunisian star host Mohamed Krichen, who sits down with me in Qatar. He adds: “Our talk shows may not themselves modernize Arab society, but they are certainly moving along side by side. In the beginning, what we heard there was shocking, unbelievable, and today we’re getting used to our own nerve and so is our audience. Homosexuality is often mentioned on Al Jazeera, but mainly on talk shows, very rarely on the news. It is still a taboo topic.” Ahmad Kamel, one of the long-term correspondents in Europe, confirms this view: “Homosexuality is still a very sensitive issue in the Arab world, and nobody, not a single TV channel, openly supports gays. Al Jazeera is very hostile to the question, even though its competitor, Al Arabiya, which the Saudi group MBC owns, is more neutral. But it is still, again, a very superficial modernity.”

Although Al Jazeera may sometimes appear, thanks to some of its talk shows, as an engine of change, the Qatari channel also puts on the brakes—as evidenced by the program Sharia and Life, broadcast from Doha every Sunday at 9:05 p.m. (Mecca time). This well-known program regularly invites the superstar of Islamist teleprediction, Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, an Egyptian exile known to be close to the Muslim Brotherhood. On this program, the “satellite sheikh” answers concrete questions that Muslims ask about living modern lives while remaining faithful believers. Millions of people have been influenced by his opinions and fatwas, relayed in his books (for example, The Lawful and the Prohibited in Islam) and on his website, Islam Online, a leading Arab world site (islamonline.net). His advocates claim that Yusuf al-Qaradawi is a rather progressive interpreter of Islam, particularly as concerns women. Others have accused him of having called for jihad against France when it banned young women from wearing Islamic headscarves in public schools. When a viewer asks him if the Koran authorizes one to be filmed while making love to one’s wife, the televangelist replies: “Yes.” And his defense of fellatio, which is according to him compatible with the values of Islam, remains without a doubt one of the most debated interventions in the history of the Arab television. What does he say about homosexuality? There he is no longer as careful as when discussing the rights of women or respect for privacy. Here, he wages an antigay campaign. He reverts to very orthodox thinking, full of prejudice: gays as well as lesbians must be harshly condemned. The death penalty? He doesn’t rule it out. And he’s even spoken of stoning. In other circumstances, he encourages sexual-conversion therapies. His views are a homophobic caricature and against the grain of the progressive thinking that some people attribute to Al Jazeera.

Ultimately, Al Jazeera cannot totally avoid the homosexual question because the topic inevitably interferes in many discussions owing to the interactive nature of its shows and the frequent airing of public issues on social networks. Al Jazeera gives voice to the people, something that no Arab medium has done before—and the people talk about homosexuality. “Increasingly, we are asked to ‘personify’ the discussions, to tell stories, to present life stories, and that is how the homosexual question appears on the air, I would say despite ourselves,” says Labib Fahmy, the head of Al Jazeera in Belgium, whom I interview in Brussels. He adds: “But, in general, homosexuality is not rejected by Al Jazeera; it is mostly denied: you don’t talk about it.”

Ali al-Dhafiri is Saudi, and you would suspect as much because he is one of the few journalists to wear a thawb and a shmaikh. He is the host of a popular talk show on Al Jazeera. I meet him in Al Jazeera’s cafeteria at the group headquarters in Doha, where smoking is permitted. “It is freedom of expression that made Al Jazeera’s success,” he explains. “We created an information revolution: the revolution of Arab news. But as to the revolution of social behaviors, other channels are in the process of doing that: LBC, Rotana, MBC.”

After several months of research at Rotana headquarters in Riyadh, at MBC in Dubai, at LBC and Murr TV in Beirut, and at Al Jazeera in Doha, I am convinced that the Arab sexual revolution, for women and for gays, will take place through these talk shows, these series, and these TV programs.

“It is on these talk shows shot in Beirut by the Rotana, MTV, LBC, MBC television networks that the greatest freedom is to be found,” says Makram Hannoush, a well-known Lebanese producer of TV programs. “In the Arab world, what these young people say and tell us is completely amazing. Under the pretext of talking to each other, creating buzz on TV, describing their daily lives, they are addressing issues of drugs, prostitution, gays, lesbians, and transsexuals. For a man of my generation, it’s absolutely incredible to hear that. But I am listening, fascinated. They are the ones, these talk show hosts who aren’t yet twenty-five years old, who are going to help open up Arab countries.”