The Rainbow Age of Television, page 9
The most frequently referenced early gay television movie to have been broadcast on US airwaves is likely That Certain Summer, which aired as a 1972 ABC Movie of the Week. Directed by Lamont Johnson, the film told the story of divorced contractor Doug (Hal Holbrook), whose teenage son is coming to San Francisco to visit his dad and, unbeknownst to him, his dad’s life partner, Gary (Martin Sheen). Much like the character that Jodie would become, the pair represents a purposefully sanitized, upper-middle-class white gay couple that was meant to evoke understanding and cautious sympathy toward a sexual class usually portrayed as effeminate and disruptive to traditional notions of fatherhood and family. Holbrook, who, in 2019, explained he was attracted to the project because of “the principle of fair play, honesty, decency,” represents much of the ethos that went into its production and the reception that garnered the film critical acclaim and an Emmy.18
As with Sud, That Certain Summer was met with restrictions and revisions from its network around physical touch. Where Sud was burning with desire and its description of gay love as a sin was imbued with homoeroticism, That Certain Summer was miserable, describing homosexuality as a possible sickness at the behest of ABC. Reflecting on the film, Steven Capsuto characterizes the final scene—in which Doug weeps over the rejection of his son and Gary is censored from physically comforting him for the ease of the mass audience—as both cruel and nonsensical: “Imagine if a TV movie presented the same scenario with a straight husband and wife who never seemed to touch each other, even at a time of such great emotional pain. What conclusions would viewers rightly draw about the health, lovingness, and value of that marriage?”19 This conversation recalls the heartbreak of HeartBeat—not so much a diegetic tragedy, but an indignation that strains the believability of the relationship.
The next notable made-for-television film, The War Widow (1976), was constrained to a certain threshold of allowable outright sexual language and touch, but like Sud, it leaned into the stifling tension of that and distanced itself from a narrative like That Certain Summer in almost every way, especially when it came to valuing nuclear family and propriety over freedom. Initially produced for Los Angeles PBS affiliate KCET’s Visions series, and broadcast nationally with a disclaimer that it was funded by grant money rather than public funds, gay playwright Harvey Perr and director Paul Bogart (whose credits include the landmark gay film Torch Song Trilogy [1988] and a whopping ninety-seven episodes of All in the Family) created a sumptuously designed, carefully staged period piece of quiet despair being met by determination, in which upper-class, depressed, and harried mother Amy (Pamela Bellwood) is brought back to her senses by bold portraitist Jenny (Frances Lee McCain). Invited to write for a playwright-to-TV-writer program designed by TV pioneer Barbara Schultz, Perr penned the script while just out of the throes of the dissolution of his own marriage and temporary estrangement from his daughter, transplanting his coming out onto the pages of an aesthetically softer world.20
The War Widow is astounding for a number of reasons—not the least being that it devoted an hour and twenty minutes to portraying queer women in an unshadowed, admiring light. The film included more displays of queer desire than almost anything on television before it as well as for a period after, and it paired shining, vulnerable performances with wholly romantic dialogue like “This is my life I’m risking. This is my life I’m offering.” Amy and Jenny share poetic, sincere conversations, and touch in dozens of forms—stroking each other’s hands, arms, and shoulders; cupping each other’s heads; drawing each other close while dancing and whirling about the room. Further, Amy and Jenny aren’t isolated in their queerness. In one scene, Jenny brings Amy to an afternoon tea with two delightfully chatty older women who are novelists, artists, and, as they reveal in a sparkling moment praising each other’s work, lovers. Overall, it’s the kind of period piece that one could imagine seeing green-lit today, hopefully with a much larger budget.
The very next year, ABC aired the Golden Globe–nominated legal family drama A Question of Love, starring respected actors Gena Rowlands and Jane Alexander as a forcibly outed, working-class lesbian couple fighting for custody of divorcée Linda Ray’s (Rowlands) youngest son. Based on a real case that was brought to ABC’s attention by NGTF member Ginny Vida, the film moves beyond an after-school special in large part due to the unbelievable caliber of its performers, but it’s also sensitive, realistic, and largely optimistic about the care Linda Ray and Barbara (Alexander) sustain for each other during their fraught public trial against Linda’s ex-husband. While the language and attitudes of their families, colleagues, and neighbors are expectedly blunt, the film is a compelling and genuine love story, albeit one in which the ABC standards and practices board struck again, changing a kiss on the hand between Rowlands and Alexander into holding a hand against a cheek.
Most other landmark television movies that followed, including the Glenn Close–starring Serving in Silence: The Margarethe Cammermeyer Story (1995) and the Mario Lopez–starring Breaking the Surface: The Greg Louganis Story (1997), came out after queer characters had secured some sort of leading role in a series, but portrayals of bisexual and trans characters were more difficult to find than their gay and lesbian counterparts. In 1986, two made-for-television movies would air opposite each other: My Two Loves on ABC and Second Serve on CBS. The former took up a familiar fascination with family dynamics and queer parents, but this time with a bisexual widow being pursued by two suitors, a woman (played by Lynn Redgrave) and a man, as her daughter disapproves of both. Second Serve was the biographical story of Renée Richards (played by Vanessa Redgrave), a trans woman and tennis pro, adapted from Richards’s own memoir. All in all, 1986 was a fruitful year for one demographic in particular: the Redgraves.
Will & Grace (and Ellen, Too)
Between 1989 and 1997, when Ellen’s by-now legendary “The Puppy Episode” aired on ABC, there were many watershed moments for queer representation. In 1989, thirtysomething (1987–1991) showed two gay men next to each other in bed, which reportedly lost ABC over $1 million in pulled advertising. In 1990, 21 Jump Street (1987–1991) inadvertently introduced the “lesbian kiss episode,” in which a queer woman and straight woman would lock lips, only for one of the women to never appear again. In 1991, rare bisexual regular character C. J. Lamb (Amanda Donohoe) would perpetrate a second lesbian kiss episode on L.A. Law (1986–1994), driving home the point that lesbian kisses existed for sweeps week. In 1993, Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City would drive PBS’s highest ratings ever before subsequently getting pulled out of the United States altogether. In 1994, Wilson Cruz’s portrayal of Rickie Vasquez on My So-Called Life would spark an awakening for queer kids of color who had never seen more than a hint of their reflection onscreen.
By the late nineties, the biggest shows on television—Melrose Place; Friends; Seinfeld; Roseanne; NYPD Blue; ER; Mad About You; Sisters; The Golden Girls; Picket Fences; Spin City; Star Trek; The Simpsons; Cybill; In Living Color; Beverly Hills, 90210; and more—featured recurring or regular queer characters. They hosted gay weddings, pregnancies, families, friends, trans aliens, and blatant transphobia, with a hefty helping of “not that there’s anything wrong with it!” jokes to remind everyone that queerness may have been in vogue, but it still wasn’t natural. This was the gay nineties.
None of these characters or shows represented abject failure and unexpected, mind-blowing success the way that Ellen and Will & Grace did, at almost the exact same time.
In April 1997, after at least a full year of negotiations with ABC and Disney, months of rabid media anticipation, and years of being semi-closeted in the public eye, Ellen DeGeneres’s goofy onscreen persona, Ellen Morgan, leaned across an airport podium to Susan (Laura Dern) and became the first openly gay lead character in a prime-time series and the first openly gay actor to play a gay character on any American network comedy or drama. The episode would be viewed by forty-two million people and win a Peabody and an Emmy. The next season, heavily undermarketed and slapped with parental warnings despite its extremely tame lesbian humor, would be Ellen’s last. Ellen DeGeneres would find her career briefly paused, and Laura Dern would lose work and need to hire a security detail.21
In September 1998, just two months after Ellen’s final episode, a sitcom about a gay man and a straight woman, a classic combination since before the man could come out, premiered to modest ratings on NBC. Along came their pals, another gay man and a somewhat straight woman, as perfect foils to their starring counterparts. Ellen’s so-called curse was knocked straight out of the water—at least for gay men. Will & Grace made history for its title alone—no other out gay man had ever been a titular character on a network series (sorry again, Sidney).
Looking back, all the pieces were there to slowly put Will Truman together over decades. With Max Mutchnick and David Kohan’s proudly politically incorrect, lighthearted, snappy scripts, veteran director James Burrows’s (Cheers, Friends) watchful eye, and two odd couples with sparkling chemistry, it seemed that it was a perfect, tried-and-true recipe that hit at just the right time.
Will & Grace has been credited with changing then vice president Joe Biden’s mind about gay marriage.22 In a 2015 poll, Ellen DeGeneres was the top result as the celebrity who most influenced the American populace’s opinion on gay marriage.23 If I were a politician, I would also probably go back in the closet and then say Modern Family or The Fosters really taught me to think about the “LGBT” community in a whole new light. They’re just like us! But for queer television, Ellen and Will & Grace aren’t anywhere near the be-all and end-all. They’re the culmination of a very specific lineage of queer characters, mostly written for straight people in majority straight series, with some gay input, to be palatable for as many viewers as possible. They’re approachable, silly, welcoming, cis, and white, and they’re finally, completely out enough to lead their own shows. But in the end, they’re just an ordinary guy. For Will & Grace, that struck gold. For Ellen, with no thanks to her quickly bailing network, which fought her every step of the way and blamed her for making the show too gay, that struck lead.
After Ellen: The Beginning of the Queer Series
Enough has been written about both Ellen and Will & Grace that I don’t have much more to add to that particular conversation—as a queer person or as a TV enthusiast. There’s no debate that they’ve both left a mark. However, when you get to the demise of Ellen and the roaring success of Will & Grace, you also get to a timeline where queerness has now been used, even briefly, as its own hook. While prime-time network television would try to replicate the magic, widely approachable, and just gay enough combination that Will & Grace perfected, premium cable and narrowcast channels with specific age demographics in mind had started to agree: they didn’t need to appeal to everyone; they just needed to retain a smaller portion of loyal, satisfied customers.
With that agreement, new types of queerness were able to make it to the screen. There were an increasing number of queer characters on networks aimed toward teens, with the WB picking up fare like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Dawson’s Creek, and Ryan Murphy’s first show, Popular. There were difficult, messy queer shows aimed at more mature audiences, with characters that thrived when an audience couldn’t always feel safe around them. As soon as they got revved up, it seemed like HBO and Showtime were competing to see who could lay claim to the most layered, implacable, and maybe even unlikable queer character.
Even before Ellen fell, HBO had been experimenting with lesbian made-for-TV movies, and then in 1997 it launched its first one-hour original drama, Oz (1997–2003), a gruesome, violent look inside a fictional experimental men’s prison unit that would take queer romance and psychological power struggles to twisted new heights and depressing nadirs. In 2000, Showtime launched their US reboot of the 1999 UK series Queer as Folk (2000–2005), depicting a sex-, drugs-, and more sex–fueled version of Pittsburgh that would have made the Philly-based characters of Brothers blush. HBO came back with some of the greatest shows and characters of all time with The Wire (2002–2008) and Six Feet Under (2001–2005). In 2004, Showtime, having bided its time in anticipation of the moment when, post-Ellen trepidation, lesbians could finally make their triumphant return to television, unleashed The L Word (2004–2009) on our poor unsuspecting souls. Finally, in 2005, Logo TV launched as a specifically LGBT basic cable channel, kicking off its reign with Patrik-Ian Polk’s dramedy centering four Black gay friends, Noah’s Arc (2005–2006).
While Logo turned out to be a disappointment, canceling the fabulously received Noah’s Arc after two short seasons and shifting away from LGBT programming in 2012 in favor of mostly playing sitcom reruns and the occasional gay-themed dating show, network television was coming back around to gay viewing for the entire family. Glee on Fox and Modern Family (2009–2020) on ABC both debuted in the same year with multiple gay characters, quickly becoming ratings giants, with the former doing irreparable damage to high schoolers’ music tastes.
In 2013, Netflix began its landscape-altering dips into original programming with a bang, with Orange Is the New Black (2013–2019) introducing the biggest cast of queer women characters since The L Word had gone off the air. Amazon Prime Video followed in 2014, releasing the game-changing but troubled Transparent (2014–2019). Both Orange Is the New Black and Transparent amplified conversations about trans representation and casting that had been circulating but gone largely ignored for years, but no more. In 2018, FX debuted ballroom drama and 1980s period piece Pose (2018–2021) with five trans women of color series regulars. And those are just the obvious landmarks!
Today, a queer series regular or recurring character is rarely treading new ground solely from their inclusion. With queer characters now presumably far freer than their one-to-three-episode guest star ancestors, the sky should be the limit. In some ways, queer characters—and, remarkably, queer series—have blasted into outer space, exploring far beyond the bounds of mere existence as a form of positive representation. But in the two decades since “The Puppy Episode” proved that even neutered queer characters are sometimes too much, there can still be hesitation around pushing the envelope and fear that a queer character who burns too brightly just won’t last.
Queer & A: Jamie Babbit
Credits: But I’m A Cheerleader, Itty Bitty Titty Committee, Popular, Nip/Tuck, The L Word, Drop Dead Diva, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, A League of Their Own, and many, many more
Jamie Babbit is as inextricable from the contemporary queer television landscape as one director can get. Babbit first rose to the attention of queer audiences with the debut of her candy-coated, piercingly funny feature narrative But I’m a Cheerleader (1999), and like other independent queer filmmakers of the eighties and nineties, including Rose Troche, Guinevere Turner, Angela Robinson, Donna Deitch, Kimberly Peirce, Nisha Ganatra, and more, she soon found a home in television.
Babbit’s résumé as a director is enormously long-running, crisscrossing through an impressive chunk of the series written about in this tome, as well as hugely successful series like Girls, Nip/Tuck, Gossip Girl, Gilmore Girls, Alias, United States of Tara, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, and so many more. Being able to interview her was like approaching someone with the keys to the queer TV kingdom, especially because one of Babbit’s latest projects, the television adaptation of A League of Their Own, had just swept through queer viewers like a particularly welcome D’Arcy Carden–shaped wildfire. I was able to speak with Babbit about her own driving desire to work on any queer script that was sent her away, the importance of seeing queer possibility before you yourself can imagine it, and how she’s continued to navigate the responsibilities of telling queer stories for queer audiences who aren’t always receptive. This is an edited excerpt of our conversation.
SHAYNA MACI WARNER: Do you remember the first queer character you saw on TV, whether they were expressly queer or just coded?
JAMIE BABBIT: I think the first queer character that I remember on TV was definitely not overtly queer, but it was Jo on The Facts of Life. I certainly remember movie people like Kristy McNichol, who I always loved. And Barbara Stanwyck in The Big Valley.
SMW: When you were first moving into directing for TV, was the personal importance of queer representation something you were actively thinking about?
JB: I came to storytelling as a gay person who always wants to tell gay stories. My parents were really political when I was growing up, and I always thought if I got into any kind of storytelling, whether it was theater directing or movie directing or TV directing, that I wanted to tell gay stories and feminist stories. That’s literally my reason for getting into the business. So any time queer content comes in front of me, I always say yes to directing it. It’s my interest. It’s what I like, it’s what I know about, and it’s what I care about so, yes, 100 percent.
SMW: One of your first big projects after But I’m a Cheerleader was Popular, Ryan Murphy’s first show. Your credits are full of what we now know as huge queer shows—The L Word and Looking, to name just a couple. When you were making these shows, did you and your fellow queer filmmakers have the mindset that these were going to be landmark queer shows, or were they just another job?
JB: One thousand percent, on every one of those shows. We were a bunch of gay people making gay content, and we were really excited. We knew it was groundbreaking and important, and we cared a lot about gay representation. We wanted to tell stories that felt accurate for our community that we weren’t seeing on TV. Certainly Ryan Murphy did. Popular was his and my first TV show. We got a lot of pressure from the network to cut a lot of stuff, but Ryan was very who he is and fought back, and I was fighting as well. We were able to push forward, getting things on TV that have never been on TV before. Especially for young people, because Popular was a show for young people.
