September 3
on the airoff the press
28 gay characters on TV, and none have a love life
by John Graves
Just as I pointed out at the beginning of this last season's TV lineup, although theoretically there are 28 lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender characters on broadcast TV, those characters are often incidental, and their sexual relationships, let alone platonic romantic relationships, are ignored or entirely off-screen. Instead, the sexual and romantic relationships and activities of heterosexual characters seem to be the single focus of most network TV programs.
Sad to say, with the disappearance of some characters because they were written out of their shows or because the shows themselves have been cancelled, the upcoming fall is not much better.
"The upcoming television season is barely realistic in the portrayals of lesbian and gay characters," says Scott Seomin, entertainment media director of the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, or GLAAD. "With few exceptions, the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community portrayed in primetime is overwhelmingly white men who are gay-inname-only."
"With over 540 lead or supporting charac-
ters on primetime this fall, the gay community encompasses less than 2% of total portrayals," Seomin continues. “Lesbians have been relegated to small, marginal roles and gay people of color are almost nonexistent."
There are bright spots, however, in the new television season for the lesbian and gay community. These include soap-opera actor Russell (Dan Montgomery) on the ABC drama Wasteland and the elderly gay couple Wally and Gus (voices of Tom Kenny and Nick Jameson) included in the WB animated series Mission Hill.
"Characterizations like these promise to be more fully realized portrayals than we have previously seen," Seomin says. "Usually, the only indication of a character's sexual orientation has been in the form of a punch line at his, her-or someone's expense. Gay characters rarely have had a romantic encounter while their straight counterparts hop between multiple dates or affairs. Wasteland and Mission Hill will break this artificiality.”
Returning shows, including WB's Dawson's Creek, NBC's Will & Grace and ABC's Spin City also show promise in their gay character representations.
"These are shows with integrity," notes Seomin, "but they need to further develop their gay characters. If Will Truman doesn't have a date on Will & Grace this season, then the network has failed to realistically deliver that sitcom's premise of the life of a gay man.'
""
GLAAD is appealing to the broadcast and cable networks to not only include more lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender representations on television, but also to have these representations be more diverse and more fully realized.
"The advances that have been made for lesbians and gay men on television are great in increased awareness, but seem to have only gone so far in portraying more than one dimension," Seomin says. "How about acknowledging that a character can be defined in more context? Wearing a gay nametag should not be confused with identity."
Ruthie talks about Real World life
Openly bisexual Ruthie Alcaide is clearly the stand-out character on what has been described as the highest-rated season in eight years of MTV's The Real World. She talks
about her experience on the show, her childhood and her relationships with her biological and foster families, and her amicable breakup with her real-life girlfriend Jess last April, in the August 30 issue of People magazine and the September issue of Curve magazine.
Alcaide, who came out as bisexual in 1998 while on scholarship at Rutgers, told People that she tried out for the Real World cast "so that others could see people who are comfortable with their sexuality like I am."
Talking about her self-described "party girl" lifestyle and the 30-day alcohol rehab program mandated by her roommates and the show's producers, Alcaide told People, "I lost on the show for a little bit, but it really comes out very positive in the end. Even though in TV land the 22 episodes are over, my life continues, and, there will be more episodes." (In the episodes currently airing, she is away at the rehab center.)
Meanwhile openly gay Justin has done rather well standing up to homophobic comments and assumed privileges of heterosexuality on the part of some of his roommates.
Etheridge, Fierstein in cartoon
Gay actor and writer Harvey Fierstein and lesbian rocker Melissa Etheridge lend their voices to Sissy Duck, an animated feature premièring on HBO September 14.
Etheridge, who performed her first major concert in three years at San Francisco's Civic Center Plaza August 19, also hosts Beyond Chance, a new documentary series about women whose lives have been affected by strange but true twists of fate, airing on Lifetime Mondays at 8 pm.
Early cultures had no queers?
Seeking to shed its image as the “All World War II, All the Time" station, History Channel producers were told to "push the limit" for The History of Sex, a five-part documentary miniseries about the past, present and future of sex, that premiered August 16.
Although the first show provided a pretty comprehensive look at the history of lesbians and gays in Western culture in the 20th century, the other shows, covering other times and other cultures, were quite disappointing from a lesbigay point of view.
In most cases, lesbians were hardly mentioned and gays were considered only as a reflection of what the straight community thought of homosexuality. While the series provided ample documentation of the sexual practices and romantic enticements of heterosexuals, same-sex relationships were generally treated as dalliances by men and women who were really straight.
In the discussion of the Greek island of Lesbos and its most famous citizen, the lesbian poet Sappho, the program seemed to go to great lengths to prove that most of the women on ancient Lesbos were almost overly heterosexual and it asserted that Sappho herself was probably not a lesbian.
I suspect the show's producers will probably claim that there is little knowledge of lesbigay life in other times and cultures. But they need only have read Judy Grahn's moving 1979 tome Another Mother Tongue or anthropologist Havelock Ellis' 1897 Sexual Inversion for a treasure trove of such information. Ellis, by the way, was an early supporter of the women's suffrage movement and the first scholar to assert that homosexuality is part of a person's nature and not a mere “lifestyle choice."
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Lots of LGBT movies on cable
Check your local program guides for these lesbigay and transgender-themed films now playing on cable TV: Late Bloomers, Boys on the Side, Mrs. Doubtfire, Black Widow, It's Pat, Change of Heart, Johns, Personal Best, The Detective, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, Chasing Amy, Modesty Blaise, Making Love, Pret-a-Porter, Ma Vie en Rose, Hotel New Hampshire, Listen, Billy's Hollywood Screen Kiss, Wild Side, Joyride, Wild Things, Victim and Total Eclipse. I still say that with films such as these, cable is your best programming source.
Thank you, Doreen
Finally, I want to offer my personal thanks to outgoing Gay People's Chronicle managing editor Doreen Cudnik, whose help and inspiration have made writing this column a real labor of love. She is leaving the paper to become executive director of Stonewall Cincinnati. Good luck Doreen, Cincinnati is getting a real treasure.
John Graves is the producer and host of Gaywaves, a lesbian-gay public affairs show on Cleveland's WRUW 91.1 FM Fridays at 7 pm, and at http://radio.cwru.edu. Dave Haskell, Jim McGrattan and Kim Jones also contributed to this column.
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