August 31, 2001
GAY PEOPLE'S CHRONICLE
on the airoff the press
New show has TV's first transgender main character
by John Graves
CBS will break new ground this fall with The Education of Max Bickford, a new drama featuring a transgendered woman as one of the main characters.
The show stars Richard Dreyfuss as a college professor. His colleague Steve has sex reassignment surgery and becomes a woman named Erica, played by actress Helen Shaver.
The Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation praised CBS for including Erica as a regular character in the show. "This is a significant first for television," the group said.
Concerned about how critics and reporters might write about Erica, GLAAD sent a letter to media sources bringing their attention to the show and offering some guidelines for writing about transgender charac-
ters.
"Transgender television characters have appeared primarily on 'very special' episodes of medical, legal, police dramas (usually during sweeps) as pathetic and tragic victims," GLAAD said in its letter. "They are typically sex workers, suicidal, homeless, or dead.
GLAAD asked the media to use female pronouns when writing about Erica and to avoid using quotation marks around female, woman, Erica or female pronouns when referring to Shaver's character. The group included a mini-glossary and style guide of transgender terms, their meanings as well as terms GLAAD described as "problematic terminology" such as she-male, he-she, trannie, tranny and gender-bender.
"These words only serve to dehumanize transgender people and should not be used," GLAAD said.
In the style guide accompanying the letter, GLAAD suggests the media use the word transition instead of sex change and intersex person instead of hermaphrodite, and includes explanations of sex reassignment surgery, GID or gender identity disorder, and a definition of the word transgender.
No complaints on 'Six Feet Under'
HBO has not received any complaints about explicit scenes in their popular new drama Six Feet Under, which has become a hit with viewers and critics alike.
USA Today columnist Peter Johnson says those scenes include a deep kiss between the closeted David Fisher (Michael C. Hall) and his boyfriend Keith, sex with one man he met on the Internet and another he met at the family's funeral home. David also gets arrested while having sex in a parking garage with a male prostitute.
Hall, who is straight, told Johnson that this was more than just his first time playing a gay role, saying, "It was the first love scene I had ever done, kissing someone I didn't know. It was like jumping in the deep end."
Matthew St. Patrick, the African-American actor who plays Keith is also straight. He told Johnson, "This was a chance for me to roll the dice--and I'm glad I did."
Alan Ball, the show's openly gay creator, wanted to portray the relationship between David and Keith as honestly and openly as the relationship between David's younger brother and his girlfriend. Ball, whose credits include the film American Beauty and the network TV series Grace Under Fire, Cybill and Oh Grow Up, told Johnson, “In a lot of ways it (the role of David) mirrors my life. I spent the first half of my life trying to be straight."
Ball said he didn't like the way the networks portrayed gays, saying they were "not allowed to be truly human or sexual the way heterosexuals are." Ball is not on a crusade, however. "I don't ever look at David and say, 'The purpose of Davis is, to educate America'."
Scott Seomin of the Gay and Lesbian Allince Against Defamation says Ball may be doing that anyway. The show "represents the first time many people in this country gay and straight-have seen two gay men make out. That the gay storyline is so matterof-fact isreally remarkable," he told Johnson.
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Living with HIV
Openly gay HIV-positive actor Michael Jeter talked about living with the virus in an interview with Patricia Nolan in the August 14 issue of the Star supermarket tabloid.
"It was a horrible, horrible shock," Jeter told Nolan about his diagnosis in 1996. "My first thought was: Well, that's it, it's all over, I'm gonna die soon." But, "Here I am more than five years after learning I have HIV, and I feel great. I'm not sick, I'm not dying-I am living!" Jeter said that, with the aid of his partner Shaun Blue, he has been fighting back by following a strict diet and exercise plan, and faithful adherence to his medication.
Michael Jeter
"So far, it's worked. I take my pills every day, along with vitamins. I eat only healthy foods and I exercise every day as well. No alcohol. No tobacco. I feel healthier than ever these days. And," he went on, "the greatest thing is, Shaun has remained HIVnegative."
"I don't deny that I have HIV, that would be foolish," Jeter added. "But I have a new attitude about myself that has kept me healthy. If I had decided, in 1996, to give up and die, then I probably would be dead now. But I decided to live, and here I am! And I tell others not to give up and die, either. I'm really happy with my life these days. And the best thing is that the demons from the past are gone."
Jeter spent many years in the closet before his HIV status forced him to come out.
Jeter played Udesky in Jurassic Park III. He will appear next year as Toto in Welcome to Collinwood, a comedy set in the title's Cleveland neighborhood.
Bernhard's new show debuts
Bisexual comic and actress Sandra Bernhard's career took a new turn when her new talk show, The Sandra Bernhard Experience, debuted on A&E last week.
'Survivor' Hatch arrested for assault
Openly gay Survivor winner Richard Hatch was supposed to be one half of the first gay couple on the TV dating show Blind Date this next season but a new legal problem has put that on hold for a while.
Hatch pleaded innocent to a domestic assault charge after allegedly pushing a former partner who tried to force his way into Hatch's home.
Hatch went to the Newport County Courthouse on August 21 to seek a restraining order against Glenn Boyanowski. While there, Hatch learned there was a warrant out for his arrest, so he turned himself in.
Hatch was released on $1,000 bond. He also was granted a temporary restraining order against Boyanowski.
Speaking on a Boston morning radio show which he has hosted since January, Hatch said he was simply defending himself from a jealous ex-boyfriend in the August 20 incident. "I actually feel sorry for him [Boyanowski]. He is truly, truly, truly psychologically damaged."
Hatch was arrested in April 2000 on a charge of abusing his then nine-year-old son by allegedly grabbing him and forcing him to exercise. That charge was later dropped. Heche tells all to Barbara Walters
Anne Heche has written a new tell-all book, Call Me Crazy, set for release September 4.
with her ex-lover Ellen DeGeneres and her She will talk about the book, her break-up mysterious wanderings shortly after the
She will also discuss her upcoming marriage to Coley Lafoon, the man she had an affair with while she was still with Ellen.
Scout ban gets coverage
Kudos to Newsweek for printing (August 6) a ten-page, cover feature series of articles on the controversy over the Boy Scouts of America's ban on gays.
Kudos also to the Cleveland weekly Free Times (August 8-14) for an extensive article on how the Scouting organization spirited Troop 98 away from Pilgrim Congregational United Church of Christ, the troop's home since 1910, rather than let the troop sign a pledge to honor the church's gay-inclusive anti-discrimination policy.
Both stories were timely, and may have helped generate the coverage that the daily Plain Dealer and Cleveland TV stations gave to an August 25 rally on Public Square by Scouting for All, which is trying to persuade the Boy Scouts to end the ban.
Thanks also to USA Today for publishing two feature articles (August 24) on gay parents and children of gay parents as followups to their August 22 story on the U.S. Census finding same-sex couple households in nearly every county in the nation.
Laura Bush's designer profiled
Openly gay fashion designer Michael Faircloth, who counts first lady Laura Bush among his clients, was profiled by People magazine correspondents Elizabeth O'Brien and Chris Coats in the August 27 issue.
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Faircloth met Laura Bush when her husband was elected governor of Texas in 1994, and seven years later was asked to design an inaugural ball gown for the new first lady.
Faircloth had married his high school sweetheart Donna Smith after graduating from the fashion design program at the University of North Texas at Denton in 1983, and soon after the two started their own Midon line of fashions out of their Dallas apartment. The marriage began to unravel after Faircloth met decorator David Davis in 1988..
"I had been wrestling with the possibility of being gay," Faircloth told O'Brien and Coats, "When I met David, I felt like I had met the person of my dreams."
After he and Smith ended their marriage amicably in 1989, Faircloth found running the Midon line too taxing for one person so he became an assistant at a Dallas fashion house.
Now an in-house designer at Lilly Dodson, whose clients include Sarah Perot, the daughter-in-law of Texas billionaire Ross Perot, O'Brien and Coats say Faircloth is designing a ready-to-wear collection that will debut in 2002.
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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