The Prime Time Closet: A History of Gays and Lesbians on TV (12 page)

In the 1970s, law and order dramas reached an unprecedented popularity with American audiences. On almost any night of the week, channel surfers could tune in to a police or detective series. Consequently, the gay killer became a stock character. Some, like Miss Brant, were suffering from severe sexual confusion or internalized homophobia. Others were self-admitted homosexuals who killed anyone — homosexual or heterosexual — who stood in their way. Even when a killer had a specific motive for committing murder (wealth, power, love, etc.), there was still the implication that their criminal behavior was linked to his or her deviant sexuality.

Surprisingly, one of the earliest was another episode of N.Y.P.D. entitled “Everybody Loved Him.” On the opening night of his new film, Arnold Eliot, a successful producer, is murdered in the bathroom of his high rise apartment. To prevent word about Arnold’s homosexuality from getting around town, his sister Freida (Leora Dana) hires a sleazy detective, Jerry Jameson (Jack Somack), to protect her brother’s good name. Jameson first slips a fin to the doorman, who tells Jerry that Arnold used to bring young men (“tough guys with tattoos”) up to his apartment. He then bribes the elevator man, Nick (Walter McGinn), who helps Jameson sneak into Arnold’s apartment so he can swipe some incriminating photographs from his wall safe. When he finds Nick’s photograph among them, Jameson accuses him of being one of “Arnold’s boys.”

Meanwhile, Lt. Haines is interviewing their prime suspect, Arnold’s “right-hand man,” an effeminate actor named Wade Hansen (Ted van Griethuysen). The police discover Hansen is bitter because Arnold led him to believe he was going to make him a star, but the only role he ever played was that of Arnold’s flunky. They had a fight the night Arnold was murdered, but Hansen claims he left the apartment and, when he returned, Arnold was dead.

Wade is only a red herring. The killer turns out to be Nick, the building’s psychotic elevator man. During his confession, Nick describes how since his childhood, homosexuals have been bothering him. That night, Arnold invited him up to his apartment. “He smiled,” explains Nick, “and then I wiped that smile off his face.” Ward and Corso sit in silence, which causes the paranoid Nick to freak out. “What are you guys looking at? I killed that guy, and you still think...” He then suddenly screams,
“What do I have to do, anyway?”

Like Miss Brant, Nick is a closet case suffering from acute internalized homophobia, which has — naturally — turned him into a psychotic killer. While Miss Brant targets the young women she desires, the paranoid Nick is disturbed not only by homosexuals (like Arnold) who objectify him, but heterosexuals like Jameson, Ward, and Corso, who he assumes are
thinking
he is a homosexual.

As in “Shakedown,” the episode encourages blackmail victims to seek help from the police. When Jameson reveals he has worked for Freida in the past to lean on blackmailers threatening to expose her homosexual brother, Det. Lt. Haines chastises him for not going to the police for assistance. “All you had do is call us. You know we would never release information on his private affairs...” Haines explains. “You would have had a happy client with no risk at all.”

The following season (1969-1970), the first in a long line of homosexual killers left his mark in an episode of
The Bold Ones: The Lawyers
(“Shriek of Silence”). Gubernatorial candidate Stephen Patterson (Craig Stevens) is framed for the murder of one of his campaign workers, Ellen Sherman. When he finds her dead in his apartment, he panics, stashes her body in his car, and parks it outside her apartment building. Instead of calling the police, Patterson seeks advice from his lawyer, Walt Nichols (Burl Ives). Meanwhile, a witness named Paul Mitchell (Richard Van Vleet) comes forward and testifies he saw Patterson moving the victim’s body. During the trial, Nichols confronts Mitchell with a discrepancy between his testimony and the physical evidence. According to a police report, the victim’s blood was found in the trunk, not the front seat. Mitchell finally admits he is testifying on behalf of a “friend” and simply repeating what he told him he saw.

The “friend” turns out to be the killer, Barry Goram (Morgan Sterne), Patterson’s old college chum and a former member of his campaign committee. When Patterson discovered Goram was a homosexual, he forced him to resign to avoid a scandal. Goram was not pleased, so he sought revenge by framing Patterson for murder.

Donning a pair of color-tinted eyeglasses, Goram is one of those cool, calculated homosexual killers. Like the murdering duo in Hitchcock’s Rope, he has an air of superiority about him when being interrogated. He is so brazen he even attends Patterson’s trial. Goram’s motive is clearly revenge. Yet, before getting her throat slashed, Ellen implies Goram is really in love with the heterosexual Patterson and is bitter because the feeling isn’t mutual. Goram never responds to her accusation and, consequently, he remains a one-dimensional character.

Discrimination against a gay employee by the federal government is at the center of a 1971 episode of
Dan
August
. In “Dead Witness to a Killing,” Det. August (Burt Reynolds) investigates the murder of the wife of Frank Devlin (Monte Markham), an assistant district attorney with a less than exemplary reputation. Ambitious, opinionated, and hot-tempered, Devlin is a prime suspect because he and his late wife were having marital problems. Devlin also beats up a witness, a cab driver named Norman Sayles (Martin Sheen), who claims to have seen him running from the scene. The case gets even more complicated when Sayles is hospitalized for chest pains and then assassinated by a sniper through his hospital room window. Unfortunately, poor Devlin can’t clear his name because his alibi dies before admitting he was with him the night of his wife’s murder. Yet, August still believes there’s a missing piece to the puzzle. He finds it, of all places, in a gay bar.

Reynolds turns a few heads when he strolls into Logan’s Place (he also gets an “oink,” a familiar anti-cop jeer in 1971) and demands some straight answers from Logan, the cooperative gay proprietor, who quips “I’ll be as straight as I can.” August discovers Sayles was the lover of Devlin’s brother-in-law, Arthur Coleman (Laurence Luckinbill). As Coleman later explains in his confession, his late sister Joyce disapproved of his lifestyle. When he was appointed as a special consultant to the President’s cabinet, she refused to lie for him when the government conducted his background check. So to insure he didn’t lose his high-level government job, he not only killed his own sister, but his lover/accomplice, Sayles, who he was afraid was going to crack under pressure:

At the end of his confession, Coleman breaks down and starts weeping. Like Barry Goram, Coleman will stop at nothing to get what he wants. He considers himself a victim of society’s homophobic attitudes, so he’ll go as far as to murder his own
sister
and
lover
to get a job as a consultant — to the Nixon administration!

In the early/mid-1970s, the representation of gay men as ruthless killers gained the attention of gay activists, who were at times asked to serve as consultants on scripts. According to
The Advocate,
three members of the Gay Media Task Force — clinical psychologist Newt Dieter, Pat Rocco, and a woman identified only as “Country” — were consultants on a 1974 episode of
Police Story
entitled “The Ripper.” The team were reportedly “active consultants on script revisions and authenticity of performances by actors and actresses playing gay characters, with the full cooperation of NBC and the production company, Screen Gems.”
¹¹

“The Ripper” follows two Los Angeles detectives, Matt Hallett (Darren McGavin) and his younger partner, Doug Baker
(The Mod Squad
’
s
Michael Cole), on the trail of a serial killer who is murdering gay men in Los Angeles. Baker is an opinionated homophobe who freely uses words like “fag” and thinks lesbianism is a “waste.” He would even prefer to handle cases involving only heterosexual victims, but as Hallett explains, it should make no difference because all murders come down to “the murdered and those who murder.” While they’re enroute to inform Mrs. Bannister (Pat Carroll)), the mother of the ripper’s latest victim, of her son’s untimely passing, Hallett contemplates how difficult it must be for a mother to lose her son. Baker suggests it must be especially difficult “when the only one you have is a dead
fag
.”

Hallet is quick to correct him. “A dead
son
,” he says.

When they meet the loud and overbearing Mrs. Bannister, Baker decides she must have been the cause of her son’s homosexuality. “Home like that, no wonder the kid ended up a fag,” he says. “She wouldn’t mother a child, she’d smother a child.”

Baker also assumes the ripper is “one of them” (meaning gay), but Hallett suggests the killer may be a homophobe, which he defines as “somebody who’s convinced himself that he hates homosexuals and that hate allows him to carve them up afterwards. Of course, on the other hand, he could be a latent homosexual.”

Hallett’s first guess was correct. The killer turns out to be Abbott (Peter Mark Richman), the homophobic owner of a fashion modeling agency (talk about picking the wrong profession!) who enticed his victims with the chance of a modeling career. Abbott has no difficulty rationalizing the killing of homosexuals and others on the margins of so-called “normal” society:

With a little prodding from Hallet, Abbott adds he’d also include on his hit list “the lame and the blind,” who would all be eliminated as “painlessly as possible of course.”

Even though members of the Gay Task Force served as consultants, the gay press’s reaction to the episode was less than favorable.
The Advocate’s
Harold Fairbanks characterized the plot as “clichéd,” the characters as “cardboard,” and the episode as catering to “the lowest mentality of the viewer.” Fairbanks admitted he was the wrong choice to review the episode because he was not an avid fan of network programming. He believed public, rather than commercial television, to be the more suitable forum for “positive gay thought” because of its greater innovation and willingness to treat controversial subject matters accurately. “Authentically gay drivel,” Fairbanks concluded, “is just as unstimulating as homophobic drivel.”
¹³

Wayne Jefferson of the
Gay People’s Union Newsletter
identified some positive aspects of the episode. He liked how the gay characters “look refreshingly like non-gays, which is good not because we see ‘respectable’ images or put down flaming types, but simply because that’s the way it is realistically.”
¹⁴
The same goes for the gay bar scenes, though he notes that only lesbians are shown same-sex dancing.

Jefferson also uncovers the episode’s major contradiction within the subplot involving Hallet and his fiancée Sheila (Kathie Browne), who are contemplating having children. In describing why he is hesitant about bringing a child into a troubled world, the supposedly gay-friendly Hallet puts gay people on his list of undesirables that also includes addicts, pushers, hookers and thieves — a list similar to the one recited later by Abbott in his confession. On a more positive note, Jefferson acknowledges the significance of having Baker emerge from the case more enlightened, if not sympathetic, to homosexuals, though it is never made clear in the end why “some persons have queer-fear and others not have it?”
¹⁵

Meanwhile, up north,
The Streets of San Francisco
are being terrorized by a killer in a 1974 episode aptly titled “Mask of Death.” John Davidson guest stars as a successful female impersonator named Ken Scott, who is best known for his imitations of Carol Channing and a fictitious actress named Carole Marlowe. When a tired and overworked Scott allows Marlowe to take over his personality, “she” begins stabbing men to death with a large hat pin.

Inspector Keller (Michael Douglas) applies some basic textbook psychology to figure out how Scott chooses his victims, who are all out-of-town salesmen. According to her biography, the legendary Miss Marlowe blamed all of her problems on her absent father, a traveling salesman. A psychiatrist who treated Scott confirms the possibility that his former patient is suffering from “psychic dualism,” which allows him to imagine he feels exactly what the person he is imitating would feel. In fact, Scott may not even be aware of what his alter ego is doing. Luckily, Keller and his partner, Inspector Mike Stone (Karl Malden), manage to move in on Marlowe before he/she claims another victim. The predictable plot aside, the episode is memorable if only to see Davidson doing a pretty decent Carol Channing impression (with a singing voice supplied by professional female impersonator, Jim Bailey).

Two years later, Bailey took the spotlight as a female impersonator receiving death threats on an episode of
Vega$
(“The Man Who Was Twice”). Bailey plays Las Vegas headliner Jeremy Welles, who hires private investigator Dan Tanna (Robert Urich) to find a stalker, a man with a gravelly voice who identifies himself only as Martin. Jeremy receives a copy of his own 8 x 10 glossy head shot with “DIE” written across it and a doll-like replica of his head, which tumbles out of his refrigerator. Later, he is attacked in his dressing room. Then, while singing “The Man That Got Away” onstage dressed as Judy Garland, the lights go out and he is nearly stabbed to death. Even Dan starts receiving death threats from the mysterious Martin, warning him to drop the case.