The Prime Time Closet: A History of Gays and Lesbians on TV (27 page)

Malcolm’s first-season central plotline deals with a bogus sexual harassment suit filed against him by a sleazy actress, Sandra Cassandra, which the network wants to settle out of court. But when Malcolm is forced to represent the network on a television talk show to discuss the “Velvet Curtain” (Hollywood’s discrimination against gay actors), he gets into a heated exchange with another panelist and ends up outing himself. Sandra’s lawyers think it was all done to settle the suit. To complicate matters more, the press publishes a story about a heterosexual fling from Malcolm’s past. As a result, LGT ends up settling the case.

The sexual harassment storyline takes a realistic look at the struggle many gay men and lesbians continue to face in their professional lives. Even in the entertainment business, which many people assume to be homophobia-free, there is still a gay stigma. Although the lawsuit was settled in the first season, the show’s executive producer/writer Peter Lefcourt continued to address the theme of homophobia. Incidentally, Lefcourt is the author of
The Dreyfuss Affair: A Love Story,
a novel about an affair between a major league short stop and a second basemen. The project has been in development for nine years (first at Disney, then at New Line Cinema). According to Lefcourt, the issue is casting — the film requires “a major star because the hardcore homophobe in America doesn’t want to see two men kissing.”
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Casting is an issue early in
Beggars and Choosers’s
second season when Malcolm must hire an actor for the role of Dodi Fayed in a TV-movie about his love affair with Princess Diana. In one of the series’s best episodes (“The Naked Truth”), Malcolm tries to hire a gay actor to play the role. Although he gives a terrific reading, network chief Rob Malone (Brian Kerwin) admits he won’t hire him because he is gay. Ironically, Rob receives an award that evening for taking a stand against the Hollywood Blacklist — an award he publicly admits he doesn’t deserve.

In the early 1970s, network executives considered homosexuality a mature subject matter requiring sensitivity and care. The networks were certainly aware that controversial subjects like homosexuality could generate high ratings. Yet, at the same time, they didn’t want to alienate their viewers — and sponsors — and/or be accused of promoting the gay rights agenda. This seemed highly unlikely considering, at the time, the networks were airing some of their most blatantly homophobic episodes, such as
Marcus Welby, M.D.‘
s “The Outrage” (1974) and
Police Woman’
s “Flowers of Evil” (1974).

The networks also played it safe my limiting the representation of gay men and lesbians in the early 1970s to adult characters, most of whom remain in the closet until their late twenties/early thirties. To avoid being accused of endorsing the gay lifestyle, prime time television rarely dealt with the topic of teen homosexuality before the mid-1980s. That testy subject was limited to medical dramas, which essentially ducked it by focusing on heterosexual teens undergoing a sexual identity crisis. However, some dramatic series did a little better, albeit in an indirect manner.

The first television drama to address the subject of teen homosexuality is
Channing,
a 1963-1964 drama set on a fictional midwestern college campus. In “The Last Testament of Buddy Crown,” a student named Buddy tragically drowns while trying to swim across a lake. Buddy was intelligent, but he lacked athletic ability and social skills, which made him an easy target for the other guys’ put-downs. Even his roommate, a fast-talker named Hal (Russ Tamblyn), taunted Buddy when he wasn’t bumming cigarettes or money off him. After Buddy drowns, Hal takes advantage of the situation and tries to win over his late roommate’s wealthy father, Dr. Crown (David Wayne), by playing the part of the grieving best friend. Dr. Crown is impressed with Hal and considers adopting him to insure someone carries on the Crown name.

The plot thickens when Hal finds Buddy’s note revealing Buddy knew he’d drown if he tried to swim the lake. The reason why he may have risked his life becomes even clearer when his English professor, Joseph Howe (Jason Evers) reads Buddy’s last English assignment. Based on Jonathan Swift’s satirical essay, “A Modest Proposal,” Buddy’s composition describes a world in which men like his father aren’t allowed to have children. Prof. Howe confronts Dr. Crown and accuses him of forcing his son to live up to his unreasonable standards:

On the surface, “Buddy Crown” is not about homosexuality, but the pressure society exerts on young people to subscribe to traditional, socially acceptable masculine and feminine roles. As Prof. Howe explains, Buddy was ostracized by his peers because he was different, but it was his father’s contempt that drove him to knowingly risk his life in the name of manhood. Yet Dr. Crown claims the “poison” (meaning homosexuality) was already there — he just gave it a name. We never find out if Buddy was indeed gay and, moreover, Prof. Howe never even considers whether it may have been true. If it were, perhaps viewers in the early 1960s may have been less sympathetic and have even felt Dr. Crown’s attitude toward his gay son was justified.

Less than ten years later,
Room
222, a comedy/drama about a racially integrated Los Angeles high school, addressed some of the same issues surrounding gender roles, conformity, and sexual orientation. In “What Is a Man?” a talented student named Howard (Frederick Herrick) performs a female role in a reading of Shakespeare’s
Twelfth Night
and gets teased by his classmates. The name-calling escalates and when someone writes “fag” across his locker, Principal Kaufman (Michael Constantine) asks Howard’s Social Studies teacher, Mr. Dixon (Lloyd Haynes), if he thinks Howard is a homosexual.

“In my opinion,” Dixon admits, “I have no idea.”

When his friends start to avoid him, Howard decides he needs to prove he’s a man. So he joins the track team, but his asthma makes it difficult for him to compete. He finally gets the chance to prove his manhood when challenged to a fight by one of his detractors, Mark (Ric Carrott). Instead of using his fists, Howard gives Mark and the crowd that gathers around them an answer to the question posed by the episode’s title:

Like “Buddy Crown,” “What Is a Man?” aims to expose masculinity as a patriarchal construction rooted in ignorance and fear. Once again, the homosexual question is raised, but it is immediately put on the backburner in favor of the more universal message about accepting our differences. Television was still not ready to answer the question “What Is a Homosexual?” — at least as far as teenagers were concerned.

With the exception of a 1976 episode of
Family
(see inset, page 161), television continued to proceed with caution when teenagers were involved. In the 1976 made-for-TV movie
Dawn: Portrait of
a
Teenage Runaway
and its sequel,
Alexander: the Other Side of Dawn,
Eve Plumb (best known to TV viewers as
The Brady Bunch’s
Jan Brady) plays a runaway-slash-prostitute. She falls in love with a handsome male hustler, Alexander Duncan (Leigh McCloskey), who is adept at servicing both male and female clients.

In the 1977 sequel, Dawn returns home to Tucson to finish high school and Alex, an aspiring artist, remains in Los Angeles to earn some money so the two can settle down together. But nobody will hire Alex because he is underage, so he returns to the streets and immediately gets arrested by a vice cop. Alex is bailed out by Ray Church (Earl Holliman), a psychologist who encourages him to get his head together by attending some of the programs at the Gay and Lesbian Community Center. Alex chooses to take an easier route and becomes a “houseboy” for a closeted gay pro football player, Charles “Snake” Selby (Alan Feinstein). Snake showers Alex with gifts and attention, at least until a blonde-haired, blue-eyed replacement comes along. When Alex is arrested for copping drugs for Snake, he saves himself from a prison sentence by telling the judge he wants to be able to take control of his own life, rather than have others tell him what to do. He makes a convincing case and the charges are dropped. Dawn and Alex are reunited and head north to start a new life.

So is Alex gay? He repeatedly insists he’s not. Is he bisexual? Maybe, maybe not. He has sex with men, but only for money and the nature of his relationship with Snake is ambiguous (nor do we really know if Alex is even attracted to him or men in general). Although the question about Alex’s sexuality is raised, it is not the real issue.

His “bisexual odyssey” is actually an oedipal search for a surrogate father, who kicked his artistic son out of the house because he was more interested in drawing pictures of the family farm than working on it. In Los Angeles, he seeks the approval his own father denied him from a series of “father figures:” Don Umber (Georg Stanford Brown), the social worker in
Dawn
who reaches out to him; Ray, the gay psychologist and friend of Don’s who tries to get Alex to open up emotionally; and Snake, who offers financial security and encourages Alex to pursue his dream of becoming a painter. They all try, in their own way to help Alex, but he resists both Don and Ray’s assistance and the attention he receives from Snake. Alex finally ends his oedipal journey to adulthood in a Los Angeles courtoom. Just as the judge is sentencing him to juvenile detention, Alex, speaking on his own behalf, admits it is time for him to take control of his own destiny. “When it comes down to it,” he explains, “I haven’t done a very good job of growing up. I’d like to do what I want to do for once.” His choice is, of course, to live a happy heterosexual life with Dawn.

Although Alex may have slept with men for money or their approval, his confusion doesn’t stem from his repressed sexual desire toward the opposite sex, but his father’s rejection. The two are thematically linked when Alex reluctantly attends a men’s rap session at the Gay Center. When one participant recalls how he desperately wanted his father’s approval, his story triggers something in Alex. “I should have at least tried to make him happy,” Alex mutters under his breath. When the others try to get him to open up and explain what he meant, he gets defensive and runs out.

Although its treatment of topics like prostitution, teen runaways, and homosexuality are sensationalistic and heavy-handed (“A young male hustler struggles to make a new life!” read NBC’s ad), there was at least some attempt made to present a “balanced” image of gay men (Russ, the dedicated, morally upright gay psychologist vs. Snake, the closeted pro football player who likes them young). Yet, we never know for sure where Alex falls on the Kinsey scale. Ultimately, whether or not Alex is gay, bisexual, or just confused, doesn’t matter because he has no trouble closing the (closet) door on his gay past and living happily, heterosexually ever after with Dawn.

Eighteen years after
Alexander,
the Fox Network aired
The Price of Love
(1995), an original made-for-TV movie about a 16-year-old, Bret (Peter Facinelli), who is kicked out of his parents’ house. He heads to Los Angeles and befriends a male hustler, Bo (Jay R. Ferguson). Unable to get a job, Bret turns to hustling. But unlike Alexander, Bret’s sexual orientation is not ambiguous — he is strictly gay for pay. In fact, he’s even a little homophobic and makes the mistake of asking the flamboyant Bo to tone it down when his girlfriend comes to stay with them. All Bret wants is a normal, stable life, but unlike Alexander, who wants to do it his own way, he feels his only choice is to give himself over to child authorities and become a ward of the state.

In the 1970s, teenage lesbianism received sensationalistic treatment in two made-for-TV movies set in in a juvenile detention center for young women.
Born Innocent
(1974) and
Cage Without a Key
(1975) are both harsh indictments of a system that fails to rehabilitate our nation’s youth and subjects them to the horrors of lesbianism, rape, and violence. However, in their attempt to expose the harsh realities of prison life,
Innocent
and
Cage
are both guilty of exploiting the same conditions they’re exposing.

In
Born Innocent,
Linda Blair portrays Chris Parker, a 14-year-old chronic runaway sentenced to a detention center. When she rejects the sexual advances of the center’s ringleader, an evil lesbian named Moco (Nora Heflin), she’s brutally gang-raped in the shower with a broom handle. The rape sequence became the focus of a 1978 lawsuit filed against NBC that claimed it inspired a copycat crime. Consequently, the scene was deleted from the film.

Cage Without a Key
is also set in a women’s detention center, the San Marcos School for Girls, where Valerie Smith (Susan Dey) is serving time for her role in a botched liquor store robbery that left one man dead. Valerie was an unwilling participant in the hold-up, which was committed by a casual acquaintance who offered her a ride. She had previously rejected his sexual advances, so he told the police she was involved. Like Chris Parker, Valerie soon finds herself in detention hell, where she ends up in the middle of a violent power struggle between several gangs. Fortunately, she is rescued before one of the inmates, Noreen
(Eight Is Enough’s
Lani O’Grady), sexually molests her. The film’s subject matter and violent content were too dicey for some CBS affiliates, which decided not to air the film or run an edited version.

Not all teenagers can resolve their sexual identity so easily (especially in one hour’s time, minus commercials). In a 1979 episode of
The White Shadow
(“One of the Boys”), Ray Collins (Peter Horton) transfers to Carver High School from the more upscale Palisades High to escape a rumor he is gay. At Carver, he’s recruited for the basketball team, but when the rumor finds it way across town, Coach Reeves (Ken Howard) considers cutting him from the team. The coach’s sister Katie (Robin Rose) tries to talk some sense into him. “You know you sound like an Anita Bryant scare brochure...” she scolds. “You don’t know if the kid is a homosexual in the first place and if he is he hasn’t done anything.”

Coach Reeves soon finds himself defending Ray and accusing the team of McCarthyism because they’re judging their teammate on the basis of rumors. Finally, Reeves asks Ray if he is gay. Ray says he doesn’t know, but explains the rumors started when he admitted to a male friend he was jealous when the guy started spending time with other people. When word got around school, the trouble began, so his father transferred him to Carver to toughen him up.

Ray decides his only option is to drop out of school, yet in the final, emotionally charged scene, Vice Principal Buchanan (Joan Pringle) convinces him to return to Palisades High. She recalls what happened when her family moved to Oregon back in 1952 into a community where her brother was only one of two black students in his grade school. One day he found a racist drawing in his desk. When he went home crying to his mother, she offered some words of wisdom: