CHAPTER TWO
“JUST THE FACTS, MA’AM”
HOMOSEXUALITY AND THE “LAW AND ORDER DRAMA”
T
he medical dramas of the 1970s delivered a series of mixed messages. On the one hand, homosexuality was no longer being treated as an illness or a disease. Gay, lesbian, and transgender doctors were depicted as healthy, stable, and productive members of society. However, some of their patients were still very confused about their sexual identity. Fortunately (or unfortunately), doctors were able to reaffirm their patients’ heterosexuality, through the miracle of modern medicine, by simply dispensing a few basic “facts” (i.e. homosexuality isn’t hereditary, one homosexual experience does not a gay make, and so on).
Consequently, series like
The Bold Ones
and
Medical Center
served a dual function. They advocated tolerance by telling their presumably hetero audience “gay is O.K.” (and homophobia isn’t). Yet, in response to the increased visibility of homosexuals in American society, they also aimed to educate viewers, particularly parents, who presumably needed to be reassured their child’s heterosexuality wasn’t at risk.
Like the 1970s medical shows, detective, police and courtroom dramas (or, more simply, “law and order dramas”) also conveyed contradictory messages about homosexuality. Beginning in the late 1960s, series such as N.Y.P.D.,
The Bold Ones, Dan August, Police Story,
and
Police Woman
simultaneously reinforced and challenged negative stereotypes by featuring gay characters on both sides of the law. On the one hand, homosexuals were portrayed sympathetically as victims of blackmail, violence, and murder. Yet, gay men, lesbians, and drag queens were also depicted as deranged, knife-wielding, gun-toting psychopaths whose sexuality was considered as “deviant” as their criminal behavior.
This, of course, was nothing new. As Vito Russo demonstrates in
The Celluloid Closet,
there is a long tradition of gay and lesbian villains in Hollywood cinema.
1
According to Russo, the preponderance of gay killers in films and on television in the post-Stonewall period was part of the cultural backlash against the increased public visibility of homosexuals.
2
And although media watch groups, like the Gay Activists Alliance and the Gay Media Task Force, continued to actively challenge the three major networks in the early 1970s, they would by no means put an end to negative gay stereotypes.
Even in the so-called enlightened 1980s and 1990s, crimes continued to be committed by (and against) homosexuals. The one major difference was that the gay killers had the same motives (greed, ambition, jealousy, etc.) as their heterosexual counterparts. Yet, with such a limited number of gay characters on television, it is undoubtedly difficult even today for some viewers not to think of a homosexual who murders people as a
gay
killer, rather than as a killer who happens to be gay.
Beginning in the mid-1970s, gay men and lesbians were also appearing on law and order dramas as detectives and police officers. The majority of the long-running police and detective series of the 1970s and 1980s
(The Streets of San Francisco, Starsky and Hutch, Hill Street Blues,
etc.) featured one or more episodes about a gay cop or detective who comes out of the closet. In most instances, an off-duty police officer or detective (usually male) witnesses a crime inside or outside a gay bar. As soon as the officer files his report, the rumors begin to circulate around the precinct, thereby thematically linking the hatred and anti-gay violence on the streets to the officer’s personal struggle against homophobia. These storylines focused primarily on male cops and detectives. However, the sexual orientation of several female TV police officers was called into question in the 1970s when they were falsely accused of molesting a female prisoner.
Far more progressive than police and detective series have been the courtroom dramas, which are generally critical of the justice system for its failure to protect the civil rights of gay, lesbian, and transgender Americans. Popular series, such as
L.A. Law, Law and Order,
and
The Practice
drew from actual court cases to examine a wide range of issues, including discrimination against gay people in areas such as employment, adoption, child custody, marriage, and health care. As with police and detective series, gay characters are on both sides of the law as defendants, defense attorneys, plaintiffs, prosecutors, and judges.
“EVERYBODY RUN! MISS BRANT’S GOT A GUN!”
The gay killer would become a 1970s stock character on law and order dramas, but a few choice gay (and gay-coded) psychopaths were on the prowl as early as 1961. One of the first (and most bizarre) is a lesbian sniper who shoots young women in an episode of
The Asphalt Jungle
, a short-lived police drama based on the popular 1950 film.
In the opening scene of “The Sniper,” a young woman is shot while sitting in a parked car with her boyfriend in Lover’s Lane. The mysterious sniper has already claimed three victims, who, according to Deputy Police Commissioner Matthew Gower (Jack Warden), are all young, pretty, and with their boyfriends at the time of the shooting. The only suspect is Lonnie Peterson (Leo Penn), a 34-year-old man who is found roaming around one of the crime scenes. Lonnie admits to killing the women when the police question him, but he is sketchy about the details. His employer, Miss Brant (Virginia Christine), who owns and operates a local teenager hangout, the Paradise Diner, rushes to his defense. She claims Lonnie, who is mentally slow, is incapable of murdering anyone. The one thing that is clear is that Lonnie is enamored of Miss Brant, who, unlike his hateful mother (Ellen Corby), treats him with kindness and understanding.
The police are forced to release Lonnie due to the lack of evidence. Soon afterwards, the sniper strikes again. First, a bullet fired through the diner window grazes Miss Brant’s shoulder. Then another girl is shot while necking on the steps of her apartment building. The police once again suspect Lonnie, but his rifle is too old and rusty to have been fired. Lonnie finally admits he was trying to protect the real killer — Miss Brant. The police track the lady sniper down at the local drive-in just as she is about to shoot one of her waitresses, Susie (Natalie Trundy), who is on a date with her boyfriend. When Miss Brant is finally caught, she explains her motives for murdering all “those girls:”
MISS BRANT: Those girls! Carrying on like that! They had to be punished! I told them! They shouldn’t kiss, hug like that with the boys! They wouldn’t listen to me! Wouldn’t listen! Those girls! Those stupid girls!...I never meant to do any of this! It just came over me and I couldn’t hold it back!
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Miss Brant confesses that she murdered her female victims because they made themselves sexually available to men. Overcome by a twisted sense of morality, she believed it was her duty to punish them for exhibiting overt sexual behavior. The “L-word” is never uttered, but you don’t need a degree in psychology to understand Miss Brant is a repressed lesbian compelled to kill pretty young women because they arouse her repressed sexual desires. The fact she shoots her victims during or after they engage in a little prime time foreplay is all the more telling.
Miss Brant’s affinity for young women is also obvious when she interacts with Susie. She dotes on the young waitress, and in one scene even fixes her blouse and suggests she wear her pink one next time because she looks prettier in it. (“All the customers think so,” Miss Brant assures her.) When the sniper strikes again and Susie admits she’s afraid to stay alone, Miss Brant insists she move in with her. She also does not hide her disapproval when Susie goes out on a date. Although Miss Brant assumes the role of the good mother with Lonnie, she is more authoritative with Susie, to the point of being controlling.
Another early example of a gay-coded psychopath is a transvestite who terrorizes nurses in “An Unlocked Window,” a chilling 1965 episode of
Alfred Hitchcock Presents.
On a dark and stormy night, two private nurses, Stella (Dana Wynter) and Betty Ames (TC. Jones), are caring for a sickly man in a remote old house. The women are on edge because a killer who is targeting nurses is reportedly on the loose in the area. When the killer phones and tells Betty he’s been watching them, Stella becomes hysterical. Suddenly, Stella hears a man laughing in the front hallways, so she goes downstairs to investigate. She is shocked to discover the laughter is coming from Betty, who is actually a man in a nurse’s uniform. As he strangles Stella to death, the killer compliments her on being “such a pretty nurse.”
Betty is played by professional female impersonator TC. Jones (and by Bruce Davison in the 1985 remake for the series revival). Jones played a similar dual role in a memorable 1967 episode of
The Wild Wild West.
In “Night of the Running Death,” Jim (Robert Conrad) and Artemus (Ross Martin) are on the trail of a murderer named Enzo who, like Nurse Betty, strangles his victims to death. In hope of tracking Enzo down, Jim and Artemus join a wagon caravan carrying Enzo’s girlfriend, Miss Tyler. What they don’t know is that Miss Tyler is actually Enzo — in drag!
There is a clear link in both “The Sniper” and “An Unlocked Window” between sexual perversion and murder. While Miss Brant reveals her motives, twisted as they are, for killing young women, Betty the killer nurse is just your run-of-the-mill transvestite/psychopath. The reason why he kills nurses is never revealed, though one can speculate he suffers from some sort of gender identity disorder. Or maybe he just likes how he looks in white.
SHAKEDOWN AND BREAKDOWN
The first law and order drama to directly address homosexuality is the 1967 premiere episode of the police series
N
.
Y
.
P
.
D
. “Shakedown” opens with Det. Jeff Ward (Robert Hooks) and Det. Johnny Corso (Frank Converse) arriving on the scene of an apparent homicide. An out-of-towner named Huntington Weems has been found dead in the bathroom of his hotel room. Their subsequent investigation uncovers a homosexual blackmail ring operating within the hotel. Apparently, a man working for the blackmailers picks up gay men in the hotel bar, brings them up to a hotel room, and robs them. The blackmailers threaten to use the information in the victim’s wallet to tell his family and employer he is gay unless he pays them off. With the cooperation of one of their victims, a closeted construction worker named Gaffer (James Broderick), the detectives manage to break the ring.
When Ward, the African-American detective, first meets Gaffer, he encourages him to help them catch the blackmailers, even if it means coming out of the closet. Gaffer is hesitant because he knows if he comes out, his troubles will be far from over:
WARD: Mr. Gaffer, nobody’s troubles are over.
GAFFER: Very easy for you to say.
WARD: Why, because I can’t hide what I am anyway?
GAFFER: I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that.
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The link between the oppression of homosexuals and African-Americans in this brief exchange is acknowledged once again in the final scene.
After convincing Gaffer to cooperate, Ward seems less sympathetic toward the victim’s situation than the other two detectives. Corso thinks Gaffer is a “gutsy guy” for volunteering to help the police catch his blackmailers. Ward questions whether it is really so “gutsy” because if they are caught, he’ll no longer have to pay them off. Corso tells Ward to take it easy because the man has “a real problem.”
“The world is full of problems,” Ward retorts.
Once the blackmailers are apprehended during a sting operation, Gaffer knows he’ll have to come out publicly when he testifies. “You go tell people you’re different,” Gaffer tells Ward, “they don’t like it.”
“That’s the way it is, Mr. Gaffer,” Ward says with a quick smile. Gaffer flashes a slight smile back.
This subtle, yet somewhat ambiguous exchange acknowledges that Ward and Gaffer do in fact have something in common. Rather than dismissing Gaffer’s problem, Ward is instead expressing, albeit subtly, that he does understand. Yet, Ward also seems to resent Gaffer’s attitude because by the very color of his skin, Ward doesn’t have the choice of keeping what makes him different a secret.
The conversation between Ward and Gaffer did catch the attention of several television critics.
Variety
observed that the fact “Hooks [Ward] is a Negro allows for some obvious but well-directed social comment, as when he counterpoints the homo on the matter of being ‘different’ in society.”
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George Gent of
The New York Times
was more critical of the exchange, noting that the “use of a Negro officer to persuade a homosexual that life is easier if one concedes being different from others was a very embarrassing grafting of different sociological concerns.”
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The episode also features a character who acts as a “representative” of the gay community, an openly gay businessman and activist named Charles Spad (John Harkins). Det. Lt. Haines (Jack Warden) asks Spad if he knew Weems, who the police discovered was not murdered, but committed suicide because he was afraid his blackmailers would expose his homosexuality. For one brief moment, this “straight-acting,” intellectual homosexual displays a little gay attitude when he makes it clear that “just because I’m homosexual...doesn’t mean I know every other one in the country.”
But when Haines explains he needs some information, Spad succintly characterizes the kind he’s looking for:
SPAD: [Information] about an area of human activity feared and abominated by our pluralistic, moralistic, straighter-than-thou — forgive the expression — body politic. So dedicated to hypocrisy that they do their own secret things and call it having a little fun and what someone else does they call perversion.
7
Besides serving as the gay “expert” who leads the detectives to Gaffer, Spad’s function in the story is to point out society’s hypocrisy in condemning homosexuality, while at the same time engaging in sexual practices outside the so-called “norm” of heterosexual monogamy. Although Spad is certainly sympathetic toward Gaffer and Weems, the gay activist’s view of the world is more cynical than optimistic. In reference to Weems’s suicide, he laments, “I think if he’s homosexual, it’s not hard to think of reasons why he might commit suicide.”
In addition to the gay blackmail story, the episode breaks new ground in its depiction of the two male homosexual characters, Gaffer and Spad, who are anything but stereotypical — something American viewers were not used to seeing in 1967.
Variety
even praised the casting of Broderick (the late father of actor Matthew Broderick) as one of the “virile third-sexers,” but was quick to note the actor “shaded the rugged construction worker with just enough of that fey quality to make the point.”
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The following season (1968-1969),
Judd, for the Defense
tackled the subject of homosexuality in “Weep the Hunter Home.” The episode contains no negative gay stereotypes, largely because it has no homosexual characters. Almost 30 years after it first aired, “Weep” was rebroadcast on Nick at Nite’s TVLand on September 21, 1997, as part of the Museum of Television and Radio Showcase.
The plot concerns a wealthy college student, Larry Corning (a young Richard Dreyfuss), who, along with his best friend, Don Daniels (Peter Jason), play a practical joke for “kicks” on Larry’s conservative father, Lawrence Corning, Sr. (Harold Gould).
Pretending to be kidnappers, young Larry and Don call Corning to tell him they have his son. Don then shows up at Corning’s house with a phony ransom note demanding $15,000 he claims was given to him by the kidnappers. Corning tells his lawyer and friend, Clinton Judd (Carl Betz), he’s suspicious because Don is involved. He doesn’t hide his disdain for his son’s friend, who he refers to as a “queer” and an “aberration.” “You can see for yourself,” he tells Judd, “what he is...those tight pants, the way he walks, the way he talks. Don’t you read in the papers and the magazines what’s going on with young people?”
When Corning finds evidence in his son’s room proving Larry wrote the ransom note himself, he decides to take matters into his own hands. With a gun in his pocket, Corning hunts down Don and Larry. During a scuffle, Corning is shot. He claims Don shot him, but at the trial, Larry, who was standing behind his father with a gun, admits to shooting him to prevent him from killing Don.
Somewhere within this muddled story there is supposedly a message about homophobia. Corning hates Don because he’s a homosexual who he fears is trying to convert his son. If one or both of the young men were actually gay, the episode would have certainly made a statement, particularly back in 1968. But instead, the homosexual issue is displaced onto a generational conflict. As Larry explains to Judd, his father thinks he’s gay because “You people [meaning the older generation] don’t groove the way we do.” Don is more specific and explains that when the older generation becomes suspicious of two men who like to spend time together, “they get called
fags
.”
In the end, Corning is forced to make a decision. Should he let the boys go to jail or tell the judge that Larry and Don were just playing a joke and never intended to keep the money? We never find out, though in the final scene Judd makes his position clear to Corning, whom he blames for falling victim to the media hype surrounding the teenager’s lack of morality:
JUDD: You read that every sixth male in the United States is a homosexual, just as you read that most college girls rely upon the pill, and that practically all young people smoke pot and take LSD. And all this legalized libel stuck in your mind. I call it libel because you can also read about studies showing that the morals and mores of college students today are not that much different from their parents. I read one like that, but I accidentally found it on the back page. If you believe just what you read on the front pages, you’ll have to think that all young people today are going to hell in a handbasket. And you might be tempted into the idiocy of trying to stop them with a gun.
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In the end, “Weep the Hunter Home” delivers a mixed message. Corning’s temporary mental breakdown, which almost drives him to commit murder, is caused by his irrational hatred of homosexuals. But instead of chastising him for being homophobic, Judd criticizes him for assuming the worst about Larry, Don, and their generation. The episode ultimately reinforces the notion that homosexuality is a vice topping the list of contemporary social evils. In the end, the real issue here — homophobia — is never sufficiently addressed.