The Prime Time Closet: A History of Gays and Lesbians on TV (13 page)

So who is Martin? Welles’s tough-as-nails manager (Darleen Carr)? His ex-manager (Dick Dinman) who may be holding a grudge? His devoted make-up man Kirk (Bill Fletcher)? None of the above. The answer is Welles himself, who, like Ken Scott, is suffering from a split personality. He created an alter ego, Martin, to cope with the sudden death of his sister, with whom he’d had a love-hate relationship. In the climactic scene, Dan stops Jeremy from taking a plunge off a catwalk. Holding him in his arms, Dan offers the entertainer some comforting words: “Jeremy, don’t give up. What will happen to Judy or all those wonderful performers if you give up?” Apparently the show must and does go on. In the next scene, Jeremy is back on stage belting ’em out. Jerry’s manager assures Dan he’ll be getting psychiatric treatment. Good idea. And some time off from performing might help too.

Interestingly, Jeremy’s alter-ego, unlike
Streets’s
Ken Scott, is a man rather than a woman. Perhaps this was writer Judy Burns’s strategy, to separate Jeremy’s “problem” from his being a female impersonator, as if to suggest his pathology has absolutely nothing to do with performing six shows a week dressed as a woman. Still, neither Scott nor Jeremy’s sexual orientation really factors heavily into the story. Scott seems to be straight, but the nature of his relationship with female friend Lori (Marianne McAndrew) is ambiguous. As for Jeremy, we never see any aspect of his personal life beyond his professional relationships.

Killer drag queens barely raised an eyelash compared to the fury surrounding the depiction of homosexual child molesters. Since the controversial 1974 airing of the
Marcus Welby, M.D.
episode, “The Outrage,” the National Gay Task Force kept close watch on TV series dealing with the subject of child molestation. In October of 1976, the Gay Task Force issued a “media alert” for an episode of
Kojak
(“A Need to Know”) in which a foreign agent, Cart Dettro
(Chicago Hope’s
Hector Elizondo), is accused of molesting two young boys. Dettro is captured by the police, but they are forced to let him go because he has diplomatic immunity.

According to the gay newspaper,
The Blade,
the Task Force issued the alert because they were concerned the character “would be interpreted by a large segment of the public to be about homosexuality, thus perpetuating the common misconception that gays are child molesters.”
¹⁶
The article continues by stating there were no references to the word “homosexual,” yet “a detective called the molester a ‘fruitcake’ and a psychologist said he had problems dealing with women.”
¹⁷
Washington D.C.’s CBS affiliate, WTOP-TV (now WUSA-TV 9), was the only station to insert a disclaimer at the beginning of the episode to “clarify that the program deals only with the subject of child molesting, not homosexuality.”
¹⁸

Prior to its broadcast, members of the Task Force viewed the episode and recommended some edits. A copy of the shooting script was sent to the NGTF’s Production Consultant, who said he’d have approved the script with a few minor changes. According to Richard L. Kirschner, Vice President of Program Practices at CBS, the broadcast wasn’t edited or delayed because there were “sufficient comments about molesting ‘children’ (meaning both male and female) rather than just boys.” A member of the National Gay Task Force also agreed with CBS that the “fruitcake” remark “was a reference to a lunatic rather than a gay.”
¹⁹

Three years later,
Baretta
tackled the subject of child molestation within the context of teenage prostitution. In “The Sky Is Falling,” Det. Tony Baretta (Robert Blake) befriends 14-year-old street hustler Tommy (Barry Miller), who witnesses the brutal murder of his friend, Jeff (John Herbsleb), by a john named Harding (James Ray). Baretta discovers both boys ended up on the streets because they were physically and mentally abused. Tommy was raped in reform school and Jeff was kicked out of his home by his mother (Jadeen Barbor), a religious fanatic who claims “an evil force got hold of her boy.” Although it is never actually stated, the “evil force” she is referring to is obviously homosexuality. When she claims the “hand of God” killed her boy, Baretta doesn’t mix words when he tells her she is responsible for his death.

Harding and the men who frequent the arcade where the hustlers hang out are characterized by Baretta as pedophiles and “chicken hawks” (a slang term for a man who seeks out boys as sexual partners). Their “partners” in this case are not unsuspecting children, but teenage boys who solicit men for sex. Fortunately, there is no direct connection made between these men and adult male homosexuals. The well-intentioned episode is rightfully more concerned with exposing teen prostitution as a social problem by dramatizing the sad and often tragic lives of homeless teenage boys forced to sell their bodies to survive.

Not all gay killers on television in the 1970s were drag queens or chicken hawks. And not all series were sending a serious social message. On an episode of
Harry-O
(“Coinage of the Realm”), a pair of hit men, Joe Heston (David Dukes) and Fred Lassiter (Granville van Dusen), are hired by the “big boss” to kill a man holding incriminating evidence. The fact Heston and Lassiter are lovers has absolutely nothing to do with the plot. While no one can accuse the producers of stereotyping, depicting professional killers as homosexuals is probably not what gay activists had in mind in their fight for equality.

Lesbians also did their share of killing in the 1970s. In November of 1974, NBC aired “Flowers of Evil,” an episode of
Police Woman
that became one of the decade’s most controversial TV hours. Premiering a few weeks after
Marcus Welby, M.D.’s
“The Outrage,” the episode concerns three lesbians — the super butch Mame (Faye Spain), the bitchy Gladys (Lorraine Stephens), and her femme lover Janet (Lynn Loring) — who own and operate The Golden Years Retirement Home. The police suspect the trio of murdering their elderly female residents and stealing their pension checks. To expose their operation, Sgt. Suzanne “Pepper” Anderson (Angie Dickinson) gets out her white hat and shoes and goes undercover as a nurse.

Before it even hit the airwaves, the episode generated protests from the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force. Consequently, NBC postponed the episode’s original scheduled telecast (on October 22, 1974) so it could be re-edited. According to an NBC spokesman, the program dealt with lesbianism in a “somewhat sensationalized and insensitive manner.”
²⁰
Producer Douglas Benton described the changes as “mostly cosmetic cutting,” which according to the
Los Angeles Times
included explicit references to lesbians, shots of hands touching, a lesbian’s “lascivious glance” at Pepper while she’s undressing, and Gladys giving Janet a kiss on the forehead.
²¹
The editing only seemed to create more controversy because it tried (and failed) to conceal the sexual orientation of the murderers. Although it is never directly stated that “they are lesbians” (Pepper’s line stating just that was excised), the characters are such gross stereotypes it’d be difficult to think otherwise.

Mame, the surly, flannel-outfitted ex-Marine, described by Lt. Bill Crowley (Earl Holliman) as looking like “she should be driving a diesel truck,” is the most problematic. In his review of the episode, John O’Connor of
The New York Times
describes her as “a hostile ‘My Favorite Martian’ with mussed hair.
²²
Faye Spain, the actress who plays Mame, even admitted in an interview that ”the Lesbians in this show have no redeeming virtues. I’m surprised the gay libs haven’t protested.”
²³

After 40 minutes of lesbian-bashing, “Flowers of Evil” shifts gears with a scene involving Pepper, who tries to reach out to the younger lesbian, Janet. While Pepper claims not to condemn Janet for being what she is, she also implies lesbian love is unhealthy and leads to nothing but unhappiness.

Pepper seems to be saying she doesn’t condemn Janet for being a lesbian. But in the next breath, she states she knows
“what a love like yours can do to a person.
” By a “love like yours,” what exactly does she mean? Lesbian love? Or an obsessive kind of love which makes you lose all sense of yourself and be an accomplice to murder? The analogy between Janet’s love for Gladys and Pepper’s lesbian roommate’s unrequited love for her is confusing. The implication, whether intentional or not, is that there is a correlation between obsessive love and lesbian love. Janet does finally come to her senses and fingers Gladys for the murders, yet in the next breath she pleads, “Just don’t hurt her please! She’s all I ever had!”

NBC had originally planned to air the edited version on November 15, but decided at the last minute to move the airdate up to November 8. Activists disliked what they saw. Members of the Lesbian Feminist Liberation staged a sit-in inside an NBC executive’s office, while protestors rallied outside of the building. Gay activists eventually met with NBC executives, who agreed not to rerun the episode.
²⁵

What is puzzling is why producer David Gerber didn’t have the foresight to consult Newton Dieter and other gay media activists as he did previously on “The Ripper.” According to the
Los Angeles Times,
Gerber believed there was no need to get expert advice because the lesbian overtones were minor. Also, since the premise was based on an actual case, he didn’t think there was a need for consultants to question the facts.
²⁶

“Flowers of Evil” remains one of the most blatant examples of negative stereotyping on television. By today’s standards, the episode is so outrageously offensive it borders on camp. One scene in particular, in which Gladys interviews Pepper for a nursing job, oozes with sexual innuendoes:

“Flowers of Evil” did not put an end to lesbian killers on television.
The Streets of San Francisco
(“Once a Con...”) featured a lesbian college student named Jackie Collins (yes, Jackie Collins!) who murders her lover’s best friend. Jackie (Devon Ericson) confesses to killing Mary because she was jealous. “I didn’t mean to,” she explains to her lover Tina (Joanne Nail), “It was an accident. I only meant to scar her because she was so beautiful.” Tina is horrified, yet still embraces Jackie and assures her that she and Mary were only friends. Too bad they didn’t have this conversation sooner.

As law and order dramas moved out of the 1970s and into the Reagan era, greed would become the number one motive for crimes committed by and against gay men and lesbians. Two episodes of
Hunter
— “The Fifth Victim” and “From San Francisco With Love” — feature characters who kill strictly for the cash.

“The Fifth Victim” begins with a manhunt for a serial killer of eleven gay male victims. When the psycho is nabbed, he admits to killing all of the men except one — victim number five, an architect named Sanger. Det. Sgt. Hunter (Fred Dryer) and Det. Sgt. Dee Dee McCall (Stepfanie Kramer) are able to track down the second killer when they discover the detective in charge of the case, Sal Drasso (Bill Smith), revealed confidential details about the serial murders to his friends. An associate of Sanger’s, Sedgwick (William Joyce), used the information to commit a copycat killing. He murdered Sanger because he knew Sedgwick was skimming money off the top of a construction project. The episode also includes the by now familiar subplot involving a closeted gay detective, Frank Buchanan (Rick Giolito), who is forced to come out while helping Hunter. Fortunately, he receives support from the gay-friendly Hunter and their boss, Captain Devane (Charles Hallahan).