The Prime Time Closet: A History of Gays and Lesbians on TV (19 page)

In 1988, the television drama
Midnight Caller
featured a controversial episode about a bisexual, HIV-positive man deliberately exposing his male and female sexual partners to the virus. In “After It Happened,” Jack Killian (Gary Cole), an ex-cop who hosts a late night radio talk show in San Francisco, is reunited with his ex-girlfriend, Tina (Kay Lenz). She asks Killian’s help in tracking down a one-night stand, a man named Mike Barnes (Richard Cox), who got her pregnant and infected her with HIV. During his search, Killian meets Barnes’s other victims: his ex-lover, Russ (J.D. Lewis), who Barnes abandoned when he became ill; and another one-nighter (Kelly West), who Killian advises to get tested. Killian finally locates Barnes, who feels no remorse for intentionally infecting his partners. “Why can’t you understand? It’s my life...” Barnes explains. “I have to live my whole life in one hundred nights.”

Knowing he has no legal right to stop Barnes, Killian warns people about him on his radio show. Barnes hears the broadcast and threatens to sue him for defamation. Their heated conversation is interrupted by Kelly, who, having discovered she’s HIV positive, pulls a gun on Barnes. When Killian manages to talk her out of shooting him, a grateful Barnes asks why he saved his life. “Because your life is worth saving,” Killian explains. (In an alternate ending to the script, Kelly reportedly wastes him.)

As the episode was going into production, the script for “After It Happened” was leaked to San Francisco AIDS activists. “Getting Screwed By NBC Is Not Safe Sex” was the headline of a leaflet inviting everyone to attend a protest march and rally on October 25 starting at the corner of Market and Castro Streets and ending at City Hall. The flyer accused NBC and Lorimar Production of issuing “shoot to kill orders” against anyone who’s HIV positive:

Despite the court order Lorimar won to keep protestors away, filming around the city was disrupted.
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The protests didn’t end when production wrapped on the episode. On the evening “After It Happened” aired (December 2, 1988), protestors stormed the offices of KRON-TV, NBC’s affiliate in San Francisco, and demanded the station run a disclaimer during each commercial break. The station refused, but the following disclaimer did appear at the opening of the show:

The protest was the top story on KRON-TV’s 11 o’clock news. Live coverage of the protest was followed by several AIDS-related stories, including a report on the AIDS quilt, which was on view at the Moscone Center; advancements in AIDS testing; and a new study on the development of the HIV virus in children.

Immediately following the news, KRON-TV aired a live, half-hour special news report entitled
Midnight Caller: The Response,
which gave San Francisco officials and community leaders the opportunity to air their concerns about the episode. Among the guests was Terry Beswick of ACT-UP San Francisco, who discussed how the series’s producers ignored the organization’s concerns about the episode’s content. Dr. David Werdegar, San Francisco Director of Public Health, voiced his objections to how “After It Happened” presents vigilantism, rather than health education, as a legitimate response to the AIDS crisis. Werdegar also stressed how the episode inaccurately reflects the San Francisco gay community’s response to the AIDS crisis. For example, there’s no evidence of a support system for people with AIDS like Barnes’s abandoned ex-lover, Russ.

The protestors’ concerns were indeed legitimate. The episode clearly exploits the AIDS crisis by characterizing HIV as this mysterious, evil, unknown “other” lurking around dark street corners, rather than what it is — a disease transmitted by a virus from which we can protect ourselves by taking certain precautions. Furthermore, having the show’s protagonist literally hunt down Barnes certainly legitimizes vigilantism as a response to people known to be HIV-positive.

Far more problematic than
Midnight Caller
is the premiere episode of Chris Carter’s
Millennium.
The supernatural detective series from the creator of
X-Files
focuses on an ex-FBI agent, Frank Black (Lance Henriksen), who has the ability to see through the eyes of a killer. In the series’s pilot, he helps track down a serial killer he characterizes as a man confused about his sexuality. Black believes the killer is fulfilling prophecy by trying to end the great plague (AIDS), which can only be “avenged by the blood of a just man.” In one grisly scene, they discover one of his victims, a gay man buried alive in a coffin. Apparently the killer takes the blood of his victims then buries them alive before testing it for HIV If the captive tests HIV positive, he dies.

Like Carter’s other series, the long-running
X-Files, Millennium
is dark, moody, and intellectual. The clues left by the killer contain references to the Bible, Nostradamus’s prophecies, and Yeats’s poem “The Second Coming.” Yet scripture and poetry can’t mask what the episode is really about — a serial killer who hunts down gay men to rid the world of AIDS. Black doesn’t actually say the killer is gay, but when he characterizes him as confused about his sexuality, the implication is clear enough. Due to his “confusion,” his victims include women. GLAAD was certainly not pleased with the episode, which they argued “relied on out-dated stereotypes about gay men by presenting a violent gay serial killer...[who] hates women and thus murders a stripper and then kills a gay man in a public cruising area in Seattle because he is so ashamed of his own sexuality.”
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Fortunately, most law and order dramas take a more humanistic approach to AIDS. In
The Equalizer
’
s
1987 Christmas episode (“Christmas Presence”), Robert McCall (Edward Woodward) protects a six-year old boy, Mickey Robertson (Corey Carrier), from a neighbor who doesn’t want the boy around. On
21 Jump Street
(“A Big Disease With a Little Name”), Det. Hanson goes undercover to protect an HIV-positive teenager, Harley Poolish (Philip Tanzini). Harley, a hemophiliac who supposedly contracted the virus through a blood transfusion, has been the target of death threats. He grows closer to Hanson and finally admits he’s not a hemophiliac. He reveals, without actually using the “G word,” that he is gay by comparing his father to Anita Bryant. The 1988 episode isn’t only cautious in how it handles the gay issue; it also fails to mention that the HIV virus can be transmitted through heterosexual as well as homosexual sex.

Courtroom dramas like
L.A. Law, Law and Order
and
The Practice
have addressed legal issues — usually based on actual cases — that have been raised since AIDS was declared a national health crisis (as opposed to just being “that gay disease”).
L.A. Law
first approached the issue in 1985’s “The Venus Butterfly.” Deputy district attorney Grace Van Owen (Susan Dey) is forced to prosecute a gay man, Christopher Appleton (Peter Frechette), accused of mercy-killing his dying lover. Van Owen is clearly moved by Appleton’s testimony, in which he describes the pain and suffering his lover endured, but feels obligated to enforce the law. When he is found guilty, Van Owen helps out his lawyer, Mark Gillian (Stanley Kamel), with their appeal (“Fry Me to the Moon”). She gives Gilliam information he can use for Appleton’s retrial, which is granted when Gilliam admits to the judge that he wasn’t prepared to defend his client and is therefore incompetent. Ironically, Appleton ends up thanking Van Owen, the woman who successfully prosecuted him, for her help.

Mercy killing is also the focus
of Law and Order’s
third episode, “The Reaper’s Helper.” Bobby Holland is found shot dead in his apartment and after questioning the victim’s lover, they track down an acquaintance of Holland’s named Jack Curry (once again, Peter Frechette). Curry admits to mercy-killing Holland and other men with AIDS in San Francisco and Los Angeles. Executive Assistant District Attorney Ben Stone (Michael Moriarity) decides to prosecute, only to regret his decision when he finds out Curry has AIDS. But when a copycat killing occurs, he has no choice but to continue the trial. So Stone asks Dets. Greevy (George Dzundza) and Mike Logan (Chris Noth) to find a piece of evidence to help him dismiss the trial. Curry’s lawyer learns about Stone’s instructions to the detectives and uses the information as part of his client’s defense. In a variation on the
L.A. Law
episode, Curry is acquitted and it is revealed Stone was actually the one who provided the defense attorney with the information that exonerated him.

Both of these shows question whether people who commit euthanasia should be prosecuted as criminals, even when they have the consent of their victims. Grace Van Owen and Ben Stone are both torn between following their moral conscience and enforcing the law. Their respective resolutions find a middle ground by having both DAs fulfill their legal obligations to serve the public yet work within the boundaries of the law to aid the defendants.

A series that took a more sensationalistic approach to the same topic is
New York Undercover,
created by
Law and Order’s
Dick Wolf. In “Without Mercy,” a married bisexual man with AIDS poisons himself after infecting his wife with the virus. His former male lover, Hector (Vincent Laresca) doesn’t believe he’d have committed suicide. So when a man treated by the same clinic dies from the same type of poison, Eddie (Michael DeLorenzo) goes undercover at the clinic as an intravenous drug addict with AIDS. When he starts asking around the clinic about where he can get some poison, someone slips something into his food, landing him in the hospital. Meanwhile, another patient, Judd Dawes (Charles Malik), despondent over being disowned by his family, admits to a clinic counselor, Jane Simmons (Amy Povich), he doesn’t want to live. When Dawes is poisoned and goes into a coma, Eddie realizes Jane is killing AIDS patients because she didn’t want them to suffer like her daughter, who she also poisoned. In the end, Jane fatally poisons herself.

“Without Mercy” takes an otherwise serious issue — mercy killing — and trivializes it by turning it into a motive for a paint-by-numbers whodunit. GLAAD was particularly critical of the episode because as in
Midnight Caller,
it perpetuates negative stereotypes about bisexuals: they spread AIDS to heterosexual women; they can only get AIDS through sexual contact with gay men, who are the “carriers of the virus to the rest of society;” and they’re “deceptive, promiscuous” and have relationships with both sexes simultaneously.
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During
L.A. Law’s
eight-year run, the law firm of McKenzie, Brackman, Chantey, and Kuzak handled several discrimination cases. Some of the institutions, companies, and individuals targeted have included an insurance company that denies coverage to a lawyer with AIDS (“Since I Fell For You”); a doctor who refused to perform emergency surgery on an accident victim with AIDS (“Blood, Sweat, and Fears”); a cosmetics company who fired a model because she is a transsexual (“Speak, Lawyers for Me”); and the parents of a gay man dying of Lou Gehrig’s disease who refuse to allow their son’s lover to visit (“Smoke Gets in Your Thighs”).

David Kelly, a former writer/producer on
L.A. Law,
continued to present gay-related cases on three of his subsequent series,
Picket Fences, The Practice,,
and
Ally McBeal.
A job discrimination case on
The Practise,
reminiscent of the feature film
Philadelphia,
involves a childhood friend of lawyer Jimmy Berluti (Michael Badalucco) accused of discriminating against one of his employees with AIDS (“Honorable Man”). Peter Hines (Tom La Grua) is charged with violating Wayne Mayfield’s (Jim Pirri) privacy by circulating a memo around the office stating that Mayfield has AIDS. Hines argued he did it to protect himself in case another employee had to administer emergency medical treatment to Mayfield without knowing his HIV status. Berluti agrees, until he realizes Hines really is a homophobic bigot, a point the lawyer implies in his closing statement. Mayfield wins the case, but Hines is only fined $25. The episode demonstrates quite clearly how homophobia can in fact be protected under the law, yet the small amount demonstrates what little importance is placed on the issue.

Something positive does comes out of the trial. Berluti picks up the telephone and calls his mother, who came out of the closet in an episode from a few seasons prior (“The Civil Right”). Berluti has had mixed feelings about his mother’s lesbianism, particularly when she asks him to represent her in her attempt to legally marry her lover. The phone call suggests his experience with Hines has made Berluti reexamine his own prejudices about his mother’s homosexuality.

Another David Kelly series,
Ally McBeal,
has featured several cases involving transgender clients. In “The Oddball Parade,” John Cage (Peter MacNicol) defends four clients — an obese woman, a man who obsessively claps his hands and has verbal tics, another man described as “scary looking,” and a cross-dresser, Matthew Vault (Anthony Anderson) — who are all fired from their jobs at a graphic design company because of their appearance. Cage, feeling like an oddball himself, decides to take the case. The humor on
McBeal
becomes suspect when it is derived from characters considered outside of the so-called “norm” of its neurotic, heterosexual world. Matthew, who returns in a later episode (“Prime Suspect”) when his boss is murdered, and the other oddballs are treated sympathetically. At the same time, they become targets of McBeal and company’s snippy quips.

This was particularly evident in a three-part episode involving a transvestite named Cindy McCauliff (Lisa Edelstein), who hires Fish (Greg Germann) and Ling (Lucy Liu) to represent her in a lawsuit against her employer for requiring her to have a physical exam (“Girl’s Night Out”). As an anatomical male living like a female, she feels the exam violates her privacy. The problem comes when the lawyers’ colleague, Mark (James LeGros), falls for Cindy. His colleagues aren’t allowed to tell him she is anatomically a he because of lawyer-client confidentiality.

When Mark begins to date her (“Two’s a Crowd”), he becomes the butt of jokes around the office, though he eventually finds out the truth when she presses up against him on the dance floor. The fact that Cindy is a man doesn’t change Mark’s feelings for her, until the next episode (“Without a Net”), in which Mark tries to deal with the situation by convincing Cindy to join a support group for odd couples.

Although Cindy is a well-developed, three-dimensional character, her central purpose seems to be to give the other characters the opportunity to crack cheap jokes, which GLAAD found problematic:

GLAAD wrote a letter to Kelley requesting a meeting, which never happened. The organization’s media director, Scott Seomin, did speak to the writers, who were planning to bring Cindy’s character back. She appears briefly in “Love on a Holiday,” in which the homophobic Fish participates in a male auction. Cindy gets revenge by having gay men bid on him. Seomin felt the episode, in his words, “sort of misses the point by 45 degrees. We want the transgender character to be treated with respect, not to seek revenge.”
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Cindy finally receives the respect she deserves when she returns for her third appearance in “Hats Off to Larry.” She wants Fish to represent her in her suit against the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, who won’t let her marry her new boyfriend (Todd Eckert). Although some homophobic comments are still bandied about, as Bill Roundy of the
Washington Blade
observes, there is a definite shift in the way the other characters treat Cindy, who is now referred to as “she.” Mark, who clearly still has feelings for Cindy, also comes to his ex-lover’s defense, while Fish agrees to officiate at their non-legal wedding ceremony. Although they lose their case, Fish unloads a passionate trial speech in which he points out that “sex offenders can marry, murderers, cannibals can take vows — but two Gay people...Woah! There goes the sanctity.” Roundy concludes that the episode “almost manages to erase memories of the earlier, offensive stories...showing characters growing out of their reflexive trans-phobia.”
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