The Prime Time Closet: A History of Gays and Lesbians on TV (20 page)

On November 1, 1972, ABC aired the first made-for-television movie about the subject of homosexuality. In
That Certain Summer,
14-year-old Nick Salter (Scott Jacoby) visits his father, Doug (Hal Holbrook), a gay man living in the San Francisco area with his lover, Gary McClain (Martin Sheen). Not yet totally comfortable with his homosexuality, Doug isn’t ready to tell Nick the real reason he divorced his mother, Janet (Hope Lange), three years earlier. So Gary, temporarily moves out of the house, yet still spends time with Doug and Nick, who is understandably confused about the nature of his father’s close friendship with another man.

Over the course of the weekend, Nick grows increasingly suspicious. Then he finds his father’s watch and reads the inscription on the back: “To Doug, With Love, Gary.” An upset Nick telephones his mother, who senses there’s something wrong and hops on the next plane. Nick spends the day wandering around the streets of San Francisco. When he returns to his dad’s house, Doug has no choice but to tell have that certain father-and-son talk.

Upset and confused, Nick packs his bags and goes home with his mother without even saying goodbye. “Give him a little time,” Janet tells Doug. After they leave, Doug starts to cry. The final images, which also appear during the opening credit sequence of the film, are from home movies that depict a much happier Doug and a younger Nick playing together.

A somber yet powerful drama,
That Certain Summer
boasts an intelligent script by veteran TV scribes Richard Levinson and William Link and superlative performances by Holbrook, Sheen, Lange and young Jacoby, who received a supporting Emmy for his work. The film is essentially an adult coming out story. But instead of focusing on the obvious, like Doug leaving Janet for another man, which would have been difficult to explore in the film’s 75-minute running time, Levinson and Link wisely chose a simpler and ultimately more interesting route.

When the story opens, Doug is already living with Gary but not yet completely out of the closet. He doesn’t tell a flirtatious female client he’s gay and doesn’t approve of public displays of affection between men. When he sees Nick watching two gay men holding hands in the park, he expresses his disapproval to Gary, who questions whether his reaction is really coming from the part of him that’s still ashamed about being gay. “It takes some of us a while to come all the way out,” Gary explains. What Gary is implying is that Doug isn’t all the way out because he hasn’t told his son the truth. The overly protective Doug thinks Nick is too young to understand. As we soon see for ourselves, the teenager is not emotionally ready. But when he discovers the truth on his own, Doug has no choice but to have that certain father-and-son talk.

Doug’s coming out speech to Nick was criticized by some gay activists who objected to the father telling his son “some people think it’s [homosexuality] a sickness” and “If I had a choice, it isn’t something I’d pick for myself.” According to Levinson, ABC insisted those lines be inserted:

There’s no doubt Levinson and Link’s hearts and minds were in the right place. If only the latter part of Link’s statement (about how it’s more comfortable to be straight than gay in a bigoted society) was included in Doug’s speech to clarify what the character meant by
“it’s not something I’d pick for myself.
” To complicate matters more, the network wouldn’t permit any on-screen physical contact between the two men, making them seem more like roommates than lovers. Of course, Doug does object to public displays of affection and the two men are seldom alone together, which makes it difficult for them to engage in even a little on-screen foreplay.

According to
The New York Time’s
television critic John J. O’Connor, one version of the script contained an alternate ending in which Nick admits to his mother at the airport that he “should’ve said goodbye to him.” Cut to Doug, who is watching home movies, but isn’t crying. O’Connor preferred the ending that was used because there was a more “subtle indication of an eventual reconciliation” which “was preferable in the over-all dramatic context.”
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What O’Connor also found preferable was how the film generally treated the subject matter in comparison to “A Very Strange Triangle,” an episode of
The Bold
Ones
that aired the very same week, which he characterized as “inane” and “superficial.” “There is a need for the exceptional level of quality found in
That Certain Summer,”
O’Connor suggests, “but that type of intelligence and sensitivity is essential for all television, from situation comedies to news specials.”
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That Certain Summer
broke new ground by portraying homosexuals as real people, rather than one-dimensional stereotypes. How honestly and accurately the film reflected gay life in America is certainly debatable, but there’s a more important question: who exactly is the film’s “intended” audience? Clearly, it was not gay male couples living in San Francisco, but heterosexuals who have never met a gay person (or so they think) that hopefully gained some new insight into gay male relationships and the emotional struggle many gay people endure as they seek acceptance from loved ones.

Since the early 1970s, TV has continued to offer viewers advice on how to (and how not to) treat their son, daughter, parent, and friend when he or she comes out of the closet. The trauma of coming out would continue to be a source of dramatic conflict, especially for teenagers, even as dramatic series and made-for-TV movies could then begin tackling other gay-related issues, such as homophobia, discrimination, and AIDS.

In 1964, ABC, the lowest-rated and most innovative of the three networks, successfully transported the daytime serial format to prime time with the premiere of
Peyton Place.
Based on Grace Metalious’s bestseller, which was adapted for the big screen in 1957 (followed by a 1961 sequel), the series was set in a small New England coastal town. In addition to launching the careers of newcomers Mia Farrow and Ryan O’Neal,
Peyton Place
broke new ground on television with its treatment of what were considered “mature themes,” such as adultery, pre-marital sex, illegitimate children, and suicide. The show’s popular and healthy five-year run (at its peak, ABC ran three new episodes a week) insured the genre — which, for a long time, had been considered synonymous with daytime television — a future on prime time. As far as we knew, there were no homosexuals living in Peyton. In fact, homosexuality would remain one of the last of the great taboos for both daytime and prime time soap operas until the late 1970s.

The first bona fide non-heterosexual character introduced on a daytime soap opera was in 1977.
Days of Our Lives’s Sharon
Duval (Shelly Stark), an unhappily married bisexual, fell in love with one of the show’s central characters, Julie Williams (Susan Seaforth Hayes), who made it clear she had no romantic interest in her (or any woman). Like many prime-time lesbian/bisexual characters on television in the 1970s, Sharon was confused and deeply troubled. After two unsuccessful suicide attempts, she was hospitalized and upon her release, she and her husband left Salem permanently.

Days
opened the closet door — albeit in a not very flattering way — but it would take a long time for daytime soaps to work up enough nerve to take on the subject of homosexuality and feature gay, lesbian, and bisexual characters on a regular basis. Although not all gay characters are as fragile as Sharon, homosexuality would still generally be approached as an “issue,” usually in the form of a big secret that would eventually be uncovered. Once their storyline drew to its conclusion, gay characters typically disappeared, though starting in the 1990s certain soaps, like
All My Children,
have let their gay characters stick around.

Around the same time that Salem’s resident lesbian was having her nervous breakdown on
Days, Executive Suite,
a prime time CBS soap, introduced a similar character. Like
Peyton Place,
the series was based on a bestseller that had been a successful feature film in 1954. The short-lived drama focused on the professional and personal lives of executives working for the fictitious Cardway Corporation. In the tenth episode (“Re: The Sounds of Silence”), Julie Solkin (Geraldine Brooks), who’s being physically abused by her husband Bernie (Norman Fell), admits to her best friend Leona (Patricia Smith) she is a lesbian. Bernie shares his suspicions about his wife’s friendship with Leona with her husband, Andy (William Smithers). When Leona later admits to her lesbian friend that she does have feelings for her (“Re: What Are Patterns For?”), Julie follows an upset Leona into the street and is hit by a truck. At the funeral (“Re: The Identity Crisis”), Bernie blames Leona for his wife’s death, causing a guilty and confused Leona to have a nervous breakdown.

It’s no coincidence that all three women had troubled marriages:
Days’s
Sharon is unhappy with married life, while
Executive’s
Julie Solkin is being battered and Leona’s husband is cheating on her. Lesbianism and bisexuality are thus positioned as alternatives to heterosexuality. So poor Julie must be killed off after awakening Leona’s repressed lesbian tendencies that, in combination with her guilt over her friend’s death, eventually turn her into a catatonic.

The only other non-heterosexual characters to appear on a nighttime soap opera in the late 1970s were featured on what were essentially parodies of the genre.
Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman
(1975-1977) followed the trials and tribulations of an off-the-wall suburban housewife (Louise Lasser) and her equally loopy family and friends. Among the residents of Fernwood, Ohio, was a bisexual named Annie “Tippeytoes” Wylie (Gloria DeHaven) and the Hartmans’ neighbors, a gay couple who posed as the sons of fortune teller Betty McCullough (Vivian Blaine). When Mary’s husband Tom Hartman (Greg Mullavey) temporarily moves in with Howard (Beeson Carroll) and Ed McCullough (Lawrence Haddon), he walks in on what he believes are the two brothers kissing. The truth about Howard and Ed eventually gets around Fernwood and at one point, the couple even consider tying the knot.

Producer Norman Lear attempted to repeat the success of
Mary Hartman
with
All That Glitters
(1977), another syndicated soap set in corporate America, but with one major twist: traditional male-female roles are reversed, so it’s the women who helm Globatron Corporation, while the men are either at home where they belong or taking dictation (when not being chased around the boss’s desk). The cast featured a
pre-Dallas
Linda Grey as Linda Murkland, a male-to-female transsexual model.
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The very presence of a transsexual character exposes the absurdity of a patriarchal (or in this case, matriarchal) male-female power structure that is, at its very core, rooted in biology. The series lasted only five months, perhaps because the sex-role reversal gimmick wasn’t enough to sustain an entire series. Of course it may have been a matter of poor timing, considering
All That Glitters
aired in 1977, when the backlash against the feminist movement was in full swing and the defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment (in 1982) was on the horizon.