The Prime Time Closet: A History of Gays and Lesbians on TV (36 page)

Teenagers can experience the same disappointment about a potential suitor. On
Blossom
(“It Happened One Night”), Nick (Ted Wass) volunteers his daughter (Mayim Balik) to show his friend’s son Fred (Charlie Heath) around Los Angeles. The situation becomes awkward when Nick is caught spying on the couple. Later, an even more embarrassed and clueless Nick finds out from Fred’s father, Dan (Chris Mulkey), in a rather refreshing, matter-of-fact way, that Fred is gay.

A somber episode of
Moesha
provides an interesting contrast to the breezy, gay-positive tone of
Blossom.
In “Labels,” Moesha (Brandy) meets Hakeem’s (Lamont Bentley) cousin, Omar. On their first date, she figures out he’s gay and makes the mistake of telling her gossipy friends about it, who spread the news all around school. Hakeem doesn’t believe it’s true and gets angry at Moesha for starting rumors about Omar. In the final scene, Moesha reads the lyrics from an Edie Brickell song “I Know What I Know if You Know What I Mean.” While she reads the poem, we see (but don’t hear) Omar telling Hakeem he’s gay. Hakeem is clearly upset and in the final scene, he visits Moesha on her porch and says hello. As the two sit in silence, we hear Moesha say in voiceover, “Dear Diary, I got my friend back.”

While the episode delivers a positive message to youngsters about being true to oneself, the ending skirts the gay issue by making it more about Hakeem and Moesha’s friendship. Omar’s “coming out” and Hakeem’s reaction are never fully played out, which makes the ending all the more confusing. Hakeem and Moesha’s silence in the end is also ambiguous. Although it seems to be more about the tension in the friends’ relationship, it can also be read, particularly because of the lack of dialogue between Omar and Hakeem, as if they’re mourning his gayness. Moesha got her friend back, but what about poor Omar?

Unlike the
Moesha
episode, most sitcom characters find it easier to accept a friend stepping out of the closet than when the door swings open in their own house. The issue seems to hit closer to home when a father, mother, brother, or sister decides to let the family in on their little secret. Consequently, the situation has greater comic potential because the gay or lesbian parent or sibling is typically someone the rest of the family
really
thought they knew.

For example,
Dream On’s
Martin Tupper has a real shock in “Pop’s Secret,” when his dad Mickey (Paul Dooley) moves back to New York. Martin is afraid to live in the same city as his father because it will cramp his style, but instead his father spends all his time with his new roommate Roger (Dion Anderson). After Martin observes the two men acting like a married couple, Martin asks his father if he’s gay. Mickey admits it’s true and a reluctant Martin accepts Roger into the family.

Unfortunately, the relationship doesn’t last (“The Courtship of Martin’s Father”) and Martin’s worst nightmare comes true when Dad appears at his door with his suitcase. Although he still feels uncomfortable with his father’s homosexuality, Martin encourages his father to meet someone else. He brings his father to a gay bowling alley and even tries to educate him about safe sex. When Mickey begins to interfere in Martin’s personal and professional life, Martin gets angry and finally admits he wishes his father wasn’t gay. Surprisingly, Mickey admits he feels the same way and wonders if it would be easier for everyone if he went back into the closet. Martin eventually realizes it’s not his father’s homosexuality that’s troubling him — but the fact that he, like his father, is also a single man living in Manhattan looking for love. Father and son come to an understanding and in the final scene, they enjoy a warm and fuzzy father-and-son moment sitting in their bathrobes watching The Weather Channel and drinking beer.

Dream
On’s humor is derived from the incorporation of old movie and TV clips to illustrate what Martin’s thinking. In situations involving his father, the clips are used to punctuate how uncomfortable Martin is about his father’s sexuality. Martin isn’t homophobic; he’s
homo-nervous.
When Martin first suspects Mickey and Roger are more than just roommates, everything he hears and sees has a gay connotation. In discussing their golf game, Roger says “Your dad putts like an old lady.” (Cut to Bette Davis saying “What was that word?”) While snooping in their medicine cabinet, Martin sees two shavers. (Cut to an image of W.C. Fields and another man shaving each other.) Created by David Crane and Marta Kaufman, who’d later strike gold as the co-creators of
Friends, Dream On’s
camp sensibility made it one of the more gay-friendly shows of the 1990s. This is particularly unusual for a sitcom that is essentially about a horny straight divorce trying to get laid. With its adult language and brief glimpses of female nudity,
Dream On
paved the way for other adult-oriented cable comedies like HBO’s
Sex and the City
and Showtime’s
Beggars and Choosers
and
Rude Awakening.

Like Martin Tupper,
Grace Under Fire
’s Grace Kelly (Brett Butler) is shocked when she discovers her father-in-law Emmet (Bryan Clark) is gay. In “Emmett’s Secret,” Grace and her boyfriend Rick (Alan Autry) mistakenly go into a gay sports bar in St. Louis to watch a game. There they run into Emmet and Danny (Michael Winters), his lover for fifteen years. Unlike Martin, Grace prides herself on being the only gay-friendly member of her family. Her favorite relative is her ex-husband’s cousin, DeForest Kelly (Barry Steiger). When Grace’s ex-husband’s clan invades her house on Thanksgiving (“Cold Turkey”), DeForest (named, like all the others, after a famous Kelly) is the only one she’s happy to see.

Grace promises to keep Emmet’s secret from his wife Jean (Peggy Rea), who suspects her husband may be having an affair with another woman. Jean finally finds out the truth when Emmet dies suddenly (“Emmet, We Hardly Knew You”) and Dan makes an appearance at the funeral. Grace is sympathetic to Dan, but at the same time she tries to protect Jean from finding out the truth. In the middle of the eulogy, a grief-stricken Danny stands up and declares, “He loved me and I loved him!” Jean tries to ignore him, but a few days after the funeral she finally breaks down. Grace is there to lend a shoulder to cry on and reassure her that although Emmet lived a double life, he really did love her.

Both
Dream On
and
Grace Under Fire
explore issues surrounding homosexuality often ignored by television until the 1990s. Mickey and Emmet are two men who were born in an era when choosing an openly gay lifestyle over a more traditional heterosexual existence was never even considered an option. Although he was lying to his wife, Emmet still emerges as a sympthetic character. “I just thought you got married, had kids, and that would make these feelings I had for men go away,” he explains to Grace, “but it didn’t and then Danny came along, and everything changed.”
⁴²
Mickey also suppressed his feelings and came out later in life. “I’m winging this,” he explains to Martin. “I don’t know what I’m doing. It’s all new. I’m living with a guy. He’s buying me slippers. And I’m liking it.” Both programs demonstrate that there are gay men over the age of 50 capable of falling in love.

The same subject is treated with less sensitivity on an episode of
Seinfeld
involving George’s future father-in-law, Henry Ross (Warren Frost). The trouble begins when Susan makes the mistake of inviting George, Jerry, and Elaine up to her parents’ cabin for the weekend. Kramer accidentally burns down the cabin, but George manages to recover a metal box (“The Cheever Letters”) which, to everyone’s surprise, contain love letters to Henry from real-life closeted gay author John Cheever. The revelation makes Cheever and Henry’s relationship more like a dirty secret that would have been better left unopened.

Several coming out episodes have dealt with older women revealing their sexual orientation to their children and families. Once again,
All in the Family
broke new ground with an episode (“Cousin Liz”) set at a party after the funeral of Edith’s cousin Liz. Cousin Liz’s roommate Veronica (K. Callan) explains to Edith she and Liz were lovers. Edith agrees to let Veronica keep a family heirloom, a silver tea set, which angers Archie because he knows it’s valuable. Edith tries to explain the situation to her husband, who’s ready to take her to court. But Veronica would not be able to go to court because she is a teacher and in 1977, it could mean losing her job. As always, Edith emerges as the sympathetic voice of reason:

Archie gets the message and reluctantly lets Veronica keep the tea set, but not without getting the last word in. “Can’t understand you people at all,” he grumbles. “Why don’t you all just stop that!” The Bunkers exit and as with the majority of 1970s sitcom characters, Veronica (and the tea set) are never seen or mentioned again.

While Liz never got a chance to come out to her cousin Edith, Mandy D’Arcy is given the opportunity in a funny episode of
Married With Children,
in which openly lesbian actress Amanda Bearse is featured in the dual role of identical cousins Mandy and Marcy. In “Lez Be Friends,” the overbearing Marcy reveals she has been jealous of Mandy all her life because she’s sweet and has always been more popular. Even Al (Ed O’Neill), who can’t stand Marcy, likes Mandy and prefers her company to that of his own wife, Peg (Katey Segal), because she likes going to ball games, plays a mean game of foosball, and enjoys cooking. Peg isn’t too fond of Mandy, but she changes her mind when Mandy compliments Peg on her gorgeous looks.

The situation comedy
Roseanne
had its share of lesbian characters during its nine-season run. In the fall of 1991, Nancy, played by sharp-tongued bisexual comedian Sandra Bernhard, married Dan’s (John Goodman) old army buddy Arnie (Tom Arnold). Like Roseanne and Tom’s marriage, it didn’t last too long. When Arnie disappears at the end of the season (Tom Arnold moved on to his own series,
The Jackie Thomas Show
), Nancy announces in “Ladies’ Choice” that she has a new love in her life — Marla (Morgan Fairchild).

The following season, Roseanne and a very nervous Jackie (Laurie Metcalf venture into a gay bar, where Nancy’s current girlfriend Sharon (Mariel Hemingway) plants a kiss on Roseanne. The episode (“Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”) included the now infamous kiss that ABC feared would result in a major loss of advertising revenue. But ABC went ahead with the kiss and the March 1, 1994 episode was the week’s highest rated program.

Fortunately, Roseanne didn’t stop there. In an episode during the show’s final season (“Home Is Where the Afghan Is”), Rosie’s mother Bev (Estelle Parson) makes a startling revelation over Thanksgiving dinner — she hates sex with men and had to look at a
Playboy
magazine before she could make love to her late husband. Everyone is shocked — and
Roseanne
makes television history by introducing us to America’s first lesbian grandmother. Later in the season (“Rosanne-feld”), Bev gets a girlfriend, a boozy lounge singer named Joyce (Ruta Lee). In the series’s final episode (“Into That Good Night Pts. 1 & 2”), Roseanne reveals Dan had died the previous year and the entire season was actually the product of her imagination. She says what really happened that year was her sister Jackie was the one who came out of the closet.

Another recurring character who goes gay in the 1990s is Paul Buchman’s (Paul Reiser) sister Debbie (Robin Bartlett) on
Mad About You.
In “Ovulation Day,” Debbie tells Jamie the story about a romantic evening she had with another woman, a doctor named Joan (Suzie Plakson). She plans to break the news to her parents, Sylvia (Cynthia Harris) and Burt (Louis Zurch) that evening over dinner. They stop by Paul and Jamie’s apartment, where Paul is about to impregnate an ovulating Jamie. Their baby-making is put on hold when Debbie decides to tell her family she’s a lesbian. While Burt seems fine with the news and Paul needs more time to process it, Sylvia heads for an open window. “Why do you say these things?” she asks, “To aggravate me?...We should have never named her Debbie. We should never have let her play field hockey.” Sylvia is prevented from jumping and when everyone leaves, Paul has trouble getting back in the mood, until Jamie uses Debbie’s story to describe a fictional lesbian encounter she once had with her college roommate to get her husband excited.

On
Malcolm and Eddie,
Malcolm (Malcolm-Jamal Warner) is totally cool about his sister Maura (JoNelle Kennedy) being a lesbian, but in “Sibling Rivalry” they both find themselves pursuing Malcolm’s new waitress, Brenda (Paulette Braxton). They both make fools of themselves in the process, especially when Brenda picks Eddie (Eddie Griffin) over both of them.

While lesbian characters like Nancy, Bev, Debbie, and Joan have recurring status, gay brothers usually stop in for a brief visit — just long enough to come out. The earliest example is “My Brother’s Keeper,” a 1972 episode of
The Mary Tyler Moore Show.
Phyllis tries to fix Mary up with her brother Ben (Robert Moore). She’s not happy when he hits it off with Rhoda (Valerie Harper). The thought of Ben and Rhoda getting married is Phyllis’s worst nightmare. When Rhoda tells her flat out that Ben is not her type, she’s offended.