The Prime Time Closet: A History of Gays and Lesbians on TV (42 page)

Jodie Dallas is certainly the most memorable gay character of the pre-Ellen era. Smart, funny, and a tad insecure, Jodie is fairly well-adjusted in comparison to the collection of off-the-wall characters inhabiting this hilarious send-up of soap operas. He was also more three-dimensional than most gay men on sitcoms of the time, thanks to his creators, comedian Billy Crystal and writer/producer Susan Harris, whose credits include
Benson, The Golden Girls,
and
Empty Nest.
Crystal’s work on
Soap
made him a household name, which is ironic considering that in
1977,
actors stayed clear of gay roles for fear of being typecast or, even worse, mistaken for the real thing.

As the announcer states in the opening of each episode,
Soap
is the story of two sisters, Jessica Tate (Katherine Helmond) and Mary Campbell (Mary Damon). Mary, who always appears to be on the brink of a nervous breakdown, has her hands full with her hyperactive, yet impotent, husband Burt (Richard Mulligan); her two sons, Jodie and Danny (Ted Wass), who works for the mob; and two step-sons, Chuck (Jay Johnson), a ventriloquist who travels everywhere with his dummy, Bob; and Peter (Robert Urich), a handsome tennis pro who is bedding every woman in Dunn’s River, Connecticut, including his (step) Aunt Jessica.

When she’s not cheating on her philandering husband Chester (Robert Mandan), the naive, ditzy Jessica takes care of her shell-shocked father, “The Major” (Arthur Peterson), who is still fighting World War II; and her three children: daughters Eunice (Jennifer Salt) and Corrine (Diana Canova), who both have a tendency to get involved with the wrong guy (a married congressman, an escaped convict, a priest, and so on); and young Billy (Jimmy Baio), who is seduced by his teacher and later joins a cult.

Then there’s Benson DuBois (Robert Guillaume), the family’s wisecracking black butler. After two seasons, Benson got his own series when he went to work for Jessica’s widowed cousin, Governor James Gatling (James Noble). Like his predecessor, the Tate’s new butler, Saunders (Roscoe Lee Browne), never hesitated to comment on all the lunacy going on around him.

Soap
debuted in September of 1977, a few months before the premiere of
Dallas,
the first of the nighttime serials that dominated the prime time schedule throughout most of the 1980’s. Plotlines involving adultery, murder, homosexuality, and fallen priests would soon become commonplace on prime time soaps like
Dynasty,
and
Falcon Crest.
Yet, in 1977, several religious groups did not deem these subjects appropriate for prime time and launched a letter writing campaign pressuring ABC to pull the sitcom from its 1977 fall schedule before it even aired. They also pressured advertisers, some of which pulled their commercials.

The controversy was sparked by a June 1977
Newsweek
article describing the negative reaction the pilot received from network affiliates when it was screened at the annual affiliate’s meeting.
¹⁴²
The description of the series’s characters and plots that subsequently appeared in the national press caught the attention of the leaders of such influential religious groups as the National Council of Churches, the United States Catholic Conference, the United Church of Christ, and the United Methodist Church. ABC reportedly received 20,000 letters, mostly negative, prior to the show’s debut. In all, a total of twelve affiliates chose not to air the first two episodes.
¹⁴³

Religious groups were not the only ones to voice their objections. After previewing the first two episodes, Newt Deiter, head of the Gay Media Task Force, wrote a letter to Tom Kersey, the head of the west coast division of ABC’s Broadcast Standards and Practices. While Deiter understood the tone of the show’s humor, he felt Jodie was too much of a wimp because he was subjected to homophobic remarks and never stood up for himself. Deiter suggested making the character stronger by turning Jodie into a militant gay activist.
¹⁴⁴

Deiter specifically objected to a storyline introduced in the first few episodes in which Jodie decides to have a sex change so he and his lover Dennis Phillips, a closeted, bisexual professional football player (Olympic Gold medal pole vaulter Bob Seagren), can be together. The idea of a gay man having a sex change so he can be together with another gay man not only conflates homosexuality and transsexualism, but also plays into the myth that, deep down, all gay men really want to be women. In one of Jodie’s early scenes, Mary catches her son trying on one of her dresses. (“Oh, you wear that belted!” she exclaims.) While she’s supportive of his decision, brother Danny is in denial that Jodie is gay and Burt is clearly uncomfortable and disgusted.

The staff of the National Gay Task Force had a stronger reaction to what they regarded as a stereotypical representation of a gay man. Although they never officially launched an organized campaign against the series (as they had done with
Warcus Welby, M.D.),
they did take out an ad in the September 7, 1977 issue of
Variety
stating they were

The ad goes on to demand that Jodie’s scenes be reshot, as well as call for some reassurance that the character was not going to meet a girl and go straight, as President of ABC Entertainment Fred Silverman implied in his address at the affiliates meeting.

The Task Force’s instincts were not entirely wrong. Dennis, concerned about his pro football career, marries a woman. A despondent Jodie decides not to have a sex change, but instead attempts suicide by taking an overdose of sleeping pills. He recovers and although Dennis reenters his life briefly (his marriage didn’t work out), there’s no romance in Jodie’s life for the remainder of the series’s run.

Instead, Jodie falls victim to a mantrap named Carol David (Rebecca Balding), who seduces him and gets pregnant. When Dennis returns, Jodie finds himself in the middle of a love triangle. He does the right thing and offers to marry Carol, but she leaves him at the altar. While a despondent Jodie is sitting on top of the Triborough Bridge contemplating suicide, he meets a lesbian named Alice (Randee Heller), who is also thinking about jumping. In one of the rare instances on TV in which a gay man and a lesbian develop a deep friendship, Jodie and Alice become confidantes and roommates. They come close to having a physical relationship, but their friendship is cut short when Carol’s mother, Lorelene (Peggy Pope), arrives from Texas with Jodie’s daughter, Wendy.

“So you’re not a
ho-mo
anymore?” asks Lorelene. When Jodie explains Alice is a lesbian, Lorelene decides she doesn’t want her granddaughter living with two homos and forces Jodie to choose between his daughter and his best friend. Little Wendy wins.

When Carol decides she wants Wendy back, Jodie spends the remainder of the series trying to hold on to her. After a judge grants him custody, Carol kidnaps Wendy, so Jodie hires a female detective named Maggie Chandler (Barbara Rhoades). Once again, Jodie begins to question his sexuality when he finds himself attracted to Maggie. He goes to a psychiatrist and through hypnosis, discovers his true identity — a 90-year-old Jewish man from New York. (In other words, Crystal was at last given the chance to play a character he had perfected in his stand-up routine.)

In all, there are basically two ways to look at Crystal’s character. On the one hand,
Soap
’
s
treatment of homosexuality was similar to the way
Dynasty
approached the issue in terms of Steven Carrington: instead of having a gay character find love and happiness with another man, he’s in a perpetual state of sexual confusion. Focusing on his relationships with women prevents the viewer from having to deal with “the gay thing” (thus keeping the network and advertisers happy), yet his homosexuality is still an issue (i.e. Jodie trying to gain custody of Wendy).

But the difference between the two series is that while
Soap
was a satire,
Dynasty
was supposedly (at least in the beginning) the real thing. Although Jodie may have never become a card-carrying member of the National Gay Task Force, at the very least he was a thoughtful, caring and decent guy — a gay man we actually wanted playing on our team. Too bad he never had the chance to make up his mind and pick a side.

Nothing makes going to work every morning easier than knowing there’s a gay co-worker waiting to greet you with a “good morning” and a wisecrack. In the real world, gay men work in a wide range of professions, but on television, their choices are more limited. To begin, there are the designing men:
The Corner Bar’s
set designer Peter Panama (Vincent Schiavelli), the first regular gay character on a sitcom;
Diana
’
s
(Diana Rigg) window dresser for Butley’s Department Store, Marshall Tyler (Robert Moore); fashion designers, such as
Daddy’s Girls’s
Dennis Dumont (Harvey Fierstein), and
Style and Substance’s
interior designer, Mr. John (Joseph Maher). Next come the hairdressers:
Cutters
’
s
Troy (Julius Carry), the first regular African-American gay character, and
Hope and Gloria’s
Isaac (Eric Allan Kramer). TV’s gay men also hold customer service-related jobs, including
Check It Out’s
supermarket checker Leslie Rappaport (Aaron Schwartz); the very campy, but not necessarily gay (uh-huh), Mr. Humphreys John Inman) on the Britcom
Are You Being Served?; Archie Bunker Place’s
Fred the Waiter (Dino Scofield); the wisecracking generic gay waiter (Tim Macaulan) on
Cybil;
and
Lush Life’s
bartender Nelson Marquez (John Ortiz), who calls himself Margarita because “everyone needs a nickname to hang their purse on.” To tell us the best place to dine in Seattle is
Frasier’s
resident food critic, Gil Chesterton (Edward Hibbert).

Gay characters continue to occupy these professions on television because homosexuals are naturally adept at cutting hair, designing a ball gown, or waiting on a party of six.

Beginning in the 1980s, gay male characters were being assigned more “hetero professions.” On
Sara,
Geena Davis works in a storefront law office which actually includes a gay lawyer (imagine — in San Francisco of all places!) named Dennis Kemper (Bronson Pinchot). Dennis is a lawyer with a conscience, which makes him a target of the firm’s other male lawyer, the very politically incorrect Marty (Bill Mahar).
Hail to the Chief,
a short-lived Susan Harris sitcom, stars Patty Duke Astin as the first female president of the United States who was protected by a gay secret service agent named Randy (Joel Brooks).

The most intelligent and respectable gay professional on television is
Spin City’s
Carter Heywood (Michael Boatman), director of minority affairs for New York City Mayor Randall Winston (Barry Bostwick). In the pilot episode, Deputy Mayor Michael Flaherty (Michael J. Fox) hired Carter, working at the time as a gay activist, after the Mayor made a disparaging remark about gay people. (When asked on camera if he’s marching in the gay pride parade, the Mayor responds, “What are you, drunk?”)

Carter is a rarity on television because he’s gay, African-American, and political. He’s never afraid of speaking his mind and in the first season alone challenges the mayor on such issues as needle exchange programs (“Pride and Prejudice”), gay marriage (“Grand Illusion”), and police discrimination (“In the Heat of the Day”). The latter episode involved Carter being picked up by the police as a suspected mugger while jogging in the park. Mike bails Carter out of jail and tries to calm him down, but Carter is too angry and defies Mike’s orders by going on
Good Morning America
and discussing the incident. Instead of firing Carter, Mike rethinks his position and apologizes for being insensitive.

Carter became one half of an odd couple when paired with the insensitive, homophobic Stuart (Alan Ruck). In “Starting Over,” the two get drunk and up sleeping in the same bed. Stuart freaks out and feels ashamed, but Carter assures him nothing happened. They’re constantly getting on each other’s nerves and even in those rare moments when one opens up and offers the other his support, there is usually a zinger attached. Stuart is sympathetic when Carter over the jogging incident: “When I look at you, I see a friend. I see a co-worker. But most importantly, I see a big fruit.” At one point (“Carter & Stuart & Bennett & Deirdre”) they purposely annoy each other by becoming friends with each other’s ex-lovers, Deidre (Beth Littleford) and Bennett (Clayton Prince). Carter also tries to take advantage of his friend by joining his gay gym so he can meet women (“These Shoes Were Made for Cheatin’”).

Their relationship takes an interesting turn when they decide to go into business together and open a gay bar. The bar is immediately closed because they’re lacking a permit. Both are flat broke, so when Stuart gets evicted and Carter’s apartment is robbed, Carter has no other choice but to to take Stuart in as his roommate (“Single White Male”). Although there’s nothing remotely sexual going on, they start to feel like an old married couple. When they meet an actual older male couple in their building (“Monkey Business”), Alfred (Richard Hamilton) and Lloyd (Mike Hodge), they wonder if they’ll still be together in thirty years.