The Prime Time Closet: A History of Gays and Lesbians on TV (7 page)

“Overland is gone,” Bob declares. “He’s dead.”

In a way, transsexuality here serves as a metaphor for how rapidly our society has changed over the years. Dr. Craig doesn’t interfere with Bob’s decision, but as he tells his drinking buddies, Nurse Helen Rosenthal (Christina Pickles) and Dr. Westphall (Ed Flanders), he wishes the world was the kind of place his father grew up in, where men and women assumed traditional male and female roles. His colleagues, however, aren’t so sure that change is necessarily a bad thing.

The dramatic treatment of transsexuality in the 1970s and 1980s was not limited to medical shows. In 1986, CBS aired
Second Serve
, a made-for-TV movie based on the autobiography of Dr. Renée Richards, a male-to-female transsexual. A well-respected pediatric ophthalmologist and tennis pro, Richards made headlines when she was denied the right to compete as a woman in the 1977 U.S. Open Tournament. (A New York State Superior Court judge ruled in Richards’s favor because, despite her high male chromosome count, her weight, height, and physique were comparable to a biological female.)

In yet another truly mesmerizing performance, an almost unrecognizable Vanessa Redgrave is equally effective in her portrayal of both Richard Raskin, who comes to terms with his gender identity; and a post-op Richards, who enters the national spotlight when she resumes her professional tennis career as a woman. Redgrave receives support from Gavin Lambert and Lisa Liss’s sensitive script and the incredible make-up work of Peter Owen, an Academy Award winner for
The Lord of the Rings.
The result is an above average made-for-TV biography that takes an insightful, intelligent look at gender identity disorder from both a medical and a human perspective.

On July 3, 1981,
The New York Times
ran an article on the back page with the headline “Rare Cancer Seen in 41 Homosexuals.” The first major national newspaper story about AIDS, the
Times
article reported an outbreak of rare cancer — Kaposi’s Sarcoma (KS) — among gay men in New York and the San Francisco Bay Area. Linking KS as well as Pneumocystis Carinii Pneumonia (PCP) to the gay male population, researchers gave the new disease a name — GRID (Gay-Related Immune Disorder). In 1982, GRID also began to show up in the heterosexual population, specifically in hemophiliacs, blood transfusion recipients, intravenous drug users, and the female sex partners of AIDS-infected men. No longer confined to the gay community, GRID was given a more neutral name — AIDS (Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome).

But for the American public, there was nothing neutral about the word and the disease, which became synonymous in the 1980s with male homosexuality. While children and blood transfusion recipients were labeled AIDS’s “innocent victims,” gay men and IV drug users were blamed for spreading the disease through their “immoral” behavior. In a demonstration of true “Christian” compassion, Moral Majority Leader Rev. Jerry Falwell declared that AIDS is God’s wrath on homosexuals. The ignorant and hateful comments made by Falwell and others, coupled with the many unanswered questions about the transmission of AIDS, only fueled the public’s growing homophobia and hysteria.

The “gay plague” stigma was also the primary reason the Center for Disease Control and the federal government were slow in their response. To accuse the Reagan administration of negligence is an understatement. President Reagan waited until 1987 to give his first speech about AIDS. In that same year, 36,000 Americans were diagnosed with the disease, 21,000 had already died, and the numbers continued to grow.

In the 1980s, the AIDS crisis offered the television medical drama a context in which to address homosexuality — and homophobia. There was no longer a need to link homosexuality to an arbitrary medical condition like a bleeding ulcer, alcoholism, or heart disease. Finally, homosexuals had a disease of their own. So in addition to continuing to educate the public about homosexuality, medical dramas began to set the public straight about AIDS. In the process, they also openly criticized the American health care system for allowing the gay stigma attached to the disease to affect the quality of care being offered to AIDS patients.

Unfortunately, when AIDS became a front page story, there were few medical dramas on the prime time schedule. In terms of dramatic programming, television in the early 1980s was dominated by prime time soap operas
(Dallas, Dynasty, Knots Landing
) and detective/action shows
(Magnum, PI., Simon and Simon).
Only two medical series enjoyed healthy runs during the 1980s —
St. Elsewhere
(1982-1988, six seasons) and
Trapper John, M.D.
(1979-1986, seven seasons). The subject of AIDS would eventually be addressed by other genres, including sitcoms, police dramas, and made-for-TV movies, beginning with the groundbreaking 1985 film,
An Early Frost.

The first medical drama to tackle AIDS was the 1983 Christmas episode of
St. Elsewhere,
“AIDS and Comfort.” A well-respected, up-and-coming 34-year-old Boston city councilman, Tony Gifford (Michael Brandon), is diagnosed with AIDS. His physician, Dr. Peter White (Terence Knox), is confused because Tony is heterosexual, not an IV drug user, and has never received a blood transfusion. Dr. White and Dr. Westphall are suspicious, so they enlist a friend of Tony’s, hospital administrator Joan Halloran (Nancy Stafford), to find out the truth. Finally, Tony admits he’s been having anonymous sex with men. Upon his release from St. Eligius, the councilman decides to go public with his illness and not resign from office.

Although Tony’s diagnosis is the focus of the episode, the story devotes equal time to the reactions of the St. Eligius staff at having an AIDS patient under their care. The possibility of contracting AIDS through casual contact was still fresh in everyone’s mind, no doubt thanks to a 1983 news release by the American Medical Association that erroneously made the very same suggestion. Dr. White is pressured by his wife to drop Tony as a patient. Nurse Billie (Rae Dawn Chong) doesn’t want to handle his blood. Luther (Eric Laneuville), an orderly, leaves Tony’s food tray outside his door. Someone even spray paints “AIDS!” inside the hospital elevator. Fearing they could contract the disease by giving blood, members of the community and the hospital staff are reluctant to donate during a city-wide shortage.

As he contemplates going public with the disease, Tony shares with Dr. Westphall a passage from
The Decameron,
in which Boccaccio describes a plague that devastated 14th century Florence:

Later, Dr. Westphall, in a stirring speech, directly challenges the labeling of AIDS as a “plague” sent by God as punishment. At the same time, he emphasizes that the role of the medical community is to care for people who are sick, not to pass moral judgment:

Eighteen years later, Dr. Westphall’s speech is still relevant when considering that PWAs (People With AIDS) continue to experience discrimination in areas such as health care, housing, and employment. Yet, we also now see how phrases like “choosing a certain lifestyle” and Tony’s “secret” admission that he contracted AIDS through anonymous gay sex offered, at the time, a limited perspective of who is at risk. Tony’s wife (Caroline Smith) is the only one who even questions whether her husband may have passed the virus on to her (Tony’s doctors never even address the issue). The transmission of the virus through heterosexual sex would, in fact, become the centerpiece of the series’s next AIDS story line.

During the 1985-1986 season, St. Eligius’s resident Lothario, plastic surgeon Dr. Bobby Caldwell (Mark Harmon), learns he has AIDS. In “Family Feud,” Dr. Caldwell is told the sore on his hand is a K.S. lesion. His blood tests positive for HTLV-III antibodies. (HTLU-III-human T-cell lymphotropic virus was the name given to the virus isolated by Dr. Robert Gallo in 1984. It was changed to human immunodeficiency virus, or HIV, in 1986.) Dr. Caldwell considers suicide, but instead moves to Los Angeles to work in an AIDS clinic. (Harmon actually left the series to pursue his film career.) Two years later, when the hospital receives word Dr. Caldwell has died (“Heaven’s Skate”), the St. Eligius staff gathers for a memorial service.

During the same season, an episode of
Trapper John M.D.
(“Friends and Lovers”) featured two intersecting story lines — the first about a gay man with AIDS and the second involving the hospital’s “unofficial” admissions policy concerning AIDS patients. The episode begins with Nurse Libby Kegler’s (Lorna Luft) reunion with her former fiancée, Terry Eliot (Robert Desidero), who broke off their engagement without an explanation. Terry is suddenly interested in getting back together, until a blood test reveals he has AIDS. Libby is, of course, distraught that her ideal man is not only sick, but gay. She’s confused and seeks some answers (“What makes a person gay?,” “I wonder if it means they’ll be gay forever?”) from Dr. Jackson (Brian Mitchell, better known today as Broadway star Brian Stokes Mitchell). Libby’s naivete surrounding homosexuality is unintentionally comical considering actress Lorna Luft is the daughter of gay icon, Judy Garland, and Liza Minnelli’s half-sister.

Libby soon finds herself in the middle of a love triangle when Terry’s ex-lover Brad (Terry Kiser) reenters the picture. She is ready for a fight, but when Terry admits he’s still in love with Brad, she follows Trapper John’s (Pernell Roberts) advice: “The reality is Terry is probably going to die. We are talking long term commitment here. If you are really willing to take that on, I want you to know. It is an emotional no-win. It takes a very special kind of love.” So even though she still loves the guy, Libby helps Brad reunite with Terry.

In the episode’s second story line, Trapper John goes up against the hospital administrator Catherine Hackett (Janis Paige) when he discovers that instead of admitting AIDS patients, San Francisco Memorial is transferring them to the AIDS unit at nearby Bay General Hospital. When Trapper shows her how many AIDS outpatients Memorial treats on a daily basis, Catherine successfully convinces the hospital board to open its own AIDS clinic.

A doctor’s relationship with an AIDS patient is the subject of a multi-episode story arc during
St. Elsewhere’s
sixth and final season (1987-1988). Brett Johnston (Kyle Secor) is a gay PWA under the care of Dr. Seth Griffin (Bruce Greenwood), an ambitious physician short on compassion. Griffin allows his homophobia to affect his doctor-patient relationship with Brett, who finally confronts him. “To you,” Brett tells Seth, “I’m only a queer dying of AIDS.”

In “Night of the Living Bed,” Dr. Griffin is forced to confront his homophobia when he accidentally pricks himself while drawing blood from Brett. The terrified doctor takes his anger out on the hospital’s new chief administrator, Dr. John Gideon (Ronny Cox), by questioning why the hospital even bothers to treat AIDS patients. “There’s no cure for AIDS! They’re gonna die!” Griffin insists. “All we do is put off death. And expose other people in the process.” Dr. Gideon and Ecumena, the conglomerate that owns St. Eligius, actually agree with Griffin. They’ve already turned down Dr. Westphall’s proposal to open an AIDS hospice because it would not be in the best financial interest of the hospital (“Moon for the Misbegotten”).

Meanwhile, Brett attempts to apologize to Dr. Griffin, but the doctor can’t help but blame him for what happened. “If it weren’t for you, I wouldn’t be lying here worrying about what’s left of my life...” Griffin says. “So get the message. I don’t really care about you.” Before Brett leaves, he explains how fear, not AIDS, poses the real threat: