OUT ON TELEVISION
Watch The Revolution
On a distant planet some 110 light years across the galaxy, Earth’s first radio broadcasts are just beginning to arrive. If intercepted by advanced civilizations, these transmissions will serve as a time machine, introducing our celestial brethren to life on planet Earth. At first, the recipients will be overwhelmed by audio messages, then 35 years later, the drip, drip, drip of television broadcasts will begin. Ten years after that the trickling stream will become a torrent.
As they listen and watch, they will witness everything from Amos & Andy to Adolph Hitler, the Dionne quintuplets and FDR’s fireside chats, but they will have to watch for 44 years until they hear the word homosexual. It will first be uttered in something called the Army McCarthy Hearings that took place in a city called Washington DC in the year 1954.
Assuming these superior lifeforms don’t lose interest in our primitive species, eventually they will not only see homosexuals (some of the first will appear in 1967 in an episode of CBS Reports entitled The Homosexuals), they will come to recognize them. Long before anyone articulated the name for this subset of human beings, they were there, popping up on television, but they were not identified as being what they were. Instead, they were known as Liberace, and Dobie Gillis’ young friend, Zelda, or Paul Lynde, Charles Nelson Riley and Mr. Drysdale’s secretary, Jane Hathaway.
Sometimes, the males of the species would dress up like the females and go by the name Milton Berle or Flip Wilson, or as heterosexual-appearing characters that met tragic, untimely deaths. Once they were out in the open, they became characters that were to be mocked. It’s likely that our extraterrestrial friends would soon figure out that what was occurring in these broadcasts was a microcosm of what was happening on Earth. They may have chuckled, remembering that even in their advanced civilization, there was a time when people were not allowed to be who they were.
Then, in January 1973 a real-life homosexual showed up, on PBS of all places. Even though his name, Lance Loud, sounded made up, he was a very real person who, along with his family, made television history in the first reality TV show, An American Family. That’s when everything began to change.
110 light years from now, when Apple+’s astounding five-part documentary series, Visible: Out on Television finally reaches them, the inhabitants of that far off planet will have a comprehensive understanding of the emergence, evolution and ultimately, the acceptance of LGBTQ people on planet Earth. Luckily, Earthlings will not have to wait that long. Narrated by Janet Mock, Margaret Cho, Asia Kate Dillion, Neil Patrick Harris and Lena Waithe, the series, which debuts on February 14th, explores the confluence of the gay movement, politics, psychology and the most powerful medium in the history of mankind.
Directed by Ryan White (The Keepers, The Case Against 8) and produced by Wanda Sykes, Jessica Hargrave and Wilson Cruz, the series presents the most extensive deep dive ever mounted to assess how the LGBTQ community has been represented on television. While the series provides viewers with an encyclopedic view of homosexuality on television, the medium, itself, hasn’t always. In the 60s and 70s there were only three networks and most households had only one TV. Viewing was a family activity, and the sponsors didn’t like taboo subjects and storylines, not even on the news. Given today’s 24-hour news cycle, it’s hard to imagine that the historic Stonewall Riots, which birthed the gay resistance movement, were not covered on TV. Since America took its cues from television, if queerness was not talked about on TV, why would anyone expect it to be discussed at the dinner table?
MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, one of 92 interviewees in the series, puts it this way, “Something about being on television makes people see you as part of the country, as part of our culture, as part of who we are as a nation.” Wilson Cruz, one of the series’ Executive Producers, adds, “This documentary is a love letter to the medium’s power.”
Before the LGBTQ community could harness television’s power to gain acceptance, there had to be gay storylines, but in the resistant culture of network television, there wasn’t much of an appetite for them. Producers like Norman Lear changed that.
Unafraid to challenge the status quo and CBS’s network brass, Mr. Lear brought the groundbreaking series All in the Family to television. While President Nixon urged the networks not to glorify homosexuals, whom he called, “The enemies of society,” Lear believed that LGBTQ characters had a place in Archie Bunker’s world. So, in 1971 the character Steve, became the first gay character featured in a sitcom. Six years later, Mr. Lear broke ground again when he featured the character Edie Stokes, a transgender woman, on The Jeffersons. He didn’t stop there. In 1975 he introduced Beverly LaSalle, television’s first gender non-conforming character, played by real-life female impersonator Lori Shannon. The character appeared in multiple episodes over the next two years before becoming the victim of TV’s first LGBTQ hate crime.
Beyond looking at the genesis of gay awareness, the series examines the medium as a tool for social enlightenment as well as protest. Forty-three years before Pete Buttigieg became the first openly gay man to run for president, Harvey Milk was the first out gay elected official in California and used the medium to promote his agenda and his candidacy. Activists also highjacked network news programs, including the top-rated CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite, using guerilla tactics to get their message to the masses.
In 1972, the first gay-themed television movie, That Certain Summer, starring Hal Holbrook and Martin Sheen was broadcast on ABC. As Tales of the City author Armistead Maupin notes, “The fact that we were allowed on the screen at all was a breakthrough.” For all the forward movement that sensitive portrayals of gay lifestyles made, sitcoms typically represented gay life and mannerisms in stereotypical terms, often making homosexuals the butt of the joke. Think Three’s Company, and early episodes of Soap. But, as Wanda Sykes notes, “At least we were there.”
Just when the LGBTQ narrative was gaining broader acceptance, a number of antagonists came along to curtail its progress. As Anita Bryant and California’s state senator John Briggs sought to deny gay educators the right to teach, Norman Lear enlightened audiences yet again, this time to the injustices that were taking place. The introduction of a sympathetic lesbian school teacher on All in the Family combined with the televised debates about the Brigg’s Initiative and satirical humor on late night television, ultimately swayed public opinion and the anti-gay initiatives were defeated.
There was one antagonist that was not so easily beaten. This time it did not appear as a sinister politician or evangelical bully, but as a virus. When television news first reported on AIDS it was dismissed as a gay disease and many saw it as deserved retribution for an amoral lifestyle. In 1985, An Early Frost, the first television movie about the disease, dealt not only with the epidemic, which is the subject of the third installment of Visible: Out on Television, but the real-life dilemma that faced many of its victims – telling their families that they had the disease and that they were gay.
The series not only looks at programs about the disease, like Angels in America, it details resistance movements including Act Up, that were formed to raise awareness of the condition and fight government complacency, and GLAAD, whose mission is to guard the narrative as to how LGBTQ characters are portrayed in the media.
While emphasizing the positive impacts television has made on the LGBTQ movement such as the inclusion of HIV+ cast members on reality series like The Real World, it also points out how daytime talk shows often portrayed gays and lesbians as outcasts and freaks.
The 1990s shaped up to be a decade of barrier breaking. Up until then, gay people could appear as themselves on reality television, but it wasn’t until ’94 when Wilson Cruz appeared in My So Called Life, that an out actor played an out gay character on network television. Other milestones included the first lesbian kiss, the first male kiss, and same sex marriage, but most importantly, the first LGBTQ lead character when, after much soul searching, Ellen DeGeneres, risked everything, and speaking her own truth, decided to come out in life and as a character on her hit sitcom.
Although 42 million people tuned in to her coming out episode, the ratings began to slide and the series couldn’t survive the public backlash. Looking back, DeGeneres comments, “Having a hit show and being a moneymaker to the studio, I was important to them, and then suddenly, I was poison to them.”
Openly lesbian comedienne and Visibile: Out on Television producer, Wanda Sykes remembers thinking, “They did this to Ellen? They love Ellen. What are they going to do to me? There were a lot of closet doors closing after Ellen.”
In the wake of Ellen’s cancellation, NBC developed Will and Grace. The show, about the relationship between a straight interior designer and a gay lawyer, became one of the top-rated programs on television. Sean Hayes, who played Jack MacFarland, said, “I had no intention of educating anyone about being gay. I didn’t realize until it was over, that it really had an effect on people.”
Even Vice President Joe Biden was a fan of the series and told an interviewer, “Will & Grace probably did more to educate the American public than almost anything anybody’s ever done so far.”
When our extraterrestrial friends get to the early 2000s, they may notice that the stakes were raised. While 14 states still had sodomy laws, gay-themed programs like Queer Eye for the Straight Guy were going mainstream and Queer as Folk was pushing the limits of what could be shown on TV. Then, in 2005, the first gay network, Logo, launched and introduced Noah’s Ark, the first show that presented the African American LGBTQ experience.
If humor truly is universal, those interplanetary viewers will undoubtedly be amused by Wanda Sykes, Ellen DeGeneres and Margaret Cho’s musing on which female TV characters were lesbians before it was okay to be one. Once they were out, you couldn’t keep a good lesbian down. Soon after Ellen’s cancellation, a new wave of lesbian-themed shows debuted. In 2004 Showtime introduced The L Word. “It was the first time we got to see hot women having sex,” Sykes remembers.
Bisexuality was harder for audiences to accept. As the character Carrie Bradshaw said on Sex and the City, “I’m not even sure bisexuality exists, I think it’s just a stop on the way to Gaytown.” Due to GLAAD’s efforts to combat the negative portrayals of bisexuals as killers and deviants, along with the emerging presence of real-life bisexuals like Sandra Bernhard on Roseanne and Sara Ramirez on Grey’s Anatomy, the stigma, while not eradicated, was lessened.
Then, in 2003, Ellen DeGeneres rose from the ashes of her sitcom experience to become one of television’s top-rated talk show hosts. The world had changed, and the gay factor that had caused her previous failure was now one of the things that made audiences love her.
There were other signs that things had changed in the 47 years since The New York Times reported on the “Gay Raiders” that invaded Walter Cronkite’s news broadcast. Three of the top newscasters – Anderson Cooper, Rachel Maddow and Don Lemmon, were openly gay and after the conspicuous absence of programs featuring the black gay experience, shows like Empire, Black-ish and The Wire had become mainstream hits.
One of the common experiences that most gays share is having been bullied. While bullying has existed since the dawn of time, the Internet exacerbated its effects, and many television shows, including Glee, developed storylines about it. The show helped open the door for numerous untold stories about the gay youth experience.
As unfamiliar as LGB experiences may have been to heterosexual audiences, LGBT stories were even more unknown. That is until trans characters started showing up in shows like Orange is the New Black, Dirty Sexy Money, Billions, Transparent and Pose whose cast included 5 trans women of color. But no one helped lift the curtain on the trans world more than Ru Paul whose Drag Race debuted in 2009. Honorable mention goes to Caitlyn Jenner who, tired of living a lie, came out as a trans woman in an interview with Diane Sawyer before starring in the reality series, I am Cait.
It is likely that by the time Visible: Out on Television reaches that distant planet 110 light years away, its tolerant inhabitants, having achieved a much higher awareness than our own, will smile, thinking how primitive we Earthlings were. But for those of us who are still struggling to understand and accept the differences in people and lifestyles here on planet Earth, we can thank Apple+ for taking us into the future by reminding us of our past.
