Essay for Laura's Pride Guide, 2016 (their 25th anniversary):

Television Then and Now

Who remembers what they were doing 25 years ago? For some of you reading this, you were toddling around in diapers. But for many, like me, we vividly recall those halcyon days, when we were spreading our wings in a blustery world, testing them to see if they could hold our weight.

Television was a wasteland in 1991, if you were looking for gay role models. Soap, with Billy Crystal’s Jodie, had ended a decade earlier. Ellen was 3 years down the road, and Will and Grace was still 7 years away.

What we had was Roseanne. In 1991, Sandra Bernhard joined the cast as one of the first openly lesbian characters to have a recurring role on a network television sitcom. The show’s popularity did not suffer from the introduction of Nancy Bartlett, and the acceptance of her character emboldened Roseanne. The show remained among the top 5 shows in the nation, according to the Nielsen ratings, through the middle of the decade, giving Roseanne the ability to include more gay themes and events in her show. The famous kiss with Mariel Hemingway didn’t happen until 1994, but it was followed closely by Martin Mull’s wedding to Fred Willis the following year.  The network had balked at the kiss, but Roseanne threatened to move to another network when NBC said they wouldn’t air the episode.  

The presence of Sandra Bernhard’s Nancy and Martin Mull’s Leon were a refreshing change from gay, lesbian, and transgender characters, who more generally appeared on television as prostitutes, murder victims, or murderers, or, as the 1980s wound down, as noble/tragic victims of AIDS. (It would be another couple of decades before the existence of bisexual people was acknowledged in any way on TV shows.)

The Golden Girls, a perennial ratings winner, ended in 1992. It occasionally featured a gay character, including Blanche’s brother, Clayton, portrayed by Monte Markham, who eventually got married in an episode airing in 1991. The show was generally gay friendly, probably because openly gay Marc Cherry, who went on to create Desperate Housewives, was a producer and writer of the show.

Similarly, Designing Women, another popular sitcom which hit its ratings peak in 1991, featured a gay character, Anthony Bouvier, portrayed by Menasch Taylor. Antony’s character occasionally wore women’s clothing, through various tortured plot twists, but otherwise his orientation was only expressed through the character’s stereotypical portrayal, rather than having a romantic or sexual life of his own. Tangentially, the show won a GLAAD Media Award in 1991 for the episode “Suzanne Goes Looking for a Friend,” in which Suzanne discovers that her former pageant friend, Eugenia, portrayed by Karen Kopins, is a lesbian.

Drama series did not do as well as Roseanne, in terms of presenting fully formed gay characters. The popular baby boomer drama, thirtysomething, which had featured an HIV positive character, ended in 1991, as did the night time soap opera Dallas. (Dallas didn’t have any gay characters, I just included it so you’d realize it’s been gone for 25 years.)

Melrose Place, created by Darren Starr (who later would develop Sex and the City from Candace Bushnell’s popular NY Observer columns), included a gay character, Matt Fielding, portrayed by Doug Savant, and began in 1992. Critics continually complained about the lack of romantic, and especially sexual, life of Matt, in a show that emphasized both for its straight characters. The show admitted that it wanted to avoid backlash from conservative activist groups who notoriously organized product boycotts whenever a TV show challenged their moral standards.

LA Law had a lesbian lawyer (C.J. Lamb, portrayed by Amanda Donohoe) on staff in the middle of the show’s 8 season run (which happened to straddle 1991), but she disappeared after a lesbian kiss generally acknowledged as a publicity stunt during ratings sweeps week. Sadly, the show initiated somewhat of a trend of featuring a kiss between a straight woman and a lesbian character, done for publicity value only.

Fast forward 25 years. We no longer have to scour the TV schedule for the occasional gay character or gay issue reference. Now we regularly have entire programs devoted to us (HBO’s Looking just finished a successful 2 season run, a 2-hour series finale will be aired in July). Indeed, we have an entire network (Here).

Perhaps even more impressive is that popular programs directed at every conceivable audience now include fully developed LGBTQ characters without fear of backlash. 

Programs on network television (Modern Family on ABC), on cable (American Horror Story on FX), and on alternate services like Netflix (Orange is the New Black) and Amazon (Transparent) feature LGBTQ characters and address LGBTQ concerns unabashedly, comprehensively, and with compassion.

Shows aimed at youth audiences, such as Glee (which just completed 6 seasons on Fox), The Fosters (whose 4th season on ABC Family starts this month), and Faking It (which just finished 3 successful seasons on MTV) increasingly have honest, positive, and complex presentations of LGBTQ lives.

Even historical dramas manage to showcase LGBTQ concerns, such as Downton Abbey showing a gay man in the early 20^th century attempting a damaging “cure” for his homosexuality. The massively popular Game of Thrones includes LGBTQ characters among its cast of thousands, without concern about the sensitivities of its straight viewers.

Perhaps most encouraging, and, most surprising, is the runaway hit, Empire, a drama on Fox about a family-run music business, based loosely on King Lear, and, as producer Lee Daniels admits, borrowing from the 1980s primetime soap, Dynasty. The show features a Who’s Who of today’s African American acting royalty, including Oscar nominated Terrance Howard as the patriarch, Lucious, and the indelible (and Oscar and Emmy nominated) Taraji P. Nelson as the matriarch, Cookie, along with a string of famous guest stars. The African American community has been much slower to accept their LGBTQ brethren, so having one of the three sons on the show be openly gay was a bold, unexpected, and welcome situation. The show begins its 3rd season this fall.

Comparing the scant offering of the bygone era of the 1990s with the cornucopia of characters in today’s entertainment landscape almost boggles the mind. Feminists like to say “we haven’t come a long way and we’re not babies” in response to the famous Virginia Slims cigarette advertising campaign. But looking back at the progress that has occurred in our societal acceptance of LBGTQ people as measured by their portrayal in in popular television culture, I can’t help feeling that we were only half right.