| Girlfriends Magazine Dykes Do TV There are as many lesbians on TV as there are out professional sapphists in Hollywood. by Carson Hunter There is a joke among Star Trek fans: "Don't bother with the fifth crew member: he always dies." Because the long-running series couldn't risk alienating viewers by killing off a regular cast member, the show used the device of the "very special guest star": a stranger who could be offed without rending the show's weekly fabric or upsetting the viewing public. For years, lesbians and gays on television were very special guest stars allowed brief moments in the spotlight, usually as part of a peripheral plotline. A show's central character was never allowed to be gay. What might be the first lesbian character on prime time TV appeared on All in the Familyin 1977. When Edith (Jean Stapleton) attends her cousin Liz's funeral, the Bunkers are shocked to learn that Liz had been living with another woman. The episode was handled with sensitivity light years ahead of its time. Edith gently explains to Archie (Carol O'Connor) the nature of her cousin's relationship: "She loved her the way I love you." However, the surviving partner was never again shown or referred to on the series. That same year, Billy Crystal made TV history playing Jodie Dallas on Soap,the first regular character to be out and gay. His lesbian equivalent didn't appear for another ten years. "Many shows are created by gay men, who are writing what they know," says Scott Seomin, executive media director for GLAAD, theorizing about why gays outnumber lesbians on TV. "Although there's a lavender ceiling for gays and lesbians, lesbians have to deal with both the lavender and the glass ceiling." While the small screen began to include a range of mincing and effeminate men--hairdresser, florist, artist--lesbians were strangely absent. Or maybe not so strangely, since there was no easy dyke stereotype. Besides, as everyone knows, lesbians "aren't funny"--a perception reinforced by the presence of lesbian characters on more dramas than sitcoms. The AIDS crisis could be credited with improving gay characters by forcing Hollywood to acknowledge their presence in the world. Although still not allowed to star, they began to show up as recurring characters: the main character's best friend or neighbor. No longer just sissy hairdressers, gay men were being portrayed "purposely against type." Even when being played against, stereotypes could still be offensive, but gay characters became almost a staple. Lesbians, however, remained an unknown to both the viewing public and the people in charge of the shows. In 1988, HeartBeatdared to try to include a lesbian as a regular cast member. On ABC's ensemble medical drama set in a women's medical clinic, Gail Strickland played a nurse practitioner who just happened to be a dyke. But while the rest of the cast was jumping in and out of bed with boyfriends, the token lesbian was reined in. In a story entitled "Is Prime Time Ready for Its First Lesbian?" Peoplemagazine reported, "On camera, physical intimacy between (Strickland) and her romantic partner, played by Gina Hecht, will be limited to eye contact and the occasional hug." Prime time proved unready for its first women-centered drama: the show lasted a mere twenty episodes. Lesbians appearing as very special guest stars in the early 1990s followed a pattern. Ad campaigns encouraged viewers to "Watch the lesbian!" Like a fifth crew member on Star Trek, a character viewers had never seen before would appear on one episode, come out, and disappear. On comedies like The Golden Girlsor Designing Women, the other women would demand to know why the lesbian character wasn't attracted to them. Some shows got braver and had their straight characters toy with the idea of going gay. On a 1991 episode of L.A. Law, after one lawyer comes out as bisexual, a straight lawyer clumsily tries to seduce her. Once the het is turned down, she can blame her behavior on her alcohol intake. Although this episode featured TV's first lesbian kiss, in tried-and-true Hollywood fashion, the bisexual character dated men before disappearing from the series altogether. In 1994, ABC launched These Friends of Mineas a vehicle for standup comedian Ellen DeGeneres and her observational humor. An instant hit, the show was consistently ranked as one of the top ten shows on the air, but was plagued with problems. Insiders said that Melissa Etheridge, slated to write and play the show's theme song, was dismissed because executives feared this might make the show "too dykey." As the new show Friends got ready to air, Ellen's show was renamed Ellen,to avoid confusion. Although Ellen continued to score high in the ratings, critics began to say it lacked focus. Of course, every show with a female lead was expected to run on funny dating situations. Without these accepted storylines, Hollywood didn't know how to sell the show. Finally a San Francisco newspaper columnist stated the obvious: Ellen Morgan wasn't dating because she was a lesbian! The rumor mill went into overdrive as the line separating Ellen DeGeneres from Ellen Morgan began to blur in the eyes of the viewing public. The creators of Ellen and DeGeneres herself started discussing the next logical step: having the Ellen character come out on the air. Security was so tight that the scripts, code-named "The Puppy Episode" to divert suspicion, were locked in a safe every night. On April 30, 1997, Ellen Morgan came out on national television in front of an audience of more than thirty-five million people in the highest-rated show of the week. Success was all too brief. When Ellen found a girlfriend (Lisa Darr), the show was slapped with TV-14 rating, meaning the show was unsuitable for viewers under fourteen. The network wanted a de-sexualized lesbian: any episode showing the two women kissing or dating was labeled TV-14. Further proof of a double standard on TV: the same week Ellen kissed her girlfriend, a man-on-man kiss on Spin Cityreceived no TV-14 warning. As DeGeneres and company fought for every scrap of lesbian content, the critics decided the show was simply unfunny. Even Chastity Bono, then GLAAD media liasion, said the show was "too gay" and therefore alienating viewers. The series' cancellation somehow seemed to prove the theory that lesbians simply aren't funny. Although some pundits claimed audiences weren't ready for a gay TV star, the year Ellenwas cancelled, Will and Gracewon a GLAAD award for best comedy series. In the last few years, we've seen several examples of the "lesbian moment," which seems solely engineered to titillate viewers and increase ratings. Previously established straight characters experiment with a lesbian relationship for one or two episodes before safely reverting to heterosex. These episodes usually air during sweeps weeks, with networks promoting them ad nauseum. When Ally McBeal featured a gal-on-gal kiss between actresses Calista Flockhart and Lucy Liu, the titillation factor was transparent. That neither character had ever showed the slightest sapphic curiosity didn't matter. The show got free publicity as the press picked up the storyline and promoted it. Last season saw a stunning reversal of all heretofore accepted plot devices. Not only were lesbians on TV, but they were regular characters. They weren't experimenting and they weren't being exploited. Like real live dykes, they were simply part of the everyday world these television characters inhabited. Viewers seemed to have a wealth of TV dykes to choose from. Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Based on the feature film of the same name, Buffyis about a teenage slayer: one of a select group of individuals whose destiny it is to kill vampires. Buffy and her friends include witches, warlocks, and even a werewolf, who battle assorted evil forces while trying to endure the trials and tribulations of being a teenager. When Buffy's friend Willow becomes involved with a woman she meets as a freshman in college, Buffy is neither shocked nor offended. Willow asks, "So are you freaked?" Buffy says, "No. No, absolutely no to that question. I'm glad you told me." Buffy tells Willow to follow her heart. Presumably, a world that includes ogres, succubi, and zombies can take dykes in its stride. Finally, younger lesbian viewers had a character with whom they could identify, whose positive coming-out experience sent an encouraging message. However, due to the characters' youth, the network has been quite firm about what will and won't be shown. "They want to draw the line at any real physical intimacy, so we have to be crafty in the way that we show their relationship," co-executive producer Marti Noxon told TV Guide. "While their relationship is certainly sexual, we really don't want to play it for titillation." Dark Angel Created by James (Titanic)Cameron and Charles Eglee, Dark Angelis set in Seattle in 2020. Terrorists have set-off an electromagnetic pulse in the atmosphere that has knocked out all satellites, killed the economy, and plunged the world into a Depression, 1930s-style. In this futuristic society, a genetically altered superwoman with animal DNA named Max (Jessica Alba) manages to evade the bad guys trying to hunt her down. Max's best friend just happens to be a lesbian, the uniquely-named Original Cindy (Valarie Rae Miller), who's really unique for the matter-of-fact way her character is presented. This lesbian makes no apologies for her sexuality and is actually allowed to be sexual, if not physical. Although we haven't seen her with another woman, we've heard her talk about them. When she's not eyeing straight women and muttering, "What a waste!" she's talking about her ex-girlfriends and swooning over women in uniform. Also refreshing: Max and Cindy are friends--and nothing more than friends. No veiled looks, unrequited pining, or discomfort on the part of Max, who shows no "typical TV uneasiness" about being best friends with a dyke on the prowl. Too many shows have had straight characters keep lesbian friends at arm's length with sentiments like, "I just don't want you to get the wrong idea," or "I like you, but I don't want you think I like you that way." Dark Angelviewers got a nice little twist on that tired storyline when Max "came out" to Cindy--as a mutant: "I was afraid if you knew the truth about me, you wouldn't be my friend anymore." Sex and The City In HBO's Sex and the City,the perpetually overheated Samantha (Kim Cattrall) gets involved with an artist (Sonia Braga). Although Samantha has previously called herself a tri-sexual--"Honey, I'll try anything once"--her character has always been shown to be the most shamelessly man-hungry of the group--until she meets Braga. Unlike the hype surrounding the Friendsepisode in which Jennifer Aniston and special guest star Wynona Ryder shared a kiss, Sex and the City'sSapphic storyline received little promotion. Even the characters remained blas�. ("So you're a lesbian now?" asks one. "Oh please," says Samantha. "The word lesbianis nothing more than a label. Like Gucci or Calvin Klein.") The developing relationship, presented with little fanfare, shows Cattrall and Braga in bed, taking a bath, and generally behaving like two people who are having sex with each other. Unfortunately, it doesn't last. True to her character, Samantha's relationship fizzles out, not because she has to prove how straight she is but because she prefers casual sex to serious intimacy. However, now that the door's been opened, the audience knows that with Samantha, anything is possible. ER The best example of this new lesbian trend happened on the hit series ER,when Dr. Kerry Weaver (Laura Innes) found herself drawn to her colleague, therapist Kim Legaspi (Elizabeth Mitchell). Unlike Friends,the Warner Brothers' other hit show, ERdidn't exploit its same-sex storyline, which was never mentioned in promotions or episode guides. This was not a "very special" episode of ER.Instead, the lesbian relationship was allowed to unfold slowly, naturally, and perfectly in keeping with Dr. Weaver's character. Too slowly for some lesbian fans, who accused the show of pulling its punches by not pumping up the lesbian storyline. But as co-executive producer Dee Johnson said, "If we were going to do it, we wanted to have it unfold in a way that was really real, and not in a sensationalistic way. We really wanted it to be a real story. This wasn't a flukey thing: she wasn't drunk and experimenting. This was a real journey for her and we wanted to be true to that in the way we portrayed it." ER also stayed true to its characters by refusing to give more publicity to one plot than another. "ERis a show that is particularly interested in keeping personal storylines from viewers," said an NBC spokesperson. "As such, they would prefer that we don't tease them in storylines or on-air promos. The producers want to keep personal moments a surprise for the audience." While one doctor struggled with cancer, another with addiction, and Weaver with her sexual identity, the medical cases on the show drew the bulk of the commercial attention. Although Elizabeth Mitchell has left ERto star in another series, "Kerry's on a journey and it's not a phase," said Johnson. "We really entered into this to treat it seriously and not treat it lightly, not to do it one season and then drop it." The Gay Riviera This year's week-long Gay Riviera,a reality show like MTV's "Real World," follows the lives of eight principals and their friends--including an aspiring lesbian pop star, a witty Cuban lesbian, and a bleached-blond Miami bartender and her makeup artist best friend. These "real people" include the simpering twentysomethings who promote the show by chirping into the camera, "Can you believe we're lesbians?" "I know, isn't it great!"While going out of its way to publicly pat itself on the back for its month-long queer-friendly programming, Bravo doesn't mention its policy of editing "objectionable content" from the films they broadcast. (A call to the network for explanation of this policy went unanswered.) Viewers who wish to see lesbian and gay films in their entirety, beware. Queer As Folk The Showtime series Queer as Folk,based on the same-name British series, focuses on the lives and loves of a group of gay men--and a dyke couple whose child results from a lead character's "donation." Gay male critics say the show reinforces stereotypes by focusing on the club scene, drugs, and one-night stands. Lesbian critics say the show trivializes the lesbian relationship, since the birth mother uses sperm from a guy her partner despises. More troublesome is that the women end up mothering their biological child--and any other character who needs it. Whether bailing someone out of jail, providing a home away from home, or waking up for a midnight feeding, the women are equal opportunity caretakers, rather than characters with complex lives. The Ellen Show Only one new show for the 2001 season will feature an openly queer character. The Ellen Showwill revolve around Ellen DeGeneres as a laid-off dot-com employee who returns to her small hometown to live with her mother (Cloris Leachman) and sister (Emily Rutherfurd). Also featured: Bunny the P.E. teacher (Diane Delano), a recurring lesbian character. Jon Mandel, chief negotiating officer for mediacom, which analyzes media play and advises advertisers, has noted that the CBS audience skews markedly older than the rest of the networks. He says, "They're simply not ready to watch this show." What's remarkable about these new lesbian images is that nearly all are man-made. Perhaps when lesbian producers, writers, and directors overcome their fear of being labeled The Great Big Lesbian Producer, Writer, or Director will dykes in Studio City achieve the same status as gay guys. For now, they'll continue to work on straight projects to show they're just as good as the guys. Carson Hunter reports on entertainment for Australia'sLesbians on the Loose. BACK HOME |