New York City - Cable's Real Gay Life
By David Zurawik, Baltimore Sun
NY Newsday - July 1, 2003

It might not be as headline-grabbing as the coming out of Ellen DeGeneres' character on ABC's "Ellen" six years ago, or, perhaps, even the kiss shared by gay partners Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman during CBS' Tony Awards telecast to celebrate their award for the songs in " Hairspray." But something deeper and more important has been happening in the way homosexuality is being portrayed on television: Viewers are being offered some of the most enlightened images of gay, lesbian and transgendered identity ever - but only on those cable channels for which viewers are paying a premium.

If nothing else, programming this month - Gay Pride Month - has brought into sharper focus the growing disparity between images of gay and lesbian life as seen on pay cable vs. those on "free" broadcast television.

"If you look at pay cable, there is all this interesting and sometimes wonderful stuff starting to happen. But, more and more, it's happening only on cable, as opposed to network TV," said Suzanna Danuta Walters, a Georgetown University professor of women's studies and author of "All the Rage: The Story of Gay Visibility in America" (University of Chicago Press).

While Walters singled out such series as "Six Feet Under" (HBO) and " Queer as Folk" (Showtime), the pattern extends beyond weekly series to made-for-TV movies, documentaries and concerts - covering the primary programming genres of cable television. And examples of each can be seen in coming days: On Saturday Cinemax debuted "Ruthie & Connie: Every Room in the House," a touching and wise documentary about two working-class, 1960s Brooklyn housewives who realized after 14 years of knowing each other that they were in love. The film looks at them as they approach their 25th anniversary together - having left their husbands for each other.

In chronicling the journeys of Ruthie Berman and Connie Kurtz from self- hate and thoughts of suicide to becoming celebrated symbols of gay pride, the documentary is a textbook on how to illuminate large social issues through honest, intimate, personal biography.

Also Saturday night, HBO premiered "Ellen DeGeneres: Here and Now," a comedy concert taped at the Beacon Theatre in Manhattan. If nothing else, the show is a nice reminder that, as much as DeGeneres' persona is defined by her sexual orientation in the press, she is as mainstream and middle- of-the-road a comedian as Bill Cosby. It's hard to think of homosexuals as some exotic "other" while watching DeGeneres perform.

Last night, Showtime aired a groundbreaking exploration of the military's "don't ask/don't tell" policy in "Soldier's Girl," a film starring Troy Garity (the son of Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda) as an Army private who falls in love with a transgendered nightclub performer and is murdered by one of his fellow soldiers.

In the skilled hands of director Frank Pierson, the film scrupulously avoids depicting the object of the young soldier's affections, Calpernia Addams (played by Lee Pace), as a freak or the "other." Based on a true story, the film exquisitely builds toward its homicidal explosion of homophobic rage.

In each of these shows, the lives of the gay, lesbian and transgendered persons are connected culturally and politically to a larger community, which gives them meaning and context. Furthermore, these people are not defined primarily in opposition to or deviation from the dominant culture. These are crucial criteria in judging images of gay and lesbian identity in the media, according to Walters.

Indeed, they are key in judging media representations of any minority, and are the same benchmarks, for example, used by Donald Bogle to access television images of African-Americans in his book "Prime Time Blues: African- Americans on Network Television" (Farrar, Straus and Giroux).

Bogle praises "The Cosby Show," for example, for being "subtly and brilliantly contextualized with African-American cultural signs and references," as well as "deftly weaving African-American history" into the ongoing narrative of the series.

As Walters puts it in applying the principles to gay identity: "One of the measures of really progressive gay representations is when gays are not just tokenized accessories to heterosexual life, but are depicted as producing, living in and benefiting from a rich and vibrant multicultural gay community. And that's what you are starting to see on pay cable." Showtime's "Queer as Folk," which ended its third season Sunday, is an example of a series moving in that direction.

"My take on 'Queer as Folk' in the early days is that it did show a gay world, but it was gay world denuded of depth and community. It was the gay world as disco and drugs - a silly, narrow version of gay life," Walters said.

"But this season, it started asking political questions, questions about identity, and questions about AIDS. And, in that process, it started showing the many-tentacled layers of the gay community to which these characters are connected. 'Queer as Folk' started getting political this year, and that made a big difference," she added.

"There's no question that many documentary filmmakers feel that premium cable TV is the first place to go to get your documentary picked up or produced," said Donald Goldmacher, the producer of "Ruthie & Connie."

Overall, the programming offered during Gay Pride Month has only heightened the disparity in the two realms of television. Typical of the kind of portrayals of homosexuality offered by the commercial broadcast networks is "Charlie Lawrence," a silly CBS sitcom starring Nathan Lane as a gay congressman newly arrived in Washington. The series failed to make CBS' fall schedule. ABC is offering "It's All Relative," a vacuous sitcom adaptation of the feature film "The Bird Cage." For every laugh (both of them) in the pilot, there are a dozen stereotypes.

"Having a bunch of gay characters on network television is nothing new," Walters said. "By the early 1990s, there was integration.

Whether it was 'Ellen' or 'Will & Grace,' you could point to 20 or 25 characters, major or minor, in weekly network series." But being visible is not necessarily being known or understood. If it's an informed look at gay and lesbian life that viewers want, the message this month is clear: They are going to have to pay extra for it.

"What's happening on pay cable with these images is a good thing," Walters said. "But I'm also afraid that we're going to have an increasingly ghettoized world."