By David Zurawik, Baltimore Sun
Sun Sentinel - June 27, 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's Tony Awards telecast earlier this month 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:

* At 10 tonight, HBO premieres Ellen DeGeneres: Here and Now, a comedy concert taped at New York City's Beacon Theatre. 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.

* This week Cinemax debuted Ruthie & Connie: Every Room in the House (it's repeated Sunday at 7 a.m.) 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.

* Monday night at 11, Showtime rebroadcasts 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. 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.

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 blacks 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 just ended its third season, 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.

The season finale was all about politics, with most of the major characters in the fictional version of Pittsburgh's gay community coming together to successfully oppose a homophobic police chief running for mayor. The episode ended with dancing, but it was dancing in the street to celebrate a political victory rather than the sweaty, bare-chested, drug-and-alcohol-fueled disco dancing at Club Babylon that characterized the first two seasons.

No program this month connects its subjects to a larger community and culture as skillfully as Ruthie & Connie: Every Room in the House, which screened at last year's Miami Gay & Lesbian Film Festival. The filmmakers continuously link the personal history of the two women to the political and social history of gays and lesbians in American life. The two narratives merge in 1988 when the couple sued the New York City Board of Education for domestic-partner benefits. Five years of courtroom battles ended in victory not just for them but for all New York City employees.

Whether it is marching in a Gay Pride Parade, leading a workshop at a community center or celebrating their 25th anniversary with a lesbian rabbi leading the ceremony, the women, who live part of the year in West Palm Beach, are repeatedly shown within the context of the community from which they draw their support and strength. In so doing, the filmmakers celebrate that community as much as the two central figures of the film.

Ruthie & Connie is the kind of film that in a more equitable television world would be available to all viewers rather than just those who subscribe to Cinemax (sister channel of HBO). But it is very much part of the trend toward a television universe of haves and have-nots.

"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.

Calling premium cable channels "ideal" for nonfiction filmmakers because of the increased level of funding they can offer thanks to a paying audience, Goldmacher said he sees the movement of the best nonfiction films to HBO, Cinemax, Showtime and the Sundance channels only continuing to grow.

That is not to say PBS is missing in action. Thanks primarily to its P.O.V. (Point of View) series, the new season of which started this month, public television has offered some enlightened nonfiction films on gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered life. Most notable was Georgie Girl, a documentary about the life of Georgina Beyer, a transsexual cabaret singer and prostitute who became a member of Parliament in New Zealand in 1999.

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, which began and ended in one week, failed to make CBS's fall schedule.

Not that the fall schedules are anything to get excited about when it comes to gay and lesbian images. Take ABC, which is offering It's All Relative, a vacuous sitcom adaptation of the feature film The Bird Cage. Two young lovers want to marry, but there's a problem with the in-laws. His parents are staunchly conservative, working-class, Boston Catholics. Her parents are two gay men. 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 ghetto-ized world."

David Zurawik writes for The Baltimore Sun, a Tribune Co. newspaper.