Dull and duller

After Ellen, gay characters are still a novelty

by Robert David Sullivan

Twenty-six years ago, in the film Cabaret, Michael York claimed to be impotent but was obviously gay. This year, the television series Will & Grace brought us a young male character who claims to be gay but is obviously impotent. Progress is indeed difficult to measure these days.

The biggest gay TV story in 1998 was the noisy and prolonged death of Ellen, just one year after that sitcom captured huge audiences with the simultaneous coming-out of star Ellen DeGeneres and her small-screen alter ego, Ellen Morgan. After the TV Ellen found a steady girlfriend (who was, alas, considerably blander than the real-life Ellen's girlfriend, Anne Heche), the show's ratings plummeted. Not surprisingly, ABC axed Ellen, and even gay viewers who felt that the show had, in fact, gone stale began to worry that the networks would view queer characters as simply not worth the trouble.

That worry was eased somewhat when NBC announced that its fall schedule would include Will & Grace, a new sitcom about a gay Manhattan attorney (Will, short for William Truman) and his straight female roommate (Grace). And for a couple of weeks, Will & Grace looked like the biggest hit of the season. The first few episodes earned unanimously positive reviews (TV Guide, hardly a cutting-edge publication, named it a "fall favorite") and surprisingly strong ratings, considering that it aired opposite Ally McBeal and followed the lame Caroline in the City on Monday nights. Its apparent success lead to a cover story in Entertainment Weekly called "Gay Men & Straight Women: Why Hollywood Just Loves Them!"

Unfortunately, Will & Grace turned out to be the television equivalent of a one-night stand -- which is still a lot more action than its lead gay character ever gets. In late September, the show won about 14 percent of the viewing audience; two months later, it had skidded to about 8 percent. The quick drop in popularity suggests that Will & Grace isn't catching on even with gay audiences. Certainly, I don't sense much enthusiasm for the show among my friends, and I don't see any bars advertising Will & Grace nights the way they used to build happy hours around Melrose Place. Nevertheless, the series is likely to hang on at least through next spring, since NBC has plenty of sitcoms with worse ratings.

What's the problem with the show? It's not the over-the-top character of Will's friend Jack (Sean Hayes), a serious attitude queen who says things like "I get a little funny in the tummy when I see the Washington Monument." At first, I got a little "funny in the tummy" myself over hearing same-sex innuendo on prime-time TV. (Grace, wanting Jack to sign for a UPS delivery, says, "Could you help that guy standing behind you with the big package?" Jack squeals, "Oh, Grace, don't tease me like that!") But these jokes have become sad rather than saucy, as Will and Jack are consigned to a version of Manhattan with absolutely no dating opportunities for a pair of young, attractive gay men. Occasionally, one of them will flirt with a hunky stranger, but a plot contrivance (such as an inadvertent interruption by Grace) usually ends the scene before we learn whether the stranger is also gay. Any mention of their sexual relationships is placed safely in the past tense, raising our suspicions that Will & Grace is really about a pair of 80-year-old gay men who like to talk dirty because they can't get it up anymore.

Its title notwithstanding, the best scenes in the show's early episodes were between the ultra-assimilationist Will and the flamboyant Jack, a two-person microcosm of guppie culture. Their banter was authentically bitchy, and their occasional use of feminine pronouns was a nice touch (a sarcastic Will to Jack: "Ladies and [brief pause] ladies of the jury . . . "). NBC must have gotten squeamish about such concentrated doses of homosexuality, because now Will and Jack are rarely in the same scene -- which certainly puts a damper on the theory that they're fuck buddies. Instead, Jack is usually paired with a straight female friend who matches his shallowness: the flighty secretary in Grace's decorating business.

In the Entertainment Weekly article, gay author Armistead Maupin speculates that NBC snapped up Will & Grace because the premise "allows a sort of ersatz hetero relationship," and EW writer A.J. Jacobs adds that "there's enough gayness to grab some hipster cred and lots of Oscar Wilde-ish repartee." If that's praise, it doesn't count for much this fall, since audiences seem to be getting mighty tired of "hipster" sitcoms, no matter who's in them. The only one that's not hemorrhaging viewers this season is Friends, rejuvenated by the secret romance between Monica and Chandler (which effectively removes Matthew Perry's character from the "closet case" list). Will & Grace is trying to be Seinfeld without the sex or the nastiness, but it risks turning off both gay and straight audiences.

---

In contrast to all the hype surrounding Ellen and Will & Grace was a totally unexpected plot twist on Homicide: Life on the Street near the end of last year. This was a real wet dream: Detective Tim Bayliss (Kyle Secor), an attractive and heroic character on one of the most highly regarded programs on television, acknowledged that he felt attracted to other men. As Homicide headed toward its season finale this spring, Bayliss wobbled a bit and described himself as bisexual. And in the season finale itself, he was shot and came within a whisker of dying -- almost as if he were being punished for refusing to make up his mind.

By fall, Bayliss had made a complete physical recovery, but his mental state remains off-kilter. His sexual identity (now he calls himself "bi-curious," at least to a woman he wants to date) is now part of a package of mystical beliefs. "This Zen detective thing is really starting to rub my rectum the wrong way," says his partner (Richard Belzer) after Bayliss goes off on a tangent about the meaning of "reality."

It would be too simplistic to say that Bayliss has been turned into a source of comic relief, but his quirkiness does reinforce the idea of gay people as entertaining curiosities. In TV land, homosexuals are usually on a par with vegetarians or, ironically, born-again Christians -- intriguing and even noble, but only if they don't become fanatics who might disrupt the backyard barbecue. Particularly on sitcoms, these characters exist mainly to promote wacky misunderstandings and to be disarmingly honest about sexual matters (usually by urging straight characters to "go for it"). They're part of the holy trinity of scene-stealers in the '90s: kids, dogs, and queers.

The gay character who may best personify this tradition is mayoral aide Carter Heywood (Michael Boatman) of the Michael J. Fox sitcom Spin City, now in its third year on ABC. Carter combines two TV stereotypes, the bracingly honest African-American and the refreshingly candid gay man. In every episode, there is at least one ham-handed reference to his sexuality. When a coworker spots him embracing a straight female friend, he barks out, "Nope, still gay!" When he uses the word poppycock, at a staff meeting, another character interjects, "That means `nonsense,' when translated from the gay."

Prominent lesbian characters aren't as plentiful on prime time, perhaps because of the fallout from Ellen and perhaps because most scriptwriters are men. There also seems to be a widespread belief that women have squishier sexual identities anyway. On the Homicide episode where Bayliss awkwardly tries to pick up a female detective, she responds, "I'm `bi-curious' myself. Most women are." On Ally McBeal, the title character has been seen in a lip-lock with another woman on several occasions. She's ostensibly trying to trick pesky suitors into thinking she's a lesbian, but there's always the suggestion afterward that the passion wasn't entirely fake. It's not a stretch to guess that these cases have more to do with straight men's fantasies than with an honest exploration of how women come to terms with sexual desire.

As usual, the truest depictions of gay life on TV may involve characters who are not labeled as gay at all. Take the title character on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, cursed or blessed (whichever you prefer) with a sixth sense about the monsters lurking in her small town. Single-minded and independent, she's shunned by the popular girls in school, and the boys see right through her half-hearted attempts to flirt with them. In case the point isn't clear enough, in one recent episode her mother demonstrates her support by offering to "march in the slayer pride parade."

Leaving aside such crypto-gay characters, however, this was not a year of significant gains in the representation of gay life on network TV. Instead of watching the celibate gay characters who now appear every week, I'd rather go back to the gay couples occasionally seen on thirtysomething and Northern Exposure during the late '80s and early '90s, or the drag queens who hung around the bus station on The John Larroquette Show.

There is hope that cable TV can break through the pink ceiling that apparently exists at the broadcast networks. Two new Showtime series, Linc's and Rude Awakenings, have supporting characters who are gay or questioning (though neither program is as groundbreaking as Brothers, a 1984 Showtime sitcom in which one of the three title characters was a gay man). And Showtime brought us one of the highlights of gay TV in 1998, May's miniseries More Tales of the City. For all their recent gains, cable networks still don't attract large enough audiences to justify producing more than a handful of dramatic series each year, but the poor quality of network TV is bound to send more viewers fleeing to Showtime, HBO, and other premium channels. That change, in turn, may lead to more-experimental series with better-developed gay characters.

Until then, we'll have to make do with nonthreatening gay characters like Will & Grace's Jack. And if that's the case, we might as well give the 1998 award for Most Successful Gay Character to Bruce Vilanch, the big-haired blond who occupies a regular seat on the syndicated revival of Hollywood Squares. He offers the same self-deprecating gay jokes that can be found on any hipster sitcom these days, but at least his straight costars are in the same predicament: in solitary confinement and at the mercy of abysmally bad writing.

Robert David Sullivan is a television critic for the Phoenix; he can be reached at robt555[a]phx.com.

---

Respond to this article.

---