E-Mail This Article to a Friend Where’s our gay Sidney Poitier? (continued)

The difference between characterizations of gay and black people on TV and in movies is that blacks appear in both comic and serious roles while gay people appear only in comedies. Only six exceptions come to mind. 1) Dr. Kerry Weaver on NBC’s ER, who emerged as a lesbian after nearly a decade as a fixture on the program, her sexuality irrelevant. As the 2004 season ended, she was locked in a custody battle with her dead partner’s family. 2) Kima and her partner, Cheryl, on HBO’s The Wire. 3) NYPD Blue includes a minor homosexual character, the civilian receptionist, whose lines reduce to "Detective, the call’s for you," and whom the lead detective, Sipowicz, calls "Gay John." Sipowicz doesn’t call his black colleague "Negro Baldwin." 4) HBO’s Six Feet Under, a critical success, includes David, a funeral-home owner, and his lover, Keith, who was a police officer, then a rent-a-cop, and is now trying to succeed as a security guard for pop divas — the most recent of whom is a self-involved, flirtatious, unattractive homosexual with a flamboyant devil-may-care attitude. 5 and 6) In the homosexual equivalents of Sex and the City, Showtime’s Queer As Folk and The L Word, almost every character is gay. All six programs have merit, but the cable shows are seen by few. How many straight people do you know who routinely or even occasionally see Queer As Folk?

Let’s look at it from another angle. Name a homosexual equivalent of Oprah, a sort of media-filtered gay "best friend." You might think of Ellen DeGeneres, but it doesn’t fit. Ellen’s persona as a comedienne who came out has been eclipsed by her roles as Dory in Finding Nemo and now as a likable host of a syndicated TV talk program, in which her sexuality may be known by some but is not stressed on the show; newcomers to her audience could easily be ignorant of the whole matter. "Gay talk host" is not how America sees her. And Ellen even fits the mold: she is a funny lady, not an Episcopal bishop giving Sunday sermons. The TV world that looms so large in the lives of many Americans is light-years away from presenting a person like that. Gays make us laugh; they do not guide us through the requisites of religion, our health, our laws, or any other significant aspect of life.

Some people in our area might retort that in the real world, the leading male TV anchor in Boston is homosexual, as is the radio talk host with the largest nighttime audience. Oh yes, Boston TV, Boston radio: how very ... Massachusetts, the Gay State.

Imagine if there were no black leads on Law & Order or Without a Trace or CSI and so on, but just on the yuck-yuck shows like Saturday Night Live and Mad TV — no meaningful presence in dramas, just fodder for mirth. Given this trivializing state of affairs, how likely is it that people who connect homosexuals with bizarre sexual practices or flip inanity or sashaying effeminacy or obsession about peripheral matters like shaving with, rather than against, the grain, will envision same-sex marriage as a matter of basic decency and fairness? Seeing blacks in positions of authority and responsibility both in reality and in fictional popular culture helped transform our nation from one that regarded nonwhites as deservedly subordinate, ill-suited to the hard tasks that white people perform. If citizens who doubted the abilities of blacks and knew few, except in positions lower than themselves on all the relevant pecking orders (social, economic, academic, and so on), never saw a black character as a significant presence in the dramas that Americans love, would America’s attitudes on race have altered as remarkably or as swiftly?

People’s attitudes are deeply influenced by pop culture. That we could have a black secretary of state and a black national-security adviser marks stunning social change, but do you doubt that more people know that three of Law & Order’s lead characters are black, than recognize the name of Condoleezza Rice? What is seen on TV and in the movies brings home the reality that blacks, Asians, and Hispanics are everywhere in America, in all jobs, and must be regarded as consequential, not just as comic relief.

THERE’S NO reason to lose our sense of humor and expunge funny gay characters from the tube. But there’s also no reason to settle for condescending marginalization and ridiculous, childish imagery in the popular media. We must insist that more gay roles convey authority, seriousness, and societal respect. Jack on Will & Grace is a frequently lighter-than-air gay equivalent of what in an earlier era, for a different part of the underclass, was called a minstrel. The minstrelsy of black America didn’t advance black people’s status in our country. Insistence on imagining black, Hispanic, and Asian characters in front-line positions did. The gay variant of minstrelsy is likewise useless. That’s why a gay character as lead FBI agent on a popular TV show is worth a hundred Queer Eye spinoffs.

The battle for parity in marital rights requires full acceptance by the majority that gay people are their equals, not just their smiling hairdressers, florists, and figure skaters, however much we appreciate those who do our hair, arrange our flowers, and look cool skating backward in tight-fitting costumes. Backward is precisely where settling for Queer Eye and others of its ilk will carry American homosexuals’ quest for equality.

David Brudnoy is a professor in Boston University’s College of Communication, a WBZ Radio talk-show host, and a long-time film critic.