Thirty years ago, prime-time television series often depicted homosexuals as suicidal or psychopaths. In an episode of “Marcus Welby, M.D.,” the doctor tells a tormented patient to “win that fight” against his homosexual feelings. An episode of “Police Woman” centered on three lesbians who murdered the residents of a retirement home.
More Top Picks Best Splitboards For Backcountry
If American television audiences could have seen then what viewers can see now.
On Tuesday nights at 8 the Bravo cable network is presenting the new reality show “Boy Meets Boy,” in which a gay bachelor will choose a potential partner from a field of 15 men, some of whom will be secretly straight.
The show is preceded and followed by episodes of “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy,” another new reality show on Bravo in which a team of gay men with various kinds of expertise — in designer clothing, in food and wine, in the arts — save aesthetically challenged straight men from their own warped senses of fashion.
These shows join a growing prime-time roster of gay-themed programming — “Queer as Folk” on Showtime, “Will and Grace” on NBC — that reflects a major shift in attitudes about gay subjects not only among television executives today but also among advertisers and audiences.
Several network and cable television executives said the Supreme Court’s 6-3 decision in June, overruling a Texas sodomy law and legalizing gay sexual conduct, underlined what they already knew: that the nation’s attitudes toward gays and lesbians are radically changing.
“Finally, television is catching up with society at large,” said Max Mutchnick, the co-creator with David Kohan of “Will and Grace.” “These new gay shows are a reflection of what everyone sees now in their jobs, in their families, in their schools. The Brady Bunch never lived next door to anyone in America. Gay people do live next door.”
But the trend already has come under attack. A. William Merrell, a vice president on the executive committee of the Southern Baptist Convention, said the new shows were a sign of the growing influence of gays in Hollywood. “I believe that the net effect is to forward an agenda making homosexuality appear first normal, and then desirable,” he said.
At the same time, some scholars and writers specializing in gay issues said the current crop of gay-oriented shows served only to trivialize and stereotype gay men.
In many ways the new shows are trying to capitalize on the popularity of “Will and Grace,” which was the third most watched sitcom on network television last season with an average weekly audience of 16.8 million people according to Nielson Media Research.
Hunger to be daring
The shows are also a measure of the hunger among television executives to offer new, even daring shows in a competitive industry in which network audiences have declined as cable networks have proliferated.
Craig Zadan and Neil Meron, the executive producers of “It’s All Relative,” a new ABC sitcom about star-crossed fiances — one the daughter of two upscale gay men, the other the son of a blue-collar couple — said the television landscape had shifted significantly in the eight-and-a-half years since their first gay-themed television project, the NBC movie “Serving in Silence.” The movie was based on the story of Col. Margarethe Cammermeyer, the officer discharged from the Washington State National Guard in 1992 for admitting she was a lesbian. (She was later reinstated.) “It was a really difficult experience,” Zadan said.
Sponsors chafed at the movie — some refused to advertise — some conservatives protested and even some of NBC’s affiliated stations expressed discomfort with a kiss shared by the movie’s stars, Glenn Close and Judy Davis.
“Look where we’ve come now, where the opposite has happened, where the chairman of ABC comes to us two years ago and says, `I want to do a show on gay parents,” Zadan said.
Lloyd Braun, the ABC Entertainment chairman, said that when he came up with the idea for “It’s All Relative.” The sitcom, he said, seeks to discuss “some of the ridiculous stereotypes that exist in our society.”
Where once such a show might have seemed risky, Braun said, now it does not.
For the last two and a half years, Showtime has offered “Queer as Folk,” a fairly explicit portrait of a group of gay men and women in Pittsburgh. Next January, Showtime will present an original series, “The L Word,” about the lives of a group of lesbians in L.A.
Then there is “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy” on Bravo. It has won good-natured reviews from critics for its universal theme: Who doesn’t want to be made over to look better? In the show, five stylish gay men, who are experts in fashion, grooming, food and design appear to take a genuine interest in repairing the images of their slovenly subjects, and the straight men seem genuinely touched by it.
“Queer Eye,” which has been heavily promoted on billboards and on television, drew roughly 1.6 million viewers on its first two shows on Bravo in July, the largest audiences in Bravo’s history. After that success, NBC, Bravo’s corporate sibling, decided to broadcast the show itself last Thursday. The show drew an audience of 7 million.
The program did not seem to want for advertisers, either. Among its sponsors on NBC on Thursday night were Bausch and Lomb, Levis, Volkswagen and the film “Seabiscuit.”
Madison Avenue analysts and executives said advertisers were less afraid to sponsor gay-themed programming than they were in the past.
“Advertisers have gotten past the point of resistance,” said Jack Myers, editor of the Jack Myers Report, a media industry newsletter heavily subscribed to on Madison Avenue. “If audience is there, the advertisers are there,” he said.
Still, the airing of “Queer Eye” did not go off without a hitch. One NBC affiliate, WAGT in Augusta, Ga., refused to show the episode until 2:35 a.m. John Mann, the station’s president and general manager, said he did not object to the gay theme but rather a scene that he believed crossed the line of decency with blunt sexual innuendo.
More Top Picks Best Quality Pocket Watches For Men
“I don’t care what your sexual preference is,” Mann said. “If that appeared in `Friends,’ and we knew about it in advance, we would have moved it too.”
“Queer Eye” has offended some conservatives. In his weekly opinion column earlier this month, L. Brent Bozell III, president of the Parents Television Council, called it “The Gay Supremacy Hour.”
Such programming “may be acceptable for that element in our culture that’s already earning an advanced degree in Sin Acceptance,” he wrote. “But it’s also acceptable to the gang at NBC, and the suits upstairs at General Electric?”
Playing on stereotypes
For different reasons, some scholars who have explored gay life and issues are not entirely pleased at the new phenomenon, either. One is Martin Duberman, distinguished professor of history at the City University of New York and author of “Stonewall,” about the 1969 uprising that helped give birth to the gay rights movement.
“You’re not seeing diverse images on these shows,” he said. “You’re seeing men acting out the stereotypical roles that the culture has long assigned them — the stereotype of the sissy involved in fashion and cosmetics, or the exact opposite stereotype: the macho gym bunny who represents a heightened supermasculinity.
Randy Barbato, a filmmaker who, with his partner, Fenton Bailey, created a documentary, “Gay Hollywood,” about a group of five gay men in Hollywood, to be broadcast on AMC on Aug. 11 at 9 p.m., said: “There are a few visible stereotypes right now. That’ll open the door for different kinds of characters. In the meantime, everyone loves to have someone who will sing showtunes at their Thanksgiving dinner and tell Mom how to belt her blouse to make her look slimmer.”