Quick, someone call John Lithgow. This madness must be stopped! A policewoman character on the Australian soap opera Home and Away is about to find love with a female deck hand (is it safe, then, to assume they don’t have lumberjacks in Australia?) in a story line that will feature kissing and — I advise you not to read any further if you’re easily offended — dancing. On the count of three, let’s all shake our heads like we’re convinced the world is going to hell in a handbasket and say it together: Won’t anyone think of the children?
A group called Pro-Family Perspectives is doing just that; its director has been quoted as saying, “The plot lines that young kids and teenagers should be presented with should be about really authentic relationships that are not just sexualised.”
Whether that means they disapprove of homosexuality or they’re merely opposed to the idea of a lesbian relationship being used as a possible ratings stunt, I couldn’t tell you. In any event, there’s been little sign of widespread public outrage yet, maybe because parents have viewed their own teenagers’ MySpace pages and are smart enough to realize that their kids won’t be seeing anything on Home and Away that they haven’t already taken countless pictures of their drunken friends doing at parties.
UPDATE:Alas, the parental outrage, manufactured or real, did happen.
Remember us? We’re the ghosts of ABC’s lesbian past.
TV Guide‘s Matt Mitovich responds to news of Grey’s Anatomy actress Brooke Smith’s firing by suggesting that ABC, previously recognized by GLAAD as America’s most gay-friendly TV network, isn’t showing equal love to all parts of the LGBT community:
Might have this frank exploration of two women coming to terms with new sexual orientations proven too hot for ABC to handle? Smith saw no such signs. “At work I had no sense of it. And more fans seemed to like it than not,” she tells EW. “I don’t think I’m ever going to know [why this happened].”
The answer may be obvious, if one looks at a pattern of recent story “twists” across ABC. Ugly Betty last season introduced with much fanfare Rebecca Romijn as a post-op transgender; now she’s gone. Right out of the gate, Dirty Sexy Money lathered things up by pairing aspiring politician Patrick with a great transgender love; last week, she walked out of his life. So Grey’s writing out a full-fledged lesbian such as Erica — versus the simply lez-curious Callie — would seem to fit this pattern. Meanwhile, gay males such as Brothers & Sisters‘ Kevin appear to go unpestered… at least for now.
Lesbians almost always get fucked over on TV, when they’re on TV at all, so that part of the story isn’t anything new. But for ABC to snuff out Erica Hahn in the wake of eliminating two transgendered characters — and to apparently de-bisexualize Melissa George’s upcoming role as a Seattle Grace intern at the same time? I think it’s fair to say that’s a bit alarming.
It’s a good thing Erica Hahn is a doctor, ’cause she’s about to get thrown under the bus.
When I last wrote aboutGrey’s Anatomy and its horribly botched attempt at a lesbian storyline, I ended my lengthy, lengthy (sorry about that) post with this:
There are people who will always be happy with crap, and there are networks that will always be happy to supply it. Will Grey’s Anatomy continue that trend? We’ll know soon enough.
That was a little more than a week ago. Since then, another episode aired. I had planned on publishing something about it later tonight or tomorrow. The thrust of the post, as presented in its opening line, was going to be “This storyline just isn’t going well at all.” I was going to briefly recap what happened in the episode (you can view the Callie and Erica-oriented scenes online) before moving onto this analysis:
Teens who watch television shows that have a lot of sexual content are more likely to become pregnant — or to get someone pregnant — by the time they turn 20, according to a study in the journal Pediatrics.
Blah, blah, blah, then:
The research was based on a 2001 survey of 2,000 12- to 17-year-olds who were asked how often they watched any of 23 popular TV shows, ranging from cartoons and comedies to adult-themed shows such as Sex and the City.
Follow-up interviews were done years later to see how many of them got pregnant in their teen years or were responsible for a pregnancy.
Teens who watched shows where sex was regularly shown or discussed had two to three times the risk of pregnancy than young people exposed to lower levels of sexual content, the study said.
Hmm. I watched TV shows “where sex was regularly shown or discussed” when I was a teenager, including Sex and the City. Never got pregnant. I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, “That’s ’cause you’re a giant lesbian. I mean, duh, your last name is Lesbian.”
But you never saw some of the women who came onto me when I was a teenager. I’m pretty sure one or two of them might have gotten me pregnant if given the chance. Had I, as a 16-year-old, gone on even one date with that very persistent 24-year-old retail manager who wanted me to see the inside of her truck (I was always afraid that was some kind of euphemism) and liked to point out that she was old enough to buy alcohol, I bet you anything a third-grader would be calling me ‘Mom’ right now.
You’ll note that no one in the Sun-Times article mentions the fact that these pregnant teenagers, and the guys who knocked them up, came of age in the George W. Bush era of abstinence-only sexual education. It was a golden era to be sure, with the teenage birth rate increasing by 3 percent in 2006 after 15 years of not rising. Which makes me think that it might be George W. Bush and his fellow evangelical nutcases who are responsible for creating this spike in our GDJP (Gross Domestic Juno Product), and not the Sex and the City gang.
Still, just to be sure, when I have kids there’s a very good chance they won’t be allowed to watch anything but I Love Lucy and The Cosby Show. They’ll be the only five-year-olds on the playground who could pick Harpo Marx out of a lineup and think loud patterned sweaters are stylish, but when they make it all the way through high school without baby spew on their graduation gowns they’ll thank me.
On Grey’s Anatomy, saving lives is easier than having lesbian sex.
We have already established that I have not been a regular viewer of Grey’s Anatomy, that ABC show about Patrick Dempsey’s dimples and Eric Dane’s impressive pecs. (It is also, sometimes, about practicing medicine. And I think it might exist in part to drive viewers over to iTunes. That’s one of two possible explanations for why they showcase so much new music so prominently in each episode; the other is that the people who make TV shows have become so lazy — Nip/Tuck was also guilty of this back when I bothered tuning in — that they’d sooner crank up the music at dramatic moments than create big emotional pay-offs themselves. As long as Jeff Buckley’s rendition of “Hallelujah” keeps being licensed to everyone who asks for it, writers will never have to come up with anything deep and meaningful ever again!)
My reasons for not loyally watching Grey’s are simple: I like good writing (which does exist on Grey’s Anatomy, as far as I can tell, just not with a great deal of consistency), and I’m immune to the charms of hunky male doctors in various states of undress. Every time I’ve seen the show, or parts of the show, it has struck me as little more than a pop culture savvy version of a Harlequin novel, filmed in high-definition.
If you fuck with the miniskirt, you fuck with Debbie Harry. If you fuck with Debbie Harry, you fuck with the gays. You do not want to fuck with the gays.
James Nsaba Buturo, the Ugandan Minister of Ethics and Integrity who last month railed against the evils of the miniskirt, told reporters at a Saturday press conference that homosexuality is an “attempt to end civilization.”
Buturo, who is under the mistaken impression that gay people can’t reproduce, said: “Who is going to occupy Uganda 20 years from now if we all become homosexuals?” If I could take a crack at this, I’m pretty sure the answer is — wait for it — homosexuals. Am I right? Do I get a cookie? But Buturo should worry not; the gays are still too busy signing up everyone who wanders into West Hollywood to take a stab at Uganda anytime soon.
Someone finally gets it…
Campbell Brown, the CNN host who destroyed McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds on live TV not too long ago, explains to the New York Timeshow the media lost its way:
“As journalists, and certainly for me over the last few years, we’ve gotten overly obsessed with parity, especially when we’re covering politics. We kept making sure each candidate got equal time — to the point that it got ridiculous in a way.
“So when you have Candidate A saying the sky is blue, and Candidate B saying it’s a cloudy day, I look outside and I see, well, it’s a cloudy day. I should be able to tell my viewers, ‘Candidate A is wrong, Candidate B is right.’ And not have to say, ‘Well, you decide.’ Then it would be like I’m an idiot. And I’d be treating the audience like idiots.”
She’s absolutely right, though I’d change “Then it would be like I’m an idiot” to “That would make me an idiot.” There’s no ‘like’ about it. And I can already hear the Fox News faithful, who won’t settle for anything less than being treated like total idiots, taking umbrage at her analysis and shaking their tiny fists and screaming: It’s not your job to tell us about the sky! You’re not a meteorologist!
Also at the Times:
For all the starburst magic she worked on Rich “Never Going to Live This Down” Lowry, Sarah Palin failed to sexually arouse Gail Collins and Bob Herbert, whose post-debate columns were appropriately somber.
Collins concludes:
This entire election season has been a long-running saga about the rise of women in American politics. On Thursday, it all went sour. The people boosting Palin’s triumph were not celebrating because she demonstrated that she is qualified to be president if something ever happened to John McCain. They were cheering her success in covering up her lack of knowledge about the things she would have to deal with if she wound up running the country.
Herbert writes:
But after Senator Biden suggested that John McCain’s answer to the nation’s energy problems was to “drill, drill, drill,” Ms. Palin promptly pointed out, as if scoring a point, that “the chant is ‘Drill, baby, drill!'”
How’s that for perspective? The credit markets are frozen. Our top general in Afghanistan is dialing 911. Americans are losing jobs by the scores of thousands. And Sarah Palin is making sure we know that the chant is “drill, baby, drill!” not “drill, drill, drill.”
Bob is forgetting that the “baby” is important. It’s what sends things we’d rather not imagine ricocheting through Rich Lowry’s living room. Speaking of which, if you missed Keith Olbermann naming Rich Lowry the “Worst Person in the World” last night, you can watch the segment online. Lowry’s mention starts around the 90 second mark and it’s an instant classic.
Kristin Davis should join her next time…
Cynthia Nixon kicks ass, but you probably already knew that. Addressing a standing-room only crowd as she campaigned for Barack Obama in South Florida last week, Nixon ripped into Amendment 2, a superfluous anti-gay initiative cynically designed to drive homophobes to the polls on November 4. As she points out, that already worked in 2004:
“In Florida… [Republicans] have tried to do again what they did four years ago: they put anti-gay initiatives on the ballot to bring out the homophobes in droves. What happened four years ago was so horrible. It was such a kick in the stomach. We all felt like we were the scapegoat, like we were the target.”
Nixon went on to say:
“It’s going to be really close in Florida. But my hope is that when Barack Obama wins, we’re going to know that those were LGBT votes. And last time they used us as a wedge, but this time we’re going to be the edge.”
You can read more about Amendment 2 at SayNo2.com.
And finally…
I don’t get all the media interest in a supposed rivalry between CNBC anchors Maria “Money Honey” Bartiromo and Erin “Street Sweetie” Burnett. Maybe it’s that I can’t get past their sexist nicknames, which make them sound like wisecracking Joan Blondell characters trying to claw their way to social respectability in an early ’30s comedy. Maybe it’s that I’m not a sexually frustrated hedge fund manager with X-rated dreams of turning on the TV one day to find them in the heat of an erotically charged catfight over tech stocks.
Whatever the case, I found this Vanity Fair article about the two of them interesting because it mentions that Burnett played college field hockey. Have you ever seen a woman on TV and thought to yourself, She definitely played field hockey? It happens to me only rarely, but Burnett was one I felt very strongly knew her way around a stick. Which is one of the many reasons I cringed (and gagged, and cringed some more) when Hardball host Chris Matthews went all lecherous on her last year. Didn’t he see Red Eye? Didn’t it teach him anything?
Having spent yesterday caught up in debate mania, I missed this Times article about the progress openly gay actors have made in landing TV roles. It doesn’t say much that gay viewers don’t already know (the headline is “Out in Hollywood: Starring Roles Are Rare”), but it’s nice to see actors like Bryan Batt of Mad Men and Jasika Nicole of Fringe mentioned alongside the usual suspects like T.R. Knight and Neil Patrick Harris. One thing that caught my eye:
Never before have gay story lines been so prominent. Nor have there ever been so many gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender characters on television — 83 by a recent count from the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, not counting reality shows, daytime dramas or gay-oriented cable networks.
Hollywood, with its depictions of cowboy lovers and lesbian neighbors, has done much to make gay men and women part of mainstream American life.
That makes things sound much rosier than they are. Gay characters in general and lesbian characters in particular don’t have nearly the kind of visibility on network television such reporting would have you believe. Or, if you will: There are gays on TV, you just have to strain your neck to see them.
If you haven’t already, you can dig through GLAAD’s findings yourself. For the record, there are currently zero lesbian leading roles to be found in scripted broadcast programming. (We’re typically underrepresented on network reality shows as well.)
In supporting roles you’ll find zero confirmed lesbians, though FOX’s Bones and House each have a bisexual supporting character and ABC’s Grey’s Anatomy has something brewing between the heretofore heterosexual doctors Torres and Hahn. (I’ve already weighed in on that; my expectations are low.) NBC’s Knight Rider, meanwhile, has a supporting character who is either bisexual or lesbian; as AfterElton’s Michael Jensen reports, the creative geniuses behind that show aren’t sure of her orientation. With cancellation looming on the horizon, they’re running out of time to make a decision.
That leaves the recurring character category, the paltriest category of all, and naturally that’s where we make a showing with the town mayor on NBC’s Friday Night Lights and Marge’s sister Patty on The Simpsons. There will also be a lesbian couple on The Goode Family, Mike Judge’s upcoming animated series on ABC, voiced by former SNL-ers Laraine Newman and Julia Sweeney. But never before have gay storylines been so prominent! Yay for gays! That lesbian chic thing has really taken off, hasn’t it?
Ebba (Elizabeth Young) enjoys being a royal subject in Queen Christina
Greta Garbo cross-dresses, dallies with John Gilbert and kisses a woman — all things she did away from the camera as well — in Rouben Mamoulian’s Queen Christina, which will be shown at 3 PM EST on TCM tomorrow as part of their day-long look at her career.
Unfortunately, TCM’s Garbo marathons are almost always the same: The Kiss,Mata Hari, Anna Karenina, Camille, Ninotchka, Grand Hotel, plus a couple more of the usual suspects, most of them long available on DVD. I’d like to see TCM (or any channel that has the rights) air something rarer, like The Painted Veil.
It came out in 1934, a year after Queen Christina, and had Garbo in another lesbian liplock, this time with Cecilia Parker. To satisfy the demands of the newly created Hays Code, their kisses were presented as mere sisterly affection. But all you have to do is see the movie, or even glance at a screen cap, to know there was nothing familial about it.
All My Children‘s Erica Kane: “I love my dead gay son!”
… Upon hearing they’re finally getting a lesbian neighbor. A source at Granada (the TV production company, not the Andalusian province; they already have lesbians in Spain) has told the News of the World that writers of the popular British soap will introduce a lesbian character at some point in the (presumably near) future, explaining, “‘Corrie lags behind on issues of race and gender. Executives want to create a soap which is representative of society in 2008 and they are acutely aware they need more gay characters.”
Which: duh. Coronation Street has been on the air for approximately five hundred thousand years, and this will be its first lesbian character. To put this in some kind of historical context, lesbians have existed in England since at least 1965, when Mrs. Peel first appeared on The Avengers and the sight of Diana Rigg in a leather catsuit turned thousands of schoolgirls across the UK gay overnight.
That means Corrie writers have been ignoring us for decades, which is more than a little ludicrous when you consider that lesbians have been stealthily infiltrating seemingly ordinary streets in seemingly ordinary towns in Great Britain and the United States for many years now, ever since Elton John and Billie Jean King reorganized the Velvet Mafia and unveiled a newer, more aggressive gay agenda around the time “Philadelphia Freedom” hit the charts in 1975.
Anyway, here’s hoping the Coronation Street lesbian, whoever she ends up being, is treated with a little more respect than America’s token lesbian soap opera character, Bianca Montgomery of All My Children, has been shown. Bianca — and correct me if I’m wrong about this, because I’ll take a Douglas Sirk melodrama over a standard TV soap any day of the week — fell in love with a corporate spy; was raped by a family enemy (who later became her brother-in-law); became pregnant from the rape; had the baby in the middle of some kind of disaster and was told her baby died; eventually found out the baby was alive and had been switched at birth; and then annoyed viewers by falling for a transgender character whose name was Mork or Alf or Nerf or something unusual like that.
In between all of that, Bianca killed her rapist and lapsed into a coma for some reason or another. Eventually she woke up and headed off to Europe, the better to oversee the international goings-on of her family’s cosmetics empire. (You might call Bianca Montgomery the ultimate lipstick lesbian.) It all sounds pretty fucking moronic, doesn’t it? Yet I have to admit that back in 1999 or 2000, whenever it was that Bianca’s coming-out storyline was first announced, I tuned into All My Children just to see how they’d handle it.
It seemed like it took Bianca, who was a teenager at the time, months to come out, but once she did the hilarity factor went through the roof. Every conversation she had with her mother, the legendary Erica Kane, included a half-dozen mentions of Bianca’s sexuality. The words “gay” and “lesbian” always came after long, dramatic soap opera pauses, so a scene might play out like this:
Erica: I, I don’t want to talk about … this.
Bianca: What, Mom? What don’t you want to talk about what? That I’m … gay?
Then there would be a commercial break, after which the action would continue:
Erica: I don’t know what you’re talking about. This has nothing to do with your being… Your being…
Bianca: What, Mom? Why can’t you just say it? Gay. My being gay.
Then there’d be another commercial break, before the conversation would resume with more of the same:
Erica: Oh, that word. That word —
Bianca: What word, Mom? Gay?
It was hilarious. Cheesy soap music would play in the background and Susan Lucci would do a “Love Me, Emmy Voters!” flinch every time she heard the words “gay” or “lesbian.” One or both characters were often on the verge of tears during these heated exchanges, and then ABC would cut to laundry detergent commercials with happy-bouncy music and sunny images of toddlers and golden retrievers before diving right back into a Straight Mom/Gay Daughter throw-down.
It made me want to spice up my own interactions with my mom by getting similarly defensive about my sexuality. Every time she’d ask whether I’d done my homework or unloaded the dishwasher, I imagined turning to face her, fists clenched defiantly, my chin quivering with emotion and my eyes filled with glycerine tears as I raised my voice to demand, “Is this because I’m a lesbian?” (It was like stepping into the Twilight Zone years later when I learned of this now-infamous Law & Order clip. My “Is this because I’m a lesbian?” would have been so much better than that one.)
By the way, in a perfect world, this post would end with a link to video of the old SNL sketch “All My Luggage,” which starred Susan Lucci. Alas, NBC Universal are bastards — or bastard people, as Corky St. Clair would call them — and I couldn’t find the clip online anywhere.
You might never have guessed from my writing, which critics across the globe agree is peppier than a cheerleader on amphetamines, but I’m a bit of the flat affect type. Enthusiasm never creeps into my voice, only mild and sometimes not so mild irritation. I’m Ben Stein, basically, except shorter, female, outspokenly liberal, have never had my own game show, and don’t wear suits. (On second thought, I’m not like Ben Stein at all. Forget I ever mentioned it.)
According to my mother, who knows these kinds of things, I was a toddler the last time I expressed unrestrained excitement about anything. I was at my grandmother’s house and she had turned on a Pointer Sisters record, and during the song “I’m So Excited” I jumped up and down and repeatedly clapped my hands in delight. That would have been in the mid-1980s.
I’m sharing these qualifications with you so you will understand the enormity of what I’m about to say, which is this: I’ve finally found something I’d squeal about, were I one for squealing. It’s the latest and final entry in the new Masterpiece Theatre: Complete Jane Austen series, an adaptation of Sense and Sensibility that was written by the prolific Andrew Davies, who penned the most celebrated of Austen movies, the BBC’s 1995 version of Pride & Prejudice; as well as Northanger Abbey just last year, and Tipping the Velvet whenever it was that Tipping the Velvet was made.
It premieres on PBS this Sunday and concludes on April 6th. The reviews I read this morning were incredible; behold the USA Today headline: “PBS’ Sense and Sensibility is truly a masterpiece,” and consider these words by Mary McNamara of The Los Angeles Times as she compares this Sense to Emma Thompson’s Oscar-winning adaptation, which excised several plot points from the novel:
Rejoice, Austen purists, here they are, miraculously restored in a two-part production that is just as lush and star-studded as the film version. If Andrew Davies’ script is a tad more steamy, it is also less glossy, painting a more nuanced portrait of genteel poverty, and the trials four women on their own would face. This “Sense and Sensibility” is truer not only to Austen’s narrative, it more successfully captures the quiet precision of her singular mind — she was the master of finding poetry in domestic detail, and for that, the small screen is much better suited than the large.
If that’s not reason enough to geek out over this TV event, how about this: Janet McTeer, she of Portrait of a Marriage and Tumbleweeds (and, more recently, the British miniseries Five Days, which played in the States on HBO and was released on DVD earlier this month), plays Mrs. Dashwood.
I’ve always been in awe of McTeer, not only because of the quality of her work and the roles she accepts — that I didn’t have the chance to see her on stage in an all-female version of The Taming of the Shrew (she played the part of Petruchio, telling Variety, “I can’t possibly turn that down. I go from playing an archetypal martyr [in ‘Malfi’] to a drunken male and finally get paid to scratch my balls. I just think that’s hysterical”) is one of those missed opportunities that will forever nag at me, like the time I turned down the role of Han Solo in Star Wars because I was underwhelmed by the script; or when I politely rebuffed the advances of a drunken Mary-Louise Parker lookalike just because she was heterosexual — but also because she’s refreshingly direct in interviews, even as she thwarts the attempts of journalists to dig into her personal life. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, check out this article from eight years ago, when she was newly Oscar-nominated for her performance in Tumbleweeds. Tell me, with her ball gown misery and childhood fights with her parents about feminism, is she not a woman after your own heart?
Related links: You can read more about this production of Sense and Sensibility at the PBS website, and find interviews with cast members at the BBC’s website. And if you don’t have access to Portrait of a Marriage on DVD, you can view it in installments on YouTube for the time being.
