Queer Eye for Straight TV

[Sylph]

Monday, Mar. 07, 2005

Queer Eye for Straight TV

By James Poniewozik

This is a tale of two elections. In November, 11 states considered ballot measures banning gay marriage. All 11 passed. There was also an election, of sorts, in January: the Golden Globe Awards. The TV awards for Best Comedy and Best Drama went, respectively, to ABC's suburban mystery Desperate Housewives and FX's plastic-surgery saga Nip/Tuck. The former is the highest-rated new series of the TV season; the latter, one of the highest-rated dramas on basic cable. Both are water-cooler shows about love, sex, fidelity and lies, mainly among heterosexual men and women.

And both were created by gay men.

A curious thing is going on in the U.S. Even as the nation is writing gays out of the definition of its most exalted relationship, gay writers--like Housewives creator Marc Cherry and Nip/Tuck creator Ryan Murphy--are behind the TV shows that are most provocatively defining straight relationships. HBO's Six Feet Under, the multilayered story of the lives and loves of a family that runs a funeral home, sprang from the mind of gay screenwriter Alan Ball (American Beauty). Before it, HBO's Sex and the City, which set the standard for frank talk about women and love, was created by Darren Star and later run by Michael Patrick King, both gay. (Later this year, King debuts The Comeback, an HBO sitcom starring Lisa Kudrow as an actress trying to revive her career.)

Is all this coincidence? Gay TV writers will tell you that relationships are universal. (If they talk at all. King, Murphy and Star declined to be interviewed for this article.) They have good reasons for saying so. Gay writers run the risk of being labeled as, well, gay writers, and the idea of a gay sensibility conjures a monolithic image of campy queens quoting from What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?

In fact, these series represent a wide range of voices (as do more overtly gay-themed shows, from NBC's Will & Grace to Showtime's The L Word and Queer as Folk). Housewives is cartoony and parodic, Nip/Tuck slick and urbane, Six Feet Under moody and cerebral. "I don't think you could say they were all told from a specific perspective that comes from being gay," says ABC prime-time-entertainment president Stephen McPherson. "But if being gay makes you that talented, I'm going gay." In art, one could argue, sexual orientation shouldn't matter.

In life, though, it does. (See those November results, above.) If these gay writers are inclined to think creatively about love and identity, maybe it's because they didn't have the option of accepting the standard assumptions. Growing up gay, says Six Feet Under creator Alan Ball, "you have a pretty deeply ingrained sense of being an outsider. You don't swallow the mythology of pop culture hook, line and sinker because you know it's not true, for you, anyway."

Among the Fisher family members on Six Feet Under, which returns for its fifth season this summer, only one, David (Michael C. Hall), is gay. (College-age Claire, played by Lauren Ambrose, has had flings with men and women.) But all, in a way, have been engaged in coming out. The funeral business they run is about the tidy management of emotions, and the repressed Fishers are continually struggling to open up to the people closest to them. Likewise, Housewives is rooted in mystery and enough lies to fill a three-car garage. "I certainly understand the nature of secrets," says Cherry. "If you grow up gay, you meet people and go on dates and find out the men are married. I'm conservative enough to be appalled. Secrets upon secrets upon secrets."

Truth and lies are unavoidable themes in the lives of gays, say Will & Grace co-creators Max Mutchnick and David Kohan. "The first 'real' moment for a gay man is when he comes out of the closet," says Mutchnick, who is gay. He says gays may have a special sensitivity to these issues "because in order to move forward, you have to live and tell the truth."

Bound up with lies and truth is a sensitivity to ambiguity in a world of black-and-white dualities: boy and girl, straight and gay. Nip/Tuck is literally about the idea that the flesh can tell lies, that identity is malleable, that a person is more than what is written on his or her anatomy. It also has an uncanny sensitivity for the stormy, complex relationship--like a platonic marriage--between the straight-male leads Christian (Julian McMahon) and Sean (Dylan Walsh). When Sean discovers, for instance, that Christian had an affair with Sean's wife and is the real father of his son, he tells his friend, heartbroken, "I loved you the most."

Ball's, Cherry's and Murphy's dramas are often compared to soap operas, which can often be code for "too girly." Says Cherry, whose writing staff has five gays and six straights: "We push the boundaries in our lives by being gay. When we write, we are perfectly willing to write extreme behavior." Ilene Chaiken, the lesbian writer and creator of The L Word, theorizes that gay men and women inevitably experience love as heightened drama. "One of the things that always make for a great love story is the obstacles," she says. "These writers are bringing to these stories not only their experiences of illicit love but enough illicitness to make the stories more exciting and infuse them with passion and intensity."

That passion, curiously, is expressed in each show through strong women. A gay man, says Ball, can see men through a straight woman's eyes--"We understand how weird men are"--but he believes he can also view women with greater detachment. "Once you remove the illusory screen of romantic projection, there is a person," he says, "and it's easier for a gay man to see the person in a female character." And, says Showtime entertainment president Robert Greenblatt, gay writers are more inclined to think about gender roles and stereotypes. "Straight men don't think about gender," he says. "Why should they? They're in the dominant position." (Of course, it's worth noting that the male perspective, straight or gay, is much more common on TV than that of women, who still create far fewer prime-time shows.)

Housewives' suburban hotties, like Sex and the City's urban ones, are unabashed straight stereotypes: the frazzled mom, the girl next door, the spicy Latina, the uptight homemaker. But, notes Paul Colichman, co-founder and CEO of Here! TV, a gay and lesbian premium channel, "Gay men have always loved sexy, ultrafeminine, exaggerated women like Marilyn Monroe. The women in Desperate Housewives are caricatures and larger than life. That's why it works."

There's an old tradition of gay writers (not to mention actors) expressing themselves through straight characters. Gay audiences saw themselves reflected in vivid women like Blanche DuBois in Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire. TV and movie writers created themes and characters that were palatable to straight audiences but tripped the gaydar of knowing viewers--say, Paul Lynde's queeny Uncle Arthur on Bewitched. (In advertising, such dual signals are called gay vague.) Even Sex and the City, with its witty, sexually assertive women, was reminiscent of the old maxim "Write gay, cast straight."

Shows like Cherry's, Murphy's and Ball's are not about sending coded messages from the closet to the living room. Yes, there are still barriers to gays on TV--Survivor last fall edited a kiss between two women. But Ball and Murphy work in cable, where they could create gay characters--and have. Even on network TV, Housewives recently had Susan (Teri Hatcher) stumbling across the teenage son of Bree (Marcia Cross) smooching another guy at a pool party. When he comes out to Bree in a later episode, she says, "Well, I'd love you even if you were a murderer"--the precise response, Cherry says, that his mother gave when he came out at age 31.

Mostly, though, these writers are asserting their right to be gay yet to write straight. Which raises the question, Couldn't straight men or women have created these shows? Probably. But they didn't. Instead, these writers have taken the idea of a gay sensibility beyond the old campy, fey stereotypes. Their shows have the subtler sensibility defined by gay film historian Vito Russo in The Celluloid Closet, his study of the influence of gays on the movies: "A natural conviction that difference exists but doesn't matter, that there's no such thing as normal even when a majority of people think so."

This is a conviction you don't have to be gay to share. Whether set in an operating room or a funeral home, a leafy suburb or glittery Manhattan, these shows question our easy ideas of normality. They argue that knowing yourself can take a lifetime. And they tell us that truth is an essential part of life and art--but one that cannot always be told straight.

-Reported by Jeanne McDowell/ Los Angeles

With reporting by Jeanne McDowell/ Los Angeles

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