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Kurt Andersen: This Sunday night, the Simpsons will debut an episode about Marge's sister Patty falling in love and marrying a pro golfer. The twist is that her new spouse is a woman.
You probably didn't know Patty Bouvier was a lesbian, but if you paid close attention in 1992, you could pick up on some little hints. Like in this episode where she spots Homer running naked across the kitchen.
CLIP FROM THE SIMPSONS:
PATTY: There goes the last lingering thread of my heterosexuality
KA: So we thought we'd take this opportunity to look back at some of TV's other portrayals of gay characters other the years. With me to talk about this is Paul Rudnick. Paul is a playwright and a screenwriter. He's written screenplays for In and Out, Jeffrey, and last year's remake of The Stepford Wives. Paul Rudnick, welcome to Studio 360.
PR: Thank you so much.
KA: Now when I was a kid, probably the first gay person on television I was aware of was the extremely flamboyant Paul Lynde. He was the kind of guy that everybody knew was gay, but still, back then nobody talked about it openly. We have a clip here from a '70's game show called, ironically enough, "I've Got a Secret." The host Steve Allen is asking Paul Lynde about his new sitcom.
CLIP FROM I'VE GOT A SECRET:
Steve Allen: Would you explain what the show is about?
Paul Lynde: Well, it's Ozzie and Harriet. (audience laughter)
Steve Allen: What do you play?
Paul Lynde: A father. (audience laughter) I know it's hard to believe. (laughter)
Steve Allen: Paul, if you whisper your secret to me… (laughter)
KA: Paul Rudnick when you saw people like Paul Lynde, or Charles Nelson Reilly on games shows and Bewitched, what did you think as a kid?
PR: Oh, I thought they were wonderful. I thought of them as complete role models. No I was also, until a fairly advanced age - maybe earlier this year - I thought that everyone was gay. I was so egocentric it didn't occur to me that there was anyone who was not like me; which was an insanely healthy way to grow up. So I was never dividing people into the conceivably gay and the conceivably straight. Paul Lynde and Liberace and Charles Nelson Reilly and Franklin Pangborn and all those guys seemed giddily happy, they seemed euphoric and that seemed admirable in many ways.
KA: Franklin Pangborn was the, "hellooooooooo!" guy, right?
PR: Sort of the Mr. Mooney of earlier film. They are men who seemed very sharp. Somehow whatever the gay caricature was, it was never dopey or out-of-it or ignorant in any way.
KA: And in control of the comedic moment, if it was a comedy.
PR: Oh, absolutely. And people who certainly had a total awareness of what the poor dim-witted heterosexual characters were up to.
KA: Certainly the modern watershed moment for openly gay characters on television came in 1997 on the sitcom Ellen, staring Ellen Degeneres. After being on the air and in the closet for three years, Ellen's character finally came out on the show, reluctantly at first, as we'll hear on this clip.
CLIP FROM ELLEN
Ellen: You thought I was gay? Why why would why would you think I was gay?
Laura Dern: Oh, I'm sorry. I just kind of got that vibe.
Ellen: Vibe? Like a gay vibe? Like I'm giving off some kind of gay vibration? GAY!
KA: Now that was a big deal at the time, she was on the cover of Time Magazine and all that. Did that seem like an actual important moment in the modern history of homosexual freedom?
PR: It was, in the sense that television personalities are the most overwhelmingly known and the most audience friendly people. Long before Ellen had come out, I think George Michael had come out, Elton John had come out, Rupert Evert. There were plenty of other open homosexuals in show business, but none of them were really that kind of in-your-living-room-every-week-sitcom-buddy. So I think that made an enormous difference. Also because she was one of the first openly gay women at that level of show business success. But I think also just the gay civil, I don't know if it's a civil rights movement, but the gay revolution has been moving by such leaps and bounds, especially in response to the AIDS crisis that demolished so many closet doors and allowed for a certain heterosexual sympathy. Not only could they then acknowledge gay lives, but they could feel…
KA: Give them a break.
PR: Exactly. Now things are a little trickier. But I think some of this red state backlash, some of this fury over gay marriage and Spongebob and Tinky-Winky may be a result of the speed at which the closet's been demolished.
KA: And we've seen that recently. You mentioned Spongebob, even more acutely in a way, just a couple of weeks ago when the Secretary of Education said that a PBS children's show called Postcards from Buster was inappropriate for PBS to distribute because, basically, it had a little story about tolerance about a lesbian couple.
CLIP FROM BUSTER:
Buster: So Gillian's your mom too?
Child: She's my step-mom.
Buster: Boy, that's a lot of moms!
Child: Yep. This is mom and Gillian right here.
Buster: That's a nice picture.
Child: This is one of my favorite pictures.
Buster: How come?
Child: Because it has my mom and Gillian, the people I love a lot and they mean a lot to me.
KA: It's oddly terrifying to hear that cartoon voice dealing with a normal kid but that aside, it's amazing to me that would be considered beyond the pale for PBS of all things.
PR: It's funny. You sort of expect that kind of behavior from the Jerry Falwells of the world, but some of the people at PBS really should be deeply ashamed of themselves because they gave statements as if saying, oh, they felt the audience and the children who enjoyed the show would be uncomfortable with this material. And what's odd, it's sort of that great tradition of American hypocrisy. I'm sure the people in those states who voted against gay marriage enjoy Queer Eye and love Will and Grace. I mean these are very highly rated shows and it's not just East Coast phenomenon because that would not be a large enough audience.
KA: Or Ellen which, for instance, is a hugely successful talk show.
PR: For the scrap-booking Middle West, that's Ellen's constituency. So there's a certain synapse between loving Ellen and acknowledging what Ellen does in her belly of retreat.
KA: I guess I would - it may be hypocrisy in some cases, but in many cases it may just be that one part of the mind hasn't caught up with the mind rather than a kind of -- the more perfidious, invidious thing we call hypocrisy.
PR: I'm always torn. There's a certain mindset that I can occasionally agree with, that underneath a level of tolerance there's still an awful lot of bubbling hatred; that there's a sense of, "Fine, but not in my backyard. Fine, but not with my son. Fine, as long as you don't want any of the privileges that my people enjoy." On the other hand, there may be this sort of lingering ignorance and this sense of, "Woah! Wait! We're going too far too fast." And that simply takes a little more time or maybe a couple of more generations to evaporate. It's really hard to tell because there was a certain sense that - okay, once everyone in America knew a gay person, that it would be that much harder to hate them. Now America tends to know a lot of gay people and there's still a lot of lingering fear or at least a sense of imperfect equality. You know, that maybe we can enjoy them and we can embrace them to a certain extent, but we can't really take that final step in saying, "they're just like us."
KA: And as we look forward in the next five or ten or twenty years, other than it coming to seem ever more normal - which I presume you would find desirable - are there place that Gay TV ought to go that would please you, that hasn't been done so far?
PR: Space. (Laughs) I think actually on all the Star Trek shows there are characters that are rumored to be gay, often the strange robot or inter-planetary characters. But it's interesting, sort of superheroes, although now in the comic book world there are actually a batch of gay superheroes, so the barriers are crumbling all over. It will be interesting to see what develops. It's funny, in the world of literature, in books like Kavalier and Clay, gay characters are now more than commonplace. In The Corrections, one of the main characters was a lesbian, so it just feels like that barn door has now been so removed from its hinges that gay characters will no longer be seen as just specialty items.
KA: Paul Rudnick, thank you very much for coming into Studio 360.
PR: Oh, my pleasure.
