Gay-Oriented TV Soap: More Hot Air Than Air Time? : Media: While hype has made “Secret Passions” a center of controversy, the fact is that not one episode is finished and no one has agreed to show the series when (or if) it is completed.

Religious fundamentalists are railing, Hollywood producers are said to be drooling and reporters nationwide are groveling over “Secret Passions,” a gay-oriented soap opera under production in Orange County.

Media including the Associated Press, TV Guide, Daily Variety and three Southland television stations have pounced on the story almost as if Zsa Zsa Gabor had hit again. Promises of homosexual bedroom scenes and kissing have appeared in seemingly endless press reports--alongside condemnations by such stridently anti-gay conservatives as Anaheim’s own Rev. Louis P. Sheldon.

But as Gertrude Stein might have said, is there really a there there?

With less than three weeks left before the soap’s scheduled debut, “Secret Passions” producer David Gadberry still doesn’t have a single episode in the can. He plans to premiere the program Tuesday, Jan. 23, on cable television public-access channels nationwide, but as of Wednesday he couldn’t name a single channel that has contracted to show it.

Gadberry isn’t worried, however. He insists that he’ll have the show’s pilot ready to submit to cable stations by Jan. 15--more than enough time to make the show date deadline. Future episodes, he says, can follow quickly, now that actors, technicians and equipment are in place. He says he’ll send the shows to cable operators in at least seven cities and counties--including New York, Cincinnati, Denver, San Francisco and Orange County--all of whom already have some sort of gay programming.

As of Wednesday, he hadn’t firmed up any deals with these operators. But Gadberry says many of them expressed interest when he spoke to them in September, before taping had begun. Plus, he notes that public-access cable operators generally are legally bound to broadcast any non-commercial program they have the time for.

Butch Peaston, who has produced a gay-oriented news magazine for the Manhattan and Paragon cable systems in New York City for three years, said this week that although he wants to see the show before making any commitments, he does want to run “Secret Passions” and that, as Gadberry indicated, he doesn’t need to see the pilot more than a day or two before he airs it.

Gadberry is further convinced that the moment “Secret Passions” premieres, Hollywood will come calling, rescuing it from the unprofitable perils of non-commerical television.

He claims that “upper level” Hollywood executives (whom he won’t name) want to help him make the soap a commercial success on a cable network such as Showtime, or perhaps through home video distribution.

One top cable executive seems dubious (see related story). But maybe the show will fly, maybe the time is right for Chaz, the series’s “gay J.R. (Ewing)” and for what Gadberry claims will be “a realistic portrayal of the gay life style.” All this remains to be seen. But meanwhile, here is the unusual story of how a homemade cable television show made headlines from Los Angeles to London before anyone had ever seen it.

In July of 1988, Gadberry, who had been producing and writing homosexually oriented plays for four years, got the idea for a gay-based soap opera. Gadberry (who won’t give his age except to say he is in his 20s) had just broken up with his 18-year-old boyfriend.

“Back when I was coming out of the closet, I never had a positive role model to go by,” says Gadberry. He hopes the soap will solve that problem for other homosexuals. (Gadberry lives in Orange County but declined to name the town, asserting that he has received death threats since news of “Secret Passions” began to circulate.)

Over the next several months, Gadberry wrote an outline for the soap and started to assemble a volunteer cast and crew. In February, 1989, he placed an ad in a gay magazine to solicit writers, and lined up several including Gary Eilps, who Gadberry says worked on “The Courtship of Eddie’s Father.” They spent about 10 weeks drafting a the basic outline for the show’s first year. Then they began to write the first episode.

By September, the pilot script was complete. About the same time, Steve Wilber, then directing a play of Gadberry’s called “The Dream Machine” at Illusion’s New View Theatre in Brea, jumped aboard. Wilbur, who heads the Orange County Coalition of the Theater Arts, an alternative theater, shared Gadberry’s goal that the soap opera, in Gadberry’s words, “promote better understanding and build ties between the gay and non-gay community.”

By early November, Gadberry reported drawing a horde of 300 actors, resumes in hand, through a recruitment ad in a Hollywood trade magazine. After auditioning about 250 people over five days, he amassed a cast of 27 men and women.

By mid-November, taping of the first episode had started in various locations around Orange County.

On Nov. 21, an Orange County newspaper carried a story about the show and, Gadberry says, “it’s been hell ever since.” As so often happens, press spawned press: Soon after the article appeared, Gadberry was interviewed by scores of other journalists about the fictional Orange County town of Orange Grove, home to handsome, powerful Chaz; June Tshwaila, the brazen black lesbian running for City Council; and the hellfire-and-brimstone Rev. Arthur Dimsdale, who warns that homosexuals--”these perverts, these sodomites”--will “recruit” the town’s innocent children.

The media got real live religious fundamentalists to vent their anger over the show, too. Anaheim’s Rev. Sheldon, an outspoken foe of homosexuality, said he would watch the program (once it’s finished) to determine whether to take any action against it.

Many media organizations, including TV Guide and television stations KNBC (Channel 4), KABC (Channel 7) and KTTV (Channel 11), reported flatly that the soap would air in January. When Daily Variety, a top Hollywood trade magazine, also ran the “Secret Passions” story, Gadberry “started getting calls,” he says, “from Hollywood people, people in upper levels in different studios” who praised the show (in concept) as one whose time has come.

Gadberry says he meets with these callers (whom he won’t identify because he says they “fear repercussions” for supporting homosexuality) and shows them a promotional tape featuring three short scenes from the show’s pilot. There have been no offers yet, Gadberry concedes, but he insists that these Hollywood folk are “going to help market the show,” the moment it premieres, to commercial cable networks or perhaps to public TV or for home distribution through video rentals.

Even if these connections fall through, “I have every confidence that we’ll be getting offers from cable TV networks like Showtime,” Gadberry says. “That’s what everyone thinks, everyone in our cast and the people in Hollywood I’ve talked to. My feeling is this is a project they’ve been waiting for and (they) want to see it fly.”

He added that he has received phone calls from people across the country who have read about the show and want to lend their moral support. “Some guy called and said, ‘We’re rooting for you, we love what you’re doing, we thank you for doing this for the community.’

“This has been the most grueling year or so of my life,” said Gadberry. “We came close to shutting down production on a number occasions, just because of exhaustion. But when I get calls from someone who has been trying to track me down for two weeks, just to say thank you, it makes me want to go even stronger with this project.”

Gadberry says he didn’t set out to exploit (cynics might say to manipulate) the media, or even to go Hollywood, but he will not deny that events have gone his way.

“I had a dream to do things on a small scale, just on public access, but it took a life of its own,” he said. “And whenever the press came out, my cameraman said, ‘Oh, the big picture, the movies, Showtime, etc.’ I said, ‘Shut up, let’s just get in on public access.’ But then I started getting calls from these high-level Hollywood people and that’s when my eyes opened up and realized, my God, this is a big project.

“So I have every confidence and drive to push this project as far as it can go, or until it kills me.”