The Thin Line Between . . . FEAR and HATE

Labeling grisly murder doesn’t alter its result. Thus, if Matthew Shepard was not the victim of a hate crime in Laramie, Wyo., that won’t soften the grief of his parents and friends, nor make him any less dead or his attackers any less ignorant or vile.

Yet if his open homosexuality is what pushed their buttons, then in a strange, macabre way, his death may signal more progress--albeit costly--in gays and lesbians being accepted into the fellowship of society’s mainstream.

A contradiction? Perhaps not.

It may be true, as some are saying, that anti-gay extremists have come to believe they have the moral authority to brutalize homosexuals based on the love-the-sinner/hate-the-sin rhetoric mouthed by stalwarts of the religious right. Above all, however, homophobia is driven by fear. And it’s when violence-prone bigots believe they are losing and that homosexuality is closing in on them that their fear is exacerbated and panic sets in, pushing them to strike out in desperation.

And losing they are, the pop-culture revolution washing over them now reflected in the growing number of prominent gay themes and characters in mainstream movies and TV series, notably NBC’s new comedy “Will & Grace.”

It’s Ellen DeGeneres’ former ABC sitcom, “Ellen,” though, that history will anoint as seminal when it comes to gays on TV, one as important in its own right as “All in the Family” or any other landmark you may want to cite.

DeGeneres has spoken about the outpouring of letters she’s received from gay youth encouraged and emboldened by her coming out as a lesbian and her urging for them to take pride in who they are. “At that level, she’s had a very direct impact with young people across the country,” said Rhona Berenstein, director of film studies at UC Irvine and a board member of the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation.

The impact is even wider, though.

There’s no evidence that Shepard’s accused murderers spent time in front of a TV set seething over “Ellen.” Jerry Springer seems more their style. Yet the whipped-up wrangling that greeted the DeGeneres show’s gay tilt in 1997 and 1998--as she and her protagonist, Ellen Morgan, outed themselves almost together--swelled into a shrill national debate that boomed stereophonically even with those who had never seen “Ellen.” From talk radio to talk TV, if you were in Wyoming or anywhere else in the United States, it was a subject you couldn’t escape.

Although beginning in 1994 as “These Friends of Mine,” a routine comedy about a straight single woman, “Ellen” went on to become prime time’s first series revolving around an openly gay character.

After a ratings surge when both DeGeneres and her “Ellen” character disclosed they were lesbian, the show’s audience numbers went south, driving a stake through its heart and making it all the easier for ABC and its parent, Disney, to escape the hot seat by dumping the series last spring.

That by itself might not have been as inflammatory if other factors hadn’t interceded.

Had DeGeneres matched the perception of lesbians as being typically macho, combat-booted, burly fireplugs with 15-inch biceps, many fewer angry protests would have been heard from the crowd that accused “Ellen” of having a “gay agenda.” (As if sexuality were ice cream and straight girls would tune in and want to be Ellen’s flavor.)

But she wasn’t Arnold Schwarzenegger in a bra. If she had been, as Berenstein points out, the show’s humor would have been largely about that instead of the “matters of the heart” that occupied Ellen Morgan’s final season.

Instead, she was someone infinitely more terrifying, at least to those fearful of gays. What daylight was to nocturnal Dracula, Ellen Morgan was to zealots who worked the stump depicting gays as demons. The mere sight of her made them shrink in terror.

The menace? She was ordinary, she was benign.

Ellen was lesbian with a biting, self-deprecating humor. Otherwise, she was tenaciously conventional, just another insecure face in the crowd, struggling to cope and find her way. Even after tiptoeing gingerly from the closet, she was no slickie when it came to romance or smoothing the wrinkles in a life full of common denominators that straight America could relate to.

It was her low-key normalcy--beamed week after week to some 12 million viewers even at the show’s lowest point--that terrified many of the “Ellen” critics who demanded it be pulled. And it was her attraction to other women, however timorously expressed, that outraged them.

There would have been fewer loud beefs, surely, had “Ellen” adhered to the sexually neutral course followed by TV’s newest sitcom with a gay leading character, the moderately popular “Will & Grace.” It has not drawn the ire of the anti-gay crowd, and no wonder.

Heterosexual Grace (Debra Messing) and gay Will (Eric McCormack) are housemates. He is masculine, in striking contrast to the flaming male stereotype that for years has been among comedy’s cheapest laughs. So let’s do hear it for diversity. In another way, though, “Will & Grace” and “Ellen” differ significantly.

Ellen Morgan acted on her long-latent sexual yearnings. She embraced, even kissed her girlfriend, something that ticked off a moralist slice of America that has been curiously mum this season about the record number of prime-time heterosexual sitcoms interwoven with sex themes.

In contrast, although Will’s prissy buddy, Jack (Sean Hayes), goes for guys, Will seems testosterone-challenged. Not that he should spend all his time humping or thinking about it, as some straight sitcom characters do. And not that “Will & Grace” isn’t pleasant enough the way it is. Yet as far as one can tell after watching three episodes, Will is gay in name only, the lone clear sign being that he is platonic with the luscious babe with whom he lives. So far, in fact, he’s outwardly attracted to no one.

Depictions on “Ellen” and Roseanne’s famous lesbian kiss on her own ABC sitcom notwithstanding, gay smooching--and perhaps even touching--are a step no network appears willing to take at the moment.

Some viewers rejected “Ellen” because they didn’t find it funny, others surely in anger over both her and her character being lesbian. What isn’t known is how many are wiser today because of exposure to her, and to what extent that tolerance evokes fear in some circles.

As Berenstein notes, we’re shaped by many factors, of which television is just one. Thus, she adds, “Ellen” could change minds for the better only as part of an overall climate for increased acceptance of diversity.

She is optimistic about TV getting ever smarter about gays. “It’s a moderate optimism,” she said. “Television is motivated by economics, not by good will or changing social mores. It won’t ever be a radical forum for social change. And it’s a problem to expect that of television.”

So be thankful for “Ellen” and other streaks of light, while mourning the loss of a Wyoming college student whose killers may have been terrified of what he was and the changes in America that he stood for.