As Minorities’ TV Presence Dims, Gay Roles Proliferate

On the surface, it looks like a prime-time civil rights movement: In the fall television season, there will be 17 gay characters on the four major networks, about the same as the number of black, Asian and Latino characters combined.

This marks a change in television’s social barometer from a couple of seasons ago. Back then, ABC was digging out from the avalanche of questions about the sitcom “Ellen” as star Ellen DeGeneres came out as a lesbian both on- and off-screen, and Fox was agonizing over a gay character on “Melrose Place.”

Indeed the demise of “Ellen” is proving to be little more than a blip in the continuing integration of gays into prime-time shows--a trend that stands in stark contrast to the situation for ethnic minorities, whose near-total absence from new prime-time shows has made this a testy summer to be a network programmer. Why the breakthrough for gays? Explanations range from the idealistic (increased tolerance in society toward gays and lesbians) to the more jaded (gay characters make for trendy additions to ensemble shows).

Others put it more bluntly: There are gays on television because there are gays in television. Unlike Latinos, blacks and Asian Americans, gay people are fully integrated into the Hollywood power structure. They hold jobs from the upper ranks to the lower reaches of the industry, in much the way Jews have traditionally occupied a disproportionate number of positions in the entertainment business.

“You couldn’t do better than grow up Jewish and gay if you want to be in show business,” says Don Roos, a longtime TV and movie writer in Los Angeles. “And you couldn’t do worse if you [grew up] black and Protestant.”

At the same time, resistance to gay characters from advertisers and even advocacy groups is dissipating.

Today, gay characters are fairly accepted by advertisers across the board, says Paul Schulman, head of the agency Schulman/Advansers New York, one of the largest buyers of advertising time, with a client list of companies that reflect and market to mainstream America.

“People just became used to seeing it. I don’t think it’s a taboo the way it was a couple years back,” says Schulman, adding that he has no clients who shy away from shows with gay characters. “The heat is pretty much off.”

Last season alone, a character on a popular teen drama (the WB’s “Dawson’s Creek”) came out of the closet, while on another WB show, “Felicity,” the title character contemplated marrying her gay boss to help him with his immigration problems. And when the dust settled, the season’s most promising new comedy was NBC’s “Will & Grace”--a show that features two “out” characters, self-contained yuppie Will Truman and his alter ego, the walking gay id Jack.

Gay characters on TV and the story lines surrounding them are also richer and more complex than before, says writer-producer David Crane. His production company, Bright-Kauffman-Crane, has three sitcoms on NBC--”Friends,” “Jesse” and “Veronica’s Closet”--all of which usually land on TV’s weekly list of the 20 most-watched shows. “Friends” introduced gay characters and story lines in its first season as Ross (David Schwimmer) coped with his wife leaving him for her lesbian lover.

“You saw gay characters [25 years ago] on ‘All in the Family,’ but there, the sheer fact that they were gay was the story,” adds Crane. “What you’re seeing on TV now is something closer to real life.”

The visibility of gay characters has emerged so fast that the American Family Assn., a leading Christian lobbying group that targets TV shows it finds objectionable for advertiser boycotts and protests, no longer focuses its efforts on gay-themed TV, says Vice President Tim Wildmon. In effect, he says, the battle has been lost, although the conservative watchdog group Parents Television Council did name “Will & Grace” among the shows it considers the most offensive.

“I think there’s been a conscious effort to mainstream homosexuality,” Wildmon says. Speaking of the writer-producers who put gay characters in their shows, he adds: “If they’re not homosexuals themselves, they’re homosexual sympathizers. That’s one of the issues that needs to be talked about.”

Trend May Result From Economic Expediency

Within prime-time TV’s cast of gay characters, however, there is little diversity. They are usually good-looking white males--window dressing for the youth market of 18- to 34-year-old viewers whom networks and advertisers covet. Seen in that context, the growth in gay characters is less a reflection of progressive politics among the networks than economic expediency, with gay characters perceived as yet another shortcut to hard-to-reach viewers.

One network president who asked not to be identified conceded that gay viewers are regarded as a key component of the young, upwardly mobile audience that networks are wooing at the expense of other minority groups. Such courting of gay dollars by corporate America is a trend seen recently in advertising, in which Absolut, Miller Brewing Co. and IBM have put together ad campaigns directed solely at the gay marketplace.

But Grant Lukenbill, author of the book “Untold Millions,” which helps companies navigate the multibillion-dollar gay consumer marketplace, cautions against the assumption that gays and lesbians are by definition part of an upscale viewership.

“Being gay in and of itself is not tantamount to an affluent lifestyle,” he says, adding that gays in smaller markets and rural communities tend to be left out of many socioeconomic profiles.

Nielsen Media Research doesn’t measure gay viewing patterns for privacy reasons, says Stacey Lynn Koerner, vice president of broadcast research at TN Media. As a result, she says, gays “tend to be a much more invisible segment of the population.” Moreover, she says, “they are much more difficult to stereotype in terms of socioeconomic factors.”

A Parallel to Women Coming Out of Kitchen

Gay characters have been coming out of the closet in much the way women came out of the kitchen before them. The image evolution that took TV viewers from June Cleaver (devoted housewife) to Mary Richards (working woman) and Murphy Brown (working woman/unapologetic single mom) is also occurring among gay and lesbian characters.

If Jodie Dallas, the character played by comic Billy Crystal on the ABC sitcom “Soap,” seemed daring in 1977, he would hardly provoke notice today. And whereas Steven Carrington, the gay son in the 1980s drama “Dynasty,” was brooding and self-doubting about his sexuality, the conflicted gay character is today a somewhat archaic figure.

On the upcoming fall television schedule, gay characters are visible in both dramas and sitcoms, and a Fox show called “Action,” a dark comedy about the entertainment business, features a high-level movie studio executive who is gay.

Inside the executive suites and writers rooms, this doesn’t even qualify as a winking inside joke. For unlike ethnic minorities, gays are common in upper-level network and studio management and on show staffs--so much a part of the mainstream of the industry that the Hollywood trade paper Daily Variety prints birth announcements for same-sex couples.

And though they’re loath to be lumped together as a group, the fact remains that some of the more powerful writer/producers in television are openly gay--including Crane, Kevin Williamson (“Dawson’s Creek” and “Wasteland”) and Max Mutchnick (“Will & Grace”).

“Do I think there’s a gay mafia?” asks Roos, who is gay. “In a funny way, it’s the best thing a person can be in show business. It’s one of the industries in America that has a disproportionate number of gay people in it.”

And so, although networks have failed in their stated goal of reflecting the multicultural face of America, putting on shows that feature gays and lesbians is a process far more native to their interests and makeup.

“People [in the industry] are realizing: As a gay person [in] a position to put a character on the air, if I don’t do it, no one will,” says Scott Seomin, media director of the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation.

Alan Ball, whose new ABC comedy “Oh Grow Up” features a gay character who leaves his wife, says that when he was staffing his show, “a lot of the writers I interviewed, their sister’s gay, their uncle’s gay, their best friend from college just came out of the closet. It’s just there.”

This is not to say that executives are freely out of the closet and that writers work without constraints, creating fully realized gay characters without fear of reprisal from the network or advertisers. Executives still routinely live semi-closeted lives, and Joe Voci, who produces series with Mandalay Television, notes that although there are gay characters on TV, gay-themed shows--with the exception of “Will & Grace”--are still nonexistent.

“For the first time, we have some leading characters who are gay, but in terms of representing the population, I think we’re still way behind,” says CBS Television President Leslie Moonves.

Still, there are lessons to be drawn from history. As shows become too narrowly focused, mainstream viewers often stop watching. The WB’s black-themed shows, for example, are drawing few white or Latino viewers. “The Steve Harvey Show,” ranked first among African American viewers, according to fall 1998 Nielsen figures, was 69th among Latinos and 127th among whites.

The success of “Will & Grace” raised concerns at NBC that a rash of clones would follow. According to Crane, the network put out the word to producers to lay off the gay themes for a while.

“ ‘Tonnage’ is the word they would use,” says Crane, who experienced the issue firsthand recently, when the “Veronica’s Closet” writers were toying with the idea of having one of the main characters on the show, Josh (Wallace Langham), come out of the closet himself. Ultimately, Crane says, the producers decided that they could mine more humor out of the character’s sexual ambiguity. But all the while the message from NBC had less to do with character development than character tonnage. As in: Keep him in the closet; we’ve already got “Will & Grace.”

Some in the industry see the sheer numbers of gay characters in prime time as more a reflection of bad, copycat writing than increased tolerance, since so many of the characters, particularly in sitcoms, still function as one-note comedic buttons, on hand to provide a laugh or two. That may be because mainstream viewers aren’t ready for anything more.

Tim Doyle was the executive producer on “Ellen” during and after the season in which DeGeneres came out as a lesbian. That event drew 36 million viewers, but the sitcom’s audience subsequently dwindled and the show was canceled soon thereafter--touching off a referendum on whether the problem was DeGeneres’ allegedly strident tone or a network not brave enough to withstand the slings and arrows of right-wing protests.

“I just feel like, post-’Ellen,’ we’ve relegated gay characters to comic types,” says Doyle. “They’re just like any other oversimplified thing on television. . . . To me, it feels roughly comparable to what all the minority groups on television are experiencing.”

‘Gay Sensibility’ Seen in Sitcom Scripts

Some in television feel that a “gay sensibility” has emerged as a strong voice in sitcoms. Many in the industry describe it as the banter you hear on countless shows--playful, catty, sophisticated.

Roos’ 1998 film, “The Opposite of Sex,” was full of cutting humor about gay life. Now, he is developing a sitcom for NBC titled “MYOB,” about a 16-year-old girl searching for her biological mother. Though the topic echoes his film’s, Roos says that none of the regular characters on “MYOB” will be gay and that the reason is simple: Network television is too restrictive an environment to say anything profound about gay life.

Instead, Roos says, he’ll use his voice more surreptitiously--turning his 16-year-old character into “Eve Arden, after midnight, when she’s sour and mean and out of cigarettes.” By infusing his character with the sensibility of a 45-year-old gay man, Roos is only following a well-traveled creative path for gay writers.

Thus it may come as no surprise that the witty patter on “Frasier” is scripted by some of the top gay writers in the TV business, including David Lee and Joe Keenan. And TV mega-producer Aaron Spelling used gay and lesbian writers on his popular 1980s dramas such as “Hart to Hart” and “Dynasty,” says Roos, who worked on two Spelling shows.

But Crane, co-creator of “Friends,” cautions against using the gay sensibility theory too sweepingly. “I don’t think the fact that I’m gay informs everything that I want to write,” he says. “I’m also Jewish; I’m also the product of divorce.”

For all the gains that gays have made, most in the industry believe it is too soon to say that they have arrived on prime-time--or that they will be allowed to reside there indefinitely.

In the past, the pressure point lay in the largely untold stories of gay romantic life. ABC lost nearly $1 million in advertising in 1990 when two men were shown in bed together on the drama “thirtysomething,” and the episode was never repeated. Two women kissing on “Roseanne”also created a minor furor.

The doors--when it comes to the bedroom--remain closed for gays. Where does that leave gays on prime time’s minority continuum?

“You’re never gonna have a show on [network TV] about the life and loves of a gay man,” says Roos.

He looks out over the landscape of new shows and adds: “What we have now is a very politically correct kind of left-wing” attitude toward gays on television, where the message, in essence, boils down to this: “Gays are nonthreatening, and we should be nice to them, as we should be nice to someone with a cane.”

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Times staff writers Elizabeth Jensen and Greg Braxton contributed to this story.

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* TV NETWORKS TARGETED: Coalition mounts a campaign against the major TV networks over lack * TV NETWORKS TARGETED: Coalition mounts a campaign against the major TV networks over lack of minority roles. F3

* TV NETWORKS TARGETED

Coalition mounts a campaign against the major TV networks over lack of minority roles. F3

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How It Plays in the Heartland

The percentage of people watching television in selected markets who tuned in to “Will & Grace” in May, a key ratings month in which networks determine their advertising rates. The show is about a woman who rooms with a gay man.

Share of viewing audience, age 18-49

Peoria-Bloomington, Ill.: 39%

Minneapolis-St. Paul: 39

Salt Lake City: 36

Topeka, Kan.: 32

Des Moines: 30

National average: 27

San Francisco: 27

New York: 26

Chicago: 25

Los Angeles: 24

Source: Nielsen Media Research