Americanized Vs. Sanitized

With “Queer as Folk,” the Brits have something to lord over their prudish American neighbors: A popular television series that really deals with gay themes.

So far, “Queer as Folk” has arrived overseas via the underground--screened at gay film festivals, auctioned online as bootlegged boxed sets, and discussed over upscale lunches by members of the entertainment industry. Lately, the word from the SUV crowd is that an American version of “Queer as Folk” will land at Showtime, sometime next year.

What awaits now--assuming the Showtime deal even goes through--will be a tougher journey. The one that would take “Queer as Folk” into mainstream American popular culture.

Those involved in selling the show here deem “Queer as Folk” not just a hot property but a consciousness-raising experience. These are people who are in the midst of selling the show to America, but they do raise some valid issues. The series shows gay men having sex with other gay men. The series doesn’t ask its audience to like gay men, or to weep for gay men. There’s just a contemporary vibe, the wit and melodrama pulling in more than just gay viewers in Britain.

Are we ready, here in the States? Will we care? Television isn’t a medium normally willing to challenge the public on such issues. In fact, the transaction usually flows the opposite way: The public reacts, and TV follows. As it stands, “Queer as Folk” only exists here in the less tangible realms of potential and hype. But those who’ve seen it are impressed by how the series suggests a future in which writers don’t have to tip-toe around gay subject matter. And the reaction in Britain suggests that the series isn’t just pulling in a niche crowd--despite conventional wisdom that heterosexual viewers don’t want to delve into the real inner lives of gay characters.

“What’s interesting about ‘Queer as Folk’ is it jumps right past the border patrol that, basically, the American entertainment monolith sets up, which is for tolerance and acceptance [of gays],” says Richard Kramer, a writer-producer on the ABC drama “Once and Again.” Kramer has faced those preconceptions in creating some of this country’s groundbreaking gay-themed TV. He wrote the episode of the ABC drama “thirtysomething” in which two men were shown in bed--the only episode never repeated. And he adapted the first installment of “Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City,” which aired on PBS in 1994 and was based on Maupin’s stories, first serialized in the San Francisco Chronicle, about the goings-on at a boarding house occupied by a gay tenant and his transsexual landlord in 1970s San Francisco.

Maupin himself hasn’t seen “Queer as Folk.” But he feels strongly that sexual honesty should be displayed.

“There are some very solid reasons for this kind of honesty, not the least of which is the violent homophobia that rages in this country. It was easy for the killers of Matthew Shepard to demonize him, because they’d never been exposed to male romantic love.”

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Since causing a sensation in England, interest in an American TV version of “Queer as Folk” has mostly traveled between two competing pay cable networks, HBO and Showtime, with Showtime now near a deal with Britain’s Channel Four to adapt the series for American audiences, according to sources. Showtime refused to comment. But film director Joel Schumacher (“Batman Forever,” “8mm”) is already attached to direct a two-hour pilot, with plans said to be in the works to then launch “Queer as Folk” as a series.

For Showtime, which is trying to emerge from the large shadow cast by HBO’s acclaimed lineup of original series (“The Sopranos” “Oz,” “Sex and the City,”), “Queer as Folk” would appear to be a good bet--or at the very least a chance to provoke the sort of media tempest pay cable channels need to attract subscribers. And “Queer as Folk” promises a tempest; in the series’ first episode, protagonist Stuart--29, miserable and burying that misery in endless sexual conquests--begins an affair with Nathan, a 15-year-old schoolboy, similarly angry and similarly ruled by his own insatiable sexuality.

Prompted by such taboo-busting territory, critics in England have decried the series as pornographic, its sex scenes more about shock value than character development. The critics ranged from conservative government officials to “boneheaded, politically correct gay political fossils,” as Russell T. Davies, the show’s creator, referred to his gay critics in an article on “Queer as Folk” in the Advocate.

Fans of the show, meanwhile, point to its dark wit and to the refreshingly unsympathetic nature of the characters, who chat away in self-involved bursts on their cell phones and greet the drug overdose of a friend with little apparent emotion or empathy. One bloke, Vince, works at a supermarket and complains about his life. His best friend Stuart has fathered a child for a lesbian couple. Stuart shags a lot, Vince doesn’t so much, though he’d like to be shagging Stuart. Meanwhile, Nathan, 15, also wants to shag Stuart, but runs away from home to live with Vince’s parents.

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Watch “Queer as Folk” and what emerges is not an exploitative exercise, say the show’s defenders, but the disarmingly bright voice of Davies, who refuses to absolve his gay characters by making them either virtuous or wooden victims of a homophobic culture at large.

“It brought gay life to the screen in a way you hadn’t seen before,” says Gub Neal, head of drama for England’s Channel Four. “One of the things it was saying about gay life is: We don’t have to give you a story about AIDS or gay victimization in order to give you a story about gay people.”

The show’s contemporary approach, in the end, may be the most daring aspect of “Queer as Folk,” particularly in the United States, where gay characters on television and at the movies are most often likable--accepted as queeny clowns or courageous martyr figures--but are rarely glimpsed with anything resembling an unfiltered point of view. Showtime itself has one such tolerance-promoting movie premiering next week--”Execution of Justice,” starring Peter Coyote as Harvey Milk, the openly gay San Francisco supervisor who was murdered in 1978.

“Tolerance and acceptance are never interesting points or subjects for drama,” Kramer says. “That’s the most interesting thing about ‘Queer as Folk.’ It presupposes that tolerance and acceptance were achieved a long time ago.”

Showtime, with its bold advertising slogan of “No Limits,” could use a high-profile, lively argument about whether one of its products is merely gratuitous or achieves a sheen of social relevance and high art. Thus far, the network--with 11.2 million subscribers as of June ‘99, not quite half of HBO’s subscriber base of 23.9 million, according to Paul Kagan Associates--has failed to launch an original series into the pop culture imagination. Two of the network’s more written-about offerings have scratched that surface--Adrian Lyne’s racy remake of “Lolita,” which aired on Showtime last year after failing to get domestic theatrical distribution, and 1997’s “Armistead Maupin’s More Tales of the City,” which Showtime rescued after PBS withdrew funding for the sequel.

“To be fair, in picking this up, Showtime is saying, ‘We like its explicitness; we like its not being censored.’ We’re very keen that they’re up for that,” says Neal. From 1984 to 1989, Showtime did air the comedy series “Brothers,” groundbreaking in that one of the brothers was openly gay. But at the time, Showtime’s presence was so minimal that the series was largely overlooked by mainstream culture.

Running alongside any political fallout Showtime might pick up from adapting “Queer as Folk” is a different question, however: Is there a big enough audience for a political fallout in the first place, given the sketchy history of British shows adapted for American TV?

In England, where “Queer as Folk” achieved acclaim and popularity in its three-month run earlier this year, ratings were good, if not astounding. The No. 2 series on Channel Four after “ER,” “Queer as Folk” averaged roughly 2 million viewers and ranked 11th overall in British shows.

Channel Four’s Neal, extolling the drama’s success, says that in order for “Queer as Folk” to catch on in the U.S. market, it will have to establish a presence on the air.

“It’s more likely to have a long-running political impact if it’s running for several years.”

But some wonder whether Showtime--or any U.S. outlet, for that matter--can remain committed to honoring the spirit and courage of a series that doesn’t blink at its gay stories. “Queer as Folk” succeeded in Britain, but it is a country seemingly less queasy about sex--or at least sex on TV. Consider that “Sex and the City,” which airs on pay cable here, airs unedited on broadcast TV in England.

Darren Starr, creator and executive producer of “Sex and the City,” says that what his show and “Queer as Folk” have in common is “they’re both about being honest and truthful.” But Starr concedes that there’s a double standard--one that sanctions the depiction of heterosexual sex but deems gay sex off-limits.

“It’s a gay show, it’s explicit, it has a lot of nudity and gay sex, and yet I feel it’s completely true to the lives those men are leading on the show,” Starr says. “That’s the key.”

Perhaps, but one source connected to the “Queer as Folk” negotiations fears the series’ subject matter could make officials at Showtime’s parent company, Viacom, nervous. Others don’t see much hope that an American TV series, even on a pay cable channel, would depict a consensual sexual relationship between a 29-year-old man and a 15-year-old boy. Bolstering the skeptics are several discussions initiated last summer between Showtime and the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation.

“There was no easy answer to the question, ‘Will this anger the gay community?’ ” says Scott Seomin, GLAAD’s media director, adding that GLAAD did recommend changing Nathan’s age from 15 to 18. “When it comes down to it, that’s an illegal act. It’s statutory rape. Gay men since forever have been linked by the religious right and other groups [to] pedophilia.”

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While Showtime declined to comment for this article, other parties involved in the production are talking, including Schumacher, who became an unabashed fan of the series after it was recommended to him by Hollywood mega-producer Scott Rudin. No writer or actors are yet officially attached, but Schumacher says he plans to start shooting this spring, using a cast of unknowns and transporting the setting from Manchester, England, to New Jersey, determined not to rob the series of its working-class setting.

“I’m going to do this pretty rough, hand-held on the streets of New Jersey,” said Schumacher, whose last film, “8mm,” was a thriller revolving around the discovery of a snuff film. “It’s better if you shoot it with the [attitude] of going where no man’s gone before and then you cut back. Because if you try to second-guess yourself, you end up with vanilla.”

But asked if he expected to get a free rein from Showtime, Schumacher added: “I keep seeing these [Showtime] billboards saying no limits, no limits, no limits. And I’m wondering how I’m going to react when the limits come.”

Some who’ve seen the series wonder why it needs to be noodled with at all--why a U.S. cable channel wouldn’t merely buy “Queer as Folk” and air it, as has been done by several countries in Europe. But Davies had never planned to turn “Queer as Folk” into a long-running series. And the show’s creator can see more inherent value in an American adaptation.

“Friends of mine are saying it could be a disaster, but no one allows for the fact that it could be better. I’m not prepared to join in the chorus that these cross-channel productions never work. We feel we’ve made it once, and we want them to do whatever they want with it. The only way to keep it alive is for them to find out for themselves.”