Times Are A-Changing for Gay TV

The aberrant homophobic lifestyle is still practiced in some parts of the U.S.

You had those tumbleweeds in the Texas delegation, for example, bowing their heads in prayer when Arizona Rep. Jim Kolbe, the GOP’s only openly gay member of Congress, gave a short speech at the party’s recent national convention in Philadelphia.

It was just 2 1/2 years ago too that ABC, buckling under outside pressure, declined to air a “Nothing Sacred” episode about a gay priest with AIDS. And tiptoeing from the closet almost hand in hand was said to have cost gay Ellen DeGeneres and her character in the ABC comedy “Ellen” millions of viewers and a shot at renewal in 1998.

The late ‘90s also found a timid PBS bailing from the sequel of “Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City,” after airing the original gay-themed miniseries about a San Francisco boarding house with a transsexual landlord.

So much for pessimism.

In June, on a more enlightened front, KCET tied an evening of fund-raising to a pair of smart programs about gays. Imagine! Here are the gays, give us your cash.

All right, it was Gay Pride Month. Nonetheless, that strategic deployment of programs was a metaphor for increasing acceptance of gays into the TV mainstream, the most visible example being NBC’s popular sitcom “Will & Grace.”

Promising an even longer stride toward enlightenment is Showtime’s coming U.S. adaptation of “Queer as Folk,” the hit British drama that wittily and candidly (code for explicit language and raw sex) depicts young gay life in Manchester, England. The U.S. version is being shot in Toronto but is set in Pittsburgh.

Running 10 weeks, the British series will premiere in the U.S. Wednesday on C1TV, a gay oriented network available Wednesday nights on leased access channels on individual cable systems here. “Queer as Folk” airs at 10:30 p.m. on Media One (Channel 39) and 11:30 p.m. on Adelphia’s Southwest Region (Channel 20 in West Hollywood and Beverly Hills, Channel 10 elsewhere).

C1, by the way, is short for “see one,” explained David Sine, the limited network’s CEO, from his Miami Beach office. “If you’re gay, you kind of look across the room and pick out another gay person.”

The young network is available in 25 cities, reaches 6.7 million viewers and is unique in targeting gays almost exclusively, Sine said. That means a first-of-its kind series is being offered by a first-of-its-kind network.

On the other hand, “Queer as Folk” attracted a broad cross-section of viewers when it aired on England’s Channel Four network. “That’s because it steps outside of stereotypes and shows people in the broadest spectrum of life,” Sine said.

Well, not always.

“Queer as Folk” takes place mainly on Canal Street, a gay district of Manchester, and features interplay among best friends Stuart and Vince, who are in their late 20s, and 15-year-old Nathan. Solid, dependable Vince, who works in a supermarket, is stuck on the hedonistic, narcissistic, predatory Stuart, who seduces Nathan, a callow schoolboy through whose eyes much of this is seen.

It’s not true that everybody here wants to “shag” everybody else, for as the characters fully take shape and story lines expand, the heavy breathing tends to fall away. Much of the series is highly sexual, though, sometimes leading to wicked humor, as when a guy confesses to the promiscuous Vince during a foreplay kiss that he has been treated for Brazilian parasites.

Oops, no sex tonight.

“Queer as Folk” does not profess to be inclusive of all gays. The show’s creator, Russell T. Davies, has said he had to overcome the feeling that he should “represent the whole [gay] community--every age, every scene. One day I realized I had to stop feeling a responsibility to show every conceivable form of gay lifestyle and simply convey the specific lives of my characters.”

They’re brash, vibrant, refreshingly unsentimental and arresting. You do worry, though, about the distinctive idiom of the Brits’ “Queer as Folk” possibly nourishing the kind of dangerous stereotypes that led to the demonization and murder of Matthew Shepard.

Although the 22-episode U.S. version is expected to be tamer, this is pay-cable, after all, an area of television that Democratic vice presidential nominee Joseph I. Lieberman and his fellow taste cops have yet to give the evil eye. And it was Showtime that filled the void and ran the “Tales of the City” sequel that made PBS flinch, and which in the mid-1980s aired “Brothers,” a comedy in which one of the protagonists was openly gay.

The staff of Showtime’s “Queer as Folk” includes writer-producer Richard Kramer, who co-wrote the “Nothing Scared” gay-priest hour killed by ABC as well as the famous episode of that network’s “thirtysomething” that featured two gay men side by side in bed after You Know What.

At the time, that was considered revolutionary. Compared with “Queer as Folk,” it’s barren.

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Howard Rosenberg’s column appears Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. He can be contacted by e-mail at howard.rosenberg@latimes.com.

“Queer as Folk” can be seen Wednesday nights at 10:30 on Media One (Channel 39) and 11:30 on Adelphia’s Southwest Region (Channel 20 in West Hollywood and Beverly Hills, Channel 10 elsewhere).