Gay characters the post-Stonewall era go a lot wir and eper than ‘Will & Grace’ and ‘Ellen.’
Contents:
LBGTQ TV: A HISTORY OF GAY CHARACTERS, OM STONEWALL TO ‘BATWOMAN’
* the following gay characters *
The 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Rts is a tone for the gay-rights movement, one beg memorated wh everythg om paras to documentari. As a Vulture say about a groundbreakg “All the Fay” episo noted, “In a moment where crics pot to ss as a medium that helped change public opns about gay rights, we should remember that the procs didn’t beg wh ‘Will & Grace’ or ‘Glee. Long before that, though, there were signature, cludg the 1971 episo of “All the Fay” which the bigoted, homophobic Archie Bunker was stunned to disver that an old buddy was gay.
Six years later, Billy Crystal beme one of the first openly gay regular characters a seri “Soap, ” the broad ABC satire. Addnal breakthroughs followed seri like “Roseanne” and “Friends, ” eventually leadg to the gay uple “Morn Fay” a ago.
Longtime TV cric Dan Avery charts the history of gay, queer, and transgenr reprentatn popular Amerin seri om 1971 to today, om Ellen to Pose. * the following gay characters *
In 1972, Hal Holbrook played a divorced dad hidg the fact he was gay om his son “That Certa Summer, ” nsired one of the first sympathetic pictns of gay characters on televisn. PBS also broke ground realy TV wh “An Amerin Fay, ” the 1973 seri that featured Lance Loud, whose g out ma him a gay in. The 1980s brought AIDS to the nversatn, wh movi such as “An Early Frost, ” an NBC movie about a gay lawyer who mt break the news about his AIDS diagnosis to his parents.
The same thg happened when ABC’s “thirtysomethg” beme the first seri to pict two gay men bed together 30 years ago, a dynamic that ed work officials to thk twice about approvg such storyl. Neverthels, work dramas ntued to ph boundari, cludg a gay teen ABC’s 1990s seri “My So-Called Life. The fay wel her warmly, but as Beverly (out of drag) and Archie’s son--law, Mike, walk to the subway, they are btally attacked by gay bashers, who beat Beverly to ath.
Mike eventually enurag Edh to be strong for her fay, but ’s clear her crisis of fah isn’t rolved when the closg creds Dallas, Soap (1977-1981)A young Billy Crystal played Jodie Dallas, one of the first recurrg gay characters on Amerin TV, this s send-up of daytime dramas. That mak Dallas noteworthy, even though gay groups at the time plaed that Dallas was a jumble of negative stereotyp about homosexualy.