Behind the laughter and bright lights of sitcoms, some of America’s favorite shows featured queer storylines – whether viewers realized it or not. From Bewitched to the Golden Girls, “Hi Honey, I’m Homo!: Sitcoms, Specials and the Queering of American Culture” explores how sitcoms played a role in the advancement of LGBTQ+ rights by embracing queer culture.
Matt Baume is a Seattle-based podcaster, YouTuber and author of the new book. He talked with us in June 2023 share some of the most impactful shows in gay history and the greater role they played in society.
The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer:
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. Matt Baume joins us today. He is a Seattle-based writer, podcaster and YouTuber. He focuses on how pop culture and big entertainment have shaped the lives of queer people and straight society as well. His new book, “Hi Honey, I’m Homo!: Sitcoms, Specials and the Queering of American Culture” focuses specifically on TV, comedy, sitcoms and specials from Bewitched and All In the Family to Friends and Will and Grace and beyond. He argues that these shows have played an outsized role in the queering of American culture by beaming their way into people’s living rooms and our brains. Matt Baume, welcome to Think Out Loud.
Matt Baume: Thanks so much for having me. It’s a real pleasure.
Miller: You start your book in the 1960s and we’ll talk about Bewitched in just a second, but I want to turn to the time before then. Were there any depictions of queer life, queer people, at the very beginning of television?
Baume: It’s kind of like one of those magic eye pictures where you kind of have to squint a little bit and look at it from the right angle and you can find oblique references maybe or you can find them if you look at it the right way and you know what to listen for. It might be a joke about Christine Jorgensen who is a figure who would look back and I would call her a trans pioneer. But there was very, very little. Mostly if you’re going to catch something, it would usually be a male comedian in drag. And the joke was, it’s a man in a dress and they’re different, they’re not like regular men. And that was the whole joke. So it was very clumsy and pretty, I’d say, hurtful comedy up until that point.
Miller: The first show that I mentioned that you really focus on in the new book is Bewitched,
which premiered in 1964. For people who didn’t grow up watching it or grow up with its reruns, and those went into the eighties, can you describe the premise of the show?
Baume: Yeah. So Bewitched was this great funny show about a woman who is secretly a witch. She comes from a family and a culture of witches and she falls in love with and marries a mortal. And in the pilot episode, in the first five minutes, he finds out that he’s married a witch. And the whole series is about them trying to blend in and be a part of “normal society” while she has this tension of loving her family and loving her husband and eventually children and also not wanting to lose touch with the culture, the people and then the magical world that she came from. And so it really reflects a sort of proto feminism of the time. And you could read it in a lot of different ways either as an interfaith marriage or a mixed race marriage or a lot of folks read this as someone who was hiding a secret about herself and something sort of queer.
Miller: Well, you say that for a show about a heterosexual couple, although a mixed one in terms of witch and non-witch, that it was a lot gayer than was readily apparent. What do you mean?
Baume: Yeah. Well, you can see it very early in the series run when characters are talking about their secrecy as witches and whether or not to come out. There’s another beautiful episode where the character Samantha, the witch, talks to her daughter who’s still a toddler about how the world may not be ready for people like us and they don’t understand, you’re going to have to understand when to use your powers and when not to, for your own safety.
Later on, Elizabeth Montgomery, who was the star, was asked if she was aware that the show could be read as an allegory for queer life. And she said yes, that was on their minds at the time. It was something they were aware of. They couldn’t talk about it on the show, but they knew that the show was welcoming to people who felt like outsiders or who felt different. So you could either just laugh at all the funny wacky sitcom shenanigans, but you could also read something a little more deep into it and feel that it was speaking to you as someone who might feel like you don’t belong in society.
Miller: You mentioned that there was a scene early on in one of the episodes where the witches are talking about why can’t we be more public? We actually have the audio of that. So let’s have a listen and then we can keep talking.
Samantha: I don’t know why we don’t simply tell everyone that we’re witches and then they’d see what wonderful, nice people we really are.
Bertha: [Laughter] You better take out lots of fire insurance first?
Samantha: Oh, Bertha, they stopped burning us years ago. We have made some progress.
Bertha: Well, not enough.
What was the context when this episode would have aired? What was going on outside of TV?
Baume: Oh Yeah. The timing of this episode is honestly astonishing. So in the episode, they’re talking about how hurtful stereotypes about witches are. Halloween is coming up and maybe it’s time for us to just come out and say who we are. But in real life, just around this time, maybe like two or three weeks earlier, there had been what’s widely regarded as the first public queer protest. That happened in New York. It happened outside an army recruiting station and in the episode of Bewitched, the witches decide to have a protest of their own. They have picket signs that say, “Witches are people, too,” and “We demand a new image.” And because they’re magical beings, they invade the dreams of an executive who wants to use derogatory witch stereotypes and they harass him in his dreams.
Well, those picket signs in the episode look almost identical to the picket signs that were held by real life demonstrators in 1966 or 1967 outside this recruiting station in Manhattan. The parallels are just so similar. I don’t think that the writers and show runners of the “Bewitched” were like, well, it was this queer protest in Manhattan; we better copy them. I don’t think that was their intent, but I think it reflects what was happening in the air at the time, that was in the middle of the beginning of the civil rights movement and a lot of minority groups or marginalized people are speaking up in ways that they hadn’t before. And the show is reflecting that, which is amazing for a goofy little sitcom.
Miller: You point out that the secrecy that you’re talking about in terms of this couple, that was not at all an outlier in terms of sitcoms around those same years. So on Mr. Ed, a man kept a talking horse, a male horse for what it’s worth, a secret from his wife. On My Favorite Martian, a reporter hid his alien friend. And then there are plenty of other examples, including cars and sort of weirder things.
Baume: Oh yeah.
Miller: Why is this? Why was secrecy? And I mean, there’s secrecy in Shakespeare. So it’s not like it was invented in TV, sitcoms in the American 1960s, but why do you think it was such a big theme at this time?
Baume: Yeah. Well, I think part of it is, like you said, it’s just a fun little drama engine to have a secret. And it’s a good premise for a show, but also I think something that we’re seeing around that time is–like I said–marginalized groups speaking out more about themselves. And up until this point, sitcoms and television, in general, had been very whitewashed. It was nuclear families, almost entirely white people in the suburbs, and of course, heterosexuals, you wouldn’t see religious minorities. You certainly wouldn’t see people with disabilities. And so television was really not telling the full story. Meanwhile, in real life, we’re seeing a lot more people having the courage to speak up and demand more and it wasn’t always safe for them to do so.
What was going on in queer circles in particular or at the time, what would have probably been called homophile organizations, was a debate just like you’re seeing in that Bewitched episode of some people saying, “Why don’t we just tell people who we are and then they’ll see that we’re nice?” And then other people saying “Are you kidding? They are going to kill us, literally.”
Miller: Literally.
Baume: Literally kill us.
Miller: I mean, that’s the “burning us,” it’s a laugh line there. But on another level, on a deeper level, it’s not at all funny.
Baume: No, no. I mean, at the time that this aired, homosexuality was a crime, it was considered a mental illness. It certainly, if it came out that you were, for example, arrested in a gay bar raid–which has often happened–that meant losing your job, losing your connection to your family, losing everything. So yeah, the stigma was unimaginably acute compared to the life that we are very lucky to have today.
Miller: Let’s turn then to the 1970s when television shows started to tackle societal issues of all kinds a lot more directly. I don’t think any comedy did that more famously than All in the Family, which dealt with race and class and war and sexuality.
Baume: Yep.
Miller: As a kind of generational clash with Archie, the bigoted dad, and then sort of countercultural kids and then his wife Edith who was sort of in between it seems, narratively. What kind of queer representation was there in All in the Family?
Baume: That’s another one that was just shocking. And for some people, it was shocking, great, and for other people, it was shocking, horrifying. But All in the Family really changed television. Up until this point, you didn’t rock the boat, you didn’t talk about the realities of people’s lives. And when the show comes on, that, at its heart, is about an intergenerational conflict, somebody who’s living in the past, those were the days is the theme song of the show and his goofball, meathead daughter and her husband. Suddenly, you’ve got this clash that you had just never seen on the television and had really never been brave enough to talk about.
At the time, people were critical of it and saying like, good grief, these people experience everything. They have conversations about war and venereal disease and sexual assault and all this stuff. Why are you putting all this stuff in there? And Norman Lear, who’s the co-creator of the show, was very frank about it. This is the reality of people’s lives and in particular, they had more queer people than you could ever have expected to see on television before then. In the first season, we find out that one of Archie’s friends is gay and Archie thinks it’s all a big joke. He thinks he’s kidding around because, oh, you can’t be gay. You’re a football player. You’re this big macho guy. You got a deep voice. You’re strong. You can’t be, you know, he calls him a fruit. He says, if that’s the punch of a fruit, well ah…and he doesn’t believe it.
Then later on, we meet a character named Beverly Lasalle, who is, according to Norman Lear, a drag queen. Other people can interpret this character as trans or might exist in a category that the language just didn’t exist for at the time, but Beverly becomes a good friend of the family. She recurs in across three seasons. She gets an amazing character arc.
Miller: Well, let’s listen to what I think is maybe right around from the introduction of her character. This is when the Beverly LaSalle character is meeting Edith.
Let’s have a listen.
Beverly: It was foolish of me to work three shows a night for 10-weeks straight without a night off.
Edith: Are you in show business?
Beverly: Yes. I’m a female impersonator. Yeah.
[Laughter]
Edith: Ain’t that interesting? You know, that’s smart, too. I mean, who can imitate a female better than a lady?
[Laughter]
Beverly: I’m afraid you don’t understand, Mrs Bunker. I’m a transvestite.
[Laughter]
Edith: You sure fooled me? I mean, you ain’t got no accent at all.
[Laughter]
What do you hear in that first long burst of laughter? I assume that’s a live studio audience. Maybe it’s a laugh track. I mean, so the character says, no, no, you know, “I’m a female impersonator” and then it’s eight seconds of laughing. What are they laughing about?
Baume: So there’s a lot going on there. One is that earlier in the episode, the audience knows that Archie has given mouth-to-mouth to the character.
Miller: Who passed out in his cab.
Baume: Yeah. And so she passed out in his cab. He gave her mouth-to-mouth and he’s bragging about what a hero he is for having saved her life, not realizing that this was, as she says, a female impersonator or a transvestite. She uses language that we don’t really use today. So the audience is laughing about that knowing now we know something that Archie didn’t and we know something that Archie would be probably horrified if he knew. But also we’re hearing a knowing laugh from an audience that’s been primed for decades at this point to laugh at a man in a dress.
Miller: And so you do hear both? A kind of punching up at Archie and punching down at the queer community? It’s happening simultaneously.
Baume: That is such a great way to describe it. Yeah. And I think what we see over the course of this episode and Beverly’s later appearances is a resolution on which way we’re really going to punch. And it becomes clear that the show is tackling bigotry and it’s not going to be another Milton Berle style, isn’t it hilarious to see a man in a dress?
Miller: You note that one of the really powerful messages that Norman Lear and All in the Family took with this is simply that this was not a one-off, that Beverly LaSalle very easily could have been a fun character in one episode, but instead she became recurring. I don’t think 40 years later that we need to worry about spoilers–so, can you give us a sense for the arc of her character? It’s remarkable and then tragic.
Baume: Yeah, it’s incredible. And she easily, exactly what you said, could have fallen into that trope, which remained common for many more decades of the one-off gay guest who appears to help the heterosexuals in some way and then is out of their lives forever.
Miller: So that was a trope?
Baume: Oh, very much. Yeah. You might see a gay guest or something like that, but it was very rare, shows like Barney Miller would actually bring queer characters back. But most of the time, they did not even appear. Shows like Maud” had some gay characters who just appeared once.
Anyway, on All in the Family with Beverly, she comes into their lives. Archie is stricken once he finally finds out that this is a drag performer. He’s very embarrassed and by the end of the episode, she helps him deflect the attention that he has gotten for having given her mouth-to-mouth and she essentially lies to protect him and says, no, no, it was actually somebody else. So Archie is grateful to have his reputation protected. Obviously, that episode would go very differently, I think, today. But, it’s still a beautiful episode, beautifully acted with that. It’s really smart.
Beverly comes back a year later and they’re all happy to see her. She’s welcomed into the house and Archie asks her for a favor–to pose as a woman and go on a blind date with one of his friends–so he can embarrass his friend. And again, this is a storyline that we probably wouldn’t do today. It falls into the trope of the “deceitful transvestite.” And it’s something that we now, I think, appreciate is a little more harmful than a lot of people would have realized at the time, but Beverly not only protests and says that she doesn’t want to deceive a stranger and that it’s wrong. She eventually relents and says, well, ok, if this is in good fun and everybody knows what’s going on and we’re not going to hurt anybody’s feelings here. Ok. I’ll go along with it and we see that Beverly is actually the most decent person on the show.
And by the end of it, Archie has forgotten that he has asked this person who he thinks is a guy in drag at this point. He has so forgotten the nature of Beverly’s character.
Miller: He’s forgotten that he’s a bigot.
Baume: He’s forgotten he’s a bigot. Exactly. Yeah. And he gives her a kiss at the end of the episode and the episode ends with his shocked expression, realizing what he’s just done. So it’s again another hysterical episode and it’s just beautifully, beautifully written.
Miller: Before we even get to the tragedy of this narrative arc, even as you’re describing this, I was reminded of something that reached out to me in the book, which is that you take on all of these episodes and TV shows in the context of the history of when they are and also in some ways, the sort of the moral limitations of the way they were made, whether that was language or the stories. You’re not censorious in saying that we can’t watch this thing anymore because of the language that was used, language that would never be used today such as the F-slur or other things which were on network television.
I’m just curious how you approach all these different bits of entertainment that in some ways are actually shocking with the 2023 understanding?
Baume: It can be a difficult translation sometimes. As you heard in that, she says I’m a transvestite, I’m a female impersonator. We don’t really use language like that today very much. And like you mentioned the slur, a lot of languages are thrown around fairy and fruit and harder f-words are thrown around. And it’s very difficult to contextualize for a viewer today to understand what characters at the time were trying to communicate.
Miller: Or show runners or writers?
Baume: Exactly. Yeah.
Miller: So just to fast forward a little bit this Beverly character. Later on in the show’s run when she’s more a part of the family of All in the Family, she is murdered in a way that it seems is very much tied to her identity and this hits Edith in particular really hard and she has a major crisis of faith because of it.
It makes me wonder why you’re focusing on comedy and this was a comedy, all of them. The point was among other things, it was to sell advertising as a television show but to make people laugh. What do you see as the specific power that comedy has to sneak into our heads?
Baume: I think it’s so clear in these Norman Lear shows. In fact, Norman himself has often described comedy as intravenous. It’s a way to get a message into people while they are laughing. And so the comedy makes it so much easier to slip something in. Now obviously, Norman and Bud Yorkin and his partners didn’t approach a show saying, “How can we change the world, how can we get a message across?” They started with entertainment. They started with being funny, but they also had values and they had ideas and they had things they wanted to express and talk about.
Miller: And you’re saying that if the context had been a drama instead of a comedy, it wouldn’t necessarily have been as effective in doing that?
Baume: Well, I think dramas would have and were effective in other ways. Around the same time. There was another really groundbreaking drama. It was a made for TV movie called That Certain Summer with Martin Sheen and Hal Holbrook and some of the folks. That was a drama. It was about a gay man and his partner and his child from a previous marriage. And again, I think that was a really effective way to tackle some pretty serious issues.
So I’m not saying comedy is the only way to talk about stuff, but when you want to ease people into a topic, laughter is such a great way to do it. It gets your guard down and also it helps an audience develop a familiarity and a closeness with characters. When I watch The Golden Girls, I feel like I’m hanging out with my friends and I know I’ve never met these people. They don’t even exist. They’re just characters but they feel like people I know. And developing a relationship, even if it’s a fake parasocial relationship, really helps an audience to feel like, oh, I like this person on television. I like this fictional character. Well, how can I not like people like that in real life?
Miller: I think in the middle of the run of All in the Family there was something, a pretty short-lived network decision called Family Viewing Hour which I had never heard of. What was it?
Baume: Well, it was a big flop. [Laughter] But, I think folks went in with some good intentions and television had been getting a lot more daring over the last few years from the early seventies and there was a point at which I think it actually did cross the line. And there were some broadcasts that were shockingly violent. This was, I think, at 8:00 or 8:30. There was a made-for-TV movie that featured a very graphic sexual assault. There had been a lot of simmering discomfort with how daring television had gotten and this one was so far over the line that the networks could see that there was a threat of government censorship on the horizon.
Miller: I have to say I’d never heard of that movie before but when I read the depiction of it in your book, I didn’t think that it would be on network television at 8 or 9 or 10 p.m., today.
Baume: No.
Miller: Something really was happening on TV. Boundaries are being pushed in a way that engenders a big pushback.
Baume: Yeah. And on one hand, I think it’s good that there was sort of a laboratory on television because for many years, there had been a production code that essentially mirrored film production rules. There was a lot of content that you couldn’t have on television and it was very restrictive and when that started to evaporate and go away, I think it’s good that television experimented because you did get great depictions of people that you hadn’t seen before. Fantastic. And sometimes it takes a few missteps to figure out where the boundaries are.
Miller: So the idea of the Family Viewing Hour was until 9 p.m., you can’t have a certain kind of content which is “not right for families, for young audience members,” but what was included in that category of not being right?
Baume: Well, you hit on the problem with it. Nobody really knew. So they said we don’t want sex and violence. Well, that sounds like a nice idea, but as soon as you start to talk about it, what does that actually mean? I found a great interview with Cher, of all people complaining about how it affected the Sonny and Cher Show and she just looks so put out and pouty and she says to the camera they won’t let us say “horny.”
Miller: Classic 1970s word.
Baume: Yeah.
Miller: So you also noted that at times shows had to move around in a different time slots depending on the content of their particular episode. So it would be 8 p.m., one Tuesday and then 9 p.m., two days later?
Baume: Yeah. So, this episode has the word hell in it. So we had to move it back an hour and that made things particularly complicated and ridiculous in central and mountain time zones because you had the Family Viewing Hour from 8 to 9 or maybe it was 7 to 8 on the coast. But then the kids in one time zone over got the full brunt of the naughty shows. So it was ridiculous.
Miller: You have a chapter about a show that created a lot of controversy before it even aired and controversy from conservative groups and from what we now call queer activists. What were they worried about in terms of Soap from the two different sides?
Baume: Yeah. So the summer before Soap went to air, there was a Newsweek article about how filthy this show was going to be and it was going to have priests having sex and there was going to be a gay character and when conservatives found out about it, they were furious that television was going to air something that they had heard was so dirty. Nobody had seen this show.
Miller: When I read that, I was curious if that was a conscious decision on the part of the studio to build excitement or — maybe this is just the cynic in me– if that article came out of nowhere and was seen as problematic by the studios because it’s probably not a bad thing for people to be talking about a show that hasn’t aired yet unless they want to fire bomb you?
Baume: Yeah. As far as I know, it was actually the result of a preview that critics got. So I think the network did want people to see what they were working on, but I don’t think they could have anticipated just how excited people were going to get. So the conservatives are furious about something so dirty and then there are gay activists who, I think, wisely saw that there was a show coming with a gay character and they were like, “oh no, not this again” because there are so many shows there. There have been some good ones, but there have been a lot of bad ones. And so I think there was a lot of anxiety about how negative the depiction had the potential to be.
Miller: How much power did queer activists have at that point to actually have their voices not just heard but paid attention to when we’re talking about the highest levels of studio executives?
Baume: This is such a fascinating time for queer media organizing. There was no GLAD (GLBTQ Legal Advocates & Defenders) which we now have today, an organization that will work directly with studios. At the time, you had a bunch of very scrappy activists working largely independently on either coast. And they were in part in communication with people who were on the inside. So there were people inside the entertainment industry who would sometimes leak scripts and tell people who tell the activists, “hey, here’s what’s coming just so you guys know.”
You had a few very prominent activists who would get the attention of network executives by writing angry letters and making angry phone calls. And sometimes if they weren’t being listened to, they would take things a little bit further and would invade network offices and hold sit-ins and they would commandeer corporate offices until they were paid attention to.
Miller: With their families, you note?
Baume: Yeah. Yeah, they would bring their kids sometimes and there was it’s a very, very savvy media move for television cameras to be right there and capturing these kids, like calling out for their mothers as these great lesbian activists are taking over at NBC headquarters in Manhattan.
Miller: What was the conceit of the sitcom Soap?
Baume: It was essentially a parody of soap operas and this was coming on the heels of Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman which was another Norman Lear show that was kind of the same idea. Soap was going to be a network comedy that took the tropes of soap operas which were super popular at the time and spun it into a comedy and was daring about it. It was written by Susan Harris who had created Fay. She had done the abortion episode of Maude and she had the Golden Girls on the horizon for her.
Miller: Can you tell us about the character Jodie?
Baume: Jodie was played by Billy Crystal who was then a mostly unknown comedian. And at first, he’s a kind of confusing character because he falls into a problem at the time of not really understanding the difference between sexual orientation and gender identity. He’s sometimes gay, he’s sometimes trans, maybe he’s both. It’s very hard to say. This is a character who expresses an interest in getting what he calls a sex change operation, again language we don’t really use today, but he’s going to get a sex change operation so that he can marry his boyfriend. Sometimes he says he’s always felt like a woman. Sometimes he says he’s just doing it for the sake of the marriage.
But then very quickly, what was going on behind the scenes was that Billy Crystal felt dissatisfied with that portrayal and he went to Susan Harris and said, could we make this character a little more consistent and deep? And over the course of the series, he becomes Jody and becomes an amazing person. He comes out very bravely. He co-parents as a gay man. He wins a custody battle. He is unabashedly himself and bold about it in a way that you just really have not seen at that point.
Miller: How do you see the parenting arc there, the fatherhood arc as meshing with the times? What was going on in terms of the politics of parenting when the show was showing his arc?
Baume: It was a pretty bad time for queer parents. Generally, they would never win a custody battle if there was some dispute either from a previous marriage or something like that. Basically, 0% of the time a judge would side with someone who they felt was unsuitable to take care of a child because they had a same sex partner. But just around the time of that, Jodie on the show wins his custody battle against a woman that he hooked up with and had a baby with, they never used the word bisexual to describe the character, although that certainly seems to be the way that he conducts himself anyway. So he has a baby with this woman and is really fighting for custody of his child.
In real life, a very similar case was working its way through the court. These two women had both left their husbands; they had fallen in love with each other; they had kids, they wanted custody of their kids; and, the husbands didn’t want that. A lower court judge had ruled that the women could have custody of the kids, but only if they separated and they appealed and it worked its way up and they won. It was one of the first high profile cases where lesbian parents–a same sex couple–was allowed custody of children. And it coincides almost exactly with this episode of Soap.
Miller: So you grew up in the 1990s, long after this show originally aired, but syndication with reruns are a huge part of the power of these shows to reverberate decades later. What did Soap in particular mean to you when you were growing up?
Baume: This was one of the first shows that really showed me a queer character, that showed me a gay character or a character that I read is gay because Jodie is a bit of a cipher that a lot of people can read in ways that they want. But it was airing on Comedy Central at the time and I remember being attracted to the show initially because it was just so funny. Then the more I saw Jodie, the more I realized, oh, there’s a whole community of people out there like me. I’m not alone. Not only being gay can I find others like me, but it can be great. I can enjoy it. I can be confident and powerful and this character is cute. So…
Miller: He had everything.
Baume: [Laughter] Yeah, it just seemed good.
Miller: Do you remember being aware of the “oldness” of the show? If you were, say, a 15-year old and you were watching a show that had been made 15 years earlier or in the late seventies, I’m wondering if that itself had an impact on you as well?
Baume: There were certain things about it like the width of the lapels certainly seemed dated. But I think one of the great things about a sitcom that really endures whether it’s All in the Family or Maude or Soap or The Golden Girls or whatever is that aside from the fashions and the hairstyles and cell phones, it just feels like it could be a story happening today. Make a few tweaks to the dialogue, update the language a bit and it, because these are very human stories. Well, people haven’t changed, their hair has, but aside from that, the stories, the experiences and relationships that we have have not.
Miller: Let’s get into the eighties and actually start with real life before we get to some of the shows that you wrote about it. This is when HIV really emerged as an enormous and, and truly terrifying public health crisis. How did TV shows in particular respond to HIV and AIDS?
Baume: A couple of different ways, but one of the most common was just retreating. There was a lot of putting the head in the sand and not wanting to deal with anything gay because at the moment you mentioned anything that came off as queer, people would be thinking about HIV. And a lot of shows felt that it was too depressing or too serious or too controversial. And so queer issues kind of backed away a little bit and there’s a little bit of a pendulum swing the other way.
That having been said, there were a lot of shows that were bold enough to do what the federal government was not and actually address this epidemic. So you’ve got episodes of The Golden Girls. You’ve got episodes of Designing Women that tackle it head on and then you’ve got dramas made for TV, movies, like A Sudden Frost that actually looked straight in the eye at this disaster and said essentially, if the Reagan administration isn’t going to come to help us, we’re going to do what we can as media makers, as television. There’s a beautiful episode of Designing Women where they do more education in the span of 15 or so minutes about HIV, than most of the federal government had been doing with its public outreach.
Miller: Let’s turn to Golden Girls. You mentioned it a couple of times. It looms large still today and on one level, it’s even just surprising that a show about four women– and they are white middle class or maybe richer women–but still older women, women in the second half of their lives, that it got made at all. How did it get made?
Baume: By accident. Originally, it was a little throw off joke a year earlier. When Miami Vice was premiering, there was a joke about, well, it’s set in Miami and there’s a lot of retirees. Wouldn’t be funny if there was a show called “Miami Nice” that was about life in a retirement community. And people at NBC laughed about that until they suddenly stopped laughing and were like, you know, actually there might be something there.
Miller: There might be money to be made.
Baume: So they brought in Susan Harris who had had a few, you know, between she did Soap. She did Benson with Robert Guillaume. And then there were a few less successful shows like Hail To The Chief and She’s a Big Girl Now that didn’t really work out. She had always included queer characters in her shows, even the ones that we don’t remember, that didn’t succeed.
Miller: You were like a human Wikipedia, like IMDb (Internet Movie Database) in your brain.
Baume: Yeah, no, it’s very funny because I can play this game now where somebody mentions any aspect of pop culture and I’m like, it’s basically “six degrees of gay Kevin Bacon” where I can connect it to anything queer.
Miller: So back to Golden Girls. So it was, it was a little bit of a joke. But then, then it worked. Let’s listen to a clip. This is when two characters, Dorothy and Sophia, are discussing Dorothy’s friend Jean’s sexuality.
Dorothy: I’m a little nervous about Jean. I mean, she’s a very special person. I don’t know if she’s going to get along with Blanche and Rose.
Sophia: You mean because she’s a lesbian?
Dorothy: [Laughter] Oh, she’s not a lesbian. I mean, what an absurd thing. How did you know?
Sophia: I’ve known since you two were in college together.
Dorothy: She didn’t even know in college. How did you know?
Sophia: A mother knows.
[Laughter]
Dorothy: Do you think I should tell Rose and Blanche?
Sophia: Jean is a nice person. She happens to like girls instead of guys, some people like cats instead of dogs. Frankly, I’d rather live with a lesbian than a cat [laughter] unless the lesbian sheds. Then I don’t know.
[Laughter]
I should say that, since you folks can’t see the radio, Sophia is eating. She’s on a couch with a big bag of popcorn and she’s just sort of stuffing popcorn in her mouth as she’s saying this. How much had changed in the writers room or in sort of behind the scenes between a show like Golden Girls and a show like Bewitched, which was twenty years earlier?
Baume: Yeah. Well, so on Golden Girls, you had writers who were perhaps not out to everyone, but they were out to some people. I spoke to a writer on the show, Stan Zimmerman, who was early on in his career on the show. Estelle Getty who played Sophia kind of took him aside and said that she would look out for him, that [as] she was the star of the show, this is not a small thing, says, “I know that you’re gay and I want to look out for you.” Estelle Getty’s career had really been made by queer stuff. She had been on Broadway in the Torch Song Trilogy. And so she gave an interview around this time where she said that essentially “homosexuals made my career and I’ll be grateful for my entire life.” So she was a huge ally.
And then you’ve got someone like Jeffrey Dutiel, who wrote this episode. He was a gay man who wrote it on spec. He didn’t know if the episode would get made, but he wrote it. He sent it in, happened to have a friend who was producing the show and they said this is great. We were looking for a gay episode. We’re going to make it. So, I mean, it was just another planet from where they were twenty years earlier.
Miller: Let’s skip ahead to the nineties and Friends which have sort of a checkered history. I think it’s fair to say in terms of dealing with, with gay characters and, and queer issues and especially with respect to Chandler. How did the show make jokes about his sexuality?
Baume: Yeah. So Chandler was a character that early in development, it was raised as a possibility that the character might be gay. And then when they cast Matthew Perry, they said he’s a heterosexual actor, and we’re not going to go that way. That’s the explanation that they’ve given now. I wouldn’t be surprised if there was also some network pushback against having a gay lead character or something.
Miller: Well, I mean, it seems like a pretty hollow excuse given that there was a long history of straight characters playing gay characters.
Baume: [Laughter] It really does, it really does. So I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a little more resistance than people want to narrativize these days. Whatever the case, there was early in the series run, an episode where they make it clear that he is not gay or they make it harder to read that the character is gay. Someone tries to set him up on a date with a man, misunderstanding him, and he protests a lot. You could read this as well that maybe he’s protesting too much. But essentially this is the show’s way of saying no, no, he, he really, he really isn’t even if you might read him this way.
It’s very similar to the Murray character on Mary Tyler Moore. There was a possibility that he might be gay until they cast Gavin MacLeod. And so he wasn’t, but you watch those early episodes of The Mary Tyler Moore Show. And it is, I think, easier to read Murray as gay than straight. So something similar happened with Chandler and the result was a lot of jokes that kind of punched down and the joke was someone’s gay, isn’t that funny? And that was kind of the extent of it.
The show did some good stuff, too. They had a, they had a lesbian wedding which was very nice, but it wasn’t all, it wasn’t all great. And to their credit, Marta Kauffman and David Crane, the creators of the show, have said they would do some things differently now that they know what they know.
Miller: This gets us to Ellen, the Ellen Degeneres sitcom before her talk show. And she was eventually an openly gay character on the show and the star of the show, but it didn’t start out that way. What was the internal set of discussions like that finally led to a very, very public TV coming out?
Baume: Yeah, that was a show that went through a lot of changes trying to find its identity as Ellen herself, the person, was going through a lot of changes trying to confront her identity. In real life, she was in therapy and she was coming to understand how unhappy she was as a celebrity in the closet, as pretty much every celebrity had to be at that time until she finally said no enough is enough. I can’t do this anymore. I want to come out and I want my character to come out. And then she had to wait for permission essentially from ABC and Disney to say, ok, I guess we’ll find a way to do that on the show and basically the show Ellen, had to drag them, kicking and screaming to let that character come out.
For folks who were alive back then and remember, it was a huge deal. I mean, this was a discourse of a duration that we simply do not experience in these fast-paced items today. Months, we’re talking months, almost a year of media speculation and gossip columns and interviews and poor Ellen Degeneres, the person, is going on these interviews on talk shows and she just can’t talk about what they’re planning to do because it hasn’t been approved yet. Imagine not being able to talk about that aspect of your life because you’re waiting for Michael Eisner to give a thumbs up to you.
Miller: You actually describe what seems like it was an amazing, barely-coded interview that Ellen did with Rosie O’Donnell. Can you describe that interview?
Baume: So this is on Rosie O’Donnell’s talk show and Ellen comes out and her line at the time, because they couldn’t really reveal anything about what they were planning, was to diffuse and deflect the speculation by saying, oh, well, we’re introducing a new character named “Les B. Ann.” That was joke number one and joke number two was that the character is going to figure out that she’s Lebanese and I guess people just misunderstood that and she says to Rosie, something like, oh she likes babaganoush and she likes Casey Kasem and Rosie perks up at that and says, “I like Casey Kasem, too. Maybe I’m Lebanese.” And you can see this spark of naughtiness between these people because they both know what they’re talking about. The audience knows, everybody knows.
Miller: That’s the joke is that everybody knows it’s also the absurdity and the sadness of the joke.
Baume: Yeah, and Ellen says you might be Lebanese. I’ve always thought that you might be Lebanese. Oh my goodness. Why can’t we just say what we actually are thinking?
Miller: And then she did come out and it was, it was a huge moment. I mean, can you describe that? And a moment that I think could never exist now for a lot of reasons but one of them is that there are a lot more channels now and we’re a lot more atomized and people can seek out the entertainment that they want. But what was that evening like for America?
Baume: I mean, this was a phenomenon like we just do not experience today - 42 million people watched this episode or some portion of the episode. It was like the Super Bowl and the way that the Super Bowl isn’t even the Super Bowl today. But people packing into bars, people renting auditoriums to show a satellite feed of the show. You could just hear people cheering out in the streets in New York when she finally said the words, “I’m gay.” I mean, it was a cultural moment that was front page news and I mean, I can’t even imagine the pressure that a person would feel that that aspect of their life was so important to millions, tens of millions of people.
Miller: And then the show didn’t really survive that change in its own narrative, but Will and Grace followed soon after. I’m curious what it was like for you when Will and Grace and then others that have followed that are really much more, not even so far from tokenizing. I mean, it was, it’s more about the centrality and richness of people’s lives. What was it like when these were beamed into people’s living rooms or even your own family’s living rooms?
Baume: I think one of the important things that Will and Grace did for me was, it showed me that I have a culture that I didn’t know that I had, that I belonged to something that I didn’t know I belong to. I was around 18, I think, when the show debuted and it was really eye-opening and it presents a pretty limited slice of American gay life. These are pretty well-to-do white gay cis men in New York, but it was more than I had seen before and it was that for a lot of people.
People focus on how groundbreaking it was to have all these gay characters at the center of a show and I think that sometimes doesn’t give enough credit to what the value of having Grace, it wasn’t just Will and Jack, it was Will and Grace and having a show that presented a gay man and a straight woman as friends and had them on equal footing and his peers, close, that welcomed a lot of people into that show and made it feel like something for, for everyone and in a way that really, I think opened a lot of eyes to kind of what I was saying before about Norman Lear. If I like this person on television, why can’t I like them in real life?
Miller: With all of these shows that we’re talking about, how much do you think that they were leading and pushing society or some households in places where they weren’t already and how much were they just reflecting where we already were?
Baume: It’s really hard to say, but I think they’re really balancing those two things and it’s a great way to look at the power of those shows that they are telling us stories about ourselves. We look at television or movies or media in general and we say, hey, that’s kind of me and that’s great, but something else that’s great that the media and television can do is show us how much better we could be. They can show us a better version of ourselves and how we want the world to reflect us in the future. And so, yeah, I think shows like that and reality shows and game shows and everywhere that we see people living lives and telling their stories, they’re all pushing us forward in some way.
Miller: The basic story that you’re telling in this book is a transition from vilification or erasure to maybe caricature to tokenism to where we are now, which I think in a lot of ways it is a more textured, fully-realized version of complex human lives. But that is for gay and lesbian characters, but where do you think we are for trans characters on TV?
Baume: I think there’s still a long way to go. I guess you could call it the final frontier of inclusion. And, in particular, we don’t see enough, I think, stories about queer People of Color and that’s another area where I think television still has a lot of room to improve. And what that takes is more of what we’ve seen in the past. We’ve been here. We’ve been at a point where we’re like, there’s not enough of us or there’s not enough of our friends or there’s not enough of our family or whatever. We’ve been here before. There hasn’t been enough, it hasn’t been good enough and we know what to do about that. And that is to demand more fans to say, hey, why don’t you have these characters kissing or why don’t you have a Black trans character on the show? Why are you leaving a whole group of the population out?
So for fans to demand more, sometimes raucously and vocally and invading television stations, if that’s what it takes. It takes writing letters and it takes message boards and whatever method it takes and it takes people on the inside who can recognize, “In my industry, I have the potential to do more.” All those groups working together using different tactics and asking for more and trying to improve things and also keeping their eye on the ultimate goal which is liberation and not being constrained by arbitrary rules.
Miller: You mentioned that 42 million people saw some or all of that Ellen episode. Those numbers don’t happen now in our streaming universe, but we have gained a ton of new entertainment options and viewpoints. If you want to seek something out, you can find it, but it’s not that you’re going to be alone but it’s not the shared sort of almost universal experience of when there were just three channels and you got what you got.
How do you think about that balance of what has been lost in terms of that shared sense and what’s been gained in terms of that explosion of diversity?
Baume: Yeah. We no longer have the phenomenon where an episode airs and we all gather around the next day because we all watched the same thing because we only had three choices that night. And on one hand, it’s great that now we can have so many diverse things, thinking about things like Steven Universe and She-ra. Animation that has queer characters! So we can have these niche shows for niche audiences that we couldn’t, that there was just no way that NBC of 1984 was going to have; however, that means that a lot of shows are hard to find. There are so many shows that exist today that I only find out about when people are angry that they were canceled too early. There’s just more than you can possibly watch.
So, yeah, it’s a good thing and it’s a bad thing and I think the best news is that we’re at a real pivot right now for television. We can clearly see that the economic model for television right now is not working. Things are going wrong with TV at the moment. And so we have a chance to change the face of that right now. Let’s see what happens.
Miller: Matt Baume. Thanks very much.
Baume: Thank you.
Miller: Matt Baume is the author of “Hi Honey, I’m Homo!: Sitcoms, Specials and the Queering of American Culture.”
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