TV's Coming-Outparty

The first Tuesday of his second season on the air was a big day for Will Truman. Will, the male half of NBC's Will & Grace, went on a date, after spending last year setting an endurance record for getting over a painful breakup. The date was with a hunky bookstore clerk we saw for all of five teasing seconds, but it was a date nonetheless. His other accomplishment: the Top-20 W&G; beat its straight-couple neighbor, ABC's Dharma & Greg, in the first round of a pitched battle for ratings.

And there you have the state of gayness on television in 1999: TV has come out, within fuzzily defined but undeniable limits. Since the much touted coming out of Ellen DeGeneres in 1997--and the much noted rapid demise of her sitcom in the following season--prime time has seen an influx of popular, prominent and well-rounded gay characters without Ellen-esque audience or advertiser cavils. Indeed, there's so much cachet in being gay that even straight characters are trying it. On Fox's Action, scheming movie producer Peter Dragon received oral sex from a star to whom he passed himself off as gay, and in what promises to be a head-turning second episode of Fox's Ally McBeal on Nov. 1, Ally engages in steamy lip-wrestling with another woman.

That straight characters are getting more on-screen same-sex action than gay ones speaks to the bizarre rules surrounding gay sexuality on TV. The first strange rule: gay men are more lovable than gay women. But girl kisses are better than boy kisses--and it's best if at least one girl is straight. Straight actors playing gay (as in Eric McCormack, who plays lawyer Will Truman) go over better than openly gay actors (DeGeneres), and so on. Thus America is apparently ready for implicit fellatio as a punch line or for a foxy hetero babe's experimentation, while actual gay characters such as Will--though enjoying increasingly substantial roles--still have libido restrictions.

There are nearly 30 gay or lesbian characters in prime time (depending on how you count and categorize them). Most are post-Ellen additions, and they are no longer limited to bit roles and punch lines (though TNT dropped a stereotypically gay "character" from World Championship Wrestling after receiving complaints about gay bashing). ABC's Oh Grow Up and Wasteland feature gay leads with actual, if tentative, love lives (Ford, a lawyer who's just left his marriage, and Russell, a closeted soap actor). Action has two gay regulars; one is Bobby G., a ruthless studio head whose massive male endowment symbolizes his show-biz power and the hetero fear of gay sexuality (literally striking dumb straight men who witness it).

Interestingly, in a season of protest over the underrepresentation of racial minorities, series creators have managed to add gay characters without getting much pressure to do so. One factor is that while coming out is still daunting to actors, there are a number of openly gay TV writers and producers, including Wasteland's Kevin Williamson (who worked a regular character's coming-out story line into Dawson's Creek last season), Oh Grow Up's Alan Ball and W&G;'s co-creator and co-executive producer Max Mutchnick. In addition, the pioneering DeGeneres is developing a show for CBS. The network says it's unknown whether she'll play a gay character but contends she's free to.

Gay writers and producers "realize it's their responsibility [to create gay characters] because the straight guy down the hall isn't going to," says Scott Seomin, entertainment-media director for the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD).

Gay characters still account for only about 2% of TV's roster, and with scant exceptions, we generally see a lone gay character associating largely with straights, viewing pals' sexcapades from the sidelines with what-fools-these-breeders-be amusement. But if nothing else, gay and straight characters show a new openness, sophistication and realism, sometimes with the help of consultants; GLAAD worked with McCormack to refine Will after the show's pilot. ("No gay man had hair like Will's, really long in the back," jokes Seomin. "He looked like Jerry Seinfeld.") Certainly much of the biting banter and in-jokes of W&G--;"I haven't seen a kiss that uncomfortable since Richard Gere and Jodie Foster in Sommersby"--would be unimaginable in the era of Three's Company's fairy jokes. Some shows even cultivate what you might call a gay sensibility. HBO's heterosexual (and how) sitcom Sex and the City regularly broaches sexual gray areas, taking the perspective, less broadly embraced among straights, that sexuality isn't either-or but a continuum. The Ally McBeal same-sex kiss episode, for all its easy titillation, takes the same view.

Gay content and gay characters--increasingly common accessories on shows aimed at trendy young adults--serve as a sort of coolness shorthand, bestowing hipness on their shows and audience, serving as a conduit to cred for the majority group, just as racial minorities have in the past. From Norman Mailer's White Negro we've gone to the Gay Hetero. As a side benefit, these characters allow networks to put affluent white boys on the air and call it diversity. (Indeed, the elderly animated pair Wally and Gus on the WB's Mission Hill are notable not so much for making out in the show's premiere as for proving that gay men don't vaporize after age 30.) But Spin City's Carter Heywood is the networks' only gay person of color, and we've scarcely seen working-class gays or bisexuals since Sandra Bernhard on Roseanne. Speaking of which, anybody remember lesbians? Judy Wieder, editor in chief of the gay-and-lesbian magazine The Advocate, says that although gay men's sexuality "seems to be more threatening to society in general than [that of] gay women," lesbians have largely been left out of TV's gay renaissance.