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Among the Fisher family members on Six Feet Under, which returns for its fifth season this summer, only one, David (Michael C. Hall), is gay. (College-age Claire, played by Lauren Ambrose, has had flings with men and women.) But all, in a way, have been engaged in coming out. The funeral business they run is about the tidy management of emotions, and the repressed Fishers are continually struggling to open up to the people closest to them. Likewise, Housewives is rooted in mystery and enough lies to fill a three-car garage. "I certainly understand the nature of secrets," says Cherry. "If you grow up gay, you meet people and go on dates and find out the men are married. I'm conservative enough to be appalled. Secrets upon secrets upon secrets."
Truth and lies are unavoidable themes in the lives of gays, say Will & Grace co-creators Max Mutchnick and David Kohan. "The first 'real' moment for a gay man is when he comes out of the closet," says Mutchnick, who is gay. He says gays may have a special sensitivity to these issues "because in order to move forward, you have to live and tell the truth."
Bound up with lies and truth is a sensitivity to ambiguity in a world of black-and-white dualities: boy and girl, straight and gay. Nip/Tuck is literally about the idea that the flesh can tell lies, that identity is malleable, that a person is more than what is written on his or her anatomy. It also has an uncanny sensitivity for the stormy, complex relationship--like a platonic marriage--between the straight-male leads Christian (Julian McMahon) and Sean (Dylan Walsh). When Sean discovers, for instance, that Christian had an affair with Sean's wife and is the real father of his son, he tells his friend, heartbroken, "I loved you the most."
Ball's, Cherry's and Murphy's dramas are often compared to soap operas, which can often be code for "too girly." Says Cherry, whose writing staff has five gays and six straights: "We push the boundaries in our lives by being gay. When we write, we are perfectly willing to write extreme behavior." Ilene Chaiken, the lesbian writer and creator of The L Word, theorizes that gay men and women inevitably experience love as heightened drama. "One of the things that always make for a great love story is the obstacles," she says. "These writers are bringing to these stories not only their experiences of illicit love but enough illicitness to make the stories more exciting and infuse them with passion and intensity."
That passion, curiously, is expressed in each show through strong women. A gay man, says Ball, can see men through a straight woman's eyes--"We understand how weird men are"--but he believes he can also view women with greater detachment. "Once you remove the illusory screen of romantic projection, there is a person," he says, "and it's easier for a gay man to see the person in a female character." And, says Showtime entertainment president Robert Greenblatt, gay writers are more inclined to think about gender roles and stereotypes. "Straight men don't think about gender," he says. "Why should they? They're in the dominant position." (Of course, it's worth noting that the male perspective, straight or gay, is much more common on TV than that of women, who still create far fewer prime-time shows.)