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Housewives' suburban hotties, like Sex and the City's urban ones, are unabashed straight stereotypes: the frazzled mom, the girl next door, the spicy Latina, the uptight homemaker. But, notes Paul Colichman, co-founder and CEO of Here! TV, a gay and lesbian premium channel, "Gay men have always loved sexy, ultrafeminine, exaggerated women like Marilyn Monroe. The women in Desperate Housewives are caricatures and larger than life. That's why it works."
There's an old tradition of gay writers (not to mention actors) expressing themselves through straight characters. Gay audiences saw themselves reflected in vivid women like Blanche DuBois in Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire. TV and movie writers created themes and characters that were palatable to straight audiences but tripped the gaydar of knowing viewers--say, Paul Lynde's queeny Uncle Arthur on Bewitched. (In advertising, such dual signals are called gay vague.) Even Sex and the City, with its witty, sexually assertive women, was reminiscent of the old maxim "Write gay, cast straight."
Shows like Cherry's, Murphy's and Ball's are not about sending coded messages from the closet to the living room. Yes, there are still barriers to gays on TV--Survivor last fall edited a kiss between two women. But Ball and Murphy work in cable, where they could create gay characters--and have. Even on network TV, Housewives recently had Susan (Teri Hatcher) stumbling across the teenage son of Bree (Marcia Cross) smooching another guy at a pool party. When he comes out to Bree in a later episode, she says, "Well, I'd love you even if you were a murderer"--the precise response, Cherry says, that his mother gave when he came out at age 31.
Mostly, though, these writers are asserting their right to be gay yet to write straight. Which raises the question, Couldn't straight men or women have created these shows? Probably. But they didn't. Instead, these writers have taken the idea of a gay sensibility beyond the old campy, fey stereotypes. Their shows have the subtler sensibility defined by gay film historian Vito Russo in The Celluloid Closet, his study of the influence of gays on the movies: "A natural conviction that difference exists but doesn't matter, that there's no such thing as normal even when a majority of people think so."
This is a conviction you don't have to be gay to share. Whether set in an operating room or a funeral home, a leafy suburb or glittery Manhattan, these shows question our easy ideas of normality. They argue that knowing yourself can take a lifetime. And they tell us that truth is an essential part of life and art--but one that cannot always be told straight. --Reported by Jeanne McDowell/ Los Angeles