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.