In the Life: Ep. 1404, "Image Conscience"

this month on in the life laura linney brings the straight eye to us gay guys live the not so queer history of broadcasting bending reality hi i'm jennifer aniston and the hottest new brand on tv us all this and harvey on america's gay and lesbian news magazine in the life in the life is funded in part by the h van hammeringen foundation additional support provided by the ford foundation the gill foundation the pride foundation the jim stepp and peter zimmer funds of the stonewall community foundation and the annual support of in the life members like you welcome to in the life i'm laura linney this month america's gay and lesbian news magazine takes on television did you know that more people watched the super bowl last year than voted in the presidential election in fact the hearts and minds of america are spending an average of two and a half hours a day in front of the tube all in all it's safe to say that if there is such a thing as a national conversation it's happening on tv and tonight in the life asks what role lgbt americans are playing in that conversation examining its roots gay people didn't even exist it's reality it's almost a condition of the casting of a show to have a gay person in the show and the forces that form it the value of that advertising is based on how many people watch the show and harvey sounds off with friends like kerry we might as well have clinton given its influence on our culture it is hard to believe that tv is actually less than 75 years old but it was not until 1939 that a new novelty item called television first began showing up in the living rooms of a privileged few television first shown to the public at the world's fair now takes its place as a new american art and industry in less than a year a flamboyant wrestler known as gorgeous george had bent the lens of american television for the first time it was however quickly flattened back out under the advance of world war ii as america's technical focus shifted from broadcasting to military communications and in the cold war that followed it was the straight and narrow all around in the 50s and 60s there were very little representations of gay characters if at all it seemed as though um gay people didn't even exist use ajax while we think that television is created to be able to entertain us and maybe inform us it's actually made to be able to bring the most amount of eyes or viewers to the advertisers and the commercials that they create so programming is really centered around the advertisements themselves and in the age of the modern nuclear family a booming ad industry apparently found gay a tough sell the first show that we found was a program that nobody i've spoken to has ever heard of called espionage a spy who's being blackmailed by a rival you know espionage organization because they believe he's gay and the word homosexual is actually spoken while the spy fiction of the mid-60s allowed the broadcast homosexual to creep back onto the screen it was not until 1967 that real life gays made it to prime time in cbs's sensational special and the picture wasn't pretty homosexuality is in fact a mental illness i know that inside now i'm sick i'm not sick just sexually i'm sick in a lot of ways meanwhile the fictional homosexual turned up a few more times in shows like abc's nypd and the opening episode deals with homosexual blackmail and the uh the police characters are actually sympathetic to the gay characters which is for 1967 again was kind of surprising by decades end the world would change again dramatically and so would representation this is uh the decade following stonewall uh the decade following uh the movement coalescing on the streets in a new and vibrant way and it starts to play out in the 70s on television shows that were more provocative and were taking risks i'm not an interior decorator no i thought all you fellas were what fellas you know tinkerbell the 70s i guess were the real beginning in terms of a lot of series actually dealing with the subject you had archie bunker being from a world in which nobody ever talked about all of these new things suddenly being challenged by uh all of these people coming into uh his life whether they were drag queens or they were gay and challenging stereotypes carol connor's character who's the bigot has this very macho friend who's played by phil carrey whose character turns out to be gay and uh mike's character rob reiner has a friend who's very effeminate this is played by tony geary and of course he turns out to be straight so the whole idea in the episode is to play around with stereotypes and show how stupid it is in all that time did i ever mention a woman well what difference does that make you a bachelor so i know but pastors they're always acting kind of private what most people remember from the 70s uh as in terms of the first gay character was billy crystal's character on soap as you can see the camels don't have nearly as much money as the taste they do however have as many secrets he was i think the first gay character gay regular character on a series that was sort of successfully incorporated where the audience warmed up to him even though it's it's not the most flattering character in the world i mean we're brothers and i'm not gay so you're not gay anyway you're too good in sports dan that has nothing to do with it you're not gay according to flores by 1980 99.5 of american homes had at least one television set but by 1982 gay life had been hit with a cataclysm and so was gay representation on tv all this progress on television that began to happen in the 70s was completely and utterly stopped cold by aids gay people suddenly became invisible again or demonized dramatically homosexuality god puts it in the same category as murderers thieves prostitution after rock hudson died of course then the issue became propelled within the media and then we had a barrage of media and television shows that portrayed gay white males struggling with this terrible disease capacity sarcoma even my doctor had to look it up nothing to worry about he said usually happens to italian men in their 60s nonetheless the closet door was now a jar and a mounting conflict played out on screens across america i'm a homosexual dad i'm gay i want you to face that your son stephen is gay not lebanese lesbian lesbian lesbian lesbian hollywood was experimenting and uh yes they would put disclaimers on television first uh warn people about it there would be an uproar but from the religious right people like richard kramer who wrote for 30-something they were pioneers they were the gay people who brought the idea to the uh networks and said we need to explore this territory and i think in the late 80s as we saw 30 something breaking ground showing two gay men in bed it led to the wave of more fully formed gay characters in the 90s i don't believe in making people uncomfortable but i also don't believe in lying the 90s followed with a decade of firsts first lesbian kiss first drag supermodel tv star first gay prison sex i know a lot of you are thinking gosh not another show on gays and lesbians on television first real live out lgbt folks singing and dancing and telling jokes on public tv a trauma so acute that the pending broadcast sent bob dole to the senate floor in protest laying down their quality smoke screen while they shovel out funding for gay and lesbian variety shows you mean this isn't american movie classics nonetheless in the life made it to the screen in 1992 challenging the established notion of how gay folks would be seen and who would get to represent them two years later pbs also drew the wrath of the religious right when a certain naive straight girl from ohio led the nation through armistead maupin's oh so controversial tales of the city a serialized soap opera set in the san francisco of the 1970s tales garnered the highest ratings in pbs history and won the coveted peabody award in celebration of tails's enormous success pbs canceled its sequel i like you well don't stop and in 1996 rupaul took vh1 where no tv station had gone before the rupaul show on vh1 uh was a direct result of my giving an award on the vh1 fashion awards i got the script and it was very i don't do i'm sassy i don't do and there's a big difference and a lot of people who maybe aren't gay uh wouldn't know how would know the difference between the two welcome back now my next guests are not gay but i bet a whole bunch of lesbians wish they were it was amazing because it was nothing like that had ever happened in this country or in the world before and then ellen came on television uh she chose to come out of the closet on her show as her character and that really was groundbreaking the greatest moment that i think swept the entire culture and really started having people talk about what it was like to be gay was ellen degeneres it forced so many people uh particularly within the media to grapple with the whole idea of what is it like to be gay what is it like to bring gay identity into people's living rooms what is it for an actress in hollywood to come out ellen really kind of just opened the floodgates poor guy came down for a ding-dong and found a couple of twinkies just because if i was in a monogamous faithful relationship with a man for 10 years i would never be allowed to marry him but if i met some strange woman in a bar we could be married within an hour and every state in the union would applaud it just like that shouldn't have written all that stuff okay it's obviously not okay since you'll barely even talk to i just want to be friends will you have eric to be your spouse to love him comfort him in sickness and in health the little boy is officially here you did it baby will you take it easy you're not gonna cop a feel over a cup of coffee okay so maybe he's bi who cares his cousin can still drive what he is what do you hear these terms she's throwing around she's an actress comedian and a daughter again they saw that no matter how much the there was an uproar there were a lot of people who really liked the programming and uh that they realized that it really wasn't a big risk that they could actually uh start to portray gay and lesbian people's lives 1998 brought yet another first first gay male leading man i think i'm about to kiss you i think i'm about to be kissed gay sex is so hot whenever the network's decided we want to have two women kiss we might have two men kiss you know all the the advertisers got incredibly nervous about this so it's actually kind of um both disturbing and funny when you see the way that they they got around doing this sort of thing this is not it where is the camera going why are we looking at fireplace get off the flames and follow the flamers will and grace receive some of the highest ratings for a network sitcom in 2004 but will and jack still represent to some limited depth in terms of their portrayal of gay life and gay people because you don't you never see them in relationships gay people on television have been much more well behaved than the straight people and i think that's where we're not seeing the complications of gay sexuality and the intricate nature of our lives to this day we keep hearing about the boyfriend who's coming and the kiss that's going to happen uh and yet this man through this whole time on this series hasn't had a lot of sex as we enter the 21st century queer moments were popping up all over the dock a lot of gay bookstores for a straight neighborhood yes ladies i'm a lesbian cable particularly had begun pushing the limits of gay characterization while still catering to the mass market michael brian like you meet kat trent uh trans i think it's great that we have shows like the l word and queer as folk even if they don't represent everybody they're both groundbreaking in that we are seeing uh people who are openly gay who are dealing with dilemmas in their lives that i think a lot of us deal with even if we don't look like them or or you know act like them or you know uh they're dealing with relationships they're having sex and i think that is a big change particularly from network television the network's kind of a breathing a sigh of relief going okay well let them do all the controversial stuff let them be more open about nudity and and you know sex scenes and that sort of stuff so the advertising advertisers will get off our backs about any of the gay stuff that we do on the air i was so embarrassed i just hoped the 21st century has also given us acclaim shows in which gay characters are integrated into shows that aren't specifically gay when did morning happen something wrong kima is a character that you don't see on television you don't see actually you know in film i mean you see certain aspects of that character but not one like her kima is a tv rarity both as a lesbian of color and as a fully drawn queer character i'm one of the few uh detectives that actually have a a personal storyline you know as small as it is it's there so you know people are um empathetic towards my girlfriend you know oh come on keema you know why you gonna do your girl like that you know she's behind you why are you treating the baby like that what's up you know so they really do get into our relationship as well so that's that's been surprising in august 2003 here tv launched the first national gay cable network initiating the next chapter in queer television 24 7 gay tv currently using a pay-per-view format and reaching over 24 million households here tv is halfway through its second season and recently announced round-the-clock programming palm springs based q television has also gotten into the 24 7 game and mtv networks is expected to launch its gay channel logo on digital cable in february i grew up in a small town in the 1970s my friends and i experienced homophobia firsthand i felt like i didn't fit in or belong i felt publicly ostracized and was in pain there were no role models i could look to no one for me to say i want to be just like her so instead i turned to thoughts of suicide drugs and alcohol that's why 10 years ago when mtv asked me to come out as a lesbian on the real world i knew i had to say yes visibility saves lives helps build progress and change and makes a difference i'm beth anthony and you're watching in the life since its inception television has been at its most fundamental level a medium for advertising news and entertainment may be the means but selling products has always been the end after all advertising has traditionally been the industry's sole source of income and the beliefs and perceptions of advertisers have long determined who gets represented and how cheers lots and lots of advertisers now use lgbt themes in their ads to usually evoke humor and comedy unfortunately not very often are they doing it for the sake of diversity and fair representation hey cookie what's for breakfast nothing honey 60 billion dollars in advertising so it's a very important very powerful market ultimately companies care about money regardless of what they profess to care about every time a niche group enters the mainstream there's always that moment where they give up part of who they are to be part of a larger hole well what happened in the beginning is not surprising which was complete invisibility in the 70s and 80s the idea started to come around that you know there are gay people and it's sort of interesting what is that wonderful fresh scent it must be the laundry but it wasn't really until the mid to late 90s that it really started getting going and the range of stereotypes uh along with the increasing uh acceptance of lesbian and gay people has shown to this day a great variety of representations the early history of television was really following on from the history of radio and early on in radio basically in the communications act of 1934 congress basically said that they would give the airwaves to broadcasters but broadcasters had to fund a rating service to tell who in the public was listening and then for television it just sort of followed suit the industry soon found a second use for ratings one that would quickly become central to the business of broadcasting and that would make nielsen media research an industry linchpin most importantly ratings serve a function of currency that broadcasters are selling advertising time on television and the value of that advertising is based on how many people watch the show those numbers are agreed to by buyers and sellers that enables a sort of coherent marketplace for advertising so in the television world the images of gay folks have been subservient to sales ikea is famous for its commercial showing a male couple shopping together well you know we went to ikea uh because we thought it was time for a serious dining room table and we have slightly different tastes i mean steve is more into country it frightens me but at the same time i have compassion it was a breakthrough out in 94 and it was uh the first to honestly depict a gay male couple together this table concluded a leaf a leaf means staying together commitment we've got another leaf waiting when we really start getting along unfortunately the commercial was ahead of its time after only one airing some of the stores in the united states got bomb threats and they decided to pull the commercial after that to you know for the sake of safety 1997 was a turning point year that was the year that ellen came out in her program and a lot of advertisers uh started to grow out of that whether they were aware of it or not on that program in fact volkswagen ran a commercial uh it's fairly well known with the da da da song it wasn't clear whether they were roommates or partners or what but because it aired on on this gay program a lot of people watching thought that it was intended to show a gay couple the german-engineered volkswagen golf it fits your life or your complete lack thereof for the record volkswagen says that was not what they had intended but it was okay for people to think so but visibility isn't always benign television advertising right now is still largely um doing uh lgbt themes for gratuitous purposes they're really just trying to get the general audience to laugh oftentimes at the expense of the lgbt community you're late never leaving this room again why this tj maxx designer thingy my gorgeous creations my skirts ties my towels all of it part of it is they want to exploit uh the discomfort that a lot of people feel with homosexuality for the purpose of humor this magic moment oh others are doing it to have sort of an edgy cachet where uh you know maybe they're an a new brand and they want to have an edge to them mom dad if you're watching i want you to know i finally found the person i want to spend the rest of my life with mom and dad this is jen hi show your colors now after all advertising isn't about social change it of course is about selling products advertisers who are interested in the gay market have been confounded by a lack of good research is there opportunity to improve the accuracy and the reliability of the numbers of course nielsen pulls most of its raw data from the us census in which sexual orientation is not reported so a control group that includes queer audience in the rating system has been elusive realistically breaking a demo group out as you know you have to think of it now this is this is marketing this is advertising and so you know kind of all the other issues aside what you're doing is you're creating a marketing entity it's not like i walked in the door and said hey there's this lesbian show and it was like great that's a really broad market you know it wasn't like that we're in a slightly different environment than the broadcast and the basic cable networks are we don't have to sell time to advertisers we have people that specifically subscribe to us so in this environment we can grow a show pay stations obviously don't sell advertising so they're not using our numbers as a currency for advertising sales but they do use our numbers to get a sense of you know how many people are watching various programs or if there was any turn away from those programs at what point in the program did people turn away from it we never had any issues from our clients we never had any angry people calling us we never we never had any of that we had an environment that was like any other programming debut some people were interested some people weren't but most people were and they wanted to see what it was about certainly the way television is going with niches lifestyle niches sports niches rock climbing niches certainly someone needs to fund that programming and by distributing it far enough across the country you can build a large enough audience and the lgbt community represents only one part of the overhaul that's needed we're working with glad and in terms of running a separate panel to try to measure viewership among gay and lesbian populations investing a lot you know the techniques that we might employ that might turn out to be very effective at encouraging participation of minorities it is great to have a community but do you want to get on the highway and get there faster and be part of something that everybody else is or do you want to stay on the back roads and be be much more myopic about your experience that's a personal decision but anytime anything's aggregated into the larger culture it's going to take on a piece of the larger culture and retain part of its own identity and gay people will arbitrate that and decide that at every moment as they go forward i think eventually the same thing will happen in advertising where we reach a critical mass of awareness and interest is going to start falling people aren't going to be as surprised anymore with a gay twist and so i think what we'll be left with is that advertisers moving forward will have representations but more for the sake of diversity in representing what society really looks like rather than just surprise kelly would go with me to events i won the emmy i thanked her from the stage way before i came out it wasn't really a secret i didn't really think that the act of saying it would change how i felt about my own life but it did profoundly there's a sense of uh of freedom and dignity and a lack of shame that um has made me feel better about myself in a way i had not expected i wish i had been ready sooner frankly i wish the week after my show premiered i would have said and by the way i'm gay okay let's go in hindsight now i know that the ones of us who are ready will hopefully mentor and inspire those of uh people who are not yet ready and to know that they're all we're all brothers and sisters all of us and you know to shame one for not acting in the way you want them to act in terms of coming out or not is just as bad as george bush shaming us off hi i'm rosie o'donnell and you're watching in the life still to come on in the life bending reality what are you doing you're changing guys gay conjugating the l word i don't really call myself anything now but married and telling it like it is the backslide of our freedom has just begun the relatively new phenomena of reality tv has struck perhaps the richest vein of gay and lesbian imagery on television but what is reality tv and how did we get here people in general love to see themselves you like to feel that you're you're normal it's kind of like one big psychotherapy session where oh wow okay so i'm not strange from the amazing race to the apprentice to to survivor those are amazing shows because you have the competition element in there and the gaming aspect of it versus um dog bounty hunter and all of them and are they kind of oddball areas to explore yeah they are but they're cool because you get to see a different story and inevitably it is a story there's a beginning a middle and an end in a cnn usa today gallup poll 23 of people surveyed believe that reality tv is totally phony let's remember it's reality television as a genre and i believe that's an important framework to put over any discussion about these kinds of shows while 57 believe that reality tv represents a distorted picture of events honestly big brother is the most realistic reality show on television do you cross dress no we have no direction from producers you know we're held accountable on camera 24 hours a day for seven days a week and so i really think that as far as the experience i've had it was very intense and very realistic but they're the same thing no there's a big difference between drag queens and gay people just because you're gay doesn't mean you want to be a woman okay one reality of reality tv is it has given the lgbt community visibility on tv like never before when you take a real close look at how we're visible on tel us most on network television is in reality program programmers have figured out what gay people have known all along which is gay people make great television i know gay people have like i have no clue that they're engaged i'm not here to stop anyone else i'm here to live and to share myself and to make this world a better place growing up in mississippi mtv in the real world was my only access to homosexuals and first it was norm on the real world and then i remember pedro who gave us the not only the gift of being gay but being the first gay american to really take his hiv status very publicly and really touch the youth market in a way that hadn't been touched before the very first person that i ever saw on television that i identified as definitely gay was pedro on the real world he was sort of the first out gay person i think that that was real brave of mtv and real brave of pedro to sort of be out there he definitely put a face on a disease for so many young people which was extremely important and i think was the first gay person that a lot of people really got to see being themselves and he had hiv and since then died and really sort of brought and he was the first person that really brought an awareness in a very real sense from that pivotal moment we have seen an explosion of memorable gay characters in reality tv it's almost a condition of the casting of a show to have a gay person in the show richard hatch probably did more for the perception of gay people in america than just about any event in television before that and the reason i say that is because he was on being himself and because he was an unlikable character and because he didn't seem gay people were more judging him as any other person rather than as a gay character and it's he sort of became an evil character who on a show that happened to be gay i think whenever anybody can make the gay part the second part of the sentence instead of saying oh there's gay so and so instead this is so-and-so who is gay tremendous difference in 2002 another breakthrough phenomenon in reality tv hit the airwaves with a title that left nothing to the imagination but made some people nervous i remember when queer i started i was nervous about the name at the time the the word queer made me think of queer nation it made me think of uh gay political activism and marches and protests and i it it's a word that's still tough for some people to digest in the back of our minds you hear that hey you little queer i mean you all let this resounding so it's like what's the show called they're like queer eye for the straight guy oh okay when we sat down to really tear apart the format and figure it out everything at that time was actually extremely mean-spirited it was always about voting off or kicking off or telling someone how bad they are and we really wanted to twist that up and we brought it from a place of of make better little kid will come up to us and you know who will say you know i can't tell you how much this means to me i love the show you guys are such amazing role models the world was ready obviously to embrace something that summer uh two years ago in which the the idea of five gay men and a straight guy and putting them in the same world and realizing not the differences but the similarities people would see walking down the mall you know down the aisle in the moment they're like oh that there's that queer guy and now literally like moms and dads kids teachers like hey yo it's the queer guy but in an exploitative and ever-changing form of tv it is not only imperative to monitor how gays are being portrayed but how they are being perceived we used to get phone calls what are you doing you're changing guys gay you're turning them gay oh yes you know we're good at that you know you there's that secret button that's your press well you know it was just ridiculous tv programmers have to be careful they have to be careful we're second class citizens we still get beaten up every day in the halls of high schools and colleges in the spring of 2004 fox tv attempted to launch a show called seriously dude i'm gay basic premise of the show is two straight bigoted guys are taken to west hollywood california where for one week they have to pretend to be gay the one who passes wins 50 grand the other one goes home they have to go out on a date during the date they have to spank their date they have to fork feed their date they have to come out to their best friend and there is a mockery of the whole process that was palpable as part of their transformation into believably gay guys the straight dudes had to go on a blind date with a man what they didn't know is that we set them up with each other and each guy totally thought the other one was totally gay and really into him so it shook up everyone's conception of what it means to identify as gay the worst piece of it was the look on the face and the reaction of the person who did not win the person who did not win essentially looked at the camera and said i humiliated myself on national television and i didn't win a dime and he had that look on his face that reminded me of a certain episode of jenny jones i mean that is ridiculous to the point of being laughable the guy who lost the contest meaning he was found two hetero to win the money would be so outraged and his gay coaches for not making him gay enough that he'd hurt someone if anything the show would make straight guys more tolerant and accepting i believe that glaad's job is to take a look at this programming and say what's the viewer take away from this is the homophobia validated or is it challenged when i finished watching this pilot i said we need to talk to fox they really should not run this and before scheduled meeting with glaad fox pulled the show before it aired i think it's unfortunate that a group that was founded with very well intentioned principles like glaad you know is now putting themselves in a position to judge and basically censor other gay creative people's work there's a very sophisticated audience out there who doesn't need to be protected as the genre of reality tv continues to push the envelope we have to carefully walk the line between inclusion and exploitation i hope that i'm making the right choice boy meets boy for example i found some of the straight guys who were voted off to say some of the most interesting and refreshing things i really learned that you have no idea who is and who isn't and it really doesn't matter love everyone for who they are bottom line as human beings i love that straight people could sort of have fun with the whole idea of there being a gaydar and trying to figure out who's trying to fake being gay and who really is gay and i thought the most moving part of that show was when a straight guy got voted off and he would look to camera and say you know now i understand what it's like to be gay i like television that you know takes me to a different place makes me laugh and relax and so i think um even if i wasn't on queer eye i would probably really like show what we're finding is as people are making these programs developing these ideas they think about including us and yes there is a heightened sensitivity i think the transgendered individuals in our society today are definitely the next group that is going to capture national attention in a big way in the same way that gay people have but i also think we need to keep a very watchful eye in the end the audience will serve as the ultimate watchdog if they are uninterested or offended the show will fail you know originally um the the station in tulsa oklahoma wouldn't air queer eye for the straight guy um and then they were showing old reruns of coach and after a couple weeks of craig t nelson they were saying bring on the come on you have this opportunity that you know to change people's minds and hearts that might not have been open to things before what we ask for when we talk with programming executives is to be included to be part of the fabric of the representations in television and film nothing more nothing less you don't have to like like what we do but you but you can't you know judge us and condemn us and deny us our rights we're your friends we're in your living room every tuesday at 10. um that's an incredible privilege who knew that that chocolate mousse and throw pillows would be such a powerful mechanism for social change when we were picking the show that we didn't understand the politics we didn't think about oh we're going to change the world all the rest of it because what if we had lost in the first day they asked i said what do you want to be called do you want to be called boyfriends or friends or married or whatever and we said mary just because we were i definitely thought that geez if we if we win this and do something a lot of people are going to see us and they're going to see the moniker married and logically what goes along with that this is a family station they did something revolutionary hi i'm chip bart from the amazing race and you're watching in the life over the past few years showtime networks has introduced two shows that not only feature queer characters but are also set in queer cultures and one of those shows the l word is also the first commercial television show to develop major lesbian characters at all so tonight in the life goes behind the scenes for the new season of the l word i sat down with a couple of executives and i said i know this is kind of a crazy idea but i just think we should do a lesbian ensemble drama and they kind of looked at me and concurred that it was a crazy idea i didn't have any representation of somebody gay on tv so i would go into this sort of fantasy world when i watched television for instance facts of life i i really thought that joe and blair like had something special going on it just goes to show that when you're left with nothing you have to sort of make do i have some recollections from saying i don't think that we could ever sell this to the suits upstairs all in the course of a season everything that was supposed to happen happened they ordered my script we went forward we cast the show which was really challenging all these actors have agreed to play these gay characters ed i don't know why that's such a taboo because a lot of people do it but with regards to wimbid again there hasn't been a show where every female character is gay i think the straight world is starting to come out of its closet and say okay here's the deal these are my friends these are my brothers my sisters my parents these are people that i care about and i want to see my world reflected in in my entertainment and it hasn't been i went to showtime as opposed to a network because i wanted to be free to tell these stories as i felt they needed to be told i wanted to be frank especially about sex and sexuality because that's really the theme of the show come on help me out here you know i mean it one of my best friends they didn't know what was wrong with her wrong she was normal she was gay we couldn't be friends because i was black and she was white i got to know for her later on saying she was sorry that we didn't get to have a friendship while we're growing up with little girls the gay and lesbian world really kept my career and what i had done in the past totally out in the open they were so supportive because they believe art doesn't retire and go away i don't understand i'm pregnant and you're happy about that daddy we haven't really come that far when you think about it you know i mean at least i feel you know as a society in terms of just accepting homosexuality i feel like we've gotten better you know as a nation but have we really when they're just still discriminatory things that happen every day you are just so gay so gay i know i know i thought that i understood uh gay issues and i thought i i was totally in tune i had no clue i you know and i realize now it's sort of like the minute you start to learn about something you realize how little you know i think in america i think it's probably really important especially with especially with the state of things as they are now becoming more and more conservative as you watch um the way the politics is going i mean who knows what's gonna what the situation's gonna be by the time this is um but yeah i think it's very important here and i think it it's necessary this kind of drama is definitely necessary with it comes an audience who may not have a good comprehension of the gay and lesbian world which is what i want what i would love to have for them to come and learn as a straight woman to play a gay character it's very interesting how other people react to you i have a secret what i've never actually attended a lot of my male friends i think it's the most exciting thing ever which is kind of odd and i'm a bit disappointed in them i have to say because they all find it like really you're going to get you're going to get like together with other women and we're going to be able to watch it on tv and it's like that's obviously what the l word is up against i always considered myself bisexual from the minute i was 16. i said that in interviews i said it to the advocate i've made a commitment it's to a man if you want to call me heterosexual fine i don't really call myself anything now but married paid any attention yeah but you guys she's got nine in the last column and she only has seven in the street yeah but the margin of error is plus or minus five percentage points are we to say that i shouldn't play tina because i'm married but what if i was the only one in the room that nailed it didn't i win that part there's always shane you know someone like mia or kate or anyone else what if they don't want to ever comment on their sexuality or what if they change their mind it's been so big kind of invades your personal space it's you come out you do these things you're promoting a show you're promoting a job that you did to get people interested and invested in it and to promote it and of course you know there's people want to know about who you are in real life but of course like there's an element of respect when it comes to that because i don't bring my personal life on that screed no no no look it's cool i totally dig need to make a living i'm meeting a client anyway i get it as a political argument i get it i get it that it might be frustrating to some people in the community but it just goes right back to can't we just celebrate the show shouldn't we just celebrate the show apple 18 i've done scenes before with men actors and they push it and they know they're pushing it the director will call cut and they will continue doing what they're doing and it's like you know we've cut now you can unhand me you're not gonna get that with them on set working with other women when it comes to the sex part of it all you just kind of got as the straight girl you got to ask questions and and thank god i work with open-minded people that have no problems expressing like well a women's clitoris you know what i mean and you just go for it we get to tell the truth the funniest thing to me is that um a lot of straight girls come up to me and they sort of whisper to me that they like the show they're like i really like the show and they're like sitting next to their boyfriend like they're not allowed or something i think we had some criticism earlier for like oh we're too lipstick it's too polished just too glammy i mean i'm from new york so i mean i had tons of friends in new york um you know gay and straight they'd be like you guys just started way too polished i do get a lot of flack sometimes with you well you know you're not representing this person you're not representing that person and um it's true but we are representing this particular group of people if i saw the big picture of of the weight the burden that we have i think i wouldn't wouldn't leave my house i'd live in the barn and just stay there and let let my hair grow nappy obviously i understand there's political things behind it but sometimes you have to just step away and step outside of the box i don't think the cast of friends is necessarily representative of manhattan but it's kind of hard to represent an entire city on one sitcom let alone an entire community of people on one show being the first of its kind there is so much pressure to get it right and there are always going to be people who think we don't get it right but we get it right for this group the big difference for us this season is that we're better filmmakers the actors have really deepened their characters it's great now the two of you can be together we hang out with each other all the time and we talk about our scenes and we talk about the scripts and we talk about our characters and we talk about how to make things better or you know how to make it more real the writers know their material better we worked with great filmmakers and our crew have honed their kind of systems for for getting the work done let's shoot it it's not like working on another cop show or something it's just it has so much meaning behind it i mean but they're friends and i am so proud to be a part of something like that it's funny doing what i'm doing now being on this show and being sort of this kind of role model is better than anything i probably expected to get out of my career television is the venue in which we get to talk about our lives at large and we get to keep on saying it because our stories don't end television is the perfect medium for that everything we do in life should be on television and should be analyzed how well we're doing where it was where it is and where it's going it's a beginning it's a celebration i think of this show is here it's about time and what i hope is that we just keep on telling great stories remember everybody as if they're looking at the parades growing up as an african-american man i've had to face many forms of discrimination playing the character of keith charles a gay man a gay cop on hbo six feet under has opened my eyes up to other forms of discrimination that plague our society i challenge all of us to step up to the plate and don't allow fear to stop us from being who we are and contributing to society in the ways that we feel comfortable i'm matthew st patrick and you're watching in the life and finally in the life's regular commentator and four-time tony winner harvey fierstein raises questions about another form of representation oh jeez are we ready getting all worked up i'll forget it one of the most indelible moments in the academy award-winning documentary the times of harvey milk occurs after the assassination dan white has slain harvey and the mayor of san francisco and in response our community filled the streets of the castro candles in hand and marched in a moving testament to their grief and solidarity but one lone voice cut through the sobs and whispered reverence tom amiano recalls a seemingly homeless man crying out to the tens of thousands marching where is your anger harvey milk our first openly gay elected official had been murdered by a small-minded jealous bigoted heterosexual we were robbed of a hero we were reduced immeasurably in our representation we lost a clarion voice for our silenced majority and we responded to that violence and mass with a loving tribute instead of storming city hall and demanding retribution where indeed was our anger but when dan white escaped the murder conviction we found our anger and it wasn't pretty but the legacy of our outrage is openly gay and lesbian elected officials all across the nation decades later when an overpowered matthew shepard was found slumped on a lonely wyoming fence tears streaking the lifeblood dried on his face again the cry went out where is your anger many of us called to the community for action for justice for an end to free speech for politicians and religious leaders and community watchdogs who spread bigotry and encourage such violence most of our anger was drowned in our sorrow and silenced in rhetoric but enough remain to beget anti-hate crime bills in cities and states and now we have witnessed an election season where even our friends felt free to spit on us no i'm surprised to hear gw bush call for legislation against us but where were our allies john kerry for whom i hosted the most profitable glbt fundraising dinner ever held in new york told the nation he would support a constitutional amendment in massachusetts to ban gay marriage can you imagine instead of standing up and saying hey we've had gay marriage for months in massachusetts and no one's getting hurt no one's getting special rights no heterosexual marriage is suffering so let's stop the panic and act like rational adults instead of standing up for reason and equal justice he used his national platform to say that it was okay to discriminate with friends like kerry we might as well have clinton oh i know there are those among us who think clinton was our pal and i am certainly among those who are grateful that bill spoke our name and hired us openly for his white house and treated us with a modicum of respect but let us not forget that it was on his watch that the defense of marriage act was created and he signed it into law and it was on his watch that don't ask don't tell became official policy causing higher rates of anti-gay violence and record-breaking discharges from service where was our anger then my brothers and sisters i'm not usually an alarmist but i feel that someone needs to say this if they can so easily pass laws to ban us from marriage none of our rights can be taken for granted if community standards is reason enough to legislate anti-gay discrimination the backslide of our freedom has just begun i beg you to take a long hard look at the election results from around the country get in touch with your anger and put it to work if we do not i promise our community will be attacked by the fascist right in the name of decency and family values with unprecedented vigor better to find your anger now than wait for the next election and ask where are my rights i'm laura linney for all of us at in the life thank you for watching and we'll see you next month in the life is funded in part by the hvan hammering foundation additional support provided by the ford foundation the gill foundation the bride foundation the jim stepp and peter zimmer funds of the stonewall community foundation and the annual support of in the life members like you you