The Year in Gay Television: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly Betty

For Being Broadcast in Color, Television Sure Doesn’t Have Much of It

While the landscape on television is bleak for gay men, it’s even bleaker for gay men of color. Logo’s Noah’s Arc, one of the only shows on television solely about black gay men, wrapped up its second season with no official word on whether or not a third season would be shot. (A movie version is rumored to be in the works).

With Noah’s Arc no longer airing new episodes and here!’s The DL Chronicles available only via subscription service, the only regularly occurring gay men of color on television are Oscar on Halfway Home (and on NBC’s The Office), Omar Little on The Wire, Calvin on Greek, and Lloyd on Entourage though he skirts close to being “barely there” at times. Logo’s animated Rick & Steve: The Happiest Gay Couple in All The World actually boasts a very diverse cast that not only includes characters that are Filipino-American, Jewish, Hispanic, Asian, and African-American, but an HIV positive, mobility challenged character as well.

Other gay characters of color include those "barely there", such as Sanjay on Weeds, Julien Lowe on The Shield, Ben on Hotel Babylon, Chaz on ER, and George on Men in Trees. Ugly Betty also recently added Suzuki St. Pierre (Alec Mapa) as a gossip correspondent, but it was never intended as a regular role. Fans can look forward to the welcome return of Omar Little (Michael K. Williams) on The Wire in January. But with that show entering its final season, the future for gay men of color on television appears even bleaker.

And the Crystal Ball Shows the Future to be…

The looming question for next year is what will happen with the ongoing Writer’s Guild of America strike. As the situation stands right now, if the strike drags on too much longer, the entire winter schedule could be canceled. That means programs such as Brothers & Sisters, Ugly Betty, Desperate Housewives, Dirty Sexy Money and others halfway through the current season would simply end and resume next fall at the earliest. Fans of As The World Turns would find themselves in luck as those shows will continue to churn out scripts with or without their regular writers.

In no way would an ongoing strike be a good thing. As the past three years have shown, even in relatively good times, gay representation is a dicey thing. A dragged out strike would increase the prevalence of reality programming, which admittedly has been relatively good for gay visibility, but scripted characters allow viewers to get to know gay characters over a much longer period of time and in a more significant way. Reality star contestants usually fade away quickly once a show ends, but scripted characters venture into viewers homes year after year, establishing the sort of connection few reality stars can.

When the strike ends, networks are going to be eager to re-capture as large a part of the pre-strike audience as possible and that is likely to drive them toward safe, middle-of-the-road fare least likely to offend; fare that will probably leave gay characters — and gay viewers — out in the cold.

And what happens if the strike does end soon? As already discussed, the number of gay characters has continued to shrink on network television and with the rise of reality television, that trend isn’t likely to reverse itself. But with a little prodding from ourselves and organizations like GLAAD, those numbers might stabilize and the quality will continue to increase. Hopefully, cable should continue to provide fertile ground, but otherwise the future continues to look cloudy at best.

Associate Editor Brian Juergens contributed to this article.