Television’s Gay Agenda

When it comes to Swingtown, the healthiest, most stable marriage seems to be the “swingers,” Tom and Trina Decker. Tom and Trina have an “open” marriage, where they occasionally sleep with other people. But it isn’t random infidelity; the couple has set very clear rules on extracurricular sexual activity.

Swingtown's Tom (Grant Show) & Trina (Lana Parilla)

This is a very gay male perspective. Gay men, completely excluded from the rituals of “respectable” society and even the moral codes of most churches, long ago started writing our own “rules” and codes of behavior. This isn’t just about sexual monogamy, which is, of course, practiced by many gay couples. It’s the notion that whatever rules, sexual or otherwise, the couples choose, they are chosen, intentionally decided upon by the participants in question – not imposed on the couple by one’s parents or religion or society at large.

You don’t want us? Well, we don’t want you either, thank you very much.

Are there straight couples that have open marriages? There definitely are — probably many more than most people think, whether it’s acknowledged in the relationship or a sort of an unofficial policy of “don’t ask, don’t tell.” But because both halves of a gay male couple are male, with often similar perspectives on sexual matters, virtually every gay male couple, even monogamous ones, practices a form of the Decker’s openness, whether it’s about porn or just checking out a hot guy together as he passes by them on the street. It seems unlikely that many straight couples have this level of openness.

Meanwhile, Six Feet Under tells the story of a family of mostly heterosexuals, but every single character begins the series repressed and unhappy with at least one secret “shame.” Over the course of the show, the characters all find happiness exactly to the degree that they loosen up, and accept and embrace their long-buried secrets. In other words, creator Alan Ball was literally telling a mutli-pronged gay coming out story, but in a way that even the most thoroughly heterosexual person could relate.

Ugly Betty’s take on the nuclear family is much more positive, but just as interesting: one theme of the show is that class and income have nothing to do with a family’s love and affection for each other (or, perhaps, they have an inverse correlation). In addition, the show, which features a Mexican-American family, has injected a very sympathetic portrayal of homosexuality into its core Hispanic HiHaudience, which tends to be more homophobic than other viewers.

The character of Justin, meanwhile, has introduced to all of America the “revolutionary” idea that gay people don’t spontaneously become gay when we hit adulthood or when we’re “recruited” by someone else; many of us display stereotypically gay characteristics from a very young age, Ugly Betty says, and we’re worthy of a family’s love anyway.

These shows wouldn’t be the first time that minority issues have entered collective American consciousness in a guise more palatable to the majority. Both jazz and rock and roll music are fundamentally African American art forms, arising directly from similarly black traditions of folk, gospel, and blues. But it wasn’t until white artists like Bill Haley, Elvis Presley, and Pat Boone co-opted the art that the music found mass acceptance. Sadly, in this case, the minority artists didn’t benefit financially and, even now, rarely get the credit they deserve.

This wouldn’t even be the first time fundamentally “gay” issues have been presented to heterosexual audiences in the form of heterosexual characters either. How many of the greatest love songs were written by gay or bisexual men? Noel Coward, Cole Porter, Lorenz Hart, Kander and Ebb, and many other songwriters may have been writing songs with lyrics about heterosexual love, but the personal experiences that informed those lyrics and the music that accompanied them were same-sex love affairs.

Next Page! Is Mame really the story of a straight kid? And what the hell does it all mean?