"Desperate Housewives": Where my gays at?

                      
Tuc Watkins and Kevin Rahm search for a decent storyline

This past Sunday’s season premiere of Desperate Housewives saw our fab ladies leap five years into the future with decidedly different results.

And while the show was its usual witty self, AfterElton.com is about the gays, and Wisteria Lane's fellas were nearly nonexistent this episode. Aside from a nearly silent Andrew and an admittedly perfectly-timed bit from the gay couple Bob and Lee (in a scene featuring Gale Harold in boxer-briefs), our resident gays were kept largely in the background during the heavily-hyped opener.

A year ago, openly gay writer/creator Mark Cherry generated a great deal of excitement when he announced that some gays would be moving to Wisteria Lane, leaving the show’s gay fan base abuzz thinking of what shenanigans our new gays would get themselves into. Would we be seeing a bitchy gay equivalent of Heather Locklear to throw our Wives into a frenzy? How about a hot bisexual stud to give the ladies (and some of their husbands) a run for their money?

Alas, the point is virtually moot since the gays we got seem to amount to little more than some diversity window dressing for the show.

Shawn Pyfrom and Ryan Carnes kept gay fans' attention a few seasons back

Tuc Watkins and Kevin Rahm’s Bob and Lee are a perfectly stable, perfectly attractive, and ... well, perfectly boring onscreen couple, and too often they’re shifted to the background to act as foils for some of the larger characters on the show.

Even Shawn Pyfrom’s Andrew, once the promiscuous gay badboy of the show (who once even slept with his mother’s then-boyfriend!) has been thoroughly declawed into a boring, asexual shadow of his old self. Long gone are the days of Andrew’s delicious villainy and his even more delicious man-capades with the likes of Ryan Carnes, having been sadly replaced by robo-Andrew in a suit, acting as Bree’s manager with nary a boyfriend or potential love interest in sight.

Housewives also all too often also ignores the complexities of gay relationships in the rush to portray the stoic Bob as “husband” and the slightly more fabulous Lee as “wife“, particularly in a cringe-worthy 2007 subplot in which the couple fight and are sent to opposing camps (Lee with the wives and Bob with the husbands) for advice.

While a great deal of network execs are patting themselves on the back due to the new GLAAD media report about gay characters on television, it seems somewhat counterproductive that while there are more gay characters on television than at any other time in history, they are too often asexual background caricatures, which is unfortunately what our two gays on Wisteria Lane have turned out to be.

"We're here! We're queer! We're boring!"
 

So what’s the deal here? Obviously the network that has embraced gay marriages and transgender extramarital affairs in its other soapy dramas doesn’t suffer from prudishness, so I’m going to chalk this one up to that common dramatic problem of too many characters, too little time. The show is called Desperate Housewives, so the title characters will always be the main focus, but is it too much to ask for the gay characters to at least be allowed to mix it up as well as the regulars?

I think I speak for a lot of people when I say that gay audiences are sick of sacrificing good writing, direction, and acting in order to stomach the few shows that exist that put us in the thick of things (I’ll never tell, but feel free to guess). It’s unfortunate that a show as gleefully camp as Desperate Housewives can’t or won’t allow its gay characters to engage in the same over the top antics as its leads.

Some say the revolution has begun with the increasing ubiquity of gay characters on television, but I say it will be complete when our gays are able to backstab and bed-hop with the best of them. I’m waiting for that day to dawn on Wisteria Lane, but judging by the Season 5 premiere, it’ll be a long time coming.