Older Gay Characters Finally Get Some Screen Time on “Brothers & Sisters”

You want to talk about media invisibility? Try finding a gay man on television who is over 50 – much less a couple of older gay men being in any way sexual or romantic.

You might have better luck looking for a bisexual unicorn.

One of the very few TV exceptions has been Brothers & Sisters, which features the character of Saul, played by veteran actor Ron Rifkin, who is 71. While the ABC show deserves credit for simply including the character at all, Saul’s been far-and-away the program’s least developed “brother” or “sister,” despite the surprising revelation in last spring’s finale that he is HIV-positive. 

Storylines involving Saul’s previous love interests, played by Dave Foley, John Glover, and Stephen Collins, were mostly of the blink-and-you-missed-it variety. Last fall, Rifkin himself expressed frustration with the characters’ lack of development, saying, “The character has become sort of peripheral over the last couple of years, and not as involved as he was the first two or three years. It’s been a frustrating struggle for me. It’s really been hard for me. And then, with the reveal of the AIDS thing, I thought, well … maybe they’ll get into it, but it doesn’t seem to be what they’re interested in.”

But last Sunday, in the show’s Valentine’s episode no less, Saul was given a major plot-line in a story involving an ex-fling, played by TV heartthrob (and recently real-life out gay man) Richard Chamberlain, age 76.

Saul and Chamberlain’s character, Jonathan, rekindle a friendship that had long since lapsed; Jonathan, it turns out, may have been the one who inadvertently infected Saul with HIV back in the 1980s.

But Saul has romantic feelings for Jonathan and is unsure if Jonathan shares them. When Jonathan turns out to know a gay food critic who is visiting Scotty’s restaurant (Family Ties’ Michael Gross), Saul presses him to pretend to respond to his affections in order to win Scotty a better review. But Saul, who is acting as waiter, is hit by a fit of unexpected jealousy, which leads him to sitcom levels of sabotage.

In the end, all is made right when Saul and Jonathan finally do express their true feelings for each other. Even more remarkable, they share a full kiss and then depart for Jonathan’s apartment where the implication is they will do much more than kiss.

It’s hard to overstate how unusual this is in mainstream media, although, interestingly, the first gay couple to ever appear on series television was an older one, George and Gordon in Norman Lear’s short-lived Hot L Baltimore in 1975. But the squabbling characters were anything but romantic.

Next Page! Greg and Peter Brady grow up and go gay?