“Greek” Graduates Magna Cum Laude for its Portrayal of Gay Frat Brother Calvin

The ABC Family series Greek comes to a close this week and with it the depiction of a gay fraternity brother. Without spoiling the ending, it’s fair to say that Calvin (Paul James), like the rest of the show’s characters, is left in a good place that suggests what lies in his immediate future without pinning down long-range details.

It’s fitting that Calvin’s fate is similar to the other characters on the show because Greek always treated Calvin like any other Cypress-Rhodes University student.

He was never the token gay character.

Indeed, after being accidentally outed to his fraternity brothers early in the show’s run, Calvin did not bounce from gay crisis to gay crisis (most recently he’s fretted over picking a college major). His gayness was just one aspect of his personality and his romantic relationships were no more or less fraught than those of straight characters in the series.

Patrick Sean Smith, the show’s openly gay creator who co-wrote the series finale with Matt Whitney, said he always intended to have a gay character in Greek but Calvin was not written for an African-American actor. He said the network encouraged diversity in casting, which is how both Calvin and Ashleigh (Amber Stevens) ended up as black characters on the show.

“I was trying to imagine even for Ashleigh what the black sorority sister experience would be and the only things that came to mind were things I’d seen a million times,” Smith said. “I never felt race, for the millennial audience, was that important to them for their reality. Dealing with sexual orientation and race is less of a thing for them than it has been even for my generation.”

(L to r) Greek creator Patrick Sean Smith, Dilshad Vadsaria, and Paul James

Smith said when it came to Calvin it was freeing to “find the soul of the character as opposed to defining him by color or strictly by sexual orientation.”

That approach did not always sit well some viewers even though it made sense for the character as he was introduced.

“You had this character who says, ‘Being gay is a part of me but not all of me,’ and that’s something you can’t get out of your head when you’re trying to develop a character that feels like that,” Smith said. “I don’t know if there was a backlash but people had strong opinions about what we did with Calvin.”

When the series began, Calvin was out to his family who had no problem with his sexuality, so there was no family turmoil storyline to mine.

“I wanted to evolve the gay character I’ve seen in previous TV shows of this genre,” Smith said. “I feel like now so many kids come out in high school, so I wanted to highlight that. He was already fine with his parents. It was more about the effect [being gay] was having on this new world he was in [in college and a fraternity] and how he wanted to manage how he was perceived and what information he wanted to give out.”

Once Calvin was successfully out to his fraternity brothers and friends, Smith did not see a need for ginning up gay angst.

“It seemed like people were interpreting that as we were not wanting to deal with his being gay,” Smith said. “It wasn’t that we were intentionally shying away from it because it was dealing with homosexuality, but I didn’t want to limit this character to being a token gay character and having all the issues in his life and his life experience be about being gay.”

Actors Amber Stevens, Scott Michael Foster, Paul James and Spencer Grammer
onstage at the 20th Annual GLAAD Media Awards in 2009