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By WINNIE McCROY
Friday, October 31, 2003
WHEN I FIRST heard rumors that Showtime was developing a “Queer As Folk”-type
program for lesbians, I was curious to see the end product. So I welcomed the
invitation to attend an opening party for “The L-Word,” scheduled
to air in January, at a restaurant in Times Square last week.
Media and show-business types milled around — as they do at such events — drinking
ice-blue martinis and interviewing cast members. Among the actors were some
stars and film veterans, including Jennifer (“Flashdance”) Beals,
Leisha Hailey, Mia Kirshner, Karina Lombard, Katherine Moenning and Pam (“Foxy
Brown”) Grier.
All good-looking, straight-looking women.
As the cast members played to the photographers, shaking back their long tresses
and flashing a little leg, I began to wonder exactly which ones were supposed
to be playing the lesbians on the show.
At lunch, I was seated next to a couple of butch lesbians from a cable-access
program, “Dyke TV,” when Showtime began rolling clips from the
upcoming first season.
But while the heterosexual sex scenes came close to soft-core, the lesbians
were limited to kisses and panty shots.
And all the lesbian characters on “The L Word” are tall, beautiful
and pretty much all femme.
Don’t get me wrong: I know a lot of beautiful lesbians who fit into
this mold. But even when I get together with my Upper West Side, Columbia Prep-spawned
ultra-femme friends, there are still always a roughly equal number of cute
butches.
In fact, the only cast member who looked like she could even pass as a lesbian
(not even a “real” lesbian, but a Gina Gershon-dream-ideal-lesbian-type
lesbian) was Katherine Moenning, who plays “Shane,” the requisite
scruffy-headed bad girl.
WAS SHE SUPPOSED to be the butch? As luck had it, she was sitting at the table
adjacent to mine, so I tapped her on the shoulder and asked her that very question.
“My character’s not very butch,” she replied.
“She sure isn’t,” I readily agreed and explained our confusion.
Moenning talked for awhile about our complaint that “real-looking” lesbians
had been omitted from the show.
I kept referring back to the classic butch/femme balance so prevalent (for
better or worse) in contemporary lesbian circles. She kept countering, “It’s
TV, not reality, and sex sells. It doesn’t try to represent the reality
of every lesbian, just this group of friends.”
She hinted at future plot twists in which the Pam Grier character hooks up
with a drag king, and encouraged me to give it a chance. I agreed, however
uneasily, with a nagging feeling that again real lesbians had been kicked to
the curb in favor of the fantasy lesbians of straight men’s porn.
My suspicions were confirmed several days later, when I came across comments
made by Gary Levine, Showtime’s executive vice president of original
programming, in a Daily News TV column.
“Lesbian sex, girl-on-girl, is a whole cottage industry for heterosexual
men,” Levine told Daily News Editor Richard Huff, noting the popularity
of talk shock jock Howard Stern’s frequent references to lesbians.
So we’re a cottage industry now, neatly and conveniently packaged for
heterosexual men.
Of course TV executives are generally scumbags, whoring themselves for ratings,
but that only slightly tempered Levine’s extremely offensive sound bite.
I laughed when I heard the show described as “something quite bold,
something unexpected” by creator Ilene Chaiken. I guess if you consider
that lesbians are otherwise invisible, even fake lesbians come across as “quite
bold.”
BUT I WAS truly disgusted when I read comments by Scott Seomin, entertainment
media director at the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, about
the show’s promise as a tool for consciousness-raising.
“If they pull them in and they get hooked on the titillation factor,
that straight male is going to learn about the lives of lesbians,” Seomin
told the Daily News, adding, “The straight men are going to sexualize
beautiful lesbians anyway. Let’s educate them along the way.”
What?! The nation’s leading voice for promoting realistic and positive
images of gay men and lesbians in the media is giving the thumbs-up to the
idea of lesbians as jack-off fodder for straight men?
Not to mention that a look into the fake lives of a bunch of ersatz lesbians
probably isn’t going to be the least bit real or insightful or educational
to the problems real lesbians face. I’ll hold my breath waiting for story
lines dealing with affordable health care, domestic partnerships and having
children.
GLAAD gave a similar high sign to the new ABC sitcom, “It’s All
Relative,” which pits a desexualized, namby-pamby gay couple against
an equally stereotypical Irish-Catholic working class couple, a lá “La
Cage Aux Folles.” (The show’s gay couple was also featured on an
Advocate cover hailing the show as a breakthrough.)
Does any programming with gay characters, no matter how misleading, stereotypical
or one-dimensional, score high marks with GLAAD and the Advocate? Are they
waiting for Archie Bunker to settle into his armchair pulpit before they speak
up? Or is it the money and clout of big networks like Showtime and ABC that
keep them smiling and scraping like gay Uncle Toms?
I also blame some of our brethren in the gay media, who feature actresses
playing lesbians on mainstream TV shows as though they were heroes. Do we even
care about their opinions about our lives? Are we supposed to be grateful for
these miserable crumbs?
We should challenge ourselves to demand more from those who claim to be speaking
for us. If lesbians have to choose between remaining invisible to the mainstream,
or being represented by Showtime’s clipped and plucked “lesbians,” I
choose invisibility.
After all, real lesbians will still remain invisible — at least until
our lives become more than a marketing tool or cottage industry or pud fodder
for Joe Sixpack.
Is it so much to ask that a TV show purportedly dedicated to showing our lives
actually portray real multi-faceted, inherently dramatic, women-for-women reality?
Winnie McCroy is managing editor of the New York Blade, a sister publication
of Southern Voice. She can be reached at wmccroy@nyblade.com.
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