I suppose the days of ‘Will & Grace’ are over. So too, the big deal that was Ellen’s coming out episode in 1997. It’s a mixed blessing. On one hand gay characters on TV not only exist, they are becoming almost commonplace. Except, well, with less hype, commonplace doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re everywhere so much as the popularity has waned making them not just less visible but actually less present.
This AP article loosely brings up some of these points. It makes me wonder whether it’s better to have controversy or acceptance and banality. For all the raciness that CW and Fox portray they (along with CBS) have no gay characters whatsoever. NBC has one, while ABC carries the brunt of the paltry 7 main characters on network TV.
It is heartening, perhaps, to say that cable is doing much better. But it never ceases to amaze me, either, how very similar media in this country can carry such different levels of consequence. By this I mean that gay characters have been common in movies forever and something that isn’t that shocking on cable at all could seem grandiose on network. It seems a strange system of denial we use in this country to see all kinds of representations in some mainstream media and not others. I would say that most Americans who have cable aren’t consciously thinking about the differences between their cable and network channels. And yet, it took until a mere 10 years ago to make being gay ok on network TV. Even I was out before Ellen and I was only 16 then…
