The Gay Metropolis (63 page)

The day after the Court's decision in
Romer
v.
Evans
was announced, Stoddard felt “a sense of legitimization.”

“It's a big deal both doctrinally and spiritually,” he said. “But I worry that some people will decide that the Supreme Court is their savior and they therefore don't have to work hard politically. That's a very genuine danger, especially with the military issue and the marriage issue bearing down on us.

“The opinion was beautifully done—both a larger majority and a larger theory put forward than any of us expected. The theory being that animus is not a legitimate basis for distinctions among classes of people. And while the Court has said that before, it's especially important in this context—not just because it's us, but because we're an especially controversial group of people. And the majority was very political in its approach. It cited very little precedent because there is very little precedent on this subject, unfortunately. And it went out of its way to dispose of the vile arguments on the other side—especially the special rights arguments. And it knew what it was doing in citing
Plessy
v.
Ferguson
at the beginning. That was a sign of the moral outrage of the majority. And just a wonderful thing to be on our behalf.

“I hope our people remember that this happened in part because a
Democrat is holding the White House [and appointed two of the justices who joined in the majority opinion].

“The point that I want to communicate is that this does not mean things are over and we can now sit safely at home. This is our christening or bar mitzvah.

“It's not our entry into heaven.”

N
INE MONTHS AFTER REJOICING OVER
the Supreme Court's decision in
Romer v. Evans,
Tom Stoddard succumbed to AIDS. The great gay visionary had been diagnosed with the disease eight years earlier; by the time the most effective drugs were available, his illness was too advanced to be halted by the new therapies. Had he lived just a decade longer, Stoddard might have spotted our “entry into heaven,” just over the horizon.

At the dawn of the twenty-first century, gay life's imprint on everyday life exploded as America embraced everything from the first gay megahit in prime- time televison to the first gay Hollywood movie to capture universal acclaim—and collect $178 million at the box office.

When
Will & Grace
debuted in 1998, there was no indication that it might change the cultural landscape. As America's first almost completely gay sitcom, it got off to a slow start, despite the presence of two straight women as main characters. Even office workers in hip Manhattan were a little nervous about it: what would people think if they started to laugh at those jokes in front of the watercooler? But the quality of the humor gradually won them over. Beginning with its fourth season, the program attracted more than seventeen million viewers every week, and it became the second-highest-rated sitcom among young adults five years in a row. With the even more popular and equally gay-friendly
Friends
as its lead-in on Thursday nights,
Will & Grace
gradually appropriated a larger space in American pop culture than anything gay ever had before. Some critics carped that its characters were clichés, but many more decided that the show's sharp writing had placed it within the pantheon of great American sitcoms.

The success of
Will & Grace
opened the market to all kinds of gay entertainment; it also gave a few celebrities the courage to finally proclaim who they really were. In 2002, during the seventh and final season of her syndicated talk show, Rosie O'Donnell confirmed one of the worst-kept secrets in show business, when her autobiography revealed that she was a lesbian. The online magazine
Slate
noted, “if someone that accessible and brazenly mainstream … can publicly acknowledge who she is and who she loves, it's time to call Jerry Falwell and tell him it's over … Rosie's disclosure [is] revolutionary by virtue of its ordinariness.”

Ellen DeGeneres had made the same revelation about herself on her own show,
Ellen,
five years earlier. The mini-media event she created around her announcement, which included the cover of
Time,
was not enough to prevent the cancellation of her sitcom a year later, but her TV career began to take off again after she hosted the Emmy Awards following the attacks of 9/11. She reminded the audience that they were supposed to go on with their lives as usual, because to do otherwise “is to let the terrorists win—and really, what would upset the Taliban more than a gay woman wearing a suit in front of a room full of Jews?” (Imagine someone saying that in prime time thirty years ago.) In 2003, she finally had a bona fide TV hit when she launched her daytime program,
The Ellen DeGeneres Show.
Four years later, she was the face of American Express on television and the emcee of the Academy Awards.

Will & Grace
didn't just change the landscape of American TV—by the end of its original run it has been broadcast in thirty-eight countries, including France, Germany, Croatia, Pakistan, Sweden, and Bosnia and Herzegovina. But just five months after its American debut, a new show started across the Atlantic that made
Will & Grace
look almost as tame as
The Love Boat
.

Created by veteran English television writer Russell T. Davies,
Queer as Folk
inspired a tsunami of criticism when it burst out from Britain's Channel Four in 1999, with an opening episode that showed a twenty-nine-year-old man making very explicit love to a beautiful fifteen-year-old boy. The installment featured the same twenty-nine-year-old at the birth of his son to a lesbian friend. After the twenty-nine-year-old bragged about his teenaged conquest in front of the mother of his child, a woman friend observed: “So, you've both had a child this evening!”

The principal characters were young gay men in Manchester who were frankly sexual, extremely drug-friendly, and never the least bit apologetic about any of it. Sarah Lyall of
The New York Times
called the show “an
explosion of graphic language, male nudity, and explicit sex guaranteed to offend as many people as it enthralled.” Gay activists were angered by the reinforcement of gay stereotypes (Davies called these critics “boneheaded, politically correct gay political fossils”), while straight viewers were squeamish with the reality that every gay adult begins life as a gay child. The fact that gay teenagers often seek out their first sexual experience with someone older was something else most people didn't want to be reminded of in prime time.

BUT NEARLY EVERYONE WAS WON
over by the vivid writing, which was funny, poignant, and always on key. It was obvious that the show's creator knew the life he was writing about from the inside. Within weeks the show became a critical smash as well as a commercial success. The truth of Davies's credo had become self-evident: “There is no drama in political correctness.”

When bootleg copies of the British show began circulating on the other side of the Atlantic, many people recognized the show as one of the freshest gay dramas since
The Boys in the Band.
Just as
Boys
had blown the lid off a slice of gay life that had been hiding in plain sight for years,
Queer as Folk
was the first completely honest depiction of the ordinary lives of millions of twenty-something urban gay men around the world—with absolutely nothing held back.

Almost everyone who saw it also had another reaction: nothing like the British program would ever be broadcast in America. But, in the fall of 2000, Americans got to watch the tongue of a twenty-nine-year-old man travel further down the backside of a seventeen-year-old boy than any tongue had ever traveled on American television before (in the only compromise with the original, the boy was made two years older to soften the blow to American sensibilities). The American sex scenes were just as explicit as the British ones; but in the land of the free, the program was available only to cable subscribers, instead of being broadcast on network television. That distinction meant the American version never had the same kind of mainstream impact that the original had in Britain. But thanks to the enthusiasm of gay viewers, it quickly became the most-watched program ever on Showtime. Five years and eighty-three episodes later, it had probably done more to demystify gay men and lesbians in small towns across America than anything else on TV. It also paved the way for
The L-Word,
which offered the same type of unvarnished portraits of high-powered Hollywood lesbians that
Queer
had provided of young, urban, gay men.

From explicit gay sex on cable it was a very short hop to the much tamer
Queer Eye for the Straight Guy,
a show that argued that there were no shortcomings in a straight geek that couldn't be cured by the superior savoir faire of five gay tastemakers. The show also marked the final reclamation of the previously pejorative “queer” by the gay community. In 2005, MTV launched Logo, a Viacom-owned gay cable channel, which quickly made distribution deals with every major cable and satellite network. Suddenly, American kids in twenty-five million homes had access to gay programming whenever they wanted it—at least when their parents weren't watching them. The predicted backlash from the religious right never happened, and within two years Logo's sponsors included Kodak, Pepsi, and Sears, proving that threatened boycotts by the right would no longer prevent Fortune 500 companies from supporting gay television.

Seven years after the launch of
Queer as Folk
in England, Russell Davies was tapped to revive
Dr. Who,
a venerable British television science-fiction franchise, which occupies roughly the same cultural space in Britain as
Star Trek
does in the United States. “I'm in a very lucky position now because I personally can get away with murder and nobody stops me,” Davies told me.
Dr. Who
features a bisexual who “freely sleeps with men and women, and he takes his clothes off at the drop of a hat. I know if I was a different writer, someone might question me. But because I've got
QAF
behind me, no one will say, ‘Do you know what you're doing here?' We just filmed an episode with two seventy-year-old lesbians in it. They very clearly say they're married and it's absolutely beautiful: eight million viewers for the highest-rated drama here on BBC-i.” In a
Dr. Who
spin-off called
Torch-wood,
Davies cast gay actor John Barrowman (who is married in real life to his partner) in the leading role: the bisexual Captain Jack Harness. “It has a lead cast of five characters,” said Davies, “and every single one of them has a bisexual experience!”

WITH SO MUCH INCREASED VISIBILITY
for gay people and gay life, the world was primed for another cultural breakthrough. In 2006, there were nine big movies with gay themes or gay characters, but only one that caused a sensation.
Brokeback Mountain
was an A-list Hollywood feature that presented two gay cowboys as a perfectly normal part of Wyoming in the 1960s—and that depiction of these archetypes of American masculinity turned out to be revolutionary all by itself. It was also the first gay love story on film which felt so universal that the enthusiasm of the audience wasn't dampened by the sexual orientation of the principals. The fact that
Brokeback
was promoted with a poster that imitated the one showing the star-crossed lovers of
Titanic
didn't hurt either. Frank Rich wrote that the film forced everyone “to recognize that gay people were fixtures in [red states] long before Matthew Shepard and Mary Cheney were born. This laconic film dramatizes homosexuality as an inherent and immutable identity, rather than some aberrant and elective ‘agenda' concocted by conspiratorial ‘elites.'”

The kind of movie that would have caused an uproar twenty years earlier became newsworthy because it provoked hardly any attacks. “What if they held a culture war and no one fired a shot?” Frank Rich asked. There was almost “no controversy, no Fox News tar and feathering, no roar from the religious right.” The following spring the film was nominated for eight Academy Awards and won three of them, including best director and best adapted screenplay. It also made more top-ten lists than any other movie of the year.

A CRUCIAL ELEMENT IN THE
movement's steady progress was a simple matter of demographics: since the 1960s, every new generation of Americans has been more accepting of sexual diversity than the one before it. Although harassment of gay high school students remains rampant, every year there are a growing number of young men and women coming out to their parents and their peers long before they reach college.

At James Baxter Hunt Jr. High School in Wilson, North Carolina, seventeen-year-old Jarred Gamwell waged a campaign for student-body president in 2004 with two posters inspired by television: “Queer Eye for Hunt High” and “Gay Guys Know Everything!” When the school principal removed the posters without explanation, the American Civil Liberties Union went to court to try to get them restored. A North Carolina judge threw the suit out and Gamwell lost the election. But most people thought he had won his point, because the imbroglio had gotten so much attention, and the school administration had made itself look ridiculous.

Besides exposing their peers to proud gays and lesbians at an early age, these brash young men and women make another significant contribution. In many cases, the first gay people American adults meet are the gay classmates that their straight children bring home from high school.

“This has brought gay people into households all over America,” said Matt Coles, the head of the gay-rights project at the ACLU. “The important thing is not just knowing someone gay, but talking to someone who is gay. I think they're having really important dialogues with their friends'
parents.” These young people are also leading integrated lives much earlier than previous generations of gay kids. “We led segmented lives much longer,” said Coles, “and most people would say it's not a healthy thing to separate your biological family from the family you build yourself.”