- He
said yes
Penn Trustee George Weiss (W'65) offered inner city students a free
college education. They became his children, bringing him joy, pain
and wisdom.
|
|
Sept.
28, 2000
STAFF Q&A/What’s good on TV? For gays and lesbians, the answer
depends on when you’re watching.
“My God, what they
got away with in pro wrestling!”
BY SANDY SMITH
On the TV behind Steven Capsuto
is Jack McFarland of “Will & Grace,” played by the
Emmy-winning actor Sean Hayes.
__________________
STEVEN CAPSUTO
Position:
Information management
specialist, ISC Support-on-Site
Length of service:
4 years
Other stuff:
What he’s watching now: on video, HBO’s “Sex and
the City” and vintage 1920s films; on TV, “Will &
Grace,” “The West Wing,” “All in the Family”
reruns and C-Span’s “Book TV”
__________________
Photo by Daniel R. Burke
|
Steven Capsuto can probably identify every gay character who’s ever
appeared on TV, going back to its infancy. He can also probably tell you
about characters you may think are gay, but aren’t really.
This encyclopedic knowledge is a by-product of his research into thousands
of television programs for his book “Alternate Channels: The Uncensored
Story of Gay and Lesbian Images on Radio and Television, 1930s to the
Present” (Random House, 2000). What he discovered was a much richer
and more complex history than he had thought existed. It’s a shame
we can only present a tiny piece of it here. Then again, that’s why
he wrote the book.
Q. In your research, you actually found gay people on TV in the 1950s?
A.Yes. Some of it was prestigious TV productions of Broadway plays
that happened to have gay characters. Also you had the Army-McCarthy hearings,
which when you study them in high school, they tell you was about rooting
out Communism in the military — well, it was about rooting out Communists
and homosexuals.
And then pro wrestling — my God, what they got
away with in pro wrestling! Which in the late ’40s, early ’50s
was just about the top-rated thing on television. There was this fellow
named Ricky Starr, who was a former ballet dancer who became a pro wrestler
and did this sort of swishy gay shtick.
The difference between him and Gorgeous George was Gorgeous
George just played this broad swishy character, even though I think he
was himself straight, and then he would get beat up and everyone would
cheer at seeing him get beat up. Ricky Starr would not only swish around
the ring, but wiggle his butt in the face of his opponent and do these
pelvic thrust routines that would just cause the announcers to go apoplectic
and cut the camera away.
Q. It seems you found a series of peaks and valleys in your research.
How did the high points come about?
A. Usually, the peaks have a lot to do with what’s happening
in the news. If you think about the big peak in the mid-’90s, that’s
coming off all of these issues that developed out of the ’92 election…
gays in the military, the anti-gay referenda in Colorado and Oregon, [and]
Pat Buchanan’s speech at the 1992 Republican convention. So whenever
homophobia becomes really blatant, it becomes “OK” to do gay-rights
stories. [And then] it’s OK to do characters who just happened to
be gay.
And this is what happened in the late ’70s. In
1977, you couldn’t turn on the TV without hearing about Anita Bryant
and her crusade against gay people. And then coming out of that, you had
ABC approve the sitcom “Soap,” with Billy Crystal as the first
continuing gay character on a successful series.
Q. How did you do all your research and work on computer support at
the same time?
A. I have done away with such luxuries as food, sleep and exercise.
[laughs] It can be done. One of the reasons I like working at Penn is
we get lots of vacation time. And that allowed me to travel and do research
on the book. It also allowed me to travel around to various colleges and
do my lecture.
Q. Is this a promo tour?
A. No, I’ve done this even before I knew this was going to be
a book. I talk for a bit under two hours, and I bring about an hour of
video clips, usually starting with Gorgeous George or something from the
’50s and [ending with] some clip from the week I’m doing the
talk.
And that helped me write the book. People in the audience
would give me feedback. It got me to rethink some of what I was talking
about. It also gave me some context to use in the introduction. When I
first started doing these lectures in 1989, people would always come up
to me after the lecture and say, You know, I know a gay character that
I bet you hadn’t thought of. And it was always Dr. Smith from “Lost
in Space.” So if you look at the book now, there’s a paragraph
about what the book is not about.
The book is not about Dr. Smith from “Lost in Space.”
We’re not talking about Uncle Arthur on “Bewitched,” we’re
not talking about Ralph, the butch woman carpenter on “Green Acres,”
and we’re not talking about Tinky Winky from the “Teletubbies.”
But somebody does need to talk about these somewhere.
Q. If you could identify one program as the high-water mark and another
as the low-water mark, what would they be?
A. There is so much to choose from. The high-water mark is especially
hard because it changes. There are things that are high-water marks if
you look at them within the context of when they were aired. There’s
a wonderful episode of “Maude” where Arthur’s trying to
shut down the local gay bar. It doesn’t hold up very well now. “Tales
of the City” is a high-water mark. The coming-out episode of “Ellen”
doesn’t hold up very well in hindsight, but at the time it was a
high-water mark.
Low-water marks are easier to come up with. There’s
a really hideous episode of “Police Woman” from 1974 called
“Flowers of Evil.” It’s about this gang of killer lesbians
who run this very upscale, posh nursing home, and they starve their wealthy
elderly residents and sort of torment them and steal their money and then
sometimes kill them.
|
