Date: Fri, 16 Jan 1998 18:48:29 -0700 From: Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation Subject: GLAADAlert 01.16.98 GLAADALERT January 16, 1998 The GLAADAlert is the weekly activation tool of the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation ABC Buries Nothing Sacred Gay Episode The critically acclaimed ABC program Nothing Sacred has found itself once again at the center of controversy, but this time because of an unaired episode about a gay priest with AIDS. A recent Los Angeles Times story ("Is a Priest with AIDS 'Too Sacred?'" Howard Rosenberg, January 9, 1998) charges ABC with suppressing the episode, which chronicles the story of Father Jesse and his test of faith, departure from the church, and eventual return to his congregation. In the end, Jesse finds the courage to come out to his poker buddies, a group of six priests (including the local monsignor) who begin each card game with the toast "to the last six celibate heterosexual priests in the Catholic church." Father Ray, long an outspoken supporter of addressing gay, lesbian and AIDS issues in his own church, also faces the internalized homophobia of Jesse and the pain faced by gay and lesbian Catholics. On Ray's desk sits an ordination class picture with X's through the faces of classmates lost to the church because of the conflict between their sexual orientation and church doctrine or their death from AIDS. GLAAD representatives had an opportunity to see the un-aired episode, and is shocked that ABC would refuse to air it and questions the network's motivations. "This episode, like the program in general, is compelling and honest and addresses real issues in the Catholic church today," said GLAAD Executive Director Joan Garry. "ABC should allow its viewers to make their own decisions about the many challenging issues which this program presents. By burying this vital and powerful episode, ABC is sacrificing quality programming to the altar of radical religious political correctness." Urge ABC to air this program and not cave into the fear of a vocal radical religious minority who prefers mandating their own view of reality to allowing viewers the opportunity to choose for themselves whether or not to view this kind of dramatic and honest portrayal of such an explosive issue. Contact: Jamie Tarses, Entertainment President, ABC, 2040 Avenue of the Stars, Los Angeles, CA 90037, fax: 310.557.7679, e-mail: abcaudr@abc.com, or call ABC at: 310.557.7777 and ask to be connected to their audience response line What's Ask Harriet? Don't Ask. A dreadful mid-season replacement on Fox features a Tootsie/Bosom Buddies-style straight man who masquerades as a woman in order to get a job. The big twist is that the man, Jack Cody, is a womanizing, sexist, out-of-work sports writer who, as "Sylvia Coco," gets a gig at the same newspaper that fired him, only now as a woman who writes the "Ask Harriet" advice column. The main comic premise is that, as a she, Sylvia is subjected to heavy come-ons by co-workers and her boss, Max Russell (Ed Asner). But the audience knows Sylvia is really a man. Get it? In its second episode, Sylvia fends off Max while trying to convince him to re-hire Jack as sports columnist. While Sylvia plays coy with Max, he tells her, "The more I see, the more I like." Sylvia replies, "You may not feel that way if you saw any more." Get it? When things get too intimate for Jack as Sylvia, he barks out in a male voice, "Back off, buddy!" to wild laugh tracks. On the third episode, which aired January 15, big laughs come when Jack's best friend, Ron, admits to having had dreams about Sylvia, which appalls Jack. In addition, Jack has a double nightmare, first as Sylvia who has permanently become Sylvia and then as Jack in a menage a trois with Sylvia and Max. Get it? According to GLAAD's Washington, D.C. Media Resource Center-based consultant, transactivist Jessica Xavier, "Unlike Jack Lemmon's sweet surrender to the notion of getting married to a male millionaire while posing as a woman in the classic Some Like It Hot, same-sex encounters are continuously portrayed on Ask Harriet as a dire threat to Jack and his all-American red-blooded heterosexuality. Thus the show goes far beyond just presuming a heterosexist status quo. It views same-sex attraction as the ultimate horror, to be escaped at any comedic cost." As the show currently stands, it only promises to become more offensive and tired as writers struggle to milk gag after gag off of this one-trick pony. Encourage Fox to bring more genuine transgender, gay and lesbian characters to the show or to dump the shallow and offensive program altogether. Contact: Peter Roth, Entertainment President, Fox Broadcasting Company, 10201 W. Pico Blvd., Los Angeles, CA, fax: 310.369.7363, or call the viewer hotline at: 310.369.3066 A Premiere Proposal for Hollywood The February issue of Premiere features "The Wrong List," a compelling call to the entertainment industry to stop just honoring those gay people in Hollywood who have died of AIDS and start also celebrating the living. Contributing writer Jesse Green starts, "Every November, here at Premiere, several of us get busy with our own ghoulish ritual: a look through the past year's obituaries, in search of the dismal four-letter word [AIDS]." He says, "This year the list seemed small enough to beg a different kind of response. To be sure, people continue to stubbornly die. And these gay men whose lives have been reduced to a few paragraphs played such a central role in the creation of mainstream American culture." Now, though, "what emerges as Hollywood's pink elephant is not how well the studios treat the dying in their midst, but how well they treated the truth of the living." He discusses how earnest AIDS films are "numbingly didactic" like the early films which struggled to combat anti-Semitism and racism. "The whole project of AIDS movies was misbegotten. AIDS wasn't the subject that needed exposure in films and television; gayness was," he says. "As such, the salient comparisons weren't to antiracist tracts like Guess Who's Coming to Dinner but to movies that came later and told multiple truths about black people. What the beleaguered ranks of Hollywood activists forgot was that gayness isn't, mustn't be, AIDS....It may be naive to ask how it happens that Ellen, a sitcom aired on a network owned by a film studio, manages to broadcast, week after week, groundbreaking stories about gay life that are more real--and more entertaining--than anything a movie has ever said on the subject." In summary, he says, "After six years of studying how dead gay people spent their lives diverting, alarming, creating America, I think we've been publishing the wrong damn list. We should publish instead a list of everyone who's left--all those gay men and women who won't be dying soon--and let America deal with that." Thank Premiere for this provocative call for Hollywood to openly celebrate the lives of lesbians and gay men in all their complexity. Contact: James B. Meigs, Editor-in-Chief, Premiere, 1633 Broadway, 41st Floor, New York, NY 10019-6708, fax: 212.767.5450, e-mail: edit@premieremag.com Us Talks to Some of Us The February edition of Us magazine features interviews with the outspoken and increasingly articulate Anne Heche and the demure Nathan Lane. In the interview with Anne Heche, she speaks of honesty, openness and the reverse-inspiration of her heavily closeted minister father who died in 1983 from AIDS complications. "'If it weren't for my father, I don't think I would be so open. So that's a huge blessing,' she says. 'I think it's somehow beautiful that because he died, because he was so unwilling to tell the truth, I got at a very young age [to] tell the truth, be who you are, there's nothing more important.'" Of being the guinea pig for an openly lesbian movie star playing romantic leads, she says, "'Being an actor, the fun is changing form, being able to portray the person you've never been...When someone says they're nervous [about whether audiences will accept a gay actress], I want tot say, are you kidding? Don't I change form for you?'" Nathan Lane also has his own take on honesty around sexual orientation, noting that when Jason Alexander said he was "the first straight man to have played Buzz [from Love! Valour! Compassion!]," he said, "'I would like to take this opportunity to thank him for clearing up that unsolved mystery that is my sexuality. I also said, Look, I'm 40, I'm single and I work in the musical theater--you do the math. What do you need, flashcards?'" Later, in explaining why he is not more explicit about his sexual orientation, he says, "The trouble with [being explicit] to me is that it [implies] that if you're gay, you were just letting your hair down and it wasn't really a performance [to play a gay role]." Please thank Us for openly exploring the role of sexual orientation and the way audiences perceive it in the lives of these two talented performers. Also, thank Anne Heche her openness and honesty about being lesbian in Hollywood. Contact: … Barbara O'Dair, Editor, Us Magazine; 1290 Avenue of the Americas, 2nd Floor, New York, NY 10104-0295, fax: 212.767.8204, e-mail: letters@usmagazine.com; … Anne Heche, c/o Huvane Baum Hall, 8383 Wilshire Blvd., Suite 444, Beverly Hills, CA 90211, fax: 213.782.9195 ProJo Prints Transgender Talk On January 8, the Providence (Rhode Island) Journal Bulletin published an articulate op-ed by transactivist Gwen Spencer about both cultural and political inclusion for transgender people. Responding to a recent letter to the editor, in which someone called a Journal Bulletin picture of a drag performer at the Miss Gay Rhode Island Pageant "garbage" and "sewage," and demanded the newspaper use higher standards in deciding what to print, Spencer asks, "What type of standards is he talking about?" She points out it isn't sexual suggestiveness, since the photo was tame compared to a December 5 "photo of the Bacchante girls of the Biltmore Hotel in its heyday....I certainly hope Mr. Martel wasn't using the words "sewage" and "garbage" to describe the person in the picture, or, for that matter, all transgender people....There are more than 1,000 transgendered people in Rhode Island. We range from post-operative transsexuals to gay and heterosexual cross-dressers. Transgender folks range from CEOs, lawyers and teachers to bartenders and waitresses." Noting that a 1995 equal rights law protecting people from discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation failed to include transgender people, Spencer says, "transgendered people and anyone who can be perceived as being transgendered are the only people in Rhode Island who can legally be discriminated against. We can be fired, forced out of homes and denied housing for no reason other than that we present a gender image different than our physical sex....So, in reply to Mr. Martel, while cross-dressers and other transgender people have no rights under the law, we are not "garbage" or "sewage." We are viable human beings and citizens of this state and deserve all the rights and guarantees of other citizens." Please thank the Providence Journal Bulletin for including this op-ed and for their ongoing inclusion of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender articles. Contact: Robert Whitcomb, Op Ed Page Editor, Providence Journal Bulletin, 75 Fountain St., Providence, RI 02902-0050, fax: 401.277.7439, e-mail: letters@projo.com GLAADAlert Follow-Up: Deseret News Continues Bad Editorial Lifestyle Choice As reported earlier (GLAADAlert 1/9/98) the arch-conservative Utah newspaper Deseret News continues its use of outdated and wildly inaccurate terms describing sexual orientation in ostensibly objective news stories. This time, in a profile of Utah anti-gay zealot Gayle Ruzicka, president of the radical religious group Utah Eagle Forum, the newspaper gives Ruzicka an almost totally uncritical soapbox from which she can preach. In addition, the paper states, "She talks to God and consults with the religious scriptures she carries at all times. Therein, she says, lie all the answers...why she must warn any homosexuals she meets about their 'dangerous, immoral lifestyles,' and how their lifestyle choices are sure to lead to an early death and a damned eternity." While the paper puts "dangerous, immoral lifestyles" in quotations to show these are Ruzicka's own words, the newspaper uses "homosexuals" instead of "lesbians and gay men," and, more critically, "lifestyle choices" rather than "sexual orientation," as their own terms. Obviously, the "lifestyle choices" of lesbians and gay men are as varied and complex as the lifestyle choices of heterosexuals, and the term serves to do nothing but cloud public understanding of sexual orientation. Encourage the Deseret News to drop deceptive anti-gay buzz words like "lifestyle choices" and bring their style guide into the late twentieth century with more accurate and less biased terminology. Contact: Don C. Woodward, Managing Editor, Deseret News, P.O. Box 1257, Salt Lake City, UT 84110, fax: 801.237.2121, e-mail: letters@desnews.com Harvard Teaches Gay Past and Present The January/February 1998 edition of Harvard Magazine, the periodical for the school's graduates, featured an excellent cover story entitled, "Gay Like Me: In & Out of the Closet at Harvard, 1653-1998." Written by alumnus Andrew Tobias, it is a personal reflection on his own transition from living in the closet, and in fear, to his new openness about his sexual orientation. In addition, it looks at other people associated with the university over the years, dating back to 1653, when Michael Wigglesworth struggled with his strong desires for other men and wrote about it in his diary. He discusses the struggles some had in seeking counseling in the late 1960s and early 1970s and finding little psychological support. Finally, the list of lesbian and gay Harvard alumni who have gone on to prominence in the struggle for civil rights and dignity for all gay people is impressive, including: U.S. Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass), Craig Davidson and Mike Valentini (who helped found GLAAD), California Assembly Speaker Pro Tem Sheila Kuehl, Kevin Jennings (founder of GLSEN), Martin Duberman, Keith Boykin (head of the Black Gay and Lesbian Leadership Forum) and Alan Gilmour (Ford Vice President who came out recently). Please thank Harvard Magazine for recognizing the realities and triumphs of its lesbian and gay students and alumni. Also, write the editor of your own alma mater's alumni publication and encourage them to include more lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender content. Contact: Editor-in-Chief, Harvard Magazine, 7 Ware Street, Cambridge, MA 02138, fax: 617.495.0324 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) glaad@glaad.org TO REPORT DEFAMATION IN THE MEDIA - Call GLAAD's Alertline at 1.800.GAY.MEDIA or go to the GLAAD Web Site at www.glaad.org and report through our Alertline Online. TO JOIN GLAAD AND RECEIVE GLAAD's DISPATCH AND QUARTERLY IMAGES MAGAZINE, call 1.800.GAY.MEDIA or join on the Web today at www.glaad.org/glaad/join/join-about.html TO SUBSCRIBE TO GLAAD-Net, GLAAD's electronic mailing list, send e-mail to majordomo@vector.casti.com with the message "Subscribe GLAAD-Net" TO UNSUBSCRIBE, send e-mail to majordomo@vector.casti.com with the message "Unsubscribe GLAAD-Net" GLAAD is a national organization that promotes fair, accurate and inclusive representation as a means of challenging discrimination based on sexual orientation or identity. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ "GLAAD" and "Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation" are registered trademarks of the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, Inc.