Gay Panic

I’m not a big TV watcher. For a couple of years, I watched little to no television as I felt like it had been overrun with bad reality shows that didn’t really keep my attention. Then I slowly integrated myself with TV viewing with shows the likes of Queer As Folk, Law & Order: SVU and most recently, Dexter. Most other drama’s on the major networks seemed stale and regurgitated and the comedies just weren’t that funny.

It was a great surprse then when Grey’s Anatomy, a show I had never watched before, introduced a lesbian storyline. Unlike other shows, it wasn’t just a one episode arc where one character got drunk and decided to see where her curiousity took her. They were unfolding the story of two women realizing their attraction to each other and dealing with the realization that they were gay (or bisexual).

Admittedly, I got excited by this prospect. Unlike the L Word, which started off promising but has turned into a soap opera, these were women and situations I could relate to. I’m not a size two, I don’t live in West Hollywood, I don’t work on film sets cutting people’s hair. There isn’t one character on the L Word I can relate to. It’s not a representation of what 98% of what most lesbians go through.

The character’s portrayed by Sara Ramirez and Brooke Smith are such that most women (gay and straight) could relate to. Neither is your typical size 0, glossy photoshopped cookie cutter actress. But yet, each brought a sincerity to the storyline that had yet to be seen on network television. While I didn’t particularly enjoy how the one character kept running to a male sex buddy to gage her homosexuality, I appreciated the fact that a major network was taking a chance at developing a homosexual couple the same way they did with a heterosexual pairing.

That is, until it was announced that ABC fired Brooke Smith and decided to make the previously bi character straight. To say this is disappointing and infuriaritng would be putting it lightly. In a span of a few short weeks, us gay folk went from being excited about the prospect of seeing a close representation of ourselves to being brushed aside and shoved back into the proverbial closet.

ABC got a major case of the gay panic and now they’ll just make a few revisions in their scripts and all will be right in their world again. How pathetic and sad.

So we gay folk have to wait a little longer before we can see storylines on television that will do us justice. I for one will no longer be watching Grey’s or any other ABC show for that matter. In the meantime, I’ll busy myself with MarioKart and know that I can always pop in my Queer as Folk DVDs for some quality gay viewing.

I wonder how comfortable TR Knight is on the set these days?