The Prime Time Closet: A History of Gays and Lesbians on TV (3 page)

By the 1960s, the leaders of homophile organizations like the Mattachines and the Daughters of Bilitis were making the rounds on the radio and television talk show circuit. Lesbians started to participate on panels more frequently, though most programs continued to focus exclusively on the male homosexual because he was still perceived as the greater threat to children. In addressing this very issue on the Los Angeles talk show
Argument,
during a discussion entitled “Society and The Homosexual,” Bilitis President Jaye Belle argued that there is a greater stigma attached to male homosexuality because the public is ignorant, or in denial, that lesbianism actually exists.
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The public’s ignorance and denial was certainly reinforced by TV talk shows and documentaries, which consistently treated female homosexuality, if mentioned at all, as a secondary issue. As Reavis noted in his proposal for the exclusively male
The Rejected,
gay men and lesbians do not necessarily share the same experiences:

Even when the subject of female homosexuality was discussed, as on an installment of the late night Chicago talk show
Off the Cuff
entitled “Homosexuality and Lesbianism,” the “expert” panel was comprised entirely of men.
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The perception that lesbianism is less threatening than male homosexuality is perhaps the reason why the subject first received dramatic treatment on a prime time medical program. In the early 1960s, the NBC drama
The Eleventh Hour
capitalized on the popularity of psychotherapy in post-war America. Each week, psychiatrist Dr. L. Richard Starke (Ralph Bellamy), along with his colleague Dr. Paul Graham (Jack Ging), were “on-call” to help a patient through “the eleventh hour” — that moment when he/she is on the brink of a complete mental breakdown.

In “What Did She Mean By Good Luck?” Dr. Starke helps an unstable actress, Hallie Lambert (
As the World Turns’s
Kathryn Hays), who is trying to get her career back on track by appearing on stage in a romantic comedy directed by the tough, no-nonsense, Barbara Stanwyck-ish Marya Stone (Beverly Garland). During rehearsals, Marya is so critical of Hallie’s work that the actress becomes convinced the director is deliberately tormenting her. In the “eleventh hour” — just minutes before the opening night curtain goes up — Hallie enlists Dr. Starke’s help.

Dr. Starke previously diagnosed Hallie as having lesbian tendencies. As the doctor explains to the actress’s overbearing mother, Gerry (Doris Dowling), Hallie’s relationships with men have been “inhibited by unnatural impulses.” Although it is natural to experience same-sex feelings at adolescence, Dr. Starke believes something or someone has prevented Hallie from making the “proper adjustment” to adult heterosexual relationships. When the doctor questions Gerry about Hallie’s affection for her former high school drama teacher, Miss Aldrich, Gerry has a strong reaction and then denies ever meeting the woman. “It’s wicked and disgusting,” Gerry cries, “and I don’t want to talk about it anymore!”

Hallie’s off-stage emotional crisis begins to affect her performance, particularly in a pivotal “seduction” scene at the end of act two. Her character, a Holly Golightly-type ingenue, makes a pass at her co-star Simon Cole (Paul Burke), who’s romantically pursuing Hallie off-stage. “Now this is such a simple scene for a good actress like you to play,” Marya explains, “and it’s topped off by a genuine warmth and a seductive moment, a moment that we must have or otherwise how’s a man like that going to respond to it?”

On opening night, Marya, still displeased with Hallie’s performance in the scene, instructs Simon to initiate the on-stage seduction. The actress becomes hysterical and accuses Marya of deliberately sabotaging her performance because she’s jealous of her relationship with Simon. Shocked by the accusation, the director dismisses Hallie’s outburst as opening night anxiety.

A desperate Hallie phones Dr. Starke, who rushes backstage for an eleventh hour therapy session. In the nick of time, Hallie suddenly realizes Marya reminds her of Miss Aldrich, who, she recalls, once slapped her in front of the entire class. The memory confuses Hallie because it contradicts the strong affection she still has for her former teacher. Hallie decides to perform opening night as scheduled, but when her director comes by to wish her “good luck” (shouldn’t it be “break a leg?”), the paranoid actress asks Dr. Starke, “What did she
mean
by good luck?”

“You are also thinking that such a suspicion is foolish,” Starke assures her. “Have faith in yourself. Trust yourself. You’ll be fine.”

At the end of act two, Hallie assumes the role of the “seducer” and, for the first time, performs the scene perfectly. During intermission, Hallie is nervous about Marya’s reaction. As the director walks toward her, we suddenly see, from Hallie’s point-of-view, Marya turn into her mother, Gerry, who raises her hand to slap her on the cheek. When her hand hits Hallie’s face, Gerry turns back into Marya, who is only giving a playful slap for playing the scene so brilliantly. The director then admits to Hallie that she is jealous, not of her relationship with Simon, but of her talent. “Yes, you’re right. I am jealous,” Marya admits, “and I’m sorry I let it show.”

After a successful premiere, Hallie reveals to Dr. Starke how the vision of her mother triggered a memory involving Miss Aldrich. When her mother arrived one afternoon to pick her up from school, she saw Hallie give Miss Aldrich an affectionate hug. Gerry later punished Hallie for having wicked and perverted feelings. Dr. Starke is now able to explain the connection between the childhood trauma and her extreme reaction to Marya:

Upon discovering through psychoanalysis that her neurosis is the product of her deeply rooted guilt, Hallie is cured and can now enjoy a healthy, normal, heterosexual life.

Amid the episode’s simplistic approach to a complex, yet rather convoluted, psychological problem, the possibility that Hallie is a lesbian is never even considered. Dr. Starke characterizes an adolescent’s strong feelings toward a member of the same sex as normal. But for adults, those same feelings are “unnatural” impulses triggered by childhood trauma. Ellis Marcus’s script subscribes to current popular medical theory surrounding the root of homosexual pathology; namely, the trauma of homosexual seduction of a youth by an adult and a dysfunctional relationship with one or both parents.
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Similarly, Gerry’s misinterpretation of her daughter’s display of affection for Miss Aldrich, and her subsequent hysterical reaction, are revealed through psychoanalysis to have hampered the actress’s sexual development. Hallie disavowed the trauma, which ultimately affected her ability to assume the “seducer” role with men (both on-stage and off) and deal with female authority figures. The situation was no doubt exasperated by the unexplained absence of Hallie’s father (who is never mentioned), which clearly strengthened her repressive mother’s hold over her daughter.

When the episode first aired, Robin Richards, a critic for
The Ladder,
a lesbian publication, dismissed the show for dealing with lesbianism “on an adolescent level and in sophomoric language and platitudes. The handling of the subject was so poor it was embarrassing to watch...the only good angle was that Hallie has a so-so-happy ending instead of being dragged to the nut hatch.” Richard’s review also includes a short plot summary, in which she matter-of-factly states that
“Hallie actually loves Marya and doesn’t want to admit it even to herself.”
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What even Richards doesn’t consider, however, is the possibility the feeling is mutual. Marya admits she’s jealous of Hallie’s talent, but
her
repressed psyche would certainly benefit from a few sessions with Dr. Starke. Then maybe we could have found out what Marya
really
meant by “good luck.”

The Eleventh Hour
is an early example of the dramatic treatment homosexuality received on a prime time network television program. Yet through the mid-1960s, the subject was generally confined to talk shows. Then, in 1967, a network news organization finally addressed the topic in a special report.
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Like
The Rejected, CBS Reports: The Homosexuals
attempted to answer the major moral, legal, and medical questions surrounding male homosexuality (once again, lesbianism is excluded). Hosted by
60 Minutes’s
Mike Wallace, the hour-long program consists of interviews with “experts” and profiles of several gay men, some well adjusted, others not so happy. In the
Confidential File
tradition, the producers also provide a touch of sensationalism by including film footage, shot in
cinema verité
style, of the inside of a gay bar; male prostitutes loitering on a Hollywood street corner; and, in the most disturbing sequence, a vice squad arrest of a 19-year-old man for public sex.

What little, if any, attempt made at “balanced” reporting is undermined by Wallace’s shameless editorializing about what he characterizes as “the most despised minority group in the United States.” The program does include interviews with self-assured, seemingly well-adjusted homosexuals, including Mattachine Society representative Harold Call, who explains the organization’s rationale for the legalization of homosexual relations between consenting adults. But even Call’s appearance is unable to counterbalance interviews with two gay men who share their self-hatred, shame, and guilt with the American public.

The first, an unidentified 30-year-old college instructor, lies on a psychiatrist’s couch, his face obscured by his knee and hand. This tortured soul recites how his homosexuality isolated him from his family, who treated him, in his words, “like some wounded animal that they were going to send to the vet...”

The second is even more disturbing. A 27-year-old man sits in almost total darkness with his face obscured by a large potted plant. He characterizes himself as “not sick just sexually. I’m sick in a lot of ways...immature, childlike, and the sex is a symptom.” Wallace explains the man, on probation after three vice arrests, is now celibate and undergoing therapy. The man behind the potted plant admits his hope of one day living a heterosexual life is still a “far away notion” because he’s afraid of being intimate with women, which he believes stems from his fear of a domineering mother.

The fear and self-loathing expressed by both men is later reinforced when Wallace offers his “insights” into the male homosexual lifestyle. As we watch the footage shot inside a gay bar and on a Hollywood Boulevard corner, Wallace characterizes the “average” homosexual:

Wallace’s narration — a string of gross generalizations and negative stereotypes — sounds as if it was scripted by Rev. Jerry Falwell. However, at one point Wallace does suggest all homosexuals are not alike by showing us a group of presumably gay men, nicely dressed in suits and ties, having a dinner party. The men are never given the opportunity to speak on their own behalf, but are used solely to illustrate Wallace’s point that there are thousands of homosexuals “who deplore the tawdry image of the so-called gay life...men who lead quiet, unexceptional lives in towns and cities across the country.”

“There is just one thing,”
he adds,
“they share with their homosexual brothers.”

Wallace’s last statement serves as an introduction to Dr. Charles Socarides, the notorious New York psychoanalyst, who offers his professional opinion:
“Homosexuality is, in fact, a mental illness which has reached epidemiological proportions.”
The most outspoken advocate of homosexuality as a pathological condition during the 1960s and 1970s, Dr. Socarides expresses his views during an obviously staged question-and-answer session with his students at the Albert Einstein School of Medicine. Socarides believed male homosexuality is a learned behavior, the result of a disturbance during the child’s pre-oedipal stage of development (before the age of three).
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By forming an unnaturally strong tie with his mother, “normal” gender identity is disrupted and any attempt by the feminine-identified adult male to establish a heterosexual relationship triggers separation anxiety with the mother. Consequently, the homosexual, who turns to other men for his “fix” of masculinity, is typically neurotic or suffers from a serious pathological condition (schizophrenia, paranoia, etc.). All hope, however, is not lost. Dr. Socarides advocated psychoanalytic treatment as a cure and claimed personal success in turning even the most die-hard homosexuals into heterosexuals.

Wallace explains that Dr. Socarides’s views aren’t universally held, but adds “the thrust of diagnosis in any treatment in recent years has been along the line that Socarides details.” No differing opinions are expressed, only an explanation of the etiology of homosexuality by psychiatrist Dr. Irving Bieber, professor of clinical psychiatry at New York Medical College, who also believed homosexuality to be a mental illness. According to Dr. Bieber, a boy’s sexuality is rooted in an overprotective mother and a detached father. “I do not believe it is possible,” he concludes, “to produce a homosexual if the father is a warm, good, supportive, constructive father for his son.”

The response of the critics was mixed. Several papers, including
The New York Times,
the
Washington Star,
and the
Chicago Daily News,
applauded CBS for tackling the subject.
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But not all believed the subject matter was suitable for television. In his review entitled “TV No Spot to Unload Garbage,” the
Chicago Tribune’s
Clay Gowran accused CBS of doing a disservice to young, impressionable viewers.“
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Most critics did not acknowledge the program’s obvious anti-homosexual bias. One exception was
The New York Times’s
George Gent, who suggested it would ”have been better to give the minority viewpoint that homosexuals are just as normal as anyone else a chance to speak for itself.“
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