Definitive, vibrant, and utterly fascinating, Alternate Channels traces the monumental growth of gay, lesbian, and bisexual images on radio and television from the 1930s to the present. Splashed against the tumultuous backdrop of the McCarthy witch hunts, Stonewall and the gay liberation movement, the birth of the 700 Club and the religious right, the outbreak of AIDS and the arrival of in-your-face queer activism, this chatty, authoritative broadcast history tells the stories of such notorious and noteworthy moments as
- 1947: Radio gays--A bitchy fashion photographer throws fits at the drop of a designer hat on the adaptation of Moss Hart's Lady in the Dark
- 1967s: Monkey business--The Monkees flick limp wrists while caroling "Don we now our gay apparel" for a Christmas special
- 1974: Pepper in the wound--A notorious Police Woman episode depicts a gang of deadly lesbians who rob, torture, and murder senior citizens
- 1977: Wash your mouth out--Billy Crystal portrays Jodie Dallas on Soap, the first hit series with a gay character in a central role
- 1991: L.A. Law breaks 'em--Amanda Donohoe and Michelle Greene share a two-second kiss . . . and start a storm of controversy
- 2000: The last laugh--Featuring not one but two gay male characters, Will & Grace skyrockets to the top of the ratings charts
From mocking banter between Bing Crosby and Bob Hope on '50s radio to a historic peck between women on '90s television, from the stereotyping of gays, lesbians, and bisexuals as sissies and psychopaths to their widespread acceptance as real people, Alternate Channels is a compulsively readable chronicle of lesbian, gay, and bisexual images in the media--packed with unthinkable shows, bizarre personalities, unlikely heroes, and some of the strangest protests ever staged in the name of civil rights.
IN THE BEGINNING ...
Early Radio
Radio is dedicated to God ... When you switch on your receiving set, you may sit back in perfect confidence that no manner of diabolic doctrine, from atheism to zymology, will afflict your ears.
--Mitchell Dawson, "Censorship in the Air," 19341
Fashion photographer Russell Paxton was a rampaging queen who threw fits at the drop of a designer hat. "I've taken pictures of beautiful males," he gushed after one photo shoot, "but this one is the end--the absolute end! Oh, I tell you he's godlike!" Russell arrived on ABC Radio in 1947 when The Theatre Guild on the Air presented Moss Hart's play "Lady in the Dark." As on Broadway, the play featured this supporting character, an openly gay photographer. Theatre Guild was a prestigious series known for breaking taboos. Its writers toned down this play for radio, but somehow convinced ABC to allow Russell explicitly gay lines like "He's a beautiful hunk of man!"2 As played on radio by Keene Crockett, he was a stereotypical, childish, self-centered whiner, but he was also a first. From the start of network radio in the 1920s until 1952, Theatre Guild's "Lady in the Dark" was the only known broadcast to include an explicitly homosexual character. This shortage of gay roles was hardly surprising. At the time, homosexuality was officially considered a sex crime and a sign of profound depravity. It was, therefore, unfit for early radio.
Radio's moral standards had to be strict. Unlike theater or film or vaudeville, radio signals reached into every home that had a receiver. Children, women, and old people might be listening (so the argument went), and society had a duty to protect them from shocking, tasteless broadcasts. This medium, where toothpaste was once considered too "personal" a product to advertise--this medium where married, hetero-
sexual characters seldom did more than kiss--was not ready or willing to acknowledge sexual deviates.3
Besides being immoral, any mention of homosexuality could have meant financial ruin for broadcasters. Angry sponsors and the United States government had closed stations over less controversial subjects. Homosexuality was so taboo that even antigay comments were dangerous. In 1930, the Federal Radio Commission (FRC) decided not to relicense station KVEP in Portland, Oregon. The FRC cited numerous "obscene, indecent, and profane" utterances that the station had allegedly broadcast, including antihomosexual remarks by a local politician, Robert G. Duncan. As commentator Carroll O'Meara observed in The Forum magazine in 1940, "... radio's unwritten code can be summed up about as follows: Nothing shall be broadcast which might embarrass, offend, or disgust any decent parents or their children seated at the dinner table in mixed company ..."4
Writers who adapted plays and novels for radio broadcast routinely straightened or neutered gay characters.5 Newscasters ignored stories involving "sex perversion."6 Censors rewrote or banned suggestive popular songs. In 1946, columnist John Crosby reported in the New York Herald-Tribune:
[Cole] Porter's sophisticated lyrics have been a headache for the song-clearance departments of radio networks for years ... The broadcasters took a long, long look at "My Heart Belongs to Daddy" before it was allowed on the air. Then, for obscure reasons of their own, they decided young ladies could sing it but young men couldn't ...
Lesbians and gay men looked in the mirror of the mass media and saw no faces like their own. When an image did flicker briefly into view--usually in the print media--the view was grotesque. "The sex pervert," Newsweek reported in 1949, "... is too often regarded as merely a 'queer' person who never hurts anyone but himself. Then the mangled form of some victim focuses public attention on the degenerate's work." Gay-themed books and plays ended in "recovery" (conversion to heterosexuality) or suicide. A comparatively liberal 1947 article in Collier's magazine urged mandatory "treatment" of gay adolescents. It described a New York project that "cured" homosexuals before their deviance could lead to harsher crimes, like child molestation, arson, and murder.8 Even these sensationalist articles avoided
lesbianism, a subject that combined two taboos: homosexuality, and the idea of women as active, autonomous sexual beings.
Radio's avoidance of gay themes made sense in that climate. There had been a few exceptions, though. One night in 1933, a San Francisco station began airing a performance of Rae Bourbon's gay drag revue "Boys Will Be Girls," live from Tait's Café. The risqué production was cut short quickly, and listeners heard the local police raiding the café to close down this illegal "pansy show." On the major radio networks, a handful of early-1930s' broadcasts included more low-key homosexual jokes, usually without legal problems. These vaudevillian routines based their humor on the assumption that all people were straight. In an episode of the Marx Brothers' Flywheel, Shyster and Flywheel, Groucho and Chico stow away on a ship. A ship's officer identifies himself to Groucho as the bos'n's mate. "You're his mate?" asks Groucho. "Well, I hope you are very happy together. Give my regards to the bos'n." Other programs used antigay prejudice to get laughs, as did a 1933 Rudy Vallee Show:
woman: Mother says I'm too young to have company. What would you do if you went out with a young fella and he tried to kiss you?
man: (warily) Look, I don't go out with fellas who try to kiss me.9
Such jokes soon disappeared. In the late 1930s, the networks restricted all sexually suggestive humor in an attempt to avoid proposed government censorship. Under the new industry guidelines, radio comedians limited their "homo" gags to oblique sissy jokes and occasional "radio drag." Though drag is primarily visual, it had a close cousin on radio. On a 1939 Jack Benny Program--a typical example--men play the catty, female leads in a spoof of the movie The Women. In preliminary dialogue, they complain about having to wear dresses and makeup for the skit, but they use their regular male voices throughout the routine. As a result, they sound like very bitchy queens. ("That hussy! I could scratch her eyes out! . . . Phyllis, you say one more
word ... and I'll slap the rouge right off your face. And then will those bags show!")10
From the early 1930s to the mid 1940s, Myrt and Marge, a popular soap opera about theater folk, featured what may have been the first implicitly gay regular character on the air. Ray Hedge plays Clarence Tiffingtuffer, a fretful, nervous, effeminate young costume designer who is a close, loyal friend of the title characters. As with other comic-relief "fairy" characters, Clarence's sexuality is conveyed indirectly, through broad stereotypes. He is snide, snitty, egotistical, and sometimes infantile--though this is less obvious when he is talking with the two heroines. The scripts often present Clarence in feminine terms. Awaiting the arrival of new costumes he has designed, he exclaims, "I'm as jumpy as a bride!" Almost lisping, he assures the chorus women that their outfits will be "simply gorgeous. Simply gorgeous! I'd love to try one on myself!" Clarence addresses other males as "my dear man"--unless they are authority figures who are inconveniencing him, in which case they become "You brute!" He is unquestionably, as Radioland magazine called him, a "thithy." And when it comes to bitchy repartee, he can dish with the best of them. "I don't mean to be catty," he confides before ripping into someone, "but ..." At the height of the censorship crackdown in the late 1930s, Myrt and Marge seemed to tone him down slightly. But by the mid 1940s, Clarence was back in full flame.11
