"Brothers and Sisters" Straight Gay Couple

The ABC-TV series Brothers and Sisters, which has been running for a number of years now, admirably has a few gay characters, as I've noted in the past. The main couple is Kevin Walker (Matthew Rhys, on the left in the photo), who is part of the main family in the show, and his boyfriend Scotty (openly gay Luke Mcfarlane, on the right).

Although it also dealt with other issues, the main storyline for the past two weeks has been a crisis in the marriage between Kevin and Scotty. It's a question if the relationship will survive. It centers on something that Scotty did several months in the past.

Now you might wonder, what did Scotty do? Did he fall in love with someone else? Decide to become an ex-gay? Tell Kevin he was lousy in bed and wanted out? None of the above. The horrible, unbelievable, absolutely awful thing Scotty did was ---

-- have a completely meaningless one-night-stand with another man on a night that Kevin blew him off for an event that Kevin knew was very special to Scotty.

Did I say this was meaningless casual sex? No one caught any diseases. Scotty did not see the fellow again, he did not fall in love with him, he did not have a male mistress or a continuing romantic affair.

It was just one lousy night, sheesh.

But Kevin and Scotty and all of the relatives are acting just the way some straight couples do when there's an "indiscretion." [And let's not call this an extra-marital affair; it was one night or less.] Yes, they are a monogamous couple who had even planned to raise a baby and Kevin is all hurt and what-not, but even women whose husbands stray in this fashion can forgive and move on. Presumably that will be the case for Kevin, but all the fucking angst in the last two episodes, you would think Scotty had impregnated some gal and was planning to march to the altar with her.

It's just all so terribly conventional, so middle-class. Like an episode of Dr. Phil, where he counsels a fat, fifty-year-old housewife who's all hysterical because her husband had sex with a hooker [had sex, period!] or went to a strip club. You can see Kevin on the show whining to Dr. Phil about Kevin's infidelity, even though it happened months ago, that it meant absolutely nothing, that Scotty still loves Kevin, and Scotty only did it because he understandably felt abandoned by his somewhat self-centered and borderline bitchy lover.

Such angst, such hand-wringing! I mean, get over it already! The most (unintentionally) hilarious scene had Kevin's gay uncle Saul (Ron Rifkin), who is seventy and spent most of his life in the closet [he didn't even come out when he learned he had a gay nephew] daring to angrily lecture Scotty, who is such a sweet guy [borderline cloying at times] that it immediately seemed like massive overkill.

[Speaking of Uncle Saul, he didn't come out until he was seventy and he winds up with Stephen Collins as a boyfriend (Collins plays "Charlie")! Even at sixty-three handsome Collins is a mite out of Saul's league. Collins plays the role just a touch stereotypically.]

I recognize there is a movement to "humanize" gays and make it clear that we are just like everybody else -- how depressing -- but the fact is that the gay community has always had its own rules and a freer mind-set. Now that more gay people are coming out of the closet, we're getting the viewpoints and influence of more conservative -- more conventional -- gays. I'm all for the diversity of the gay community, and feel every gay person has the right, more or less, to live as they choose, but there's something a little disquieting about a major gay couple on a popular TV program reacting to what should be a minor incident the way that a stereotypical straight couple would.

No offense whatsoever intended to heterosexuals, but what the world doesn't need is straight gay people.

These two episodes were excruciatingly awful, never more so than when the guy Scotty had the one-night-stand with shows up at the restaurant he owns. The guy was depicted as slick and callow, and at one point he even gets punched in the face by Kevin's straight brother [this uncomfortably reminded me of a gay-bashing]. This happens after pathetic Kevin punches out a completely innocent waiter, confusing him with the other guy. None of this was funny or dramatic, just silly and quite desperate. Surely the writers of the show can come up with more dramatic developments for Kevin and Scotty than this hysteria over a one-night quickie? Even the straight characters on the show don't carry on so over infidelity!

It's great to have gay characters on TV, but when they're poorly handled it seems like a shameful waste of a great opportunity.

"Silver Studs"

On the ABC series Brothers and Series, which airs Sunday nights at 10 PM, there are a few gay characters in what is essentially a family-oriented drama. First there was Kevin, the gay brother (Matthew Rhys), and his lover Scotty (Luke Macfarlane); then they outed Kevin's Uncle Saul Holden (Ron Rifkin, pictured). Rifkin is an excellent actor whose last major TV role was as the incredibly evil Arvin Sloane on the absorbing spy series Alias. "Saul" is quite a change of pace.

This was an interesting situation that was never fully explored. I mean here we have a guy who is a senior citizen, who apparently had an involvement with at least one man many years in the past [who got married, although Saul never did] but who never came out to his gay nephew, and when said nephew asked if he was gay became furious and refused to talk to him.

Saul did eventually come out to Kevin and the rest of his family, but we have to speculate what went wrong with his life. Obviously the man suffered from internalized homophobia -- there's no doubt of that. At a party, before he comes out, Saul is approached by his old boyfriend, who tells him that his marriage is over, he's accepted himself, and apparently wants to get back together with Saul or at least renew old acquaintances [gee, after all those decades -- Saul must have been somethin'!]. But we're left to wonder -- did they have a casual fling, did they have sex, was this guy Saul's actual lover, and was Saul so hurt when he left him to get married that he, too, tried to go straight, couldn't, but nonetheless renounced his homosexuality?

The program has never wrestled with those issues.

Last week Saul was moody and difficult, snapping at everyone. Everyone was wondering what was wrong with him. I could have told them. Saul suffers from Late Bloomer's Syndrome. Sometimes when men come out quite late in life they feel like, as others have put it, the party has passed them by. They feel they wasted years and years full of guilt and denial. At one point Saul practically cries that he's seventy years old, there's nothing left for him, and all he has is his friggin' work. In other words, Saul not only needed a man -- he needed to get laid.

While watching the program I said to myself, if Saul were a real person and I knew him, I'd recommend that he sign up on the silver daddies web site ["for older men and the men who love them"] and get himself a date. [I just can't resist playing "Gay Doctor Bill."]

Well, sure enough, after the commercial Saul bounces into his sister's (Sally Field) kitchen bubbling over with joy and tells her he's signed up for online dating on -- get this -- Silver Studs! [Gee, I wonder where they got the name?] Saul was excited because he got what's known as a "friend request." (Maybe someday he'll actually get a date and we'll see it on the program).

I imagine it's tough enough coming out when you're middle-aged, but at seventy? Still, where there's life there's hope.

In the meantime, there's the gay couple Kevin and Scotty. As portrayed, they're nice enough guys, even if Kevin is a borderline bitch and Scotty is so damn precious at times you want to puke on him. Scotty (played by openly gay Macfarlane; Rhys and Rifkin are straight) did his impression of a gay owl. Which means he swiveled his hips, turned his head around, and said, "Who?" in an effeminate voice [not that it was all that much different from his "normal" voice.] I guess I forgot to laugh. At least Scotty is a more realistic partner for Kevin than the hot and hunky supposedly-bisexual-but-definitely-prefers-guys Hollywood action movie star that he briefly dated in season one. As Kevin, who has his good points put it: "Bi now, gay later."

As this show is all about "family" [for many of us our friends are our true family, but if we have good relationships with our parents and siblings so much the better], Kevin and Scotty are having a baby. Awwww. They have hired a surrogate to carry the baby, a gal that I probably wouldn't hire to walk my dog, if I had one. But that's where the conflict and the "drama" will come in, one supposes.

Frankly, I find Saul and his dilemma and especially his decision not to give up but to meet and date new guys to be far more arresting than the domestic and baby concerns of somewhat dull Kevin and Scotty.

On my post about eighty-plus Jack Larson who played Jimmy Olsen and recently appeared on Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, I wondered if LOGO would ever have a show about senior or even middle-aged gay men. Wouldn't it be funny if ABC's Brothers and Sisters becomes the first show to detail the romantic and sex life of a gay male septuagenarian?

Maybe Saul will decide to date older instead of younger and wind up on a date -- or in bed -- with Jimmy Olsen?

Hey -- Why not? Sex ain't just for "twinks."

Law and Order and Brothers and Sisters -- No Balls!

While you can't expect every TV show that deals with gay subject matter to have a gay activist – or even a gay – sensibility, sometimes you have to wonder where the tele-writers are coming from. I think that Law and Order: Special Victims Unit is one of the best shows on television, but I was very surprised by a recent episode in which there was a sub-plot in which two men haul guys into a van and rape and abuse them. Some of the victims are gay and some are straight. One straight-identified guy, who is about to get married, won't testify because he can't stand the thought of his bride-to-be knowing what happened. He is particularly horrified because he was aroused while he was being penetrated. Now these detectives are supposed to be sensitive and understanding but instead of assuring him that even if he were gay it wouldn't be the end of the world, all they do is try to persuade him that he's still straight. But what if the guy has gay leanings that remain unexplored and because of this his marriage will be a disaster? The possibility is never even suggested. Neither Stabler nor Benson suggest that there would be nothing wrong with this guy if he were gay.

On an episode of the regular Law and Order, the storyline dealt with a hypocritical married minister who claimed he could cure homosexuality yet was running around having sex with guys. What bothered me about this episode was that the detectives kept asking if this one or that one was cured without putting “cured” in figurative quotes, as if they really thought homosexuality was some sort of disease that could be banished like polio. This may not have been the tele-writer's intention, but it made it seem like a throwback to the 1970's.

But the Law and Order shows have always been inconsistent when it came to gay-themed episodes, probably depending on the sensibility of the writer [regardless of their orientation]. Law and Order has even had a few old-fashioned episodes in which the motive of the killer was to simply prevent somebody from revealing he or she was gay. Definitely very 70's.

Now on Brothers and Sisters we have the storyline involving the gay brother Kevin and his hunky closeted soap actor boyfriend. [Does anyone really see these two as a realistic couple?] In a recent development, a web site keeps threatening to out the soap actor. Kevin, who is certainly a far cry from a proud gay activist, is willing to keep dating this rather dumb, closeted schmuck [who apparently has a pattern of using women as beards and dumping boyfriends and girlfriends alike] simply because he's hot [okay, he wouldn't be the first man or women to stay with someone because of presumably great sex]. But Kevin's actions are deplorable: Contacting the owner of the web site [it has not yet been revealed if he's gay or straight], he threatens a law suit even though he knows the insinuations are perfectly true. Does he try to convince his boyfriend that a life of shivering in the closet isn't worth what may never even become a hugely successful career in the first place? Does he agonize over the fact that as a couple he and the soap hunk can never be out and proud? No, he just acts like an asshole lawyer. Yuchh. It's nice to have a gay character on the show, but he's a complete jerk. Let's hope he develops some gay balls in the future.