Following the Stonewall riots and the birth of the modern gay rights movement in , gay activists began challenging the way American television episodes with LGBT themes presented homosexuality. With the slowly increasing visibility of LGBT characters on fiction series, a pattern began to emerge, beginning with repressed lesbian sniper Miss Brant from 's The Asphalt Jungle and continuing through a murderous female impersonator from The Streets of San Francisco and Police Woman and her trio of killer lesbians in and beyond, of presenting LGBT characters as psychotic killers on crime dramas.
Gays, the viewing public was told over and over, were simultaneously dangerous and sick, to be feared and to be pitied. In response to complaints about several early portrayals, networks began vetting scripts with gay characters or content through two recently formed advocacy groups, the National Gay Task Force and the Gay Media Task Force. Several episodes saw substantive changes based on these consultations, but in other instances, notably the Marcus Welby, M.
Protests against the Marcus Welby, M. Gays and lesbians would continue to be portrayed as killers but their motives would less frequently be related to their sexuality. Gays started killing out of greed and jealousy, just like heterosexuals. Sitcoms too began presenting LGBT characters, with All in the Family producing several episodes on the theme beginning in Gay sitcom episodes tended to follow one of a handful of plot devices: a character close to a lead character would unexpectedly come out , forcing the characters to confront their own issues with homosexuality; a lead character is mistaken for gay; a lead character pretends to be gay a recurring theme in Three's Company , where Jack Tripper John Ritter has to pretend to be gay so that his landlord s would allow him to live with two single female roommates ; or, more rarely, a recurring character from the series comes out.
In the first instance, it was rare that the gay character would ever make another appearance. Dating back to Robert Reed 's turn as a transgender doctor on Medical Center in , transgender characters and issues have tended to receive sympathetic treatment. Contents move to sidebar hide. Article Talk. Read Edit View history. Tools Tools. Download as PDF Printable version. In other projects.
Wikidata item. Episodes [ edit ]. This is a dynamic list and may never be able to satisfy particular standards for completeness. You can help by adding missing items with reliable sources. See also [ edit ]. Notes [ edit ]. Annenberg School for Communication. Archived from the original on November 29, Retrieved December 9, The Advocate. New York: Harrington Park Press. ISBN OCLC USA Today. Peter Panama Vincent Schiavelli , a flamboyant set designer on The Corner Bar, is prime time's first recurring or regular gay character.
