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• Sunday, January 14, 2007 01:52 PM

  It's "branding" (and I don't mean with a hot iron).

  There's no point in putting up disclaimers like "I don't kill gay people at night" or "Some of my best friends..." because, if you're determined to hate me, it won't matter.

  My point is that these Showtime shows are simply "branded" as being gay. If they were about straight people they'd be cancelled in ten minutes over on Fox. From what I've seen, there's nothing very special or very good about them; it's only the "gay friendly" label that keeps people watching.

  On the old Quinn Martin series "The Invaders," one episode was the Black People episode. For the most part the series had been all caucasian, and someone must have shamed Martin into doing something with black people. So he had a couple of black actors appear on this episode, and produced black aliens. (Besides the un-bendable pinky finger, the black aliens' palms were not pink-colored; they were the uniform brown color of the rest of their skin.)

  That episode closed with some yadda, yadda, yadda about brotherhood and how the few black humans who survived now knew there was an "alien race" out to kill them. And that was that. I don't believe there were any more black characters in any other episodes, alien or human.

  So, by doing an episode which contained some stuff about black people, did Quinn Martin prove himself not to be a racist? Did he break the color line in mid-60's dramatic television? I'll bet all he did was get a grumbling notice of approval in "Jet" or "Ebony" about it. ("Hey, David Vincent comes up against black aliens. We're so appreciative.")

  Meanwhile, an earlier Showtime series, "Brothers," was the first series to have gay characters on a regular basis. It even had a "flaming" character, Donald Maltby, who was more than just a rimshot joke; he could become deadly serious. This show was forgotten, perhaps because it did something that the current Showtime "gay shows" don't do; they showed gay people as people, interacting with the whole world, not just other gay people.

  But that isn't what Showtime wanted. So they ghettoize gays and lesbians. They're pursuing them as a niche audience, an audience which just happens to spend a lot more on entertainment (pay cable channels included) than the hetero audience. Hey, there's a whole night of shows that do a lot of gay stuff! None dare call it exploitation.

  Hey, "Weeds" has its characters encountering a gay drug dealer and a gay FBI agent. We're so appreciative.

  —tomreedtoon Read tomreedtoon's other letters
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