Masaryk University Faculty of Arts

Department of English and American Studies

English Language and Literature

Katerina Hasalova

Queer American Television: The Development of Lesbian Characters Master’s Diploma Thesis

Supervisor: Jeffrey Alan Vanderziel, B.A.

2013

I declare that I have worked on this thesis independently, using only the primary and secondary sources listed in the bibliography.

…………………………………………….. Author’s signature

Acknowledgement

I would like to thank the thesis supervisor Jeffrey Alan Vanderziel, B.A., for his support and inspiration

Table of Contents

Introduction ...... 1

Historical Overview ...... 4

The Early Years: Pre-Stonewall to the 1970s ...... 4

The 1980s ...... 5

The 1990s ...... 8

The 2000s ...... 12

The 2010s ...... 17

Meet the Creators, Shows and Characters ...... 21

Criteria ...... 21

Creators ...... 22

Shows and Characters ...... 26

Coming out ...... 30

Relationships ...... 39

Development within the Show ...... 49

Conclusion – Has It or Has It Not?...... 57

Works Cited ...... 64

Summary ...... 69

Anotace ...... 70

Introduction

―’Queer’ has traditionally meant odd or unusual, though modern use

often pertains to LGBT (gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, intersex and

non-normative heterosexual) people‖ ("Queer," ALGBTICAL).

The usage of the word queer is still considered a bit controversial nowadays, however, the meaning underwent a change since the end of last century, when some LGBT activists reclaimed this term as a term of self- empowerment and today is often used as an umbrella term for people who are gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, transsexual, intersexual, genderqueer, or generally of other than non-heterosexual sexuality.

Media and particularly television play an important part in everyday lives of majority of the Americans. It is true that new media are used for watching television content, like Netflix, iTunes, Hulu or for example Amazon Instant

Video, however it is mainly for convenience and to avoid commercials, not as a way to stop watching the content. As such, the broadcast is important for educating viewers.

In the last several decades, queer (or for the sake of this thesis, LGBTQ

– Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer) characters have been appearing on television more and more. They started with being shown as more of deviants, went through a phase when they were blamed for spreading

AIDS, up to what we see on television today, and that is a valiant effort to give a semblance of ―normalcy‖ when introducing lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender characters. It does not always work as well as the LGBT

1 community would have liked it to work and in some cases, there is much to be desired in this way but it could be seen as ―visibility matters‖ kind of way.

Is it true? It is hard to say because having many of the stereotypes and misconceptions of many straight people regarding LGBT community splashed over several seasons of a popular show means that some people will have wrong expectations when meeting non-straight individuals for the first time, maybe even fear them.

Since Queer American Television is a very broad topic, I have decided to concentrate on the lesbian community and their portrayal on the broadcast television in particular. I will take three different television shows that include a lesbian character and I will try to compare if the portrayal of these characters has changed through time. The television shows were created at different times – late 1980s/early 1990s, mid 1990s/early 2000s and mid 2000s until today and while the number of lesbian characters has increased somewhat during this time, in this thesis I would like to analyze whether the way they have been portrayed has changed since the 1990s and also if the depth or realistic portrayal of the characters has improved.

After a historical overview of the LGBTQ connected real life events and of what was seen on television, with mentioning some of the important or noteworthy television shows, I will then introduce the television shows and characters I have chosen, and also briefly introduce the creators. The historical development will be split in decades, rather than by the television genre to make it better structured.

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In the first chapter of my analysis, called ―Coming Out‖, I will analyze this process and look at the ways this process was handled if at all. I will compare the ways used to convey this important step in any LGBT individual to the viewers.

Since relationships are important in any television show, book or a movie, I will then devote a chapter, called ―Relationships‖, to this development in the characters’ lives. I will look at if they even had any relationships, how visible the relationships were and how they were handled. Where they equal to the heterosexual relationships and was there a difference between 1991, 2000 and 2008 when these characters were indicated to not be straight anymore?

In the last chapter, called ―Development within the Show‖, I will look at just that – whether there was any development for these three characters on their respective shows. Were these three women well rounded characters or did they appear only two-dimensional? Did their sexuality play a significant role on the shows? And also a touch of – did the type of the show and the time when the shows were aired play a significant role in the portrayal? This last question will be valid for all the analysis chapters as sort of a common thread.

By the end of this thesis, I would like to have proven that the answer to my initial research questions is yes, the portrayal has improved, and to have this conclusion backed by facts and examples.

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Historical Overview

The Early Years: Pre-Stonewall to the 1970s

In the pre-Stonewall years of American television, the most anyone could hope or dread, depending on the stance of the viewer, to see on their screen in terms of LGBT themes were various local talk shows. Generally, these shows would gravely discuss the "problem" of homosexuality with a panel of

"experts" on the subject, none of whom were identified as homosexual. These included such programs as Confidential File out of Los Angeles, which produced

"Homosexuals and the Problems They Present" in 1954 (Tropiano 269) and

"Homosexuals Who Stalk and Molest Our Children" in 1955 (Tropiano 3), and

The Open Mind out of New York which aired "Introduction to the Problem of

Homosexuality", "Homosexuality: A Psychological Approach" and "Male and

Female in American Society" during its 1956–1957 season (Tropiano 4).

Showcase, hosted by Fannie Hurst, was one of the exceptions to this rule as they presented several of the earliest well-rounded discussions of homosexuality and was one of the few programs on which homosexual men spoke for themselves rather than being debated by a panel of "experts"

(Tropiano 4-5).

With increasing visibility of the LGBT characters on fictional series post the Stonewall riots in 1969, a pattern started to appear beginning with a murderous female impersonator from The Streets of San Francisco and Police

Woman and her trio of killer lesbians in 1974 and after that, of presenting

LGBT characters as psychotic killers on crime dramas. On medical dramas, the disease model of homosexuality was supported in characters like 1963's Hallie

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Lambert from The Eleventh Hour and Martin Loring from Marcus Welby, M.D. in 1973. Lesbians and gays, the viewing public was told, were concurrently dangerous and sick, to be feared and to be pitied. Following protest and complaints over some of the more over-the-top portrayals of characters such as 1974 Marcus Welby episode "The Outrage", that introduced male child molestation plot, and the before mentioned killer lesbian trio from the Police

Woman episode "Flowers of Evil" forced networks to start moving away from the killer queer plot device and though gays and lesbians were still portrayed as killers, they were now killing not because of being gay but they started killing out of greed and jealousy, just like heterosexuals (Tropiano 71-72).

The 1980s

The 1980s started with the Democrats endorsing a homosexual rights platform and in 1981, the first story about a rare disease found in 41 gay men in New York and California was published in the New York Times. Since the most affected group were homosexuals, the Center for Disease Control and

Prevention (CDC) initially referred to this disease as GRID, Gay Related

Immune Deficiency Disorder, and only after it was found outside the gay community, was the disease name changed to AIDS.

Despite some more positive things happening in the LGBT history in this decade (Wisconsin made discrimination based on sexual orientation illegal, first

International Gay Games were held in Sand Francisco), sadly, the HIV/AIDS was the prevalent and most visible topic. Even with the danger that HIV/AIDS represented, it took the Reagan administration until the late 1980s to address

5 the crisis and President Reagan was blamed for the widespread epidemic because of this.

The onset of AIDS provided one of the topics for mostly gay male characters in dramatic series. Gay and lesbian characters still appeared mainly in a one off episodes and were largely portrayed as being responsible for the

HIV epidemic. Sitcoms would occasionally also venture into the LGBT territory, but for the most part followed the pattern that had developed during the

1970s, with episodes following 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; or, less frequently, a recurring character from the series comes out. In the first instance, it was rare that the gay character would ever make another appearance (Tropiano 191, 212, 224).

As unsatisfactory as the portrayals of the gay and lesbian characters were, they were at least present and Bill Yousman in his Further Off the

Straight & Narrow Study Guide offers a theory that representation in media is crucial for a group’s sense of identity and legitimacy. ―Even misleading or stereotypical representations are thus crucial, just due to their very existence‖

(5). No matter what we think of this theory, it is true that popular culture and television in particular, is a very important part of American life and when a group of people are absent from television portrayals it is as if they don’t exist

(Yousman 5).

With majority of middle and lower class Americans spending their

―quality‖ family time in front of the television, it was then considered as a good

6 sign that soap operas jumped on the gay wagon, too. In 1982, All My Children, a daytime soap opera that ran between 1970 and 2011, introduced the first openly gay character, child psychiatrist Dr. Lynn Carson. Though the viewers only learned about her homosexuality through her discussing it with her friend and she never had a love interest on the show, it was a start. Her character was written out after one year, though, and it took another five years before the first openly gay male character was introduced on As the World Turns, one of the longest running soap operas in the U.S. When it went off the air in 2010, it had run for 54 seasons. The character of Hank Eliot also only lasted a year, and though his original intended storyline of going through the process of AIDS diagnosis was switched to his never present lover Charles, this story was awarded the GLAAD (Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation) Media Award in 1990.

All of the above characters were only minor characters that did not stay very long. In 1984, though, Showtime introduced its sitcom Brothers and one of its main characters, Clifford, was revealed to be gay. Brothers being a sitcom meant that this was used largely in humorous situations, however, the show itself dealt with AIDS, coming out and men kissing men, too. What was positive was that Cliff was not killed off after several episodes but stayed on the show during its full five season run.

In 1989, ABC learned firsthand the drawback of showing two gay men the morning after in the episode ―Strangers‖ of their show thirtysomething.

Despite the men not touching during the scene and nothing really being

7 shown, it alienated advertisers and ABC lost more than $1 million in advertising.

The 1990s

While President George Bush signed a federally funded program for people living with AIDS in 1990, and the 1990s also saw improvements in the fight for equality and acceptance, like 101st Annual Conference of American

Rabbis decided to accept gays and lesbians as rabbis (1990); health benefits were extended to domestic partners of lesbian and gay employees of some universities (1992) and large companies (1995); Bill Clinton recognized gay and lesbian civil rights as a serious and important issue (1992); homosexuality removed from the list of mental illnesses, first by the WHO (1992) and, subsequently, by the American Medical Association (AMA) (1994); the U.S.

Supreme Court found Colorado’s Amendment 2 that would deny gays and lesbians protection against discrimination unconstitutional (1996); the Grammy

Awards featured several openly gay and lesbian musicians (1993) and Hilary

Swank won the Oscar for playing Brandon Teena, a female to male transsexual

(1999), there were also several setbacks and negative actions.

There were several hate crimes committed against people because of their actual or presumed sexual orientation, one of them being the above mentioned Brandon Teena in 1993, another Matthew Shepard who was tortured and murdered in 1998. The Employment Non-Discrimination Act that would have included discrimination based on sexual orientation in the workplace failed in the U.S. Senate in a very narrow vote and in 1993 and the

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―Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell‖ policy that prevented the U.S. Military from barring applicants based on their sexual orientation was brought into effect. Military was no longer allowed to ask about the applicants’ sexual orientation but, at the same time, also forbade the applicants from engaging in homosexual acts, nor could they state that they were gay unless they wanted to be discharged from the service. And, finally, in 1996, the Defense of Marriage Act was signed into law by President Clinton. It defines marriage as a legal union between one man and one woman. It also stated that no state is required to recognize an out of state same-sex marriage.

On the television broadcast, this is the decade that brought us the

―lesbian kiss episode‖, which is an episode where a straight female character kisses a lesbian or a bisexual character, who was very likely never seen again.

It started in 1991 with an episode of L.A. Law episode where one of the characters who is bisexual, exchanges a romantic kiss with her straight female colleague. This practice then took hold and has been a regular appearance since. These ―lesbian kiss episodes‖ usually happen during "sweeps" periods when the Nielsen ratings are used by the broadcast networks to determine advertising rates. These lesbian kisses are:

―Eminently visual; cheap, provided the actors are willing; controversial,

year in and year out; and elegantly reversible (sweeps lesbians typically

vanish or go straight when the week's over), kisses between women are

perfect sweeps stunts. They offer something for everyone, from

advocacy groups looking for role models to indignation-seeking

conservatives, from goggle-eyed male viewers to progressive female

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ones, from tyrants who demand psychological complexity to plot buffs‖

(Heffernan).

The L.A. Law started this trend and was followed by Picket Fences in

1993, Roseanne in 1994, Ellen in 1997 and Party of Five and Ally McBeal in

1999 – all of them featured a straight character kissing or being kissed by a lesbian/bisexual one. The shows that did not use this plot were mainly crime and legal dramas and those kept largely the trend from the previous decade – with gay and lesbian characters being either the victims or the offenders. The soap opera One Life to Live introduces the first openly gay teenage character in a soap opera, Billy Douglas, and All My Children brought three different gay characters almost at one time – high school teacher Michael Delaney, his boyfriend Dr. Brad Phillips, and one of Michael’s students, Kevin Sheffield.

Early in the 1990s, in 1992 to be more precise, the reality show The

Real World is introduced on MTV. This reality show has seven young people living under one roof with cameras all over the house. Except the London

(1995) and Seattle edition (1998), all the other ones included at least one gay, lesbian or bisexual resident, in 1994 having Pedro Zamora who lived with AIDS and died a month after exchanging rings with his boyfriend on the show.

Some sitcoms in this decade went where no one had before – the smash hit Friends featured the first lesbian wedding on television, between Ross’s ex- wife Carol and her girlfriend Susan in the 1994 episode "The One with the

Lesbian Wedding" and Roseanne Barr’s Roseanne featured a gay wedding between Roseanne’s boss Leon and his boyfriend Scott in "December Bride" in

1995. On Friends, we were, once again, witnesses to the double standards

10 between straight and gay couples on television – even though the wedding ceremony was featured in its entirety, there was no kiss at the end of the ceremony for Carole and Susan. Only a year later, though, Roseanne managed to get her way and the newlywed couple did have their first married kiss.

All the gay and lesbian characters up until then were only recurring or regular characters but not one was a leading one. This changed on April 30,

1997. On that day, the famous ―The Puppy Episode‖ of Ellen DeGeneres’s show

Ellen was aired and in this episode, the leading character, Ellen Morgan, came out as a lesbian. Until today, this is considered to be the biggest milestone in the history of portrayal of gay and lesbian characters on television. The coming out had been preceded by a six-month long ―Let Ellen Out‖ campaign and accompanied by ―Come Out With Ellen‖ household parties that were both led and coordinated by GLAAD. Ellen Morgan’s coming out on Ellen followed the same that was done by DeGeneres herself. She famously came out on Oprah

Winfrey’s The Oprah Winfrey Show in February of the same year. ―The Puppy

Episode‖ was the highest rated on the show and afterwards, the ratings started to decline and the show was canceled. The network announced that the cancelation came because of the poor ratings but some suspected that it might have been because of both Ellen and her character coming out and trying to push political issues. The episode won two Emmy Awards and a Peabody

Award that is awarded to recognize distinguished achievement and meritorious service by broadcasters, cable and Webcasters, producing organizations, and individuals ("Overview"). Ellen DeGeneres also received the GLAAD Media

Award in 1998.

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It is difficult to establish if the only reason for canceling Ellen was the declining ratings, however, the truth is that Ellen DeGeneres faced backlash and had difficulties getting a regular television job after coming out.

The first post-Ellen gay character was introduced in 1998 in the form of

Will Truman on Will & Grace. The show introduced more than one gay character, too, the most prominent besides Will was Jack McFarland, an over- the-top gay character who represented most of the stereotypes concerning gay males – effeminate, loved shopping, very self-centered and trying to date/sleep with as many men as possible. Despite Will being gay, this sitcom was very successful but the success of this show is linked mainly to the fact that the main focus of the show was on the ―straight couple‖ – Will and his best friend,

Grace Adler, and as Will lacked the characteristics that most people considered as belonging to gays, when originally screened, the focus groups had no idea that Will was gay. The success of the show is also due to it being funny and avoiding any political topics connected with being homosexual. It successfully ran for eight years.

The 2000s

In the fight for equality for the LGBT community, the year 2000 started well for the citizens of Vermont which was the first state in the U.S. to legalize civil unions and registered partnerships between same-sex couples. It took additional three years before the first state in the U.S., Massachusetts, legalized same-sex marriage on May 18, 2004. In the following five years, five more states followed and by 2009, the same-sex marriage was legal in

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Connecticut (2008), Iowa, Vermont, New Hampshire and Washington, D.C.

(2009). There were also five additional states that passed same-sex civil unions and registered partnerships laws.

At the same time, though, there were 26 U.S. states that passed bans on same-sex marriage (8) or both the marriage and civil unions/registered partnerships (18). On top of these, there were two special cases – Maine, where the governor legalized the marriage, however, the citizens voted to overturn this and the law, thus, never went into effect; and California. In May

2008, the California Supreme Court ruled that same-sex couples have a constitutional right to marry. This became effective and more than 18,000 same-sex couples got married by November of the same year when Proposition

8, the ban on same-sex marriage, was approved by the California voters. It was, thus, no longer legal to get married for same-sex couples, on the other hand, marriages of those more than 18,000 couples remained valid as per the

California Supreme Court’s decision. The passing of Proposition 8 inspired the

NOH8 campaign, a photo project using celebrities to promote marriage equality.

During the presidential campaign in 2007, the Logo cable channel hosted the first American presidential forum that focused specifically on LGBT issues. The forum was sponsored by the Human Rights Campaign and all presidential candidates were invited. While six Democrats, including Barack

Obama and Hillary Clinton, participated, all Republican candidates declined.

This was in line with the official stance of the Republican Party on LGBT rights.

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We entered this decade still in the wake of Ellen DeGeneres’s coming out and with Will & Grace continuing very successfully to air on NBC. The quality, if not much the quantity, of the LGBTQ representation has been steadily improving and playing a lesbian was slowly ceasing to mean the death kiss to actresses’ careers. We were introduced to several new prominent non- straight characters and some already known characters have come out of the closet, for example Willow on Buffy the Vampire Slayer coming out in early

2000, Dr. Kerry Weaver on ER in 2001, or Dr. Callie Torres on Grey’s Anatomy in 2008. And two different new cable channels launched with programming targeting primarily the LGBTQ audience – here! in 2002 and later Logo TV in

2005.

While the quality of the LGBT characters and stories has improved in most of the scripted programming, there were, sadly, a few genres that were exception to this rule. On the crime, legal or procedural dramas, the representation was not lacking much in numbers, however, the television shows kept showing story lines that did not include LGBT characters in a very positive way. ―The writers of these shows are creating fictional worlds in which

LGBT individuals are basically nonexistent or marginalized to the roles of victim or villain‖ (Where We Are on TV Report: 2007 - 2008 Season 2-3).

In terms of numbers, the number of series regular characters in the broadcast television schedule went from 1.4% in 2005 to 3% in season 2009-

2010. If only scripted programming would have been counted, the numbers would be even lower than that, however, in the early 2000s, several broadcast television channels introduced reality shows that kept improving these

14 numbers. Big Brother, where contestants are closed in a house with cameras installed in every room, Amazing Race, where teams of two contestants – friends, family members, married or dating couples – search for clues and travel all around the world to win, and Survivor in which the group of contestants (usually sixteen) is isolated for more than a month to compete and cooperate to survive, aired on CBS, and America’s Next Top Model, where a group of wannabe models were competing to win, created by a model Tyra

Banks aired on UPN and later on The CW.

All these and other reality television shows kept bringing lesbian, gay or bisexual characters in almost every season, some of them were very successful and won their seasons. On America’s Next Top Model, not many contestants were lesbians (as most of the models-to-be were female), however, until recently, two of the judges were out gay males and were prominently featured on the show.

After facing several years when she could not get a regular job on television, year 2003 saw Ellen DeGeneres’s triumphant return to television broadcast. This time it was in daytime programming with her talk show, The

Ellen DeGeneres Show. On her show, she has been avoiding any political statements in regards to LGBT rights and has never pushed her ―lesbianism‖ on people. Some organizations reproached her for that, however, by showing that she is a regular person who has the same joys and issues as straight people, like getting engaged and later married to her wife, she has done a great deal in bringing her viewers to realize that being gay is not so much different from being straight.

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Season 2006-2007 was the first one in television history when all three networks that broadcasted daily soap operas each had a soap with a gay or a lesbian character – As the World Turns had its long time character Luke coming out to various reactions by his family members, Passions featured the first

African-American lesbian, Simone, General Hospital also had a long time character Lucas come out and All My Children kept the trend of having the most lesbian or gay characters of all soap operas by having Bianca

Montgomery, the daughter of one of the main characters, return full-time for a year before leaving temporarily again.

In the second half of the decade, networks introduced new LGBT characters to the viewers. One of the bright spots of prime time broadcast was the television show Brothers & Sisters that not only gave us Kevin Walker, but has also ―given him a rich personal life without shying away from showing his romantic relationships in their most passionate or simple moments‖ (Where We

Are on TV Report: 2007 - 2008 Season 3). Other inclusive shows included Ugly

Betty with gay and transgender characters and Desperate Housewives with three different gay characters and at the end of the decade, the musical show

Glee, following a school choir, and the comedy Modern Family became part of the broadcast.

Modern Family is a comedy that follows the lives of three different families and one of them is a gay couple, Mitchell and Cameron. They are honest and hilarious and their lives are featured on the show, including them adopting a baby. Glee, on the other hand, had its main character Rachel with two dads and it also had one of its core cast, Kurt, coming out of closet to his

16 friends. In later seasons, more LGBT characters were introduced, some belonging to the main cast, like Kurt’s boyfriend Blaine, cheerleader Santana and her girlfriend Brittany who is bisexual, as well as supporting characters of deeply closeted bully and a transgender singer from a competing school.

Despite clearly seeing that the creator favors the gay male characters, mainly

Kurt, we cannot deny that with five regular characters gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender, Glee is the one show that encompasses the whole LGBT acronym.

The 2010s

We are only little under 2.5 years into the new decade but many things have been happening in the terms of equality in the U.S. lately. In August

2010, Chief U.S. District Judge ruled that Proposition 8 violates the 14th

Amendment’s equal protection clause. In his opinion, Judge Walker wrote that

―Proposition 8 singles out gays and lesbians and legitimates their unequal treatment. Proposition 8 perpetuates the stereotype that gays and lesbians are incapable of forming long-term loving relationships and that gays and lesbians are not good parents‖ (Graham). The same ruling was then done by the Ninth

Circuit Court of Appeals in California and the final ruling is now expected from the U.S. Supreme Court that heard the arguments on March 26, 2013. Only a day later, the same U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments in whether DOMA is constitutional and the decision in both cases is expected in June. In a policy shift for party members, several Republicans backed a legal brief asking the

Supreme Court to rule that same-sex marriage is a constitutional right ("The

American Gay Rights Movement: A Timeline").

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The ―Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell‖ policy was officially repealed by President

Obama at the end of 2010 and in 2012, President Obama endorsed same-sex marriage. "It is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same-sex couples should be able to get married," Obama said in an interview (Mason).

New York became the largest state to allow same-sex marriage and Maine,

Maryland and Washington became the first U.S. states to legalize same-sex marriage by popular vote.

The latter was partially made possible by having positive portrayal of

LGBT characters on broadcast television. In a recent (2013) survey, almost

20% of television viewers aged 13 – 64 stated that television has changed their opinion on same-sex marriage in a positive way, while only 10% of viewers in the same age group had their opinion changed in a negative way. ―Based on this data, I think we can conclude that TV has, at least in part, moved the needle of public opinion to see same-sex marriage in a positive way,‖ says Ben

Spergel, Senior Vice President and Head of TV Insights at Ipsos MediaCT

(Ipsos). Television, together with celebrities supporting same-sex marriage, as well as Obama’s endorsement of the same have been changing the opinion of the straight majority in a major way.

Current television season (2012-2013) is seeing the highest number of

LGBT characters on the broadcast networks. According to GLAAD’s Where We

Are on TV for this season, there are 4.4% of series regulars that are lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender. In pure numbers, that makes thirty-one series regulars who are LGBT, jumping from nineteen in the previous season, with

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Glee being the most inclusive broadcast show on television with six LGBT regular characters.

Glee might lead with the highest number of characters on broadcast television and with the screen time it devotes to these characters, but it is facing different issues. As mentioned before, it is clearly visible that creator

Ryan Murphy is favoring the gay characters over the lesbian/bisexual ones.

Whereas Kurt and his, currently, ex-boyfriend Blaine shared several kisses and were even shown having their first time in an episode ―The First Time‖,

Santana’s and Brittany’s relationship was treated almost as a joke and it took the viewers a lot of campaigning before the couple shared at least one real kiss, not just a quick peck on the cheek. The couple rarely appeared together on the screen and the best viewers could hope for was hand holding. Santana’s whole coming out storyline was questionable at best as the character was outed by the male lead in the middle of school hallway. What it lacked in sensitivity in this way, was later remedied a little when Santana came out to her grandmother who told her that it was not right and she did not want to see her again. That was heartbreaking and showed what many LGBTQ individuals have been going through when coming out to their families.

Santana and Brittany broke up after Santana graduated and left for college. Brittany stayed behind and despite trying to keep a long distance relationship, they gave up in the end. Brittany, who is bisexual, has then gone back to dating boys. And that is another thing that is happening on television lately. It seems like creators who want to include an LGBT character would prefer a bisexual character over a lesbian because they can use the bisexual

19 character for a female/female story arc and then they can go back to dating men and voila, there is an LGBT character on the show, however, the writers no longer have to worry if it might anger the straight viewers because the woman is in a ―straight‖ relationship. Besides Brittany, the same happened to

Angela, a regular character on the hit show Bones, or Thirteen on House M.D., and it would be interesting to see what way the creators of The Good Wife will go with their character Kalinda once they wrap up the storyline with her ex- husband.

Ryan Murphy currently has another television show besides Glee on broadcast and that is The New Normal that follows the lives of Bryan and

David, a happy gay couple who decides to get a baby through a surrogate mother. The New Normal, just like Modern Family, Glee and many other shows, has white gay male characters. And that seems to create a little problem for the LGBT representation. While quantity and quality of these characters have changed in the last years, the diversity has not. The majority of all the LGBT characters on broadcast are white male characters and while the number in

LGBTQ characters of color has increased, it still does not provide an accurate visibility and it is a little difficult to feel represented when there are not so many characters of color. The positive news for equality is that this problem is valid for straight characters, too.

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Meet the Creators, Shows and Characters

In this chapter, I will first start with listing the criteria for including a character/show in my analysis. I will then briefly introduce the creators of these shows, including mentioning their previous work, and in the final part of this chapter, I will briefly introduce the characters and television shows that fulfill the conditions for including a character/show in my analysis.

Criteria

Flipping through the broadcast channels of the American television, you can clearly see that the majority of the queer characters are gay males – either single or couples – and lesbian characters are scarce and very often appear in small, often negative way. Whether this disconnect is due to a misconception of the writers and producers regarding the possible stories for these characters

– the only interesting story for a lesbian or a lesbian couple must be revolving around trying to have or having a baby or, in case of the death of the biological mother, having to fight for rights to the baby with, usually, adverse family – and having, seemingly, so many more options for gay couples, or some other reason, it is difficult to miss this disproportion. According to GLAAD’s 2012

Network Responsibility Index, which is A Comprehensive Analysis of

Television’s Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Images, ―…gay men were the most prominently featured among all LGBT impressions, and were included in 69% of all the LGBT inclusive hours on broadcast television‖ and also ―Once again, lesbian women were far less represented than gay men, but had a substantially stronger showing than last year. Of all the LGBT-inclusive hours

21 on broadcast television 25% included lesbian impressions, which is up from

17% last year‖ (5). Because of this disconnect, I have decided to take a look at lesbian (or bisexual) characters and analyze if the way they were written and portrayed has or has not changed since 1991 which is long time before the famous ―The Puppy episode‖ of Ellen DeGeneres’s show Ellen was aired in

1997.

Wanting to avoid the obvious choices from the premium cable channels

(such as Showtime’s The L Word, HBO’s True Blood or The N’s South of

Nowhere), I have chosen the following criteria for including a television show in my research:

Must be or was on a broadcast network (ABC, CBS, NBC, FOX, CW or

UPN/The WB)

Must be a major/recurring character, not just a one off episode (such as

Willow in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, not Carole and Susan on Friends)

Must be in prime-time, not a daytime programing

Not a musical show (such as Glee) or a reality series

Following these criteria, I have chosen to analyze the characters in the following television series – Nancy Bartlett in Roseanne, Willow Rosenberg in

Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Dr. Calliope Torres in Grey’s Anatomy.

Creators

The creators of these shows come from very different backgrounds. The first show, Roseanne, was created by the American actress, comedienne,

22 writer, television producer and director Roseanne Barr (1952). She started with stand-up comedy routines and was successful, receiving the American Comedy

Award for the funniest female performer in a television special in 1987.

In 1988 she became attached to the sitcom Roseanne as an actress and after a disagreement with the original producers who left the show, also the producer. When Roseanne was reaching the end of its run, Roseanne briefly considered a spin-off about just Roseanne Conner but this project was scrapped.

Roseanne then went on starring in the movie She-Devil and doing a voice work for the movie Look Who’s Talking Too as the voice of baby Julie.

She also had her own talk show, The Roseanne Show, that was canceled after two seasons in 2000. Mid 2000 saw her return to stand-up comedy with a world tour, and she also joined the reality show genre with Roseanne’s Nuts that followed her life and work at her macadamia nut farm but was canceled after two months.

Roseanne received several Emmy nominations (won in 1993), Golden

Globes nominations (won in 1993) and two additional American Comedy

Award, as well as other award nominations and wins during her career.

The second creator, Joss Whedon (1964), is an American writer, producer, director, composer, comic book writer and occasionally, an actor, who concentrates not only on television but also on movies. He is credited under such movies as the original Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Alien

Resurrection as a writer, Toy Story and Titan A.E. as a co-writer and his signature can also be seen in several movies as the un-credited co-writer –

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Speed, Captain America: The First Avenger. With the critical acclaim he had received in his career, he moved to writing and producing movies, like the horror Cabin in the Woods and especially last year’s big hit The Avengers that he wrote and directed. He was also briefly connected with the possible production of Wonder Woman but withdrew from the project since.

When asked in an interview, he said that television is the place to be and so besides being connected with the sequel of The Avengers, The

Avengers 2 that is to be in theaters in 2015, he is also returning to the small screen with new series Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. that was picked up for season

2013 - 2014. This series will follow one of Joss’ recurring themes – a group of sort of heroes helping the world. Besides in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, he has used similar approach in all of his other series, too – Angel, Firefly and also his latest television project (besides S.H.I.E.L.D) Dollhouse, starring Eliza Dushku who previously worked with Joss in Buffy. She joined other actors who he brought repeatedly to his projects – Alex Denisof, Nathan Fillion, Amy Acker,

Tom Link.

Joss is also a successful comic writer of Astonishing X-Men, Buffy the

Vampire Slayer Season Eight, Angel: After the Fall and Runaways and was nominated for several awards for his work. Many of his previous projects have a cult status – Buffy and Firefly being some of them.

And finally, the third show included in my analysis was created by

Shonda Rhimes (1970), an American screenwriter, director and producer. She is best known for working on Grey’s Anatomy and its spin-off Private Practice.

Before Grey’s Anatomy, she wrote the acclaimed HBO movie Introducing

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Dorothy Dandridge, Britney Spears’ movie debut Crossroads and the sequel of

The Princess Diaries, The Princess Diaries 2: Royal Engagement.

Since 2005 she become a fixture on the American broadcast with Grey’s and later Private Practice that followed Addison Montgomery who appeared first on Grey’s Anatomy, to Los Angeles. She offered several other projects to the networks and, at the moment, has another television series on the air,

Scandal that follows the life of the political crisis management expert Olivia

Pope.

During her career she was nominated for several awards raging from the Razzie Award for Worst Screenplay for Crossroads to Black Reel Award for

Best Screenplay, Adapted or Original for The Princess Diaries 2: Royal

Engagement for movies, and three Emmy Award nominations for Grey’s

Anatomy. After receiving two nominations by the PGA Awards (Producers Guild of America), she finally won in 2007. Along with the women of Grey’s Anatomy, she was also awarded the Women in Film’s Lucy Award for ―innovation in television‖. It was ―established to pay tribute to the great star, comedienne, producer, director, studio owner and creator – Lucille Ball. The award is given annually to talented individuals who exemplify the extraordinary accomplishments embodied in the life and work of Lucille Ball‖ ("Past

Recipients").

Shonda Rhimes is known for her color blind casting, i.e. not having a specific actor/actress in mind when creating a new character.

25

Shows and Characters

Each of the chosen shows was introduced in a different television era, so to speak, and thus the approach to these characters has been very different.

Some of the differences in the portrayal also stem from the different show formats – Roseanne is a sitcom, Buffy is a fantasy/drama television show and

Grey’s Anatomy is a medical drama.

When Roseanne, produced by Roseanne Barr, first started airing in

1988, we were introduced to the Conners, a blue collar, mid to low-income family with three children of various ages (Darlene, Becky and D.J.), living in a house and trying to keep afloat with money. And when the character of Nancy

Bartlett was introduced in the middle of Season 4 in 1991, she had been already spoken about as a love interest of Arnie Thomas, one of the recurring characters. When we then finally meet Nancy, she is presented as Arnie’s fiancée and they are inviting Roseanne and her husband Dan to join them on their trip to Las Vegas where they intend to get married. Nancy is shown to be a little slower and self-centered and Roseanne picks on her most of the time.

But then again, she does that with everyone, so no difference there. Nancy remains married to Arnie until the end of Season 4 but they are facing marital problems because of whether or not to have children and the amount of time spent together and at the beginning of Season 5, Nancy and Arnie separate and later divorce. Nancy then joins Roseanne and Jackie, Roseanne’s sister, and they open a diner where they are all partners, the Lunch Box.

In 1992, producer Joss Whedon wrote a film about vampires, monsters and a vampire slayer called Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The movie was not what

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Joss originally wanted, was not very successful at the time and would have been mostly forgotten if Joss Whedon did not go and pitch his idea for a television show with the same premise as his movie. He managed to persuade the studio heads and in 1997, the first viewers were able to see the re-made idea and a new series, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, was born. The premise of there being one chosen girl who was strong enough to fight the forces of evil

(vampires, monsters, etc.) in every generation has proven to work better than the movie. Together with the teenage slayer we met her friends who were helping her with her fighting, the so-called Scooby gang. Amongst them, there is Willow Rosenberg, a quiet and very smart girl, who is good with computers, has a crush on her friend Xander, also a Scooby member, but otherwise, is not very socially apt, and is considered to be a nerd by her peers. She keeps helping Buffy with fighting the evil and gradually discovers witch powers within herself. Willow also has an affair with Xander while dating werewolf Oz in the third season. Up until the middle of Season 4, the only indication of life changes to come is episode sixteen, ―Doppelgangland‖ where Willow and Anya accidentally conjure Willow’s doppelganger who is ―kinda gay‖.

And finally, there is Grey’s Anatomy created by Shonda Rhimes. This television show was put on the air in 2005 and unlike the previous two television shows, it is still being produced and is currently in its ninth season.

Grey’s Anatomy is a fairly large ensemble medical drama where the name of the show cleverly plays with the classic book of anatomy – Gray’s Anatomy, introducing the main character of Meredith Grey and following her and a group of first year interns’ lives at Seattle Grace Hospital. When Calliope Torres, M.D.

27 is introduced late in Season 2 of Grey’s Anatomy, she is shown to be a confident orthopedic resident who is very interested and starts dating one of the main characters, George O’Malley, M.D. She is also very sure and confident in her body and sexuality and is successful in her job. When Callie’s and

George’s relationship is on a break, she has a one night stand with plastic surgeon Mark Sloan, who she becomes friends with. The relationship with

George is later reconciled and they get married in Las Vegas but due to increasing problems, caused by differences between them and George’s infidelity, they finally divorce.

Looking at the very brief introduction of the three characters, it is obvious that they all have something in common – when they were introduced to the viewers, they were shown to be straight and there was no indication of their sexual orientation being anything remotely close to the second half of the

Kinsey scale.1 With this information in mind, it is difficult to establish if the later development of the three characters towards the second half of the scale had been planned or if it was sort of a coincidence brought by the need for new stories and the creators’ desire to include non-straight recurring characters.

With Roseanne Barr, though, it is safe to assume that the inspiration was in her family as her brother Ben and sister Geraldine are both gay. Nancy was also not the only non-straight character on Roseanne as Roseanne’s boss Leon was

1 It is also known as The Heterosexual-Homosexual Rating Scale. The scale was developed by Alfred Kinsey and his colleagues in 1948 and was used to show that people were not exclusively heterosexual or homosexual, with the scale running from 0 - Exclusively heterosexual with no homosexual to 6 - Exclusively homosexual (―Kinsey Sexuality Rating Scale‖). It was used predominantly for males and has been expanded upon since its introduction. The scale is not much in use among the psychiatrists and psychologists anymore, however, it is often referenced among the population to point out where a person might be on the scale between being solely heterosexual or homosexual. 28 gay, even getting married on the show, and also Roseanne’s mother comes out of the closet in the last season.

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Coming out

―For lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (GLBT) people, coming out

is a process of understanding, accepting, and valuing one’s sexual

orientation/identity. Coming out includes both exploring one’s identity

and sharing that identity with others. It also involves coping with

societal responses and attitudes toward LGBT people‖ (―Coming Out‖).

Coming out is a very important part of non-straight individual’s life.

Some people know early on in their lives that they are gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender (some as early as four years old); some come to this realization later in their lives, usually by meeting the person who makes them question their straightness and forces them to deal with it in some way. Ideally, both the self as well as the public coming out would be a painless process of meeting the right person, not even stopping and having any questions besides whether this is a good person who I like/love. There would be no confusion or questioning in regards to the gender of the potential love interest and family and friends would have the same approach to that situation. In real life, though, this does not usually happen and there are many documented stories where coming out to family led to being disowned and thrown out of the house or high school kids being bullied by their peers, some cases leading to suicides.

Some individuals refuse to come to terms with not being straight and either because of their own self-hate and internal homophobia, or because of the society they live in and its expectations, they keep pursuing heterosexual relationships trying to make them ―normal‖.

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As each of the three female characters that are being analyzed in this thesis were shown to be initially very straight, they all deal with some form of coming out when their preferences for a partner change during the show. With a different exposure or approach to each of the characters, the process is different for each of them and that is why I will not be going chronologically in this chapter but start with the character having this storyline shown from both sides.

The only character that is shown to be dealing with the self coming out in some depth is Callie on Grey’s Anatomy. Her journey to the realization that she might not be entirely straight starts with meeting the cardiothoracic surgeon Erica Hahn, M.D. Doctor Hahn is not very well liked by the other main characters but she and Callie hit it off early on and become very good friends who spend their free time going to yoga classes, having drinks, generally hanging out. Callie does not even realize that their relationship can be perceived as anything else than pure friendship until Addison Montgomery,

M.D., once doctor in Seattle Grace who left for Los Angeles, questions their relationship.

ADDISON. Callie, are you speaking the vagina monologues now?

CALLIE. What?

ADDISON. I’m all for it, OK? I think it’s fantastic. Erica? I mean, she

seems great, I really do like her, actually, I do, and… Are you?

CALLIE. You wanna know if Erica and I are a couple? Because I

defended her to Yang?

ADDISON. Because you seem like a couple… A really happy couple.

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CALLIE. What? OK, that’s… That’s… That’s just… That’s… That’s insane,

is… is… is… is what it is. I’m… I… I like penis. I mean, I’m a huge,

huge fan of penis. Ha, hilarious. You’ve been living in Los Angeles

way too long. Way too long… Ha, ha, hilarious….

("Piece of My Heart")

During this conversation, Addison acts all cool but Callie is surprised and finds Addison’s suggestion hilarious, laughing hysterically. Her laugh does seem a little unnatural and forced, though. We can see that Addison’s idea is something she keeps thinking about, even going so far as to ask her roommate

Cristina Yang and Meredith Grey who are best friends if anyone ever considered them anything more than friends.

Later, when she is having drinks with Erica and Addison, Erica touches

Callie’s lips removing hair and Callie panics and freaks out. She goes dancing with Mark Sloan, a plastic surgeon at Seattle Grace, and then suggests leaving the bar with the clear intention of having sex. Callie later mentions Addison’s idea to Erica and they both laugh about it. However, Callie clearly keeps thinking about it and even when she starts sleeping with Mark more and more frequently, her struggle with the idea of a relationship with Erica is very obvious. Surprisingly, it is Mark who calls her on her behavior and pushes her towards resolving her inner struggle. Callie finally gives in and kisses Erica.

This development happens at the end of Season 4 and it would not have been too surprising if Callie’s struggle would be solved by the time Season 5 started several months later. However, Shonda Rhimes wanted to depict this whole coming out process with some sort of reality and discussed the new

32 development of Callie’s character with GLAAD before the storyline started to unravel, thus when the new season starts, we are almost exactly where we left off – Callie is all awkward around Erica and is not sure what is going to happen with them. She seems to be very relieved when Erica reveals that she, too, is nervous as her previous relationships were exclusively heterosexual and Callie admits that she is not sure if she likes kissing girls, that in fact she does not and only likes kissing one girl ("Dream a Little Dream of Me: Part 1"). Despite this development, Callie still struggles, especially, when Erica and Callie finally consummate their relationship. Callie seems to have been expecting there to be a difference between having sex with a woman and a man and turns to

Mark for help, in the end realizing that she enjoys both.

The next obstacle in Callie’s coming out process is disclosing this fact to her family because her friends and colleagues took it in stride and seemed not to care about it. By the time she is forced to come out to her family, Erica had left her and Callie has a new girlfriend, pediatric surgeon Arizona Robbins, M.D.

Callie’s upbringing is different from Willow’s and, most likely, Nancy’s, and her family is a very religious Latino family. She is also an only child and daddy’s little girl. After discovering that Callie is in a relationship with a woman, her father decides that she has been living away from her family for too long and in order to be ―normal‖ again, she must return home with him. Callie refuses and her father who is wealthy cuts her from his money. Callie is, of course, devastated but refuses to hide even though Arizona tells her she would be fine with that. Later in the season we are treated to one more visit by Callie’s father who brings a priest to ―pray away the gay‖ ("Invasion"). In the end, it is

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Arizona who talks to him about her coming out to her military officer father, making him see that Callie is still the same person they raised her to be, despite being in a relationship with a woman. And finally, in Season 8 we see that Callie’s mother had not accepted Callie’s relationship with Arizona despite knowing for years and Mrs. Torres even goes as far as refusing to hold Callie’s and Arizona’s daughter and leaving Seattle in the eve of Callie’s and Arizona’s wedding.

This whole storyline is in stark contrast with the coming out on

Roseanne and Buffy as it was pretty much not shown on either one of them.

On Roseanne, the first indication of Nancy being a lesbian is when she tells

Roseanne and Jackie and though we do see the start and early development of

Willow’s relationship with Tara, we do not see her struggle with this realization, the only indication she might not be completely comfortable being her keeping

Tara a secret from the rest of the Scoobies. When Tara mentions that Willow is safe with her because her friends don’t even know she exists during one of the evil crises, Willow explains to her that the Scoobies revolve around slaying and they do it together and that Willow does want Tara to meet her friends, however, she would like to have something that is only hers for a while, thus sort of confirming that Willow does not have a problem with being in a relationship with a woman. We later learn that she was apprehensive about telling her friends:

WILLOW. Well, I haven’t been Miss Available either. I—I kept secrets. I

hid things from everyone.

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BUFFY. That’s not your fault. Will, you were going through something

huge.

WILLOW. I wanted to tell you, but I was so scared.

(Fury)

Willow’s storyline is different from both Callie’s and Nancy’s in the way that we also do not see much of her coming out to her friends. She is forced to disclose her attraction to Buffy when Willow’s ex-boyfriend returns and hopes to reconcile with her. Buffy seems way more excited about it and questions

Willow about her lack of excitement.

BUFFY. Okay, I'm all with the woo-hoo here, and you're not.

WILLOW. No, there's "whoo," and "hoo." But there's "uh-oh" and… "why

now?" And… it's complicated.

BUFFY. Why complicated?

WILLOW. It's complicated... because of Tara.

BUFFY. You mean Tara has a crush on Oz? No, you... Oh! Oh.

(―A New Moon Rising‖)

This acknowledgment of Willow’s feelings for Tara is the extent of

Willow’s conscious public coming out and she in no way states that she would be a lesbian, only that she loves Tara. Joss Whedon was very intent on concentrating on the relationship between Tara and Willow and not on the coming out process or identifying either one of the characters as a lesbian.

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And that brings us to Nancy who was not one of the main characters, only a recurring one, and whose coming out storyline was the most discussed among the three shows. The coming out on Roseanne is not played from

Nancy’s point of view. Nancy just tells Jackie and Roseanne that she was a lesbian and we never see how she came to the realization and acceptance.

Roseanne and Jackie first think it is a joke and when Nancy denies it, Jackie asks why she didn’t tell them before. Nancy admits that she was scared how they would react to which Roseanne replies that they would react the same way as when Nancy tells the anything personal: ―We make fun of you until it gets old and then we move on‖ (―Ladies' Choice‖). It is then interesting to hear

Nancy say that she had always been a lesbian, just in denial which is what happens to many non-straight people who are first faced with the possibility of being gay – they go into denial and refuse to acknowledge and/or accept the situation.

What we do see on Roseanne, though, is how Roseanne and Jackie (and to a smaller extent, Darlene and Dan) deal with the information from the start.

Roseanne seems to accept it as a non-issue; however, Jackie is struggling with this new information. It is interesting to see that because she does not seem to have any issue with Roseanne’s old boss Leon who is gay. It could mean, though, that she felt betrayed a little that she did not see any signs and spent so much time with Nancy. She might be also afraid that by spending so much time with Nancy, that she would be thought to be a lesbian, too. Jackie seems to experience what many males go through when they find out that one of their friends or acquaintances is gay – they are afraid that their friends would

36 hit on them, check them out, touch them in a ―non-appropriate‖ way. There is no resolution to this discussion for Jackie and Roseanne and later we are witnesses to more discussions with Roseanne’s husband Dan. The less we saw of Nancy’s reaction, the more discussion there was in the Conner family and it seems like Jackie and Dan never really get over this.

As you can see, the approach to coming out is different in each of the television shows, each of the creators took it differently. Where Joss Whedon refused to treat Willow’s budding relationship with Tara as anything different than what other relationships on Buffy were by not showing the coming out,

Roseanne seems to kind of throw it into your face – we have a lesbian on the show and you just deal with it. Where Shonda Rhimes contacted GLAAD in order to try to make the whole coming out process as realistic as possible,

Roseanne dedicated one whole episode to Nancy’s coming out but she still tried to get as much laughter from the situation as possible. It is really difficult to say that one way of showing the coming out process was better than the other because, essentially, the creators wanted to show something different –

Roseanne is a situation comedy, so the main goal would be for that situation to be funny in some way, even though it was not an easy storyline to push through in early 1990s; Buffy’s main point is the fight with evil, despite some sources complaining about a missed opportunity with Willow’s lack of identifying herself as a lesbian; and Grey’s Anatomy wanted to show the internal as well as the outward struggle realistically which was, mostly, achieved. What has definitely improved is the amount of time dedicated to the coming out storyline and I believe Shonda Rhimes had fewer problems with

37 introducing a non-straight regular character in 2008 than Roseanne did in

1991.

38

Relationships

Relationships, especially of the romantic nature, are integral parts of most of the television series, regardless of genre. They are in fact often the reason many viewers keep coming back to a particular show, e.g. Ross and

Rachel on Friends, Leonard and Penny on The Big Bang Theory or Tony and

Ziva on NCIS, and not to go too far, Meredith and Derek or Cristina and Owen on Grey’s Anatomy. Many shows rely on the whole will they/won’t they dynamic, very often seen in crime dramas with two leading characters – Kate

Beckett and Richard Castle on Castle, Booth and Brennan on Bones, Mulder and Scully on The X Files.

The whole ―will they or won’t they‖ question is very important to many viewers and despite wanting the couple to get together, many fear ―The

Moonlighting curse‖, so called after the Glenn Gordon Caron’s show

Moonlighting with Cybill Shepherd as Maddie Hayes and Bruce Willis as David

Addison Jr. They ran a private detective agency and after several seasons of will they/won’t they, they finally did and the sexual tension was gone, then the ratings went down and, finally, the show was canceled.

This fear is clearly not an issue for Buffy, Roseanne or Grey’s Anatomy.

None of the characters is the main character or a part of the main romantic couple on the show and also, none of the shows relies on the will they/won’t they part of any of the relationships. What is interesting in terms of this thesis is that Willow, Nancy and Callie all had almost the same romantic history during their respective television shows – they are all dating a man who they either get married to (Callie and Nancy) or are in a serious relationship with

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(Willow) and later they either get divorced or break up and, except for Callie, who had one more relationship, although more of the sexual nature with Mark, they then enter a relationship with a woman and during the course of the run of the series, they had two girlfriends. One more exception is Nancy who has sort of a relationship with another man after she seems to have broken up with her first girlfriend. This is partially a speculation as far as Nancy’s relationship history with women goes, as we were only introduced to two of her girlfriends and Nancy not being one of the main characters on Roseanne did not have such exposure as Callie and Willow did, however, I will operate with this assumption for the sake of my analysis.

As I mentioned before, Nancy was only a recurring character, thus any information we have in regards to her relationship with women is when we are told in a specific episode and it is stated as a fact and we do not really see how this development happened. After Nancy’s marriage to Arnie fell apart, which we actually see glimpses of through her and his conversations with either

Roseanne or Dan, we are introduced to her girlfriend Marla in the coming out episode ―Ladies' Choice‖. Nancy introduces Marla to Roseanne and Jackie as a way of coming out and we witness them having a little awkward conversation.

The second and last time we see Marla is during a Christmas episode when

Nancy brings her to the Conners’ Christmas party. We do see some interaction and some PDAs (public display of affection) when Marla puts her hand around

Nancy and also when Dan sees them under a mistletoe about to kiss. We also see a lot of awkwardness on Dan’s side as he is very uncomfortable around anything that is either a PDA or a talk that is perceived as being of sexual

40 nature between Nancy and Marla (Nancy talking about exchanging gifts with

Marla that Dan thinks is inappropriate and tells them to keep that conversation for home, despite it being an innocent exchange).

Dan also starts a conversation about having kids and Nancy mentions that it is probably too soon for her and Marla but that they would want to have kids and, when Dan asks for specifics without being too specific, he leaves midway the conversation. This episode is the last one we hear of Marla and the next time Nancy is in a relationship, it is with Dan’s new male friend Roger.

Everyone is a little confused because she said she was a lesbian and Roseanne asks Nancy to explain it because ―… He’s and outie, not an innie‖ (―Promises, promises‖). Nancy says that he worships her and that she’s having a good time. Unfortunately, after being in a relationship with a woman, the whole relationship with Roger, including Nancy telling Roseanne and Jackie that she wants to have a baby, so she would sleep with him but does not need to be in a relationship with him, sort of confirms many people’s thought process upon learning a woman is a lesbian and that is that being with a woman is just a phase or an experiment and they only need the right man to come along to be back to ―normal‖, which is not uncommon even today when the exposure to gay and lesbian characters and people is much bigger than in the 1990s, when

Roseanne was aired. The fact that in another episode Nancy is complaining about a bad date with a woman and saying: ―That’s it; I’m back into men this week. Are there any straight guys?‖ (―The Mommy's Curse‖) does not help either.

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All this development brings us to the second ―gay episode‖ of Roseanne,

―Don't Ask, Don't Tell‖. Just like ―Ladies’ Choice‖, this episode was dedicated to

Nancy being a lesbian. Nancy introduces her new girlfriend Sharon to Roseanne and Jackie and Sharon invites them to go dancing with them to a gay bar on

Friday. Roseanne is having a good time and because Jackie feels uncomfortable (what if they would think she was gay?), Roseanne pretends to be her girlfriend. After she dances with Sharon, Sharon kisses Roseanne who is later upset but cannot figure out why. Roseanne first tells Jackie it is because

Sharon was with Nancy, but after Nancy told her she was aware of the kiss because Sharon had told her, she tells Jackie it is because of Dan, that something similar happened in the past and Dan beat the other guy up. When

Roseanne finally tells Dan, he first wants to beat the guy and upon learning it was a woman, he uses it as a visual aid for their sex life.

Even though this episode was heavy on the gay, it was not essentially about Nancy and her relationship with Sharon, but about Roseanne’s, Jackie’s and, in extension, Dan’s dealing with Nancy being in a relationship with a woman. Jackie and Dan keep struggling with it, despite Dan being very politically correct with D.J., telling him that there is nothing wrong with being gay but he is very happy when D.J. tells him that he does not want to dance with a guy.

Unlike in Roseanne, in Buffy and Grey’s Anatomy, we are experiencing all the relationship to the full extent – we see when the potential boy/girlfriend is met and the development from there. When Oz left Sunnydale in search of a cure for being a werewolf, Willow is devastated. When she finally starts feeling

42 a little better, she meets a new girl, Tara, during a Wicca meeting and from there on we see the development of their relationship during all the crises that happened to the Scooby gang on a daily basis. The relationship is not played explicitly, no real PDA besides hand holding on a few occasions to start with.

They act all shy and despite being in a committed relationship from late Season

4, their first on-screen kiss does not appear until middle of Season 5, episode

―The Body‖ and even there, it is not being shown as a big deal, it is Tara being affectionate and trying to console Willow in time of distress. From the beginning, Joss Whedon was using witchcraft as a metaphor for [Willow] expanding her sexuality (Advocate.com Editors) and until Season 7, all the couple situations, such as kissing or possibly having sex, were either not shown, shown very little or only as a metaphor, the most explicit potentially sexual scenes being from the musical episode where both Willow and Tara were fully clothed and then in Season 6 where we see Willow in bed with Tara covered but otherwise appearing naked. This is in stark contrast with other relationships on Buffy as all the other couples were showed to at least kiss and most of them even have sex on-screen, the most notable being the one between Buffy and the vampire Spike, during which they brought down a house. It wasn’t until almost the end of the final season when we were able to see Willow engage in an intercourse with her second girlfriend Kennedy.

Considering that Buffy was a fantasy show dealing with evil forces, it comes as no surprise that the relationship between Willow and Tara did not end because of a break-up, though they did break up for an extended period of time because of Willow’s addiction to magic. Their relationship ended by the death

43 of Tara which brought Willow’s evil side out and which most of the fans were never able to forgive Joss for. Some also never liked or accepted Kennedy as the new girlfriend. After Tara’s death, some feared that Willow’s next relationship would be with a man, but Joss stated that it would not happen, as

Willow is a lesbian. He did keep his promise by introducing Kennedy, who was very different from Tara. Tara was gentle, shy and was a witch, which connected her with Willow. Kennedy, on the other hand, was a very confident potential slayer who knew what she wanted (Willow) and went after it. She was also younger than Willow.

Willow’s second relationship with a woman was shown as more explicit in terms of the public displays of affection. They were never brought up as something special, though; mainly they were treated somewhat closer to the other Buffy couples in terms of exposure of the relationship. As much as Joss managed to treat Willow’s relationships with Tara or Kennedy as nothing unusual, the exposure and the extent of the PDAs and sex scenes was nowhere close to the other, heterosexual couples. This was definitely due to the possibilities of showing non-heterosexual couples on television at the time when the show was aired and despite that, Joss Whedon and Buffy are still being praised for how they managed to introduce a likable lesbian character, who did not die a horrible death and not treat it as anything special.

And that brings us to Grey’s Anatomy and Callie. As I mentioned before, her story is very similar to both Nancy’s and Willow’s but in terms of screen time of her relationships, she is closer to Willow. Callie was brought to the show as a recurring character and love interest for George O’Malley and after

44 their marriage fell apart, her relationship with Erica started mostly as an accident on Callie’s part and due to the relative shortness of the relationship, it was used to explore Callie’s sexuality, getting comfortable with the thought of being with a woman. When Season 4 ended with Callie giving in and kissing

Erica, their kiss was a part of a whole montage of kisses by other Grey’s couples. On her blog Shonda later wrote:

―There were other kisses in the episode. Maybe you noticed? Callie and

Erica. Callie and Erica!! My god, did we discuss this a lot around here.

Because Callie kisses a girl. We had this really cool meeting with GLAAD

where we talked about the idea that a woman could decide she had

feelings for another woman after being perfectly happy with men and

we all got joyous because the chemistry between Callie and Erica and

Mark is hot and interesting and fresh and like nothing any of us had

seen on television before. And we wanted it to be real – not some stunt

to get people talking. We wanted to see what would happen if a woman

suddenly had feelings for another woman. Because that has got to be

surprising. And it is for Callie who so likes men. Who so likes sleeping

with men‖ (Rhimes).

Unfortunately, Callie’s relationship with Erica does not last very long and

Erica is gone shortly after the beginning of Season 5. They break up because of an ethical disagreement and Erica leaves Seattle Grace. She is not killed, which is kind of surprising because like Joss Whedon, Shonda Rhimes is known for killing off her characters, preferably in a horrible, shocking death. In this case,

45

Brooke Smith, who portrayed Erica Hahn was let go not because of the lesbian storyline but because of lack of chemistry with Sara Ramirez who plays Callie.

Even though GLAAD was disappointed by the fact that Erica Hahn was written off the show, they praised Shonda who identified Callie as a lesbian for her intent to keep exploring Callie’s journey (GLAAD). And Shonda stayed true to her word and in the middle of Season 5, she introduced a new character,

Arizona Robbins, M.D. who, unlike Erica Hahn who was straight until she was not, identified as a lesbian from the very start. The first conversation she has with Dr. Torres is in a bar’s bathroom where she tells her that she is aware of

Callie being gay and once Callie gets over being sad, there will be people lining up for her and after Callie laughs and asks to be given names, Arizona kisses her and says ―I think you’ll know‖ ("Beat Your Heart Out"). It is refreshing to see the relationship being written as any other heterosexual relationship on

Grey’s from the start – the bumpy road that leads them to finally being a couple, the ups and downs of the relationship, facing Callie’s coming out to her father and, subsequently, being broke; breaking up over having or not having kids, getting back together and breaking up again because Arizona was leaving for Africa after receiving a grant. Arizona even got over Callie sleeping with

Mark during her stay in Africa, from where she came back way sooner than expected because of Callie, and Callie being pregnant with Mark’s baby. They survived shooting in the hospital in Season 6, a serious car crash in Season 7 and a plane crash in Season 8. Just like the other couples on Grey’s. Callie’s relationship with Arizona is not treated as anything different from the other couples in terms of exposure – some episodes there is very little interaction

46 between Callie and Arizona but then there are episodes that are very Calzona

(Callie and Arizona’s moniker) centric.

The only difference is not the amount of PDAs because here we are treated to kisses, touches and we see the support they provide each other. The difference is in the extent of exposure of their sex life. Other couples are seen having sex in different places of the hospital, at home, etc. but Callie and

Arizona are not. We are aware that they do have sex, we can see scenes that would clearly lead to sex if they were to continue on the screen, or we see them in bed afterwards but never during. That is the only difference there is between Calzona and any other couple on Grey’s Anatomy because all the ups and downs and catastrophes mentioned previously? They do not happen only to them and because they are a lesbian couple. Those happen to all the central couples at Seattle Grace. But they got their happily ever after, too, just like the other couples. They got married in Season 7 and are now raising their daughter.

The differences among the characters are very visible in this chapter as it is the one that shows the differences in the age of these shows the most. In

Roseanne, Roseanne wanted to have a gay and/or a lesbian character because they existed among people, but had to fight with the network over if she can do it and then what she can show, how much, etc. and thus Nancy’s relationships were mostly talked about but not really shown unless they were heterosexual. There were very little or no PDAs between Nancy and her girlfriends and there was always at least one of the main characters present when Nancy was in the same room with one of her girlfriends. Joss Whedon

47 had better situation on Buffy because he decided not to bring too much attention to Willow’s relationship with Tara at first and was using metaphor for

Willow’s exploration. As he stated in one of his interviews, the network was kept a little bit in the dark about Willow being a lesbian … ―We did it for 10 episodes before they even knew about it‖ (Advocate.com Editors). He was able to explore the relationships more, but kept a little back until Season 7 when he seemed to compensate for the previous seasons. And then there is Shonda who, despite lacking in some parts of Callie’s relationships, manages to bring us a well-rounded couple in Calzona who is treated the same as any other couple on Grey’s Anatomy.

48

Development within the Show

When the first, mostly gay male, characters appeared on television, they were usually depicted as very two-dimensional characters. This was true for a very long time and the first gay or lesbian characters with some depth did not appear until much later (and by depth I mean a better rounded and developed character who was not just an image of what straight people expected LGBT individuals to be, and had at least some storyline). It was a little difficult to find a well written gay or lesbian character when they mostly appeared in one episode and were usually subject of a crime investigation – either they were the victim or the offender and giving some depth to these characters was not as important as with the other, regular cast.

This, sadly, is a very close depiction of what happened with the character of Nancy on Roseanne. Nancy was only a recurring guest character and only appeared in 33 out of the 221 episodes aired between 1988 and

1997. Except for two episodes, she was also not the focus of the show, so the only depth she might have had was through the other characters on the show who discussed her. The fact is, though, that until the last episode of the show, we do not know much about Nancy. We know that she was married to

Roseanne’s and Dan’s friend Arnold who was abducted by aliens. We know

Nancy is a lesbian (or possibly bisexual because of her approach to men) and that she had two girlfriends on the show. But her primary role on the show is as the co-owner of the Lunch Box diner with Roseanne, Jackie and their mother, later with Leon. We did not really learn much more about Nancy during the course of the show. From what we can see, her character remains

49 the same during all the episodes she is in – she does not appear to be very smart, is a little simple and often very self-centered, only talking about herself.

This is really the case very often – Nancy enters a conversation someone is having and starts talking about something concerning her, without regard to the previous conversation. In terms of a character development, hers is a little disappointing as not much development is visible even in ―her‖ episodes. On the other hand, she faced the same destiny with all the guest characters – none of those appearing on Roseanne had much of a depth. They were not the center of the show, the Conner family and extended family members were.

What also played against Nancy was the format of the show – a 24-minute sitcom which does not allow much of the time for any character development as the main goal is to have the audience laugh.

In this regard, Joss Whedon had much better situation to deal with.

Willow was one of the main characters on the show. Buffy the Vampire Slayer was also an hour-long television show (including commercials) and in addition to the action centered around slaying vampires, demons, and fighting evil in general, character development was expected and was more necessary for a successful series. When the show started and we met all the characters, they were all somewhat outsiders – Buffy was singled out by her destiny of being

The Slayer, Xander by his geekiness and Willow by her devotion to studying and by being shy in general. She is presented as a bookish nerd with extensive computer skills, not very fashionable and easily intimidated by popular girls at school. During the run of the show, though, Willow became integral part and the most powerful member of the Scooby gang. During second season she

50 became more confident and started dating Oz which gave her the first edge.

The second season also marked her first foray into witchcraft, following the murder of Jenny Calendar, the girlfriend of Buffy’s Watcher Giles. Season 3 also showed us three different episodes where we could learn more about Willow’s background story – we meet her mother, a career-obsessed academic who is not able to communicate with her daughter and who tries to burn Willow at the stake for being involved in witchcraft in episode ―Gingerbread‖ and in episodes

―The Wish‖ and ―Doppelgangland‖ we meet Willow’s evil doppelganger, Vamp

Willow who is a bisexual vampire. Though Joss stated that he wanted to include a gay/bisexual character on Buffy, according to him, he did not know who that would be from the core cast until Season 4. In retrospective, though, we can consider Vamp Willow to be the foreshadowing of Willow’s later love life.

One of the biggest strains on the Scoobies’ relationship was the start of college – though Willow was accepted into various prestigious colleges, she chooses to stay in Sunnydale with Buffy and Xander. She becomes more confident as is finally in an environment where her intellect is respected. She also starts to seriously study witchcraft with sometimes questionable outcome and after joining the school’s Wicca group, meets Tara who tells Willow that she is a powerful witch.

WILLOW. Oh… I’m not… I, I don’t have much in the way of power.

Really. I mean, most of my potions come out soup. Besides, spells

going array, friends in danger. I’m definitely nothing special.

TARA. No, you are. ("Hush")

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She becomes more powerful every season and magic abuse is also the reason Tara breaks up with her but after Willow manages to go without doing magic for a few months, they reconcile. Tara’s death is the trigger for ―Dark

Willow‖ who turns dark with rage, reads all dark magic books in Giles’ magic shop and after killing Tara’s murderer, tries to destroy the world to prevent people from grief. It is Xander who manages to talk her out of it and Willow then goes to England to study magic with Giles’ old coven. At the end of the show’s run, it is Willow’s magic that helps Buffy in the final battle with the evil in Sunnydale.

As far as character development on Buffy, Willow’s development is the most significant out of the Scooby gang. Both Buffy and Xander do, of course, grow up and develop into mature adults, too. They both also have to overcome some obstacles in their lives but Willow’s life has changed the most during the seven seasons on the air. When we meet her, she is a quiet and shy girl, who is straight and kind of weak in terms of Buffy’s powers. All these three areas but especially her sexuality and her powers, are those where Willow underwent the biggest development in.

From the point of view of this thesis, her sexuality is the most important development. As I pointed out in previous chapters, the change started in

Season 4 when Willow met Tara. It may be seen as somewhat disappointing that Willow never voiced that she was a lesbian and we cannot see how she internally dealt with this change. We do see her being conflicted when Oz came back with the intention of getting back with Willow but it seemed that there was no issue in terms of the gender of the person she would choose, her only

52 issue seemed to be who she loved more. And we do know how this situation was resolved.

The second area of Willow’s development within the show was her powers and here the viewers were privy to the whole process. Unlike the mostly positive development in terms of Willow’s sexuality, becoming the most powerful member of the Scooby gang was not as easy. What started as a positive thing that could be used in the fight with the evil slowly became struggle and the more power Willow had and the more she was using magic, the more addicted she became to the high she felt doing so. Her addiction to using magic was also the reason Tara broke up with her and not until Willow almost killed Buffy’s younger sister Dawn in a car accident did she admit that she had a problem and decided to fight the addiction. As she was successful,

Tara who never stopped being friends with other Scoobies slowly became friends with Willow again until, finally, they got back together at the end of

Season 6. The tragedy that stroke Tara was the reason Willow’s control over magic broke and Dark Willow appeared. Were it not for Xander, she would have destroyed the world. Willow’s struggle with the magic addiction translates in her refusal to use magic after coming back from sort of a rehab stay with a coven in England during the final season. In the series finale, before the final fight with the First [evil], Willow has to use a very complicated spell and becomes a Goddess.

Like Joss Whedon, Shonda Rhimes writes a show that has approximately

45 minutes running time and has, thus, room for character development.

Unlike Buffy where the core cast is originally only composed of four characters

53 and adding only a few by the end of the show, Grey’s has a larger cast. Grey’s

Anatomy is, despite its name pointing to Meredith Grey, essentially an ensemble show, so the screen time and character development has to be split more ways than on Buffy. Despite this obstacle and the necessity to have some sort of medical emergency in every part, there is plenty of time for character development.

As has been shown in the previous chapters, when Callie was introduced, she was an orthopedic resident, very confident in her abilities as an orthopedic surgeon and her body. She was brought to the show as a romantic interest for George and as a confident woman, she went after him and they started dating. Her self-confidence on the personal front takes a hit when after eloping with George in Las Vegas in a wake of a tragedy, George cheats on her with his friend and despite trying to forgive him, Callie eventually breaks it off.

And that is when Mark, Erica and, finally, Arizona come along. Through her coming out struggles, being disowned and through all the tragedies that befell

Seattle Grace Mercy West hospital (SGMW) and her personally, we see Callie grow into the confident and responsible person who is in a committed relationship and who brings up her daughter with Arizona and, partially, Mark who is the father. Within several seasons, Callie went from not being very liked by the original interns who were in the heart of the show when it started, to being an integral part of the hospital staff and a part of one of the most prominent couples on Grey’s Anatomy.

Callie also becomes more mature during the years on the show. When she is introduced, we learn that she is living in the hospital basement. When

54 she is discovered by the Chief of Surgery, she is forced to move out and moves in with Cristina. Despite not being short on money (she is getting money from her father who also paid for her medical school), Callie keeps living with

Cristina for a few years, even after they move to a different apartment. Only after she summons up the courage to ask Arizona to move in with her, do they start thinking about asking Cristina to move out as with Cristina’s boyfriend almost living in the apartment, too, it is being crowded. Not used to really sharing and having to compromise, Callie learns that it is better to compromise in a relationship and to give in in things that are not that important to her and, in turn, gain in some other areas that are more important to her.

It is interesting to see that in her job as an orthopedic surgeon, we never really see her falter in her confidence in her capabilities as a surgeon…‖I’m a superstar. Superstar with a scalpel‖ ("Good Mourning"). In most of her medical cases that we are privy to, she is successful and we even see her come up with several new procedures and come up with new inventions (growing cartilage). During the show, we see her starting as a resident, becoming the chief resident (and failing in that job) and, finally, becoming attending orthopedic surgeon at SGMW.

In this chapter we, again, see the limitation of Roseanne’s format as a situation comedy. With the limited time on hand, it is rather difficult to provide much of a character development, and less so with one of the recurring ones and thus Nancy seems to be a little two-dimensional character with no development besides coming out as a lesbian. And even that is with limitation

55 due to her being written as going back and forth between men and women during some of the episodes she was in.

Both Willow and Callie, on the other hand, are fully written and developed characters. They both had several episodes that were centered around them as the main focus and not through actions and words of someone else but they were very much in the midst of the action of those episodes. We clearly see the development throughout the series – growing up and becoming very powerful for Willow, and entering in a committed relationship and being promoted to attending for Callie – and in the episodes devoted to them we learn even more about their background. The most background information we learn about Nancy is through Roseanne’s narration in the last part of the series.

It is refreshing to see that none of these three women is all goody- goody or a negative character. They are all written with flaws and as ―normal‖ people to some extent. Again, it is more visible for Callie who becomes pregnant with Mark after having unprotected sex, and the most for Willow who becomes a magic addict and a villain for a period of time. Being gay, surprisingly, did not play an overly important role for either one of the characters. Each show dealt with this a different way (see chapter ―Coming out‖) and Roseanne did use Nancy’s coming out for a bit of a laugh but all in all, identifying as a lesbian or bisexual was not that important for either of these characters.

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Conclusion – Has It or Has It Not?

When I started preparing and writing this MA thesis, I asked two simple questions: Has the portrayal of lesbian characters changed between the 1990s and today? Has the depth or realistic portrayal of the characters changed? And the simple answers to these questions are: yes and yes.

However, in fact, the answers are not as clear when you look at the series in light of what was happening in the society. When the first character I analyzed appears in 1991, being gay or lesbian was something many LGBTQ individuals still hid behind closed doors, pretending to live with ―friends‖ and though the fight for equality was no longer new, options for finding information and support were not as readily available as they are today – Internet, the source of most information today, was not commercialized until about mid

1990s and the common use started even later than that. With Internet being available virtually everywhere in the U.S. nowadays, starting a pro or against- equality campaign is as easy as slicing a cake. It is a simplification but proves my point.

Unless someone had an LGBT relative or a friend, being exposed to gay people was not as common in the early 1990s as it is today. When Roseanne

Barr started shooting Roseanne in 1988, it was said that the sitcom was based on her family life. When she wanted to introduce the first non-straight character Leon, she got into a fight over it with the original producers and, eventually, took the show over as the producer herself. With Leon, the issue was primarily spoken about, he himself did not appear on the show that often.

We could see, though, that Roseanne was somewhat mortified when she

57 almost accidentally outed him to an inspector, because it could have negatively impacted his chances of getting a job. Here we can see Roseanne reflecting on the American reality of that period where work equality laws including protection based on sexuality did not yet exits everywhere. In fact federal legislation was only signed into law in the year 2000. This meant that disclosing such information could mean the end of someone’s career.

However, Roseanne Barr was not someone who would bend easily to the network’s wishes and instructions and introduced another, more prominent character, Nancy. It was good for visibility and interesting to see the difference between how the older Conners, especially Dan and Roseanne’s sister Jackie, were struggling with the fact Nancy was gay and how easily it was accepted by the younger generation. The teenagers living in the house seemed to have no issue whatsoever with the fact, despite living in a small town of Lanford,

Illinois.

Despite all the issues there being with portrayal of Nancy (self-centered, going back and forth between women and men, and thus playing into some stereotypes), it was refreshing to see a lesbian character who did, apparently, have some relationships, not just being talked about, and also a character who did not disappear after coming out. And though the ―lesbian kiss‖ between

Nancy’s girlfriend Sharon and Roseanne was just the regular sweeps stunt that kind of followed the stereotype of a predatory gays and lesbians who would hit on and kiss their straight friends and acquaintances, it was still present on the show and was even hinted on with Sharon’s presence at Leon’s wedding.

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Having Roseanne’s mother come out, too, and even having a girlfriend, was just a cherry on the top. Her coming out could have been seen as the result of stereotypes, too. She talked about being disappointed with her abusive husband and needing Playboy to even be able to be intimate with him, but in fact, it looked more as someone keeping in a closet because of the society’s expectations but after her husband’s death, she could finally be happy.

When Joss Whedon who is known and praised for writing strong and likeable female characters and whose first writing job on television was, incidentally, on Roseanne, started writing and producing Buffy the Vampire

Slayer in 1996, the situation was different. The target audience of this show was different, too, and Willow’s coming out was also after Ellen, so everyone had been exposed to at least one gay person by then. The religious upbringing makes it more challenging to accept the LGBTQ characters for most Americans but the younger generation was more likely to be a little more OK with having one on this show.

Having Wicca and witch powers used as a metaphor for being a lesbian was a little degrading for the Wiccans, but all in all, Joss used rather a successful formula – having written a character who was very likeable and looked the same as anyone else and the subsequent coming out of the closet looked like a normal development. It would have been even better if Willow identified herself as a lesbian, instead of shying away from this declaration but from the moment Willow became involved with Tara, she did not waver in her affection towards women, with the exception of Oz coming back and Willow

59 being conflicted over who she loved more. And unlike on Roseanne, the same- sex intimacy was not a part of a sweeps period, with the first kiss being just a regular gesture, not being flashed or anything.

Joss Whedon is well-known for his feminist views and he thanks his mother’s influence for being able to write such strong and diverse female characters. Willow was not the only LGBT character on the show. There were two more lesbians (both Willow’s girlfriends), a closeted bully who comes out to Xander in the second season and one more character, Andrew, who is implied to be gay through his mannerism. And as mentioned before, Joss is also known for letting his characters die, the more prominent, the better (he even killed Buffy a few times), and one of the other motifs he is known for is ending most of the romantic relationships in his shows (besides Buffy for example Angel, Firefly) by one of the couple either dying or turning evil, so it is no surprise that Willow’s and Tara’s relationship ended so tragically, and that the gay character also did not survive the second season’s big Bad’s rampage.

Unlike some others, though, Joss Whedon did not discriminate in this and if it served the story, he killed off gay and straight characters equally, besides

Tara’s, one of the saddest was Buffy’s mother whose death was depicted in one of the best episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, ―The Body‖. Coincidently, this was also the episode where Tara and Willow share their first on-screen kiss, at that time only a sweet gesture in distress.

Even though gay characters were more present on the broadcast television, Willow’s and Tara’s relationship still garnered significant attention as it was one of the very few same-sex relationships on broadcast television at

60 that time. For two seasons, we were treated to the ups and downs of their relationship amidst the fight with evil.

When Joss then brought Willow’s second girlfriend, Kennedy, in the picture in the last season of Buffy, it was very positive that Willow did not return to men. However, besides Ilene Chaiken killing her character Dana

Fairbanks on The L Word, Tara’s death is still the one that is mourned the most by the lesbian community even today, over a decade from that time. Because of that, many viewers (and yes, for the sake of truth, I am one of them) did not like Kennedy as much as they liked Tara. But all in all, in 2003 when

Season 7 was aired, Joss managed to show more intimacy in Willow’s and

Kennedy’s relationship. That was partially also possible by The WB losing Buffy to UPN network and it was visible that Joss got more artistic freedom in the process and even today, Buffy is still praised for its depiction of a same-sex relationship and is considered one of the best dramatic series in general.

Looking at the situation through the amount of obstacles in introducing

LGBTQ characters on their shows, Shonda Rhimes had, hands down, the easiest path out of the three creators. By the time Callie’s coming out story started to unfold, Grey’s Anatomy had already featured several gay characters, the most prominent being the supporting recurring character Joe who owns the bar where everyone from Seattle Grace Mercy West goes. His sexuality was disclosed first and then in one of the storylines, his boyfriend was brought to the show in a storyline including a surrogate mother to a baby they would have liked to adopt.

61

In line with the overall trend, Shonda’s LGBTQ characters on Grey’s

Anatomy are also mostly gay males, though they are not predominantly white.

But the most visible and important LGBTQ characters are Callie and Arizona who receive significant screen time for their storylines. Shonda Rhimes has been blamed for many things wrong with her shows, amongst others the double standards in terms of the displays of affection and not having heterosexual and same-sex couples shown in the same explicitness in sexual situations, but she has also been praised for constantly bringing non-straight characters to all her shows and this year she received the GLAAD’s Golden

Gate Award for media professional who made a significant difference in promoting equality. In her acceptance speech she said that love was universal and by telling LGBT stories, she was telling everyone’s story.

With cable channels devoted primarily to LGBTQ programing and shows like The L Word, True Blood and Queer as Folk on the air, plus several other important LGBT characters on broadcast television, the networks do not have to worry that much about alienating viewers and especially advertisers by introducing non-straight characters anymore. The situation is still not ideal as in some parts of the United States, the super religious communities and organizations still protest and threaten any network and company that brings

LGBTQ individuals to the front, the most recent controversy surrounding the conservative group One Million Moms protesting first the J.C. Penney’s decision to hire Ellen DeGeneres as their spokesperson, and later NBC’s announcement of Ryan Murphy’s The New Normal, but it is inherently better now than it was in early 1990s.

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So, coming back to the original questions I had for this thesis, no matter how you look at it, the portrayal of the lesbian characters on the three shows has evolved and improved over time. The most development was visible in the years between Roseanne and Buffy the Vampire Slayer and it is nice to see that Buffy was then very close to the way Grey’s Anatomy portrays Callie today, despite being several years older. In larger part it reflects more on how good equality supporter Joss Whedon is than on what changed in the society between 1997 and 2005.

The question now remains whether there is even more room for improvement and how the LGBT story lines will be handled in the future.

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Summary

This diploma thesis contains an analysis of the way lesbian characters have been portrayed on the American television since 1991. It is done on three different lesbian characters from three different television series – Nancy

Bartlett from Roseanne, Willow Rosenberg from Buffy the Vampire Slayer and

Calliope Torres, M.D., from Grey’s Anatomy.

The thesis starts with a historical overview to provide background information for the analysis. Brief description of the events relating to the LGBT rights in the U.S. is accompanied by an overview of the situation in television broadcast in the specific decades, with important characters and shows pointed out.

The introduction of the creators, characters and the three television shows is then followed by the analysis itself with emphasis on three aspects of the lesbian characters’ development, and that is their coming out, overview of their relationships and finally, whether there has been any character development within their respective shows.

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Anotace

Tato diplomová práce obsahuje analýzu toho, zda se způsob ztvárňování lesbických postav v americké televizi vyvíjel od roku 1991. Analýza je provedena na třech různých postavách, ve třech různých seriálech – Nancy

Bartlettové ze seriálu Roseanne, Willow Rosenbergové z Buffy, přemožitelky upírů a MUDr. Calliope Torresové ze seriálu Chirurgové.

Pro znázornění pozadí této analýzy začíná diplomová práce historickým přehledem, který obsahuje stručný výčet událostí týkajících se práv homosexuálů v USA a je doprovázen přehledem televizního vysílání v jednotlivých dekádách. V tomto přehledu jsou také zmíněny důležité postavy a seriály jednotlivých období.

Představení tvůrců, postav a těchto tří televizních seriálů je dále následováno vlastní analýzou, která se soustředí na tři aspekty vývoje těchto lesbických postav, a to jsou coming out, přehled vztahů a nakonec také zda se tyto postavy vyvíjely i v rámci jednotlivých seriálů.

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