January 20, 2002
Gay TV pioneer says a long road remains
by Tony Atherton
A rich laugh rattles the trans-Atlantic line from Manchester. "Those devils," says screenwriter Russell T. Davies. "They never told me about that."
The devils Davies refers to are Ron Cowen and Daniel Lipman, executive producers of the U.S. reincarnation of Queer as Folk, Davies' controversial and compelling series about young, randy gay men. Davies is delighted by the mischief his U.S. counterparts are up to in one of 20 new episodes in the second season of the American series, which begins on Showcase tomorrow at 10 p.m.
The episode introduces a fictional TV series called Gay as Blazes, a politically correct look at gay life that takes most of Pittsburgh's gay community by storm. But Brian, the ferociously sexual gay man based on a character Davies created for his original eight-part Channel 4 drama, thinks the show is dishonest. It eschews the one thing that is the essential difference between gays and straights: their sex life.
What makes Davies laugh is that Brian's attitude in this episode mirrors his own dissatisfaction with shows like Will & Grace that play at being gay while striving to be as inoffensive, and asexual, as possible. It's shows like Gay as Blazes that made Davies write Queer as Folk in the first place.
Davies's decision to create interesting and complicated characters rather than gay role models, and to be frank and even inflammatory in the depiction of gay sex, did not sit well with many in his own community. When the British series first showed up in Canada, Irshad Manji, the producer and host of Citytv's QT-QueerTelevision, suggested the show's "sensationalism" would do nothing for the portrayal of gays on TV.
"All those concerns are expressed from a vantage point of fear and repression," says Davies. "It is saying, 'What are straight people going to think about us?' Like they weren't thinking it before.
"Your duty as a writer is to story and character. If you sit at your desk thinking only what are people going to think about this, you won't write a thing, or you'll write something utterly, utterly bland."
Davies no longer has much to do with Queer as Folk. The first season of the American series was largely based on the British original, though more than twice as long, and Davies contributed several scripts. Now he just sits back and marvels that something he created as a fixed and finite story has a life beyond his influence.
He personally could not imagine spending so much time on a single series, and is amazed by the accomplishment of someone like David Chase, who has maintained the quality of The Sopranos over several seasons.
"I just assume that (U.S. writer-producers) are so well paid that they hire somebody to do their laundry, buy their food and have sex with them, so they can get on with the writing."
Davies is pleased to be working in British TV, where not every drama has to be open-ended. It gives him the leeway to move on to other, even more controversial, fare. Like Bob & Rose, a six-part miniseries which caused a hubbub in Britain last fall, and comes to Showcase in the spring.
If the gay community was uneasy about Queer as Folk, it is downright livid about Bob & Rose. "I got more hate mail over that that I ever did over Queer as Folk," says Davies.
Bob & Rose is based on the real-life story of a friend, he says. "He was the gayest man you'll ever see and he fell in love with a woman. And now he's happily married and they have children. He still considers himself to be absolutely gay; she's the only woman he ever looks at. He told me this himself: if a man walks into a room, he'll eye him up and down, but if a woman walks in, he doesn't bother looking.
"But this one woman he is in love with. And many gay men wish that he wasn't because he's just broken all the rules, and it doesn't fit their view of the world, or their notion of what gay is."
Bob & Rose is about a similar relationship, and the way the Bob is ostracized by the gay community.
"The letters you get from people complaining about this are ... misogynist like you would not believe. I've seen the greatest violence towards women I've ever seen expressed in print in these letters from gay men."
Despite TV's more tolerant attitude toward gay characters and storylines of late, and despite his personal efforts to push the limits of what such storylines might encompass, Davies still sees network TV as regressive in its approach to homosexuality.
"Things are undoubtedly better than they were, and once the genie's out of the bottle there's no putting it back in anyway," he says. "We can only build on this. But you can see the road ahead is very, very long.
"I cannot wait for the day ... when we'll all be sitting around talking about some new gay drama that the critics say makes Queer as Folk look like a vicar's tea party."