Linda Lavin, who passed away last week, recalling the second
episode of her TV series Alice and how it featured a gay character:
“There was a football player friend of Mel’s who came to
town. He was big, and tall, and handsome and blonde and he invited me out to dinner ... And then he
came back to the apartment, we’re sitting on the sofa, and Alice is very fond
of this guy and wondering why he is not more attentive or affectionate. So she
starts asking him little questions like ‘Are you married?’ ‘No,’ he says. ‘Are
you engaged?’ ‘No,’ he says, ‘I’m gay,’ and that’s the end of act one ... [When Alice tells Mel about his friend] he says ‘You’re crazy.
He’s a football player, and he’s all man and he’s not gay,’ and that’s Mel.
That’s his small-minded, bigoted … he had planned this
hunting trip with his friend and they were going to also take Tommy [Alice’s
son but] ... Alice didn’t want Tommy to go hunting with this guy [because of her] homophobia, her ignorance, her fear. [But] then she submits to the reality that they have made this plan and they’re
going to go, and she grows up. She grows up. She accepts the situation. In a
half hour, she grows up in what took us maybe as a generation, 100 years. [When
Tommy returns he’s upset at shooting a deer] so, it went
from the place of homophobia, of fear, of a strange invasion into her life of
something she didn’t know how to handle, to something even more serious, which
was a child’s loss of innocence. The more we come out of those closets, the
more we accept each other, and I think that’s what television can do.”
All that from a TV sitcom and a wonderfully evolved and
smart woman. Brilliant
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