Free The Prime Time Closet: A History of Gays and Lesbians on TV by Stephen Tropiano Page A

where men and women assumed traditional male and female roles. His colleagues, however, aren’t so sure that change is necessarily a bad thing.
    The dramatic treatment of transsexuality in the 1970s and 1980s was not limited to medical shows. In 1986, CBS aired Second Serve , a made-for-TV movie based on the autobiography of Dr. Renée Richards, a male-to-female transsexual. A well-respected pediatric ophthalmologist and tennis pro, Richards made headlines when she was denied the right to compete as a woman in the 1977 U.S. Open Tournament. (A New York State Superior Court judge ruled in Richards’s favor because, despite her high male chromosome count, her weight, height, and physique were comparable to a biological female.)
    In yet another truly mesmerizing performance, an almost unrecognizable Vanessa Redgrave is equally effective in her portrayal of both Richard Raskin, who comes to terms with his gender identity; and a post-op Richards, who enters the national spotlight when she resumes her professional tennis career as a woman. Redgrave receives support from Gavin Lambert and Lisa Liss’s sensitive script and the incredible make-up work of Peter Owen, an Academy Award winner for The Lord of the Rings. The result is an above average made-for-TV biography that takes an insightful, intelligent look at gender identity disorder from both a medical and a human perspective.
    A DISEASE OF OUR OWN
    On July 3, 1981, The New York Times ran an article on the back page with the headline “Rare Cancer Seen in 41 Homosexuals.” The first major national newspaper story about AIDS, the Times article reported an outbreak of rare cancer — Kaposi’s Sarcoma (KS) — among gay men in New York and the San Francisco Bay Area. Linking KS as well as Pneumocystis Carinii Pneumonia (PCP) to the gay male population, researchers gave the new disease a name — GRID (Gay-Related Immune Disorder). In 1982, GRID also began to show up in the heterosexual population, specifically in hemophiliacs, blood transfusion recipients, intravenous drug users, and the female sex partners of AIDS-infected men. No longer confined to the gay community, GRID was given a more neutral name — AIDS (Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome).
    But for the American public, there was nothing neutral about the word and the disease, which became synonymous in the 1980s with male homosexuality. While children and blood transfusion recipients were labeled AIDS’s “innocent victims,” gay men and IV drug users were blamed for spreading the disease through their “immoral” behavior. In a demonstration of true “Christian” compassion, Moral Majority Leader Rev. Jerry Falwell declared that AIDS is God’s wrath on homosexuals. The ignorant and hateful comments made by Falwell and others, coupled with the many unanswered questions about the transmission of AIDS, only fueled the public’s growing homophobia and hysteria.
    The “gay plague” stigma was also the primary reason the Center for Disease Control and the federal government were slow in their response. To accuse the Reagan administration of negligence is an understatement. President Reagan waited until 1987 to give his first speech about AIDS. In that same year, 36,000 Americans were diagnosed with the disease, 21,000 had already died, and the numbers continued to grow.
    In the 1980s, the AIDS crisis offered the television medical drama a context in which to address homosexuality — and homophobia. There was no longer a need to link homosexuality to an arbitrary medical condition like a bleeding ulcer, alcoholism, or heart disease. Finally, homosexuals had a disease of their own. So in addition to continuing to educate the public about homosexuality, medical dramas began to set the public straight about AIDS. In the process, they also openly criticized the American health care system for allowing the gay stigma attached to the disease to affect the quality of care being offered to AIDS