Friday, September 20, 2013

Gay Revisionist History

I awoke in a fever at about 3 am and into the fading mist of my unconsciousness was the most bizarre lingering dream, traces of a fever and absurdity...remnants of my life in Hollywood trying to dream up the next great punchline: I was dreaming of an entire network of programming that basically took every major television series from The Honeymooners to Cheers AND INSERTED THE ABSENT HOMOSEXUALS WHOM EVERYONE PRETENDED DIDN'T EXIST WHEN THOSE STORIES WERE WRITTEN.



I was specifically dreaming of The Brady Bunch, a show I watched regularly in reruns, but which never mentioned homosexuals from 1969-1974...and the entire series would be rewritten and re-filmed to include homosexuals...which is fitting since Mr. Brady was played by Robert Reed who was gay. Maybe my subconscious was trying to unite reality with the false image portrayed on T.V.
No, Mr. Brady wouldn't necessarily be gay, since that would be weird, but gay people would come and go (or straight people would come and go, depending on your orientation). Seriously, they lived in Los Angeles and didn't have a gay Latino pool boy? THAT'S IMPOSSIBLE. Not to mention the odds that at least one of the 6 kids would be gay...or at least Alice.

In my dream this worked better than I can explain it but the gay people would not be novelties because they are gay, like white people on Good Times, but merely characters who add to the drama on the strength of their personalities. I guess this would require a denial of the campaign of discrimination and hate waged by the catholic church but I don't see how the revised shows would be comedic otherwise. If Lucy and Desi's new neighbors were a lesbian couple and their kid you just have to imagine a story that treats their sexuality as incidental. There is nothing about the Will and Grace universe that didn't exist in 1951...right?

It seems if this had been done from the start, say with Lone Ranger or Gunsmoke or Dragnet, then this petty nonsense, or what the Pope recently called "small-minded rules", could have been avoided along with much grief.

But that's why Aaron Spelling and not Oggy Bleacher makes sit coms.


P.S. I quickly went back to sleep after having this vision.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

where are you

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