Gayscape #9: Top Ten Bad Gay Portrayals in the Media

For every positive gay portrayal in the media, there seems to be another dozen crappy ones waiting in the wings. Here, then, are my top ten bad or stereotypical portrayals of gays in the media. Some are characters, some are real people essentially being characters, and all are just plain wrong.

1. Queer as Folk

When this show debuted back in 2000, I was ecstatic; a regular series focusing on a group of gay men, who were more than just side characters or guest stars? Sign me up! What made me even more excited was that the character of Michael (played by Hal Sparks) was also a huge comic book collector. With a gay geek on tv, how could this show be anything less than perfect? When the show finally premiered, it was pretty bad, but I was willing to give the show time. In fact, I gave it two whole seasons. It never got better – only worse. The characters seemed to only care about going to clubs, having lots of meaningless sex, and being bitchy and horrible to each other. You never understand what holds this group of friends together; especially since the center of the group, Brian Kinney (Gale Harold), is the worst stereotype of the bitchy pretty boy who spends most of his time cutting his friends down and insulting them. Despite how awful this show was, it had that addictive quality that found me getting caught up in reruns on the Logo Network late at night. This just makes me hate it even more. So much of this show felt like it was written by throwing darts and hitting various LGBT related topics and trying to squeeze them into a some kind of narrative. If I want to watch a show about four gay, bitchy, and promiscuous men in the big city and their sex lives, I’ll watch Sex and the City thank you very much.

2.Extraño

Back in 1988, DC Comics decided to introduce their first multi-cultural super team, and they were called The New Guardians. Amongst this parade of ethnic stereotypes (which included a Japanese man who was part computer code named R.A.M., I kid you not) was a flaming South American queen named Gregorio De La Vega, code named Extraño (Spanish for “Strange”…which is also synonymous with some word that begins with Q…hmmm…). He wore Liberace style outfits and reffered to himself as “Auntie”. Oh, and he had AIDS, because he was gay and it was the 80’s, so of course he had to have AIDS. I guess he had some kind of magic powers or something, but his abilities were kind of ill defined. The New Guardians series lasted just a year, until it was put out of its misery by DC. Since then, DC has been pretty good about introducing lots of positive LGBT characters in their books – no doubt due to their guilt over Extraño.

3. To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! – Julie Newmar

Back in 1994, a little independent film called The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert premiered. it was about a road trip involving three flamboyant drag queens across the Australian Outback. Within a year, Hollywood had released its own version, To Wong Foo. In typical Hollywood fashion, they made a totally neutered version of a better foreign film. The main plot was more or less the same; three drag queens go on a road trip, then end up with a busted vehicle and an overlay in a small podunk town. Now, I’ve known a drag queen or two in my time. More often than not, they’re more than a little bit wild and crazy, full of sarcasm, and vinegar. Now, the so called drag queens in this movie (played by Wesley Snipes, Patrick Swayze, and John Leguizamo) aren’t playing the part of drag queens, they are playing the part of men dressed up as their mothers. These so-called queens don’t really have any snark or sass, in fact they just seem to be there to help the local townsfolk by giving them fashion and cooking tips and watching Oprah with them. This movie has its heart in the right place, but it feels like it was written by someone who has never met any actual draq queens in their life (in one scene, we even see the drag queens asleep in bed while wearing their full hair and makeup. WTF?) I will say, though, that John Leguizamo is pretty damn good in this. He is the only convincing queen, but he even that couldn’t save this flick. I still maintain that this movie has a great title, though; it is far more clever than anything that actually happens within the movie itself.

4.The Birdcage

This movie is an American remake of the French 70’s farce La Cage aux Folles. Certain extreme stereotypes you could get away with in the 70’s were simply painfully dated in 1996 when this came out. The story centers around a gay cabaret owner (Robin Williams) and his partner (Nathan Lane), a drag queen who performs in the club. Together they raised a son, now fully grown and straight (and while I fully believe a flamboyant gay couple can raise a totally heterosexul child, I refuse to believe they could raise one who is so damn boring). Their grown son is now engaged to a pre-anorexia Calista Flockhart, whose parents are a conservative Republican Senator (Gene Hackman) and his old-fashioned house wife (Dianne Weist). When their newly engaged son’s soon to be in-laws want to meet his parents, Robin Williams and Nathan Lane decide to pretend to be a straight couple – with Robin Williams playing the man and Nathan Lane playing the wife. Also along for the ride is Hank Azaria as Agador, the couple’s gay Guatamalen housekeeper -cause, I mean, who better to play a flamboyant Guatamalan than a jewish guy? I’ll admit, there are some damn funny parts in this one, but the sterotypes are SO extreme, like the notion that in every gay couple one is “the man” and the other is “the woman”. Stuff like that only helps to make this movie seem even more ridiculous and outdated, even for the early nineties.

5.Bobby Trendy

When I was a young teenage club kid, waaay back in the early 90’s, there was a staple to the LA club scene that went by the name of Bobby Trendy. At (now looong gone) clubs like Midnight Mass, Sin-A-Matic, and Marilyn’s, you could often find Bobby Trendy in his pink wig, skin tight outfit, and giant silver bow, looking lovingly at himself in a passing mirror, or passing out flyers reminding everyone of his latest appearance on Jerry Springer (this was back in the time when Jerry was more a freak show and less about white trash brawling). After outgrowing that whole scene, I’ll admit that I lost track of the adventures of Bobby Trendy. Apparently he went on to open a custom furniture and interior design store called Designs by Bobby in the late 90’s. One of his clients was none other than the late Anna Nicole Smith, making him figure prominently in Season One of the Anna Nicole Show, where he engaged in a season-long dispute with Ana and her lawyer/friend/accomplice, named Howard K. Stern, during her slow decline. I can’t remember for the life of me what the Hell the dispute was actually about, but during the whole debacle Bobby acted like the worst stereotype of a bitter bitchy queen that I have ever seen. Also, Bobby single-handedly abused the word “Luxurious” to the point of it now being completely unusable.

6.Jack Tripper

Played by the late John Ritter on 70’s and 80’s sitcom Three’s Company, Jack wasn’t actually gay, but he had to pretend to be so his landlord would let him live with two single girls. And by pretending to be gay, that means mincing around on his tippy toes and being as flamboyant as possible. I’ll admit some of it was kind of funny, though. A side note: I actually first learned what the word gay actually meant (aside from the playground insult of “that’s so gay”) from Three’s Company. So in a way I should be thanking Jack Tripper, terrible stereotypes perpetuated or not.

7. Hollywood Montrose

To put it mildly, the movies of the 80’s were not kind to gay people. If gays were included at all, it was usually as the butt of a joke, like the over the top mincing Lamar Latrell from Revenge of the Nerds. But none were more ridiculously over the top stereotypes than Hollywood Montrose, played by Meshach Taylor in the 1987 flcik Mannequin. That’s the movie where Kim Cattrall is a department store mannequein who comes to life at night for Andrew McCarthy (look, all 80’s movies weren’t Raging Bull, OK?) Hollywood works at a Philadelphia department store called Prince & Company overseeing the care of mannequins, including the title one played by Kim Cattrall. Hollywood leaves no cliche untouched. He wore pink sunglasses at all times, refers to his mannequins as his “subjects”, and his car is a pink convertible called “Bad Girl” -the car also has a cover which is navy blue with pink dots painted all around. Sure, lots of gay guys like this exist, and I love ’em. But back when they were your only representation in the media, I couldn’t help but love them slightly less.

8. The Rawhide Kid

In one of Marvel Comic’s EIC Joe Quesada’s more bone-headed moves, he decided to revive the long dormant Marvel western character The Rawhide Kid as a flamboyantly gay gunslinger for the new Millenium. This was done for no other reason than the fact that Johnny Bart’s name was The Raw–Hide Kid. Oh, and it got Stan Lee on CNN defending Marvel for their brave and controversial choice, despite the fact that the whole thing was just an exercise in publicity for Marvel. And it worked, for 5 minutes, and then everyone stopped caring and carried on with not buying the comic.

9. Freedom Ring

Freedom Rings are little rainbow colored rings that gay people wear as symbols of LGBT Pride. It was also the name of yet another short-lived gay charcter over at Marvel, created by Robert Kirkman, for Marvel Team Up. Curtis Doyle had an alien ring that allowed him to alter reality (take that Green Lantern!) and was billed as Marvel’s new premiere gay super hero. A month later, he was killed off. In fact, he was impaled (no symbolism there, of course). Frankly, a gay super hero in a hot pink outfit named Freedom Ring to me seems as on the nose as an African American super hero called Black Lightning, so I say good riddance. Apparently, creator Robert Kirkman felt shitty about killing him off, and had this to say: “Frankly, with the SMALL amount of gay characters in comics in general, and how unfortunate the portrayals have been thus far, whether intentional or not–I completely understand the backlash on the death of Freedom Ring, regardless of my intentions. If I had it to do all over again… I wouldn’t kill him. I regret it more and more as time goes on. I got rid of what? 20% of the gay characters at Marvel by killing off this ONE character. I just never took that stuff into consideration while I was writing.”

It’s ok Robert, I forgive you. Not for killing off Freedom Ring, but for creating him in the first place. An A for effort though!

10.Richard Simmons
When it comes to fitness guru and American icon Richard Simmons, the late, great drag queen Divine said it best: “Richard Simmons even makes ME feel homophobic”.