Where to begin with this week on TV? Viola Davis having a lesbian sex scene with Famke Janssen? Killing of a trans teen on Law & Order: SVU? Lesbian teen suicide on Grey's Anatomy? Raven-Symone finding her lesbian voice and ripping Rick Santorum a new one? House Majority Leader Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) admitting on Fox News the Benghazi hearings were specifically to undercut Hillary Clinton's presidential bid? Another mass shooting in Oregon? Let's start with Kim Davis lying to ABC News' Paula Faris about having a "private meeting" with Pope Francis when he was in Washington, DC.
We have to say up front that we are Catholic, a fan of Pope Francis, and we saw him when he was in Philadelphia on the last leg of his American tour. We found the experience quite moving. So we were pretty bummed to think both that the Pope had met with the homophobic Davis, and that this meant he had lied to ABC senior foreign correspondent Terry Moran on the plane back to Rome when he said he was unfamiliar with Davis and her case.
On Oct. 2 the Vatican issued a statement refuting Davis' claims of a private audience with Pope Francis. The week before, Davis and her attorney Mat Staver, head of the right-wing Liberty Counsel, had claimed that a rally of 100,000 people had been held in Peru in support of Davis. That, too, turned out to be a lie.
The appropriation of the papal visit by Davis was headline news after Staver leaked it to the press late on the night of Sept. 29. The Vatican, especially, apparently, Pope Francis, was not pleased. Initially they said they could neither confirm nor deny that the Pope had met with Davis. But after Staver was all over TV giving interviews to CBS, ABC and CNN saying it was a private meeting, and the outrage from not just the LGBT community but also progressives who had warmed to the Pope was palpable, the Vatican stepped in. Fr. Tom Rosica, who assists the Vatican press office, said Pope Francis personally approved the clarification. That means this isn't just underlings scurrying to clean up their own mess. It means Pope Francis is succinct that he didn't know who Davis was and does not validate her stance. CBS, ABC, NBC and CNN were all on the story on the morning shows Oct. 2 when the Vatican released a terse statement that Pope Francis had no idea who Kim Davis was before meeting with her with "dozens of other people" in a receiving line at the Vatican embassy.
"The Pope did not enter into the details of the situation of Mrs. Davis, and his meeting with her should not be considered a form of support of her position in all of its particular and complex aspects," Vatican spokesman the Rev. Federico Lombardi said. He said "several dozen" people were present at the Vatican Embassy at the same time as Davis and her husband. Lombardi also said, "Such brief greetings occur on all papal visits and are due to the Pope's characteristic kindness and availability. The only real audience granted by the pope at the nunciature was with one of his former students and his family." That student, Yayo Grassi? Openly gay. Family? His partner of 19 years, Iwa Bagus. Oh snap. Our faith is restored.
On Sept. 30, Davis had told ABC's Paula Faris, "Just knowing the Pope is on track with what we're doing, and agreeing, you know, kind of validates everything." Well, no, since Pope Francis had no idea who she was or what she was doing. If Pope Francis is validating anything, it's gay families, with the only private audience being with a gay man and his partner.
Our guess is Staver thought the Vatican would never say anything. Just like he thought the Peruvian government wouldn't reveal that the photo Staver had given the media of the alleged rally for Davis was actually a political event that took place in 2014. Isn't lying a sin for Apostolic Christians like Staver and Davis? Because it is right there in the 10 Commandments.
Hot topics
It was a bad week for homophobes all around on the tube, which makes a nice change. We were chuffed to see That's So Raven getting all up in the grill of Candace Cameron-Bure on The View on Oct. 1. We regularly diss Raven-Symone for muting her lesbianism, but when the ladies started on their Hot Topics segment, the first one was lesbians, and Raven-Symone was on it.
It seems Melissa and Aaron Klein, owners of Sweet Cakes by Melissa, the Oregon couple who refused to bake a wedding cake for lesbian couple Laurel and Rachel Bowman-Cryer, are also refusing to pay the state-ordered damages of $135,000, even though they raised more than a half-million on their GoFundMe site. So Whoopi Goldberg poses the question of whether or not this is okay �" the fine, the couple not making the cake �" and Raven goes off. While Candace says it's a matter of religious persecution, free speech, and all the other right-wing excuses for denying us our rights, Raven took the whole table on. But oh, did she read Candace. And her hair, omg, so fantastic.
The day before, Raven had taken on Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum, who was a guest on the show because two of the hosts are right-wing loons, and one, Nicole Wallace, is a moderate Republican. Raven asked Santorum, "Why can we not have equal marriage rights, in your opinion?"
Santorum said a bunch of stuff about traditional marriage being about children, which ended with, "When you have a law that says, as the court said, that marriage has nothing to do with children anymore, then you're not going to have a society encouraging the behavior that is in the best interest of children and the future of society." We suppose he thought that stump speech was enough, because he seemed genuinely surprised when Raven, who was sitting thisclose, said, "I don't understand why you feel like people in the gay and transgender community can't raise a very smart, beautiful, intelligent child as well as a man and a woman. Sometimes, coming from a heterosexual family, there's a lot more fighting, there's a lot more stuff going on. I don't understand why you feel like that community can't give and provide for that child just as well as a straight couple can."
Then Santorum agreed with her: "I'm not saying that a same-sex couple can't have a positive and nurturing environment, but the natural mother and natural father of that child is what historically is in the best interest of that child."
Speaking of fabulous hair and smackdowns, Bollywood's gorgeous Priyanka Chopra debuted as FBI agent Alex Parrish in Quantico, ABC's new Sunday night terrorism thriller, on Sept. 27. This show is getting enormous buzz as "the most feminist show this season." We're not sure we agree with that assessment, as we think that's out gay showrunner Greg Berlanti's new terrorism drama Blindspot (NBC, Mondays), but Quantico has some pluses, including a cute gay character, Simon (Tate Ellington).
What we really like about Quantico, other than the gorgeous Chopra, who was a Miss World in 2000 at 18 and is a movie star in Bollywood, is the multicultural casting. Since Fox sent Mindy Kaling's The Mindy Project packing (it's now on Hulu), Chopra is representing South Asian actresses on network TV. Quantico 's diverse ensemble is female-driven, like Shonda Rhimes' TGIT lineup. Aunjanue Ellis, Yasmine Al-Masri, Johanna Braddy and Anna Khaja make for a stellar female cast. Does this make the show feminist? Maybe. We need more than one episode to be sure.
Sunday nights are already very strong for female characters. Returning faves Madam Secretary and The Good Wife (CBS) portend to be superb this season, what with the presidential election going on. Julianna Margulies was on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon on Sept. 30, and she dished Good Wife and presidential politics. Gay actor Alan Cumming is front-and-center this season on Good Wife, always a treat to watch. Meanwhile, season five of Showtime's terrorism drama Homeland debuted Oct. 4, with Mandy Patinkin as a character who is going to make life especially hellish for Carrie (Claire Danes).
Grey's Anatomy opened its new season with a powerful storyline about a lesbian teen couple who attempt suicide together by jumping in front of a train. If it sounds gruesome, it was. Spoiler alert: they survived, but the path to survival was very fraught. This was a powerful episode, brava to Shonda Rhimes for opening the 12th season with this timely and provocative story. The 15-year-old couple (one girl is Christian, the other Muslim; it wouldn't be TV if the gay couple weren't interracial) wanted to be together. But the Christian girl's parents were sending her to a reparative therapy camp that day. So the girls planned their suicide instead. When Callie (Sara Ramirez) discovers the girls are lovers (they have matching heart tattoos on their arms), she steps in to advocate for Jessica, the girl who is going to be sent away to be "de-gayed." Because she's been there, done that. Her own mother wouldn't attend her lesbian wedding. This enrages the girl's mother, but her father is silent. After Callie, Alex and Meredith all step in, the fathers of the girls bond. and Jessica's father tells her she won't be going to the camp.
How to Get Away with Murder revealed a whole new side of Annalise (Viola Davis) with the season opener. The Oct. 1 episode was nothing like we've ever seen on network. Annalise requested than an old classmate from Harvard Law School, Eve Rothlow (Famke Janssen!), help her with a case. Drama ensues. We can tell there's backstory, but oh what backstory there is. The reveal? The two were lovers in law school. Then Annalise left Eve for Sam (Tom Verica), her now-murdered husband.
Annalise is possibly the most complex female character on prime time. We know she's a bit of a monster, she even acknowledged it in the Oct. 1 episode. But we also know she has reasons for being a monster. So we cut her an irrational amount of slack. Because like Eve, we just can't quit her. In the Sept. 24 season opener, we know Annalise and Eve ended up in bed together. But we didn't have the backstory, and it seemed like Annalise was just using Eve like she uses everyone else.
But in the Oct. 1 episode, OMG. The two end up in bed together. On screen. Kissing, touching, Eve lying on top of Annalise. The whole everything. So much everything that when Janssen read the script she said, "Really? On network TV?" Viola Davis said on Jimmy Kimmel Live on Sept. 29, "Listen, I'm not comfortable with any sex scene. I just don't want my mom seeing it, so what I'm doing is every Thursday night I give her money to go to the casino. This Thursday especially, she will be going to the casino."
Janssen told The Wrap her first response to the role and the sex scenes was, "That's fantastic. I thought cable did these types of things. I'm really excited about it. I really hope that the audience continues to like Eve and her together with Annalise. Or not together with Annalise." Peter Nowalk, you fab gay showrunner, you have our heart.
Meanwhile, the fallout from Oliver's reveal that he's HIV+ continues to impact him and Connor as well as the rest of Annalise's crew, since Connor tells them all about Oliver's status. Connor is even taking Prep, and Oliver won't let them have sex together until the two-week period for the drug to kick in is up. Connor isn't leaving Oliver, he still wants to have sex with Oliver even when Asher freaks out and says Connor could die from it. He loves Oliver. Just like real life. This is really great stuff. Nowalk is gay, and he's putting lesbian and gay characters front and center, and making them real.
We felt much less sure about the Sept. 30 episode of Law & Order: SVU, which was an almost verbatim account of the 2013 Oakland case of 18-year-old genderqueer Sasha Fleischman, the victim of an assault by three black teens. SVU had all the pieces right, but the story got lost somewhere in the strident re-telling of this complex, tragic story. Killing off the trans teen to make the TV version more dramatic made some of the pieces fit together less well. There was little explanation of transgender lives or why straight boys might have issues with trans persons. There was also a high-toned "we're going to make an example of this boy" aspect to the prosecution that complicated the viewer's empathy, steering it from the victim, the trans teen, to the boy responsible for her death.
Also, why did the opening split-screen have both victim and killer getting out of bed in exactly the same attire: shorts, no shirt? If the episode references Avery (the stand-in for Sasha) as female, why were we seeing her naked from the waist up? Why not at least a T-shirt? SVU would never have shown a teenaged girl naked from the waist up. So: big mistake that no one caught, because when you don't have LGBT people behind the camera, errors happen. Just saying.
Speaking of straight people telling LGBT people what to do, what is up with Matt Damon? Just a few weeks ago we reported that he had told black queer filmmaker Effie Brown that she didn't understand race on Project Greenlight, for which he is still apologizing. Now he says that gay and lesbian actors should stay in the closet if they want to keep working. Damon went on Ellen's show to try and clean it up, and she stood up for him, but really, no. Don't do a Whoopi on us, Ellen. Damon was flat-out wrong, what he said was indeed homophobic, and putting the blonde smiley face and a little dance on it won't make that different.
Speaking of Ellen, Mrs. DeGeneres, Portia de Rossi, is just tearing it up on Scandal this season. Bad Elizabeth North. We love her. And we love that Cyrus is the puppeteer behind the scenes. We knew he couldn't really be off the canvas, no matter what happened in last season's cliffhanger.
We also loved Ellen Page on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert talking about her new film, Freeheld with Oscar winner Julianne Moore. Page told Colbert that it was great to be out. Moore told Jimmy Fallon on The Tonight Show that the film was one of the most important things she'd ever done, and that it was an honor to tell these women's stories.
Finally, don't forget that new shows are still rolling out. Two to set the DVR for are Oct. 26, the CBS debut of Greg Berlanti's much-hyped Supergirl, and Oct. 27, ABC's Wicked City. Billed as an "erotic thriller," Wicked City is set in 1980s Los Angeles, with noirishness and a hardboiled detective. Looks killer. Starring Jeremy Sisto, Ed Westwick and Erica Christensen. So for lying faux-Christian haters, queers behind the camera, and the political drama that will unfold with the first Democratic debate on Oct. 13, you know what to do: stay tuned.