Writing about TV should be fluffy, light, informative, and above all, entertaining. We strive for all those things and think we achieve them most of the time. But sometimes we have to say more than just what you should watch and why.
There are some good shows you should be watching right now. CBS' BrainDead is spectacular. It's dark political comedy set in real time. Scenes in the Beltway play out with TVs in the background endlessly looping MSNBC and CNN with Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump speechifying. Without a doubt, especially if you love politics, it's the best show of the summer. Danny Pino has never been better, nor has Tony Shaloub. Mary Elizabeth Winstead is the exact balance of cynical and perky.
American Gothic was compelling from the first five minutes. Doesn't everyone have a serial killer in their family? Did you watch OJ: Made in America, one of the best documentaries we've seen in recent years? If not, it's still streaming, and is brilliant and compelling and sunders all your presumptions while bolstering others. (He date-raped Nicole Brown on their first date.) It's the best documentary about race, other than Roots, you will see this summer, and even if football is not your thing, there is an insight into the game and its stars that explains a lot (like Ben Affleck's drunken rant about Tom Brady and Deflategate).
What about AMC's Feed the Beast? How did David Schwimmer go from being Ross on Friends to being the new Walter White and a stunningly good actor? The new crime series The Tunnel, from the makers of The Bridge, involves intrigue and mystery when a body is found in the Channel Tunnel (Chunnel) between England and France. The show premiered June 19, but you can catch up online by inputting your local PBS station. It feels quite timely given the harrowing Brexit vote. The BBC production Dancing on the Edge follows a black jazz band in 1930s London; it premiered June 26. DOTE has a phenomenal cast that includes Chiwetel Ejiofor (12 Days a Slave ), Matthew Goode (The Good Wife ), the great gay fave Jacqueline Bisset, John Goodman and Anthony Head. Matt Bomer is gorgeous in period clothes in Amazon Prime's limited series based on F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Last Tycoon .
But right now there are things that must be said about what's been happening on TV since our last column. Pride Month is supposed to be joyous. Celebratory. Full of vibrancy, camp and all things gay. The TV landscape is often barren for Pride. Sometimes in an effort at tapping into our market, cable channels will pull out LGBT-themed movies or shows. More often there's a dearth of anything LGBT on the tube in June. This year Netflix timed the new season (and what a season!) of Orange Is the New Black for Pride Month, and we are grateful. Several new series have LGBT characters, which cheers us. NBC's America's Got Talent and Fox's Master Chef have given us some real-life LGBT people to identify with.
But then Orlando happened. A man walked into the biggest LGBT nightclub in Orlando with an AR-15 assault weapon and started killing people, beginning with the black lesbian bouncer Kimberly Morris, and moving through the club until 49 people were dead and 53 people were wounded. The LGBT faces we have never seen on TV because we are still a hidden minority, we are still marginalized people, were suddenly everywhere because the Pulse was now the site of the worst mass shooting in U.S. history.
Within hours of the shooting, our TV was full of gay and lesbian faces. We saw LGBT people carrying bleeding friends like a scene out of a Middle Eastern bombing. Suddenly we heard stories day after day after day of the wonderful gay men and fierce lesbians who were the majority of the victims. We were told how they died, and it was almost unbearable. Finally we were part of the TV landscape like never before, but in the cruelest of ironies in the midst of Pride Month, it was because of a confluence of America's dual love affairs with bigotry and with guns.
In the 22 years we have been writing this column there have been some devastating events played out over our TV sets. 9/11. Hurricane Katrina. A plethora of mass shootings, including Sandy Hook, where 20 six-year-olds were slaughtered in their first-grade classroom two weeks before Christmas, and San Bernardino last December, where 14 people were killed and 20 injured, among them gay men. Our TVs have also borne witness to a series of pivotal elections, including the one we are currently enmeshed in, which is as historic as the last. There was last Pride's historic Supreme Court decision, granting us marriage equality. And now there is Orlando.
In those 22 years we have been writing this column we have often searched for something LGBT to write about, and often, especially in the 90s, found little. For years there was a lot about Frasier, The X Files and ER, because implied gayness was all we had. Then Ellen DeGeneres came out, and even though we had known she was a lesbian forever, it was huge. It opened a closet door just a little.
We saw Queer as Folk. The L Word. Rosie came out. Neil Patrick Harris came out. Nate Berkus came out. Oprah kept gay people front-and-center on her show. Shonda Rhimes and Ryan Murphy arrived, there was Grey's Anatomy and Glee, and the TV landscape got just a little more welcoming.
Every Big Gay Moment on the tube was marqueed across these pages. A first here, another first there. We charted the failure of the mainstream media to report our stories with a segment we titled "News you're not seeing." And now there is Orlando. There have never been so many gay and lesbian, bisexual and transgender faces on the tube for so many hours and days at a time in our 22 years writing about TV as there have been in the past two weeks. White faces. Black faces. So many brown faces.
Not the faces of actors playing us, but our faces. No more news you're not seeing where the LGBT story was buried, but the headline for the past two weeks. Why did so many of people have to die for our lives to have meaning for straight media?
For the past year we've been battling life-threatening illness. Television has taken on a special meaning for us in that time. We watch TV in the hospital. We watch TV at home. TV takes us to the places we can no longer go. TV keeps us connected to the world past the hospital bed. We were always addicted to news, but now, more than ever.
When you come close to death, your empathy for those who have been touched by death and for those who are suffering like you are is exponentially more acute. You quite literally feel their pain. If you've been a victim of a violent crime, as we have been, the connection becomes that much deeper. When the number of dead suddenly increased from 20 to 50, we gasped, bursting into a spate of uncontrollable tears. Fifty LGBT people. Of course it was a hate crime. He wanted all of us dead.
You don't have to be staring down death to know that death hovers around every corner now in America, and that it stalks LGBT people with a ferocity even we didn't know was possible. Two days after Orlando, as news media attempted to sort out the hate crime that was the attack on the Pulse nightclub by Omar Mateen, ABC's Nightline addressed the violence with a spate of hate crimes facts about how often LGBT people are attacked and how violently. Sexual assault/rape is often part of hate crimes attacks on LGBT people, particularly lesbians and trans women. Nightline explained, "According to FBI the LGBT community is the most targeted minority, making up a fifth of all hate crimes, and more than half of LGBT murders are transgender women of color. That number could be higher as many of these crimes go unreported. The police oftentimes don't classify hate crimes properly. Mississippi counted one hate crime. New Jersey counted hundreds."
Nightline's report explained that there weren't more hate crimes in NJ than Mississippi, just that NJ does a better job of reporting hate crimes against LGBT people. But there is no co-ordinating effort between local law enforcement and the FBI. And the will to report LGBT hate crimes may be lacking.
There was also a segment on guns, because nothing happens in America without guns. Donald Trump told reporters after Orlando that if patrons had had guns, they could have stopped the shooter. Because shooting a gun in a loud, dark crowded nightclub after drinking makes sense.
Nightline reported that the LGBT gun group the Pink Pistols doubled their membership within 48 hours of the Orlando shootings, and featured a white lesbian who lives in the South who said she felt safer, post-Orlando, with the Glock she bought incredibly easily at a gun show. Nightline quoted Mike Smith, a firearms instructor closely tracking the sudden surge in gays and lesbians buying weapons. "I think right now because of what happened, people are looking for answers," he said. "You walk into a gun shop and you expect to see people, frankly, who look like me. I think we forget we're a country of all people, not just people who fit that predetermined mold."
The images out of Orlando will stay with us forever. The funerals have begun: so many to be buried. The oldest victim, Brenda McCool, 50, mother of 11, was at the Pulse with her gay son, Isaiah Henderson, 21. She died trying to protect him. She was buried on June 22, and her funeral was just gutting as her son eulogized her and broke down sobbing.
Imram Yousef, a former Marine and a bouncer at the Pulse who got more than 30 people out of the club at the beginning of the assault, saving so many lives, told his story on ABC and CBS. He began to cry as he said, "I wish I could have saved more."
The heartbreak of attorney Christine Leinonen as she searched, sobbing, for her son ("He's my only child," she keened on our TV screens) Drew and his partner Juan Guerrero was unbearable to witness as it played out in real time over hours as dark became light became dusk. Both men died at the Pulse. They were going to be married, and will be buried together. The stories will resonate with us for a long time. The story of the shooter will complicate everything: Was he a closet gay? Was he a jihadist? Why did he target the Pulse? So many unanswered questions. So much suffering.
ABC did fantastic coverage the day of the shooting, starting on-air at 6 a.m. EST and staying on nonstop for 12 hours, giving the tragedy the gravitas and attention it deserved.
There were moments: CNN's Anderson Cooper, an out gay man who has seen his share of tragedy, began his June 14 show by reading the names of each of the victims and saying something about them. It's hard to watch, and Cooper breaks down as he does it. But it honors our dead.
Pres. Obama spoke to the nation. Hillary Clinton gave a statement. GOP lawmakers did their standard "our thoughts and prayers are with the people of Orlando," and eight days later vetoed four gun control bills in succession. Our LGBT dead re-opened the discourse on gun control, leading to a filibuster in the Senate on June 14 and a sit-in at the House June 23, where a vote on gun control legislation was demanded. These events meant LGBT people mattered, if not to the Republicans, at least to the Democrats. Civil rights icon Rep. John Lewis (D-GA), whose first arrest came after a sit-in 52 years ago, led the sit-in on the House floor. Lewis mentioned the LGBT victims. He was wearing a rainbow lapel pin. The 76-year-old Lewis said no more killing and stayed there for 15 hours, on the floor, until the House was shut down on the orders of Speaker Paul Ryan. At one point Lewis led the floor in singing "We Shall Overcome."
C-SPAN, which broadcasts live sessions of the House daily, was heroic, broadcasting cell phone feeds of House members of the events. C-SPAN broadcasts are only allowed when the House is formally in session. Ryan put the House into recess and tried to silence the protests. It didn't happen. Later on CNN, Ryan called the sit-in a publicity stunt, but hundreds of people went to the Capitol just to stand outside in solidarity. Lewis went out to speak with them.
Now, as we go to press, we have Brexit. Trump has already applauded the regressive move, while the punditocracy asserted on June 24 that Hillary Clinton would be damaged by the so-called populist movement for Britain to sever ties with the EU.
These events, from the first reports of the Pulse nightclub shooting to the Brexit vote, played out over real time on TV. The immediacy was palpable. We felt as if we were there among the LGBT people in the streets of Orlando, blood everywhere, doing what they could, saving lives where they could.
So sometimes, discussion of dramas and sitcoms is not enough. It is not enough now, as we mourn so very many dead, as their mostly young, mostly brown, beautiful faces are splashed across our TV screens. For some of these families, they learned their son or daughter was gay at the same time they were told of their deaths, reminding all of us that the closet is real, for many, necessary, and as it always has been, ultimately deadly. Will we ever know for sure if it was the closet that pushed Mateen to mass murder? Details are still emerging.
But on June 23, ABC reported that Barbara Poma, owner of the Pulse nightclub, held a Latin night for the community at a nearby venue, since the Pulse was just released as a crime scene on June 20. Poma founded the club 12 years ago to honor her brother, who died of AIDS, but told ABC that the club was "vital" to the community, and so would be reopened, as much for the victims as for the community. And now back to your regular programming. Stay tuned.