"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. It was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness. We had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way �" in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only."
So begins both the 1859 novel and the fabulous 1989 BBC-TV production of Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities, starring James Wilby (Brideshead Revisited ) and Jean-Pierre Aumont. The quiet intonation of these words in voiceover sets a tone for the two-part mini-series. The words resonate again and again: The best of times, the worst of times. Those words also set a tone for what portends to be what Arthur Rimbaud called A Season in Hell. Once again entertainment TV has been scuttled for a different drama playing out across our TV screens: the cold-blooded killing of black people in America.
It's a mere month since we were riveted to TV by the worst mass shooting in America, a shooting that has already receded into the national consciousness. That shooting of 49 LGBT Americans �" the first and last victims black lesbians, the majority of victims Latinx �" brought our community into the foreground for a nanosecond. We saw dozens of real-life LGBT people on our TV screens every day for more than a week, just like we see straight people 24/7, 52 weeks a year, every year of our lives. Suddenly, we knew what it was to not be invisible, but for the most terrible of reasons. We always have to die to be seen.
As we write this, two black men have been killed by police, literally as we watched on our TVs, one bleeding out right in front of us while the white arm of the police officer who shot him continued to point a gun through the window of his car. Blood spread, so much redder than it ever is on TV cop shows, across Philando Castile's white T-shirt.
Alton Sterling was shot while on the ground, pinned by two police officers, at point-blank range, in Baton Rouge, LA. Castile was shot inside his car after being pulled over for a routine traffic stop in Minneapolis, MN, a city we forever associated with Prince. Until now. Castile's girlfriend, Diamond Reynolds, recorded everything, including Castile's final breath, on Facebook video as it happened, and it live-streamed on social media, then CNN. In the back seat of the couple's car lay their four-year-old daughter. At the end of the video Reynolds, who had been bravely, preternaturally calm as she recorded each detail, breaks down at the enormity of her loss. From the back seat we hear the small toddler voice say, "It's OK, Mommy. I'm right here with you."
Were it written in a TV script, it would be edited out as over-the-top, too tear-jerking for the audience. If you haven't seen it and your stomach is strong, watch the video at CNN.
As we write this, a series of black, gay reporters are on TV talking about what it means to be black on the streets of America. We love LZ Granderson, an ABC contributor and often the most rational voice on ABC's This Week. Granderson is insightful, funny as hell, has good politics. As senior writer and columnist for ESPN, Granderson is no ordinary sports columnist and commentator. He's also the most visible openly gay sports journalist in the nation.
When we see him on TV, we never think of him as a victim. We think of him as a vibrant voice we always look forward to hearing. And now, as he talks about these most recent murders of black men his own age in America, we realize how easily he, too, could become another name in the cemetery, another hashtag on Twitter. It's horrifying.
Granderson said on CNN, "I'm tired of our streets being peppered with dead, unarmed black people. Tired of listening to armed assailants describe how they feared for their lives. Tired of being told 'this has nothing to do with race.'" Those words and the images on Diamond Reynolds' video play together. It was the worst of times. In a report for ABC on July 7, Granderson talked about the impact of these killings on the black community.
A black gay male friend of ours, a New York TV writer, cried out to us in a text after we send him the link, "There are so many different ways I could be killed as a black gay man, and no one seems to care. Some days you think you can't even leave the house. You can't even get in a cab or walk to the subway or just show your black, gay face anywhere at all. Because you just don't know. "
No one thinks of CNN's Don Lemon, the first out gay black TV anchor, as a potential victim. Lemon has won an Emmy, the prestigious Edward R. Murrow Award, and other journalism awards. But, as he said on CNN July 8, he's still black. On his show CNN Tonight on July 7, Lemon got into an argument with a white guest, a law enforcement official who kept telling Lemon police treat everyone the same and Lemon doesn't have to call police "sir," as Diamond Reynolds kept doing with the police officer in her live-stream video.
Lemon, a Baton Rouge native like Alton Sterling, said, "I'm an American, I shouldn't have to do that. I shouldn't have to be 'Yes, sir'-ing anybody. I'm a grown you-know-what man." The guest said he didn't have to do that. Lemon said, "I do it because I want to stay alive. That's why I do it. Now, my white counterparts don't do that. They speak to police officers in a way that I would never in a million years, and that is the reality of it. I have to do that because I want to stay alive."
Astonishingly, the white guest kept interrupting and contradicting Lemon. "Let me finish, let me finish!" Lemon said. "As accomplished as I am, and a man of color on television who is recognizable to many people, I have to do that because I don't want to be shot and I don't want to be killed. And I am someone who is never in trouble. The only time I'm stopped is for something stupid: riding a skateboard on the sidewalk. That's the kind of crap I'm stopped for, not for anything else.
"I comply because I want to stay alive. I call cops 'sir' because I want to stay alive. Still some of us die even when we comply. When will it stop?" Philando Castile was stopped for a broken taillight. As Lemon said: something stupid.
We were watching NBC's Aquarius July 7, the period drama that combines the best of star David Duchovny (The X Files) as LA Det. Sam Hodiak, the impending horror of the Charles Manson (Gethin Anthony) murders, and the race- and politics-driven mayhem of the late 1960s. Somehow, going back to a time that seems, retrospectively, more harrowing than our own, with a different war (Vietnam) and a different Republican danger (Nixon) was, if not calming, at least familiar. We know the story, we know how it ends. There are no surprises, just nuances.
A scene in the July 7 episode presages the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy. Hodiak, whose close friend is working for the Kennedy campaign, introduces RFK to Hodiak. It's Chekhov's rifle. We know by the end of the episode Hodiak will be conducting a homicide investigation and the victim will be the presidential candidate.
It's perfectly shot. Aquarius wisely avoids attempting to find an actor with the same chiseled Irish good looks of RFK, and instead has the actor backlit by a nimbus of photographers' lights. We see only the silhouette of the man, and hear a voice with the characteristic Boston accent.
RFK asks Hodiak, "What can we do about race relations?" as riots continued to rage throughout the country. Hodiak responds flatly, "Nothing. People don't change." He notes that all that can be done is to protect the good people and get the bad ones off the streets. The episode ends with RFK's assassination.
Then the 11 p.m. news came on: 12 police officers shot in Dallas. Over the course of the night, five had died. By morning, Pres. Obama had spoken, Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings had given a press conference with Police Chief David Brown, and we knew that a man angry over the extrajudicial killings of black Americans "wanted to kill white people, especially white police officers." He'd done just that. He'd been blown up by a police robot after a long stand-off. Another "lone wolf" scenario like the one from the Pulse nightclub who had a plethora of guns.
On June 26, the BET Awards were held. The gorgeous Jesse Williams (he of the perfect abs and come-hither eyes), who plays Dr. Jackson Avery on ABC's Grey's Anatomy, won the Humanitarian of the Year Award. Williams gave a speech about black lives that was in the news the next day because Williams called out white people, white privilege, white supremacy. This line holds particular resonance now: "Even with videotaped evidence of police destroying black people, many freedom-loving Americans remain unconvinced of a systemic problem."
On July 1, a Change.org petition began circulating demanding that Shonda Rhimes, creator and executive producer of Grey's Anatomy, fire Williams for what the petition called "a racist hate speech against law enforcement and Caucasians." The petition also called Rhimes' support for Williams' speech "a blatant slap in the face to the entire human race." The petition asserts, "If this was a white person making the same speech about an African American, they would have been fired and globally chastised, as they should be, but there has [sic] been no consequences to Williams' actions. There's been no companies making a stand against his racist remarks, and no swift action condemning his negative attitude."
Erin Smith, author of the petition, noted that Rhimes had previously fired another cast member for homophobia. We're pretty sure this was not something Smith applauded at the time Isaiah Washington was fired back in 2007, which we covered here. At press time, the petition, which also calls for a boycott of ABC and cast members of all of Rhimes' programs, had garnered nearly 26,000 signatures. Rhimes shrugged off the petition with a tweet, as did Williams. A day later, Alton Sterling was killed, reinforcing the import of Williams' speech.
We have said repeatedly that this column is, like this newspaper, first and foremost a political statement of intent: Call this The Lavender Tube or LGBT Lives Matter. Despite our often-dual identities as multiracial, multiethnic and multicultural people, LGBT folks are the most invisible on earth, which is why this column and this paper need to exist.
We watched a news segment about Mama Dragons on PBS July 7, Mormon mothers who are "fierce protectors of their LGBT children. They were put to the test after the church hardened its stance against same-sex marriages." These mothers were driven to act for their Mormon LGBT kids who have attempted or committed suicide. They are trying to prevent more such deaths. Stories like this, with dead LGBT youth at the center, remind us again that the fight for LGBT visibility is a fight for our very existence, and it's also a full-time job.
Over the past three months we've watched a dozen lesbian characters killed off on various dramas. We'll write about this in more depth later, but the point is: LGBT people are easy to dispose of, in real life and on the tube, and many people, straight and LGBT, take their cues from TV. Witness the reality TV star who is the presumptive Republican nominee. That many of those lesbian characters were also women of color (what do we always say about this two-for-one diversity quota?) is concerning. Yes, these are "just" fictional characters. But they are also representative of a statement about our place in the TV landscape. The Catch, The Family, Person of Interest, The 100, Jane the Virgin, The Walking Dead, The Vampire Diaries (two lesbians), Code Black, The Magicians, The Expanse, The Shannara Chronicles have all killed off lesbian characters since January. Each was a major character, and in the case of Vampire Diaries and Walking Dead, these are shows which have been on air for many seasons and had never had a lesbian character before.
Killing is and has always been a national pastime in America. We don't have public executions, but we kill many people daily on TV, and some might say it inures us to real-life killing, and to its consequences.
On July 8, Nightline aired a special report, Lethal Force, dedicated to the extrajudicial killing of black Americans interspersed with the developing story of the murderous rampage against the Dallas police. Some numbers were staggering: 560 people have been killed by police in America so far this year. Of those, 40% were black. Yet black Americans are only 13% of the total U.S. population. How can people not think they are being targeted, as Granderson and Lemon pointed out both eloquently and exasperatedly?
Yet every day we watch scripted TV in which characters are killed, and it's our favorite form of entertainment. If, as Byron Pitts reported on Nightline, young black men are nine times as likely to be killed by police as anyone else, what do we think when we see a similar killing on one of our favorite dramas? We're pretty sure Erin Smith isn't putting together a Change.org petition about it.
On July 8, Trevor Noah gave an impassioned commentary on these issues on The Daily Show. Noah, who as a native South African knows a little something about racism, was succinct. Referring to the killing of Sterling, Noah said, "Did you guys see the shooting that happened two days ago? Because don't worry, if you missed it, there was another one yesterday," noting Castile's killing. "You know, the hardest part of having a conversation surrounding police shootings in America, it always feels like in America, if you take a stand for something, you automatically are against something else. But with police shootings, it shouldn't have to work that way. For instance, if you're pro Black Lives Matter you're assumed to be anti-police, and if you're pro-police, then you surely hate black people. In reality, you can be pro-cop and pro-black, which is what we should all be!"
There are voices to the contrary, however, and none is more omnipresent on the tube than Donald Trump. On the day Elie Wiesel died, Trump tweeted an anti-Hillary meme featuring a Juden star on top of a pile of money. He spent another five days on TV explaining how it really wasn't an anti-Semitic symbol.
Every time we turn on our TV, we have fewer answers, only more questions. In the coming week we recommend the Olympic trials on NBC, FX's Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll starring Denis Leary, AMC's Feed the Beast, CBS' American Gothic and BrainDead, and of course, stay tuned.