This “documentary,” one of a four-part series about revolutionary trends in television history, either ignores or swiftly skips over most of the history of lesbians and bisexual women on television. Once again the gay television revolution appears to be primarily (if not all) about gay men, and when Out of the Closet does choose to turn its lens on lesbians, its choices don’t make a whole lot of sense.

This is unfortunate not only because lesbians and bisexual women continue to be postscripts in the dialogue about gay rights in many areas of our culture, but also because there really is a revolutionary story here—one in which lesbians on television have evolved from mental patients or homicidal maniacs to intelligent and sexy women with careers and characters.

Just don’t expect the network that brought you Queer Eye for the Straight Guy to tell that story.

Out of the Closet begins in the dark ages of television history—that is, in the 1950s. But after showing some black-and-white clips of happy postwar mothers in their shiny suburban kitchens and announcing that gays were nowhere to be seen on TV, the documentary quickly moves to 1967 and Mike Wallace’s news program on “The Homosexuals.” In this episode of CBS Reports, Mike Wallace interviewed several openly gay men (who were disguised by potted plants placed in front of their faces) and psychiatrists, who discussed the fact that homosexuality was a mental illness.

While “The Homosexuals” was certainly an important milestone, it was not the first time that homosexuality had been discussed on TV. Many local news programs had broadcast segments about homosexuality before 1967, usually focusing on the impact of gay men on the broader public. Although some lesbians were featured on these programs, as Steven Tropiano argues in The Prime Time Closet,“The public’s ignorance and denial [of lesbianism] was certainly reinforced by TV talk shows and documentaries, which consistently treated female homosexuality, if mentioned at all, as a secondary issue” (page 7).

Out of the Closet’s analysis of the 1970s includes programs such as All in the Family (one of Archie Bunker’s buddies turns out to be gay), That Certain Summer (Martin Sheen and Hal Holbrook play gay men struggling to come out to Holbrook’s son), An American Family (early reality TV with gay son Lance Loud), and Soap (Billie Crystal plays a gay man). The narrator declares warmly, “For the first time, gay men and women are beginning to see images of themselves on TV.”

Maybe the producers weren’t looking, because there were no images of gay women in Out of the Closet’s rendition of the 1970s.

This is unfortunate because the 1970s were very important for women, both gay and straight. In 1972, an episode of Owen Marshall, Counselor at Law featured the first self-identified lesbian character on TV, journalist Meg Dayton (played by Kristina Holland). Dayton is called on to testify that her friend Ann Glover (played by Meredith Baxter, who later was the mom on Family Ties and a lesbian mom in the CBS afterschool special Other Mothers), who is accused of sexually molesting a fifteen-year-old girl, is not a lesbian.

Although the storyline falls into the long history of conflating homosexuality with pedophilia, the character of Meg Dayton is actually fairly stable and does not reject her lesbianism.

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