Back
in the Day: The Women of Brewster Place by
Malinda Lo, May 2005
Back
in the Day is a monthly column by Associate Editor Malinda Lo
that takes a look back at key moments in the history of lesbians
and bisexual women in entertainment.
In
1989, The Cosby Show was the number one
television program in the U.S. The show was revolutionary
in its portrayal of African Americans, giving America an upper
middle-class, highly educated African American family led
by Dr. Cliff Huxtable (Bill Cosby) and his attorney wife,
Clair (Phylicia Rashad).
At
the same time, Oprah Winfrey was just beginning her transformation
from talk show host to media titan. She had been nominated
for an Oscar for her performance as Sofia in The Color
Purple (1984), and her talkshow had debuted in national
syndication in September 1986 to unprecedented ratings. It
seemed that decades of racism on television was finally being
overturned.
But
Oprah’s first foray into producing a dramatic feature
was not met with universal acclaim. Her 1989 television adaptation
of Gloria Naylor’s National Book Award-winning novel, The
Women of Brewster Place, was criticized by both African Americans
and non-African Americans for portraying African American men in
a decidedly negative light.
Greg
Quill of The Toronto Star wrote, “The perspective
in this overly long and sentimental drama, starring and co-produced
by talk-show host Oprah Winfrey, is relentlessly feminist; the
men in the story are almost universally brutal, selfish oafs,
devoid of conscience or any sense of responsibility.”
And
Martha Bayles of the Wall Street Journal argued, “Brewster
Place's woman-centered universe, the ideal of boilerplate
1970s feminists who saw all male-female relationships as exploitative,
doesn't look so good in 1989.”
The
mainstream critique of Brewster Place as misandrist and
“relentlessly feminist” nearly obscured the fact that
one of the main storylines in the miniseries centered on an African
American lesbian couple—something that had never before
been seen on American primetime television.
The
miniseries, which aired on ABC from March 18-19, 1989, was executive
produced by Oprah Winfrey (who also starred in it as Mattie Michael)
and directed by Donna Deitch (Desert
Hearts). Set in a 1967 tenement in a nameless East Coast
city, The Women of Brewster Place tells the stories of
seven working-class African American women and their struggles
with men, racism, and making a living. Although the storylines
of the characters are intertwined to a degree, the lesbian storyline
is mostly told in the second half of the miniseries.
Lorraine
(Lonette McKee), a teacher, lost her job after it was discovered
that she was a lesbian, and she and her partner Tee (Paula Kelly)
move to Brewster Place in hope that they can live together
in peace. But soon after they arrive in Brewster Place, neighborhood
gossip Miss Sophie (Olivia Cole) begins to spread rumors about
their sexuality in an effort to force them out. A local gangster,
C.C. Baker, threatens and torments Lorraine, calling her “lezbo,”
“butch,” and “freak.” In a conversation
between the two women, Tee urges Lorraine to come to terms with
the labels:
TEE:
Lorraine, you are a lesbian. A dyke, a lesbo, a butch—all
those names that boy was callin’ you… Why can’t
you just accept it?
LORRAINE: I have accepted it! I’ve accepted it all my life!
I lost my family because of that, but it doesn’t make me
any different from anybody else in this world!
TEE: It makes you damn different…. As long as they own the
whole damn world, it’s them and us, and that spells different.
Tee
and Lorraine’s only friends in the housing project are young
black activist Kiswana (Robin Givens) and elderly handyman Ben
(Moses Gunn). The homophobic slurs against Tee and Lorraine climax
at the finale of the miniseries, when C.C. Baker assaults Lorraine
with a switchblade and rapes her.
Shortly
after the crime, Ben comes across a distraught and traumatized
Lorraine, who shouts at him to stay away from her. But when he
tries to calm her down, she attacks him with a wooden club. In
the novel, Lorraine beats Ben to death, but in the miniseries
he is taken away in an ambulance and it remains unclear whether
he survived the beating. The attack on Lorraine galvanizes the
women of Brewster Place, who band together in the triumphant conclusion
to tear down the brick wall that separates the tenement from the
rest of the city.
