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“Fastlane” Lesbian Episode a Fun But Uneven Ride

On January 17th, 2003 the Fox drama Fastlane aired its “lesbian episode,” and despite the cringe-worthy title (“Strap On”) and a few negative stereotypes, the series did a surprisingly good job of realistically and positively portraying lesbians and lesbian relationships.

Each hour-long episode of Fastlane — which follows three undercover cops in L.A.: Officers Van (Peter Facinelli) and Deaq (Bill Bellamy) and their boss, Lt. Wilhelmina ‘Billie’ Chambers (Tiffani Thiessen, formerly known as Tiffani-Amber Thiessen) — revolves around a specific undercover assignment, and the series features liberal use of the slo-mo and multiple-windows camera techniques accompanied by a lot of flashy clothes and hip music.

The storyline in this episode boils down to this: Deaq’s house is robbed by a pair of female burglars ? Sara and Jill, played by Jaime Pressly and Colleen Porch, respectively ? and in order to catch them, Billie goes undercover as a lesbian/bisexual women and develops a relationship with Sara after “accidentally” meeting her in a lesbian club.

Thiessen is best known for her roles in the long-running television series Saved by the Bell and Beverly Hills 90210, and Pressly for her role as a cheerleader in the teen movie-spoof Not Another Teen Movie.

The portrayal of lesbian and bisexual women in this episode is complicated — in some ways, very progressive and gay-positive, in other ways, regressive and stereotypical.

I’ve categorized the episode’s lesbian-related content into three areas: the good, the bad, and the mixed bag, based on how it portrays or reflects upon lesbians and lesbian relationships.

The Good

1. Overall, Billie and Sara’s interactions are very believable ? in fact, these two are more believable as a couple than many actual lesbian couples in lesbian movies. The way their relationship develops is fairly natural and realistic (for TV), and the two have very good chemistry.

2. Billie is clearly not at all uncomfortable with lesbians and displays of lesbian sexuality. She illustrates this several times throughout the series by frequently acting as the aggressor with Sara (grabbing Sara’s ass in the parking lot scene and pulling her close, instigating the kiss in the hot tub, etc.)

Billie also illustrates this early on in the episode through this conversation with a Hollywood version of a butch lesbian (i.e. short hair and an armband tattoo) named Nance who asks her to dance:

NANCE: do you want to dance?

BILLIE: no thanks

NANCE: are you sure you don’t want to dance?

BILLIE: (laughs) no, not this time

NANCE: can’t blame a girl for trying

BILLIE: (smiles) no, you can’t.

The easy way in which Billie declines the invitation and her relaxed body language indicate no surprise or distaste at the woman hitting on her.

3. Sara tells Billie, “So you’re not really gay, you’re bi-curious.” This is the first time the concept of “bi-curious” has ever been mentioned on TV, despite being a common term among lesbians and bisexual women in real life.

4. This episode may also be one of the only times on television we have seen realistic dancing between women ? not the fake version of lesbian dancing we usually see, where two women intertwine fingers while they dance two feet apart (although there were a few of those shots in the beginning). For the most part, the women in the club who were couples danced like lesbian couples do in real life: close.

5. The episode featured three lesbian kisses — and long, passionate ones at that (this includes the scene when Jill kiss her girlfriend passionately on the throat several times in the club, since that is equivalent to a kiss in terms of explicit displaying lesbian sexuality).

This may be a record number of lesbian kisses in a single episode on primetime television.

6. The scene with Billie, Sara, and Jill naked in the hot tub is also unusually explicit portrayal of lesbian sexuality (if a little guy-fantasy oriented) and only the second time lesbians have been shown naked together on television (the first was a scene with Willow and Tara in bed together in an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer last season).

7. The episode challenges the myth that lesbians are attracted to all women when Sara tells Billie in the hot tub that her friend Jill is not her type, insisting “we’re just good friends.”

8. The episode was aired at 8pm, a time slot which has usually been off-limits to portrayals of lesbian sexuality.

The Bad

1. Since Sara and Jill are the only lesbians ever to appear on Fastlane, this episode reinforces the lesbian-criminal association that is a close cousin to the dead/evil lesbian cliche frequently employed in television and film (such as in the recent “lesbian episode” of Smallville). Of course, this is a cop show in which almost all of the characters besides the three cops are criminals ? so it’s not that lesbians were being unfairly portrayed in the context of this particular series. The reinforcement of the stereotype occurs when you look at the portrayal of lesbians on a macro level ? i.e. across shows.

So even while it might be totally appropriate and fair for the characters to be criminals within an individual series, when an overwhelming number of the lesbian characters on television are evil, criminal, or dead it creates an overall impression that lesbians are disproportionately evil/criminal.

The dead/evil/criminal lesbian has appeared on shows like 24, All My Children, Babylon 5, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Dark Angel, ER, For the People, Law & Order, Millennium, Northern Exposure, NYPD Blue, The Practice, Quantum Leap, and Smallville, while the the number of happy (or at least not unhappy), law-abiding lesbian characters on television is much smaller.

2. It’s unfortunate that the only time butch lesbians are shown on television, it’s in a negative light. The are usually shown in a scene similar to the one in this episode where a butch lesbian makes unwanted advances towards a straight woman or newly out lesbian, and is rejected. The cumulative result is that anyone watching television would come away with the impression that butch lesbians are destined for a life of invisibility and rejection.

3. In the hot tub, Sara tells Billie she is drawn to women who are similar to herself because “I figure if I can’t be a better me, I might as well date her,” which reinforces the “lesbians are narcissistic” stereotype.

4) The show featured a warning about “adult sexuality” at the beginning, which is hypocritical and unnecessary considering the nature of the show and the fact that this warning is not shown before episodes which contain explicit scenes of heterosexual sexuality.

The Mixed

1. Billie’s comfort with kissing and feigning attraction to Sara is in marked contrast to Van and Deaq’s clear discomfort at the idea of kissing another guy when they are pretending to be a gay male couple in the club. While this makes Billie appear less homophobic, the episode does nothing to challenge the men’s homophobia, and worse, actually plays their homophobia for laughs.

2. When the cops discover the women are gay, they have the following conversation:

VAN: They may be lesbians but they don’t have to stay lesbians

DEAQ: Van thinks he can turn ’em.

BILLIE: (laughing) Okay, I’ll let you in on a little secret ? you’re the reason lesbians become lesbians.

Although the last line is said in jest, it does subtly reinforce the stereotype that lesbianism is a choice, and that it is not a choice for women but a rejection of men. It also obviously references the stereotype that lesbians just need to meet the right guy, but Billie clearly dismisses this idea at the same time ? her tone is teasing and she makes fun of Van’s assumption that he can “convert” lesbians.

3. When Van and Deaq ask Billie where she’s going, she says “I’m going to see the lesbians.” The way the sentence is structured makes it sound like Billie is going to visit zoo animals, or a circus act, but Billie’s mocking tone appears to be making fun of the guys’ this idea of lesbians as strange and different.

4. Almost all of the women in the bar are ultra-femmey (i.e. long hair, trendy tight-fitting clothes, makeup, etc.). This isn’t too surprising given that it’s television where everyone has to look glamorous all the time, but it’s not exactly realistic (although if any lesbian bar actually looks like this, it probably would be one in L.A.)

5. Although she’s a criminal, the character of Sara is actually presented in a fairly sympathetic light, and Billie appears to genuinely care for her, at least a little (although not necessarily in a sexual way) as evidenced by Billie’s treatment of Sara after she has been arrested (she speaks gently to Sarah, reassures Sarah that her life isn’t over, and then offers her a deal which will prevent her from going to jail).

Overall, the episode was better than most special “lesbian episodes” at dispelling stereotypes and normalizing lesbians and lesbian relationships, with a few disturbing exceptions. It was a fun episode to watch, and displayed probably one of the most realistic portrayals of affection between lesbians so far on television.

This is likely due to the fact that the writer of the episode, Kim Newton, is a lesbian, as she indicates here in an interview with Gay.com:

There are multiple on-screen kisses that I had to do a little fighting for, because people get nervous. There’s a hot tub make out scene and a kiss in Girl Bar. We definitely show the physical contact. We don’t go as far as a true sex scene, but we have two really nice kissing scenes.

A producer of Fastlane recently hinted that the character Billie may actually be a lesbian in a recent interview with Entertainment Weekly, but this statement appears to be made mostly in jest as indicated in this excerpt from the EW article:

”We want to hint at something in Billie’s character ? is she bisexual because she’s doing her job, or is she a lesbian?” teases exec producer John McNamara, who says Fox’s standards and practices department gave them major leeway to tell the story (so look for plenty of making out). ”One thing about the show that’s worked is that it is not afraid to be outrageous when it needs to be outrageous.”

The fact that he believes this episode is “outrageous” seems to imply that it will not be a regular part of the series.

On the other hand, Newton left open the possibility that Billie might be gay in her Gay.com interview:

[Billie’s] character is mysterious, and the guys are always speculating about what her life is like. In the first episode we did after the pilot, featuring motorcycle gang girls, [Van and Deaq] were like, ‘You’re a lesbian, aren’t you? It’s OK with us.’ And she doesn’t answer them. So we kind of planted a little seed that she could be gay.

The writers deliberately left Billie’s sexuality ambiguous in this episode. When Van and Deaq are trying to work up the courage to ask Billie if she’s gay or bisexual, they chicken out and instead ask her if she misses working undercover. The show cuts to a scene of what Billie is thinking, which is dancing in the club with Sara, clearly having fun; cutting back to the scene in the office, Billie smiles and replies, “Yeah, I do.”

Clearly, the producers wants to maintain this ambiguity ? only time will tell whether this is just a ratings ploy.

Update: Ratings for this episode were up 32% from the previous week’s Fastlane episode, and it was the highest-rated show on Fox that evening. But it wasn’t enough to make up for the overall lackluster ratings for the season; in May, 2003, Fastlane was officially canceled by Fox. The complete series is now available on DVD.

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