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Back in the Day: “The Women of Brewster Place”

Back in the Day is a column 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.

The Women of Brewster Place won its timeslot on both nights that it aired on ABC, defeating significant competition in the form of The Wizard of Oz on CBS and The Return of the Jedi on NBC. It was later nominated for two Emmy Awards, and won a GLAAD Media Award for outstanding TV mini-series.

Although a spinoff series, titled Brewster Place, aired briefly on ABC in 1990, it was soon canceled due to poor ratings. The spinoff differed from the miniseries by featuring positive male characters, and eliminating the lesbian couple.

The critical rejection of Brewster Place as man-hating essentially replaced homophobia – which had by then, in the age of AIDS, become un-PC – with feminist-bashing, which has never gone out of style. Washington Post columnist Dorothy Gilliam, an African American woman, argued that the miniseries perpetrated some of the worst stereotypes of African American men ever seen – and trotted out similar stereotypes of African American women. ‘Indeed,’ she continued, “in the long, sensitive portrayal of the lesbian relationship, the message seemed to be that the best women don’t even deal with men.”

Gilliam’s comments indicate two significant things: first, Tee and Lorraine were indeed sensitively portrayed in the miniseries. Their relationship, in fact, was the only harmonious one at all. But Gilliam’s conclusion, that “the message seemed to be that the best women don’t even deal with men,” reflected a complicated intersection of beliefs about the feminist movement, lesbian feminism, and lesbians in general.

That bundle of political nerves, when greatly simplified, boils down to the notion that lesbians (and feminists) hate all men. The critique of Brewster Place as misandrist, then, can also be read as a homophobic rejection of the lesbian couple, who represent the pinnacle of man-hating behavior: they don’t even need men to love them.

Critics who characterized The Women of Brewster Place as perpetrating negative stereotypes of African American men were not entirely mistaken. The miniseries did have more than its share of criminals and cheaters among the male characters, and when there are so few positive portraits of African American men in the media in general, adding a few negative ones can have serious repercussions.

But The Women of Brewster Place needs to be recognized as a revolutionary miniseries for showing how strong the love between women can be. In addition to the loving couple Tee and Lorraine, Brewster Place showed the bonds between women friends and between mothers and daughters – something that is often relegated below the importance of relationships with men.

The Women of Brewster Place‘s other obvious contribution is its positive portrait of an African American lesbian couple, despite the horrific rape and its aftermath. Before Brewster Place, the only instance of an African American lesbian character on TV was in the 1975 TV movie Cage Without a Key, when a black lesbian teenager in a juvenile detention facility died to save the life of a wrongly imprisoned white girl. After Brewster Place, the short-lived 1995 series Courthouse included African American judge Rosetta Reed (Jenifer Lewis) and her lover, Danny (Cree Summers).

In 2002, HBO’s The Wire became the first television series to feature an African/Korean American character in Detective Shakima Greggs (Sonja Sohn), as well as her African American girlfriend, Cheryl (Melanie Nicholls-King). Finally, in 2004 Showtime’s The L Word premiered with biracial Jennifer Beals playing the part of museum director Bette Porter, also biracial.

The L Word has gone further than any other series in creating a three-dimensional African American lesbian character; Bette has been forced to deal with her African American father’s homophobia as well as the complicated terrain of giving birth to an artificially inseminated biracial child with her partner, Tina.

When Oprah Winfrey talked with the New York Times in March 1989, shortly before The Women of Brewster Place was due to air, she said, “You present the story and then you let people choose to change the way things are or not. I want to make a difference. I want that on my tombstone.”

It’s clear that Oprah’s well on her way to achieving a monument in her honor for making a difference.

But Brewster Place also made a difference. It ignited a debate about the relationships between African American men and women, but it also showed that women can support and love each other – whether or not they’re lesbians.

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