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CSI’s Mixed Track Record on LGBT Characters

Despite the fact that Ann Donahue, one of CSI‘s executive producers, is openly lesbian, the popular CBS crime drama’s track record on LGBT characters has significant room for improvement. CSI still routinely depicts LGBT characters driven to kill due to their sexuality: they are desperate to hide their sexual orientation, psychotically jealous of their lovers, or criminally insane due to gender dysphoria.

These representations call to mind the negative stereotypes that pervaded crime dramas in the 1970s and 1980s, when criminals who were gay killed because of their sexuality.

Over the course of its five seasons to date, six episodes have focused on LGBT characters: two about lesbians, two about gay men, and two about transgenders. The first three episodes-one about murderous lesbians, one about a killer gay man, and one about a female-to-male serial killer-aired in the first two seasons of CSI. After two years in which no LGBT characters were included, another three episodes beginning in March 2004 aired with slightly more positive representations.

The most progress was made in the representation of transgenders, but even that improvement was limited by the fact that the killer in the episode was a psychotic male-to-female transgender who killed other (more sympathetic) MTFs. Three of the six episodes aired during sweeps periods, and one of them (“Ch-ch-changes”) drew more viewers than any other CSI episode that has ever aired.

Obviously, queer killers are still a popular draw.

Killer Lesbian Syndrome

CSI‘s depiction of lesbian murderers has evolved since the 1960s and 1970s, when television dramas depicted lesbians as sexually repressed killers. The two CSI episodes involving lesbian killers present these women more sympathetically, suggesting understandable, human reasons for their homicidal behavior. Nevertheless, CSI‘s first episode featuring killer lesbians did directly connect the killer behavior to sexual orientation.

In “Friends and Lovers,” a first season episode that aired on November 3, 2000, the Las Vegas team investigates the death of Vernon Woods, a private school dean. When Catherine Willows (Marg Helgenberger) first views the scene, in which Woods’s bludgeoned body is lying in a blood-spattered office, she declares, “A lot of passion in this one.”

The main suspect is school founder Kate Armstrong, who claims that Woods attacked her first and she had no choice but to defend herself. But based on the blood spatter evidence, Catherine and fellow CSI Nick Stokes (George Eads) conclude that Kate was not alone when Woods was killed. When confronted with the evidence, Kate readily admits that her colleague Julia Eastman was present, but only as a witness in case Woods sexually harassed her-something that Kate claims he had been doing repeatedly.

After additional evidence reveals that Julia held Woods down while Kate bludgeoned him with a paperweight, the women admit that they are lovers, and that Woods had been blackmailing them with his knowledge of their relationship. Julia and Kate had finally decided to put an end to the blackmail, but when Woods threatened to reveal their relationship to the entire school, they killed him. “Julia and I would have never survived a rumor like that. We panicked. The school is our whole life,” Kate explains at the conclusion of the episode.

Kate and Julia’s violent reaction to Woods’ threat to expose them as lesbians is a classic TV example of internalized homophobia exploding in homicide. Kate and Julia are so frightened that being outed will destroy their career that they are willing to kill to stay in the closet. The episode, and others like it in the 1970s and 80s, suggests that it’s better to be a murderer than to be gay.

CSI‘s second episode to feature killer lesbians was “XX,” a fourth season episode that aired on March 11, 2004. Set in a women’s prison, “XX” concerns the murder of prison inmate Antoinette “Baby Girl” Stella, whose body was tied to the bottom of a prison bus. The autopsy of Baby Girl’s body shows that she is pregnant, even though no conjugal visits are allowed. The process of DNA elimination, combined with some semen found in the back of the bus, reveals that the father of the baby is Doug, the bus driver.

Antoinette also has half of a heart tattooed on her, and the CSI team soon finds that the other half is tattooed on the arm of Antoinette’s ex-cellmate, Juanita, who was also her lover. When Juanita discovered that Antoinette was pregnant, she became extremely jealous and the two fought. But shortly after they reconciled, Antoinette was transferred to another cell because she was caught smuggling a necklace into the prison. Juanita believes that Antoinette arranged the transfer on purpose to break off their relationship. When Juanita discovers Antoinette in a compromising position with Doug in the back of the bus, she kills her with a combination lock wrapped in a sock.

At the episode’s denouement, Catherine Willows tells Juanita that she believes Antoinette had smuggled the necklace into the prison to give to Juanita. Juanita, who is now about to do even more time for murder, simply looks depressed as she considers that she killed the person who loved her.

“XX” is an improvement on “Friends and Lovers” if only because Juanita and Antoinette do not appear to have been trying to hide their relationship, and there seems to have been true feelings of love between the two women. Unfortunately, Juanita’s love escalates into murderous jealousy, suggesting that there is a thin line between lesbianism and psychotic behavior.

Men Do it Too

CSI‘s track record on gay men is slightly better, but not by much. In May 2001, at the end of the first season, “Evaluation Day” examined the case of a disembodied head discovered in the trunk of a car. The deep wounds on the head prompt Catherine Willows to declare it “Definitely a crime of passion,” just as she had earlier that season on “Friends and Lovers.”

The head belongs to Victor Da Silva, whose body is soon found stuffed into a foot locker. When the CSIs examine Da Silva’s home, they discover ? in his closet, no less ? a photo of Victor standing with someone who has been cut out of the photo, except for a multiply-pierced ear. They soon discover that the ear belongs to Fred Applewhite, who is Victor’s ex-lover. When Victor broke up with him and began dating someone new, Fred’s jealousy erupted into a violent argument in which Fred killed Victor. He tried to stuff the body into a foot locker but because the head wouldn’t fit in, he cut it off and put it in the trunk of his car to dispose of later.

“Evaluation Day” is another example of homosexual jealousy that escalates into murder. While crime statistics do prove that victims are often killed by those who are closest to them, and “crimes of passion” are frequently depicted on television shows, it simply underlines negative stereotypes when gay characters kill their lovers.

Last month on the fifth-season episode “Committed,” the CSI team investigates the murder of an inmate in a male psychiatric ward. Because the ward is populated by mentally insane killers of all types, there seems at first to be a plethora of possibilities. But it soon turns out that the prime suspect is a serial rapist who had been in a sexual relationship with the victim. In this episode, the man’s gay relationship is presented by the CSIs as something positive coming out of a decidedly negative environment.

However, in the episode’s twist, it turns out that the gay man was the victim of an incestuous, controlling relationship with his mother, who began molesting him in childhood and has recently joined the psychiatric ward as a nurse. After she realizes her son is in a positive relationship with another person (the fact that the relationship is homosexual seems incidental), she kills her son’s lover by smothering him, and then her son tries to cover it up by banging his dead lover’s head on the floor to make it look like he died from blunt force trauma.

“Committed” is marginally more positive than “Evaluation Day” because the rapist’s relationship with another man seems to be the most healthy relationship he has ever had. Even though the rapist makes openly homophobic statements denying that he is “queer,” it’s unclear whether those denials are truly homophobic or whether they were words that his mother told him to say. It’s clear that the CSIs themselves believe his relationship with the other man to have been a positive experience. It’s too bad he also had to be a mentally insane rapist and victim of incest on top of covering up a murder.

Transgender Transgressions

Transgender characters have experienced the most negative stereotyping on CSI, but they have also seen the most improvement. The second season episode “Identity Crisis,” which aired on January 17, 2002, opens with Gil Grissom (William Petersen) recognizing the work of a killer he had previously encountered ? Paul Millander, who kills other men using the same method used in the murder of his father, which he witnessed as a child. The episode undergoes a relatively circuitous route to its conclusion that involves Gil Grissom having dinner with Paul Millander, his wife, and adopted child, but finally finds its focus when the team visits Paul’s mother.

At Mrs. Millander’s house, Catherine Willows sneaks upstairs and discovers a frilly pink girl’s bedroom. When she rifles through the drawers, she finds items that would more normally belong to a boy ? baseball cards and the like. Mrs. Millander admits that she used to have a daughter, Pauline, but she claims that her daughter died. Further investigation proves that Paul used to be Pauline. The episode also suggests that Pauline might have been intersexed ? a condition that is not the same as transgender, and is glossed over in a vague and confusing manner.

At the conclusion of the episode the team returns to Mrs. Millander’s house to find that Paul has murdered his mother and committed suicide. In a recorded suicide message he says, “I just can’t do it anymore. I’ve lost hope.” Sadly, Paul’s suicide is the most accurate depiction in the episode of the trauma that many transgenders go through.

After “Identity Crisis” aired, GLAAD issued a statement criticizing CSI for continuing “a long-standing Hollywood tradition of portraying sexual minorities as dangerous criminals and homicidal maniacs.” GLAAD also pointed out that “Identity Crisis” was only the second time that a female-to-male transgender character has appeared on television; the first was during a 1999 episode of L.A. Doctors. “To have the second female-to-male character presented as a vicious, matricidal serial killer is profoundly disturbing and deeply offensive.”

It appears that CSI producers did listen to GLAAD’s critique, because when the series’ second episode featuring transgender characters aired on November 18, 2004, several efforts were made to educate the audience about the reality of life as a transgender person. “Ch-ch-changes,” which carried an adult content warning before it began, was CSI‘s 100th episode, and over 31 million viewers tuned in, making this the series’ most-watched episode to date.

The episode investigates the throat-slashing murder of a male-to-female transgender showgirl, Wendy Garner. During the course of the investigation the CSIs meet with Wendy’s sexual reassignment surgeon, Dr. Mercer, who explains that all sexual reassignment candidates must live in their desired gender for one year before they are allowed to have surgery. Like many transgenders, Wendy was impatient with the waiting period and wanted to hasten the process. For this reason she was involved in a counseling group led by Dr. Mona Lavalle, where she became friends with another MTF named Mimosa.

Mimosa calls Gil Grissom and invites him to have a drink with her, and during this meeting she does her best to put a sympathetic and progressive spin on life as a transgendered person. She explains that gender is a social construction, notes the popular misconception that transgenders are crazy, and explains the trauma involved with being born in the wrong physical body. Grissom helpfully explains to viewers, “People confuse your obsession with gender with an obsession with sex,” failing to understand that his use of the word “obsession” that still connotes a psychological disorder.

Meanwhile, a piece of paper found in Wendy’s possession leads the CSIs to a remote storage facility that has been turned into a gruesome operating theater, complete with the bloodied, dead body of an MTF on the operating table. The body belongs to a woman named Peaches who turned tricks at a club called the Cockpit, a magnet for men who want to have sex with transgenders. At the Cockpit, Peaches’s friends explain that Peaches wanted surgery fast, and she likely went to a mysterious doctor named Dr. Benway, who is known for fast-track sexual reassignment surgery that unfortunately sometimes goes wrong.

The CSIs soon discover that Dr. Benway is none other than Dr. Lavalle, who used to be a male medic in the U.S. Army. After leaving the Army, Lavalle/Benway was an activist who performed illegal abortions for women, and later transitioned into a woman herself. After Dr. Lavalle/Benway is arrested, she claims, “I’ve devoted my life to helping those cast out by gender prejudice. Where would these souls be without me?” (Incidentally, Wendy Garner’s murderer is Dr. Lavalle’s husband, who killed her after Wendy threatened to expose Dr. Lavalle’s illegal surgical practices.)

Despite its ridiculously stereotypical name, “Ch-ch-changes” marks a huge step forward in depictions of transgenders on CSI. The character of Mimosa is unquestionably the most sympathetic transgender character that CSI has ever featured. In addition, the episode overtly addresses many of the stereotypes about transgenders. Finally, Dr. Lavalle herself, despite her psychotic tendencies, is actually one of the least stereotypical transgenders to be seen on television. Unlike most MTFs seen on the small screen, she does not look like the sensationalistic drag queen type of transgender; she actually looks like an unremarkable woman.

But even though Dr. Lavalle did not purposely kill Peaches (who died during a botched surgery) or Wendy, she is not a transgender character to be proud of. Although her motives fall more into the “mad doctor” stereotype than the psychotic transsexual stereotype, the simple fact that she is both transgender and delusional about her medical prowess means that she still fits into the traditional role of psychotic transsexual.

CSI‘s Potential

When examining the representation of LGBT characters on CSI, it’s important to note that the series routinely depicts behavior that is viewed as “abnormal” by the mainstream. This includes the culture of swingers (“Swap Meet,” 10/28/04); a man whose fetish was being treated as a baby (“King Baby,” 2/17/05); people who enjoyed dressing up as furry animals (“Fur and Loathing,” 10/30/03); and the culture of BDSM (“Slaves of Las Vegas,” 11/15/01).

The crime scene investigators routinely examine these subcultures with both scientific detachment and some degree of personal curiosity. They rarely make negative judgments about people perceived as “abnormal” unless the crime involves harm against children or incest. The investigators themselves appear to be among the most open-minded and non-judgmental on television.

The problem is that LGBT characters appear on CSI only as victims or killers ? and generally as both at the same time. Despite the show’s improvements in the last couple of years in moving away from traditional stereotypes of gay killers, it is still difficult to tell stories about killers who happen to be gay, as opposed to gay killers.

The only way that CSI can truly move beyond these limiting and harmful stereotypes is to include openly gay characters who have nothing to do with the crime. CSI could do this by including an openly gay crime scene investigator, police officer, lab technician, or expert witness.

Given that CSI is routinely the number one show on television, that would be a giant step forward, indeed.

Update: on the Thursday, May 12 episode (“Iced”), CSI included its first gay character who was neither a killer nor a victim, just a random gay college student.

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