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Visibility Matters: The Disappearing Lesbian on Primetime Broadcast TV

Visibility Matters is a monthly column by AfterEllen.com Founder Sarah Warn about larger trends affecting lesbian/bi women in entertainment and the media.

This weekend at the annual Women’s Event fundraiser for New York’s gay and lesbian center, L Word creator Ilene Chaiken said that when she launched her series six years ago, she assumed there would be plenty of other shows with prominent lesbian leads on mainstream TV by the time it ended.

But The L Word‘s final season begins in a few months, and not only are there no lesbian cop shows, comedies, or medical dramas on broadcast TV, there are no lesbian characters, period. At least, not on primetime broadcast television, home to America’s most-watched shows.

At the turn of the century, there were several lesbian series regulars on primetime broadcast TV. In the 2004-2005 season, there were four or five. By 2006-2007, it was down to one.

This season (2008-2009), the number of lesbians among the 616 series regulars is approximately zero.

(There are only four lesbians in the recurring characters category – the rarely seen gay mayor on Friday Night Lights, and three cartoon lesbians). To be fair, we did have one lesbian series regular on a primetime broadcast series this season – for two weeks

I’m referring, of course, to Grey’s Anatomy‘s Dr. Erica Hahn (Brooke Smith), who finally came out as a lesbian last week, and was promptly fired from the show by ABC execs. Smith’s last episode of Grey’s is tonight, and when she leaves, the only lesbian couple on primetime broadcast TV goes with her. But the controversial departure of Erica Hahn is just the latest casualty of long, slow decline of lesbian characters on primetime broadcast television.

Despite the gain in lesbian visibility in pop culture due to the popularity of high-profile lesbians like Ellen DeGeneres, Melissa Etheridge, Rosie O’Donnell, and Rachel Maddow, lesbians characters have dwindled down to near extinction on scripted television. (And when South of Nowhere ends next month, and The L Word two months after that, lesbians will be close to invisible on cable programming, as well, save for shows on LGBT channels like Logo and Here TV, which still aren’t accessible to many Americans).

And despite the fact that we’ve been writing about this trend for years now, this near-invisibility of lesbian characters on scripted primetime broadcast TV has generally been ignored by just about everyone but us.

GLAAD noted the lack of scripted lesbians in their most recent annual report about LGBT characters, but this statistic was overshadowed by the larger one showing that the total number of LGBT characters on television overall has almost doubled – which was the statistic touted in the headline by almost every news outlet covering the report.

Almost none of the mainstream news coverage of Brooke Smith’s departure from Grey‘s this week has mentioned that her character is the only lesbian character, in the only lesbian relationship, on primetime broadcast TV.

BISEXUAL IS THE NEW (AND IMPROVED) LESBIAN When the decline in lesbian TV visibility is discussed, the factors most often mentioned are the conservative political climate, and the proliferation of reality TV (which has drastically reduced the number of scripted series).

But one factor has been left out of the discussion, and it may be the most critical one of all: the increasing visibility of bisexual women.

When I reviewed the way The O.C. portrayed its bisexual teen character Alex (Olivia Wilde) in early 2005, I commented that, “bisexual characters on network television are about as rare as a rainy day in Orange County.”

What a difference three years makes.

In the current 2008-2009 season, the only queer female characters on scripted broadcast television are bisexual.

Grey’s Anatomy (ABC), House, M.D. (Fox), and Bones (Fox) all include regular or recurring bisexual characters who have had romantic relationships with men and women. The first openly bisexual TV character was L.A. Law‘s C.J. Lamb (Amanda Donohoe), who came out in an episode in 1991. Roseanne‘s recurring character Nancy (Sandra Bernhard) followed a year later, but there were no new bisexual characters until the turn of the century, when short-lived comedies like That ’80s Show (2000) and Coupling (2003) introduced one-dimensional bisexual characters.

That same year, Two and a Half Men (2003) debuted with Marin Hinkle playing Jon Cryer’s character’s maybe-bisexual wife, but that aspect of her sexuality was soon dropped.

It wasn’t until 2005 that we saw the first attempt at well-developed bisexual characters, on The O.C. (at least until the storyline jumped the shark halfway through the season), and One Tree Hill.

That same year, Persia White’s technically-bisexual character Lynn on The UPN sitcom Girlfriends finally had on-screen relationship with a woman for the first time in an ill-fated storyline.

Around this time, bisexual characters started turning up occasionally in minor guest-star roles on primetime broadcast dramas like North Shore and Wonderfalls.

On basic cable TV, there was a jump in bisexual characters in the mid 2000s, especially on “edgy” shows like Nip/Tuck, Rescue Me, Degrassi, and South of Nowhere. But it wasn’t until the last year or two that bisexual women began cropping up on primetime scripted broadcast TV as supporting or leading characters.

In most cases, the character’s bisexuality still exists primarily in name only, with the occasional Sweeps episode exploring her Sapphic side. But there has been a slow but steady improvement in bisexual visibility on TV.

PLAYING TO THEIR BASE More (mostly positive) visibility for bisexual women is a good thing, considering how marginalized they’ve been for so long.

But it appears that improved visibility for bisexual women has come at the expense of visibility for lesbians, and this trade-off is only going to happen more frequently moving forward.

In a television environment in which lesbian and bisexual women are still primarily confined to token or supporting characters, and there’s only room for one leading queer woman (if any), writers on mainstream TV shows will choose a bisexual character over a lesbian every time.

Why? It’s all about keeping your options open.

Primetime broadcast TV shows aimed at a audience comprised of a majority of heterosexual viewers prefer bisexual characters over lesbians because they allow for maximum titillation (which translates to ratings) and storytelling options (since they can be paired with a man or a woman), and minimal potential for alienating a majority of their audience (straight men).

The only reason TV writers didn’t make this switch years ago is because social taboos around bisexuality prevented them from doing so. Now that social restrictions around portraying female bisexuality have been relaxed, network execs, showrunners, and writers are free to exploit female bisexuality at will.

There will always be far more shows targeted to a broad audience, rather than a niche audience (lesbians).

From a business standpoint, there’s no good reason to add a prominent lesbian character (limited storytelling options, more alienating to straight men) over a bisexual one (broader storytelling options, more pleasing to straight men).

Obviously, a show could include both lesbian and bisexual women, but that will happen only rarely until we get to the point where true diversity of characters is the norm.

But before we point too many fingers at mainstream TV writers, it’s worth nothing that we still don’t have diversity in shows aimed at an LGBT audience, at least not when it comes to sexual orientation.

Bisexual women on shows aimed primarily at a lesbian audience are still ignored (Exes & Ohs); vilified (Tina on The L Word); or turned gay (Alice on The L Word). “Lesbian” shows don’t include bisexual women because many lesbians have negative or mixed emotional reactions to bisexuality – often lumping it in with heterosexual experimentation, or buying into stereotypes that equate bisexuality with promiscuity – and showrunners and network execs don’t want to alienate the largest segment of their audience, or they just want to prioritize the types of characters their audience is most likely to respond to.

Which means bisexual women are absent from lesbian shows for the same reason lesbians are absent from mainstream shows – the creators/writers/producers are playing to their base.

It also doesn’t help that many heterosexuals and gay men don’t understand, or want to understand, the difference between lesbian and bisexual women.

In her statement reassuring Grey’s Anatomy fans that Brooke Smith wasn’t dismissed because her character became a lesbian, Rhimes said, “Clearly it’s not an issue as we have a lesbian character on the show — Calliope Torres.” But only four days earlier, the writers had clearly established Callie’s bisexuality with a convoluted storyline involving her sleeping with a male doctor twice and concluding that she liked sex with men just as much as with women.

Either Rhimes doesn’t know the difference between lesbian and bisexual women, or she does and doesn’t think anyone else will. Unfortunately, the latter is probably true.

CONTEXT MATTERS There is one place lesbians still show up with some regularity on primetime scripted broadcast TV: crime dramas. Not as cops, detectives, FBI agents, forensics specialists, or anyone else on the crime-fighting team, but as victims or criminals. Especially during Sweeps periods.

In just the first two months of the 2009-2009 season, we’ve had sadomasochistic lesbian crime victims on Life; a dead lesbian astronaut and her grieving partner on Law and Order: SVU; and a dead lesbian victim’s advocate on Without a Trace.

How many of these shows have ever had lesbians (or even bi women) in lead roles? None.

Last week I blogged about the Without a Trace episode, in which the agents drop a lesbian abduction case halfway through in favor of tracking down a kidnapped child, because it was such a clear example of the way writers on crime shows use lesbians only when it’s convenient to advance another story line, or to maximize ratings (Without a Trace has never had a lesbian character as part of the cast). As I was writing about the episode, I debated internally whether to include the same explanation I and other writers on AfterEllen.com have provided many, many times over the years about the problem with lesbians on crime dramas – that it isn’t that there are lesbian and bisexual crime victims and criminals mixed in with all the heterosexual ones, but that there are virtually never any lesbian/bi cops, FBI agents, forensics investigators, etc. to balance them out (whereas there are plenty of heterosexual lead characters to balance out the heterosexual crime victims and perpetrators).

In other words: that it’s not as much about the individual episode, as about how the episode fits into the context of that show, and the broader TV landscape.

But I decided against going into all that again in the Without a Trace blog post, because after six years of explaining this every time we criticize a crime drama that features a lesbian criminal/victim, it felt redundant, and I thought it was understood by now, at least by our readers.

Unfortunately, I was wrong.

The next morning, I found a slew a comments on the post along the lines of “there’s no double-standard, most of the victims/criminal on this show are straight, what are you talking about?”

Clearly, I had made a mistake in skipping the explanation.

But if so many lesbian and bi women can’t even connect the dots on this – can’t immediately understand that the problem is the broader context of the ongoing lack of regular or recurring lesbian characters on scripted primetime TV – how can we expect TV writers, most of whom are straight, to get it?

And even if they understand, why should they care, now that they can use bisexual women instead of lesbians, and risk alienating less of their audience?

TELLING OUR STORIES If this trend persists, the only lesbians on broadcast TV will be the occasional reality TV contestant; hosting daytime talk shows (Ellen); or on daytime dramas (All My Children).

Most of the lesbians on cable will be on LGBT channels that are not predominantly watched by heterosexuals, and the internet will become best place to find widely accessible scripted programming starring or featuring lesbians (but that won’t happen until technology makes it easier and cheaper to watch web series on our television sets, as well as our computer monitors, which is a few years away).

On primetime broadcast TV, we’ll have to look for glimpses of our lives in dead lesbian astronauts, and Hot Lesbian Carol from Payroll.

Earlier this week, Americans participated in an historic event: the election of our first black president.

But that same day, gay and lesbian Americans lost basic civil rights in several states, including the right to marry, and the right to adopt children.

Multiple studies have shown a clear correlation between the visibility of gays and lesbians on television, and attitudes towards homosexuality. I have a few thousand emails and private messages from readers over the last six years that prove how much lesbian TV characters help lesbian and bisexual women come out – to themselves and others. And Ellen DeGeneres has arguably done more to advance gay rights in America in the last few years than anyone else just by being openly gay on television every day. But a glimpse into the lives of a handful of high-profile lesbians like Ellen isn’t enough to make lesbians feel represented. And it clearly isn’t enough to change hearts and minds, as the recent election results prove.

Television is America’s cultural campfire, where we tell stories about ourselves. Where we imagine what our lives could, and should, be like.

As long as lesbians aren’t included in these stories, we won’t be included in our culture in other meaningful ways &#8212 including at the ballot box.

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