Friends of Dorothy: How The Golden Girls was Good for Gays

[babydraco]

The show was amazingly groundbreaking on the topic of homosexuality. And I don’t just mean that there’s a ton of potential for LesYay in a show about three healthy and active single women who live together and love each other deeply (which the show occasionally joked about itself). Nor do I mean that it must have been popular with drag queens because all four main roles are surely a godsend for female impersonators of a certain age. They were some fabulous ladies in caftans, to be sure and Miami has (or had) a big GLBTQ party scene.

No, I mean that the show openly tackled many topics associated with homosexuality when most other shows really didn’t, and did it respectfully and realistically. On a lot of older shows (and even some now) the gay characters are jokes or tragedies. Gay men were parodies of unmanliness and lesbians weren’t seen, because they’re supposedly not as funny unless it’s jokes about two hot straight girls fooling around.

The first two or three episodes of the show actually had a regular gay character, a housekeeper named “Coco” who was replaced by Dorothy's mother Sophia. He wasn’t funny and contributed little to the show, but you gotta admire them for trying right out of the gate.

Blanche’s brother comes out to her. This, by itself, was a big deal in the 1980s. The character isn’t effeminate or ultra butch, he’s just a regular guy. And nothing bad happens to him. He’s not gay bashed by strangers, he doesn’t catch a fatal disease, he even gets to end up with a stable, loving partner and three out of the four main stars are supportive. They don’t even debate it, they just accept him. And yet what I also love is that the show had the courage to initially portray Blanche as the one who couldn’t get past it. Not only is it in character for her (she seemed quite conservative politically despite her unconventional love life) but it really pointed out the double standards that heterosexuals can have. In the two main episodes where her brother appears, Blanche makes most of the appeals and arguments that homophobic people make, and every one is shot down by her friends. But Blanche is not portrayed as stupid, uninformed or evil, she’s simply a person who had one view of the world and is now trying to readjust to the learning curve of this new worldview that she never asked to have. Everyone in the story is a person with the right to their own viewpoint, and she changes her views not because everyone yells at her but because she loves her brother and doesn’t want to hurt him.

Blanche’s brother returns for at least one other episode, where he actually marries his boyfriend in one of those “commitment ceremonies” people used have to back when no church or state allowed them to marry legally. That episode aired at a time when the mainstream public was just beginning to become aware that such events actually happened-this is years before Ross's ex will marry her girlfriend and Elaine will attempt to get to a lesbian wedding via the subway.

The show also tackled lesbianism in an episode when a friend of the women told them she was gay. Blanche was confused then as well and provided one of the Crowning Moments of Funny in 1980s US tv history. In fact, the joke was referenced last year on “Glee” (which is the current Big Gay Show). Another time, Rose forces Dorothy and Blanche to pretend to be gay lovers so she can provide guests for the talk show produced by her boss. It pokes a great deal of fun at the way men see lesbians.