By Marilyn Duff, Contributing Editor of Dispatches
April 1994 – Lindsay Law, executive producer of PBS’ American Playhouse series, may be guilty of the biggest rationalization of the network’s liberal bias – ever. When the Public Broadcasting System (PBS) broadcast Tales of the City recently, part of the hype was Law’s statement, “It’s not a heavy dramatic piece – it’s a lark.” Wrong. It was more like watching a sensitive comedy of 1930s Germany before the Holocaust, only the enemy here is not fascists – it’s a terrifying, silent virus.
Watching the story of life in San Francisco in the late 1970s was, therefore, painfully discomforting. Armisted Maupin’s fictional account ran first as a serial in the San Francisco Chronicle in 1976, the halcyon days of homosexuality.
Bay City homosexuals seemingly had it all back then: style, influence and free-wheeling sex lives. They had their own bars with mud-wrestling, slave auctions and jockey shorts contests. And along with unbridled promiscuity, they had political clout, for in San Francisco, gays were the most important single voting bloc and had just elected the first openly gay city councilman, Harvey Milk.
Even in middle America in the late 1970s they’d achieved a kind of look-the-other way tolerance. PBS’ Tales captures the last days of this era before AIDS, and a group of sexually free people in an apartment house high on Russian Hill.
Homosexuals Decimated by AIDS
But since the Chronicle published the initial stories in this series, AIDS has decimated the San Francisco gay community, shut down the bathhouses and driven formerly promiscuous homosexuals into uneasy monogamous relationships fraught with problems that middle-class heterosexual married couples have dealt with for centuries.
In his last book (Maupin authored six in all) called Sure of You, the dark specter of AIDS has invaded the once-happy fictional group. More important, in this last book some of the saga’s homosexuals are beginning to realize that human relationships are more complicated than a quick sexual encounter in the dark back rooms of the Castro district’s Jaguar Book Store, and yuppie married heterosexuals are struggling to keep love alive in the face of success, fame, expensive private school for the kid and a posh apartment.
Unfortunately this last, rather sober book was not included in PBS’ recent American Playhouse series. And though the British producer Channel Four condensed Maupin’s first three books for this broadcast and has been commissioned by PBS to make more, one wonders if they’ll ever get around to dealing with the stark reality of Sure of You.
Instead, PBS used taxpayers’ money to showcase the ’70s homosexual lifestyle, complete with bathhouse nudity, deep kissing between males and a transsexual landlady who is really a male with a Scandinavian sex change operation, played by Olympia Dukakis.
The series ran at 9:00 p.m. over three nights in January, easily accessible to teens and young adults.
With the glorious beauties of San Francisco as a backdrop, viewers are given the charming affability of a young male homosexual, the frolicsome loyalty of a lesbian twosome – and the smothering repressiveness of two heterosexual marriages. One character is a married man who is a closet gay; another a married, middle-aged business executive who has an affair with the transsexual landlady.
PBS has had past skirmishes with its audience over its broadcasts of Tongues Untied, an explicit view of homosexuality; Stop the Church, a documentary of gay protest in St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City; and a P.O.V. documentary of a sex-change by a man who wished to be a woman.
Congressmen, most notably GOP Senators Robert Dole (KS) and Jesse Helms (NC), have waged valiant, but futile, campaigns to defund PBS’ parent company, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), or to reduce or freeze its stipend of tax monies. But to no avail. Last year CPB received an increase in funding of $19.36 million from the Democrat-controlled Congress, which was heavily lobbied by its liberal constituents including the vocally and financially still strong homosexual lobby.
Meanwhile, PBS has steadfastly refused to respond to complaints of straight America that it’s pushing a homosexual agenda at a time when the AIDS epidemic is taking far more lives of homosexuals than any other group. Though Tales was well written (Maupin is a master of observation and an entertaining social commentator), the question remains: When is PBS going to spend anything like equal money to push a return to heterosexual marriage and family values as an antidote to many of society’s ills? Or to offer viewers opposing views such as a thoughtful documentary based on Michael Fumento’s The Myth of Heterosexual AIDS?
Questions for New PBS Head
Tales of the City is further proof that PBS is way behind the loop on these issues. Instead, it continues to allocate taxpayers’ money for programs that border on gay propaganda or even recruitment.
New PBS President Ervin Duggan needs to be asked some hard questions about why this is so. And congressmen have a responsibility to bring PBS’ programming to the attention of voters and to name their colleagues who support it with increased funding. After all, with Arts & Entertainment, Discovery, the Learning Channel and C-SPAN picking up the slack, who needs the budgetary excess of public television? 
