Watching the first few episodes of ''Queer as Folk'' is like nothing so much as peering through glass at a world that heterosexuals can witness but not enter.
(That puts me, with a straight female point of view, about as far from the world of the series as you can get and still speak English yet it also allows me to gauge how well the series works for viewers who do not share its perspective.)įor heterosexual viewers, the experience of watching ''Queer as Folk'' is captured in a scene in which Brian, the 29-year-old advertising executive whom everyone adores, takes a shower with Justin, his eager 17-year-old lover, as the camera sees them from the other side of the glass door. The viewer's individual perspective becomes more crucial than ever, as most of us are abruptly put in the minority position, a new and unsettling place to be. That is very much its purpose: to reverse society's heterosexual assumptions. Such shows nudge the network television audience toward a broader acceptance ''Queer as Folk'' is the cable equivalent of a karate kick to the head.
DeGeneres is developing for CBS, she plays a lesbian who returns to her hometown this time she begins as a gay character but is still surrounded by straight society.
Even today, half of ''Will and Grace'' is heterosexual, and the unsubtle new John Goodman sitcom, ''Normal, Ohio,'' is about the gay main character's dealings with his traditional family. The prototype is Mary Ann, the wide-eyed Midwesterner who finds herself playing Alice in the midst of the gay wonderland of San Francisco in the 1994 miniseries ''Tales of the City.'' Before the famous coming out on ''Ellen,'' Ellen DeGeneres's title character posed as heterosexual for years, and afterward was constantly explaining herself to the straight friends who surrounded her. Previous shows about gay characters have given the straight audience a reassuring guide into their worlds. The series is like nothing else on television because never before has a mainstream American series assumed the perspective of gay characters, making no concessions to straight viewers.
Here are some of the highlights selected by The Times’s TV critics: Television this year offered ingenuity, humor, defiance and hope. Tonight's two-hour opening episode (on Showtime at 10, with hourlong installments every Sunday at 10 after that) includes a bedroom scene that makes one man look like a contortionist. This series is intended to jolt a mainstream audience, and it does, with language that is largely unquotable and sex scenes so intimate that the squirm factor for most viewers will be high. It is simply not true, though, that the series is about individuals who just happen to be gay, as one of the actors says in a Showtime promo. Not that there's anything wrong with that, as the ''Seinfeld'' characters used to say. ''Queer as Folk'' is defiantly about gay sex, which defines who these characters are. Michael modestly describes himself as ''a semi-cute boy-next-door type,'' and the other main characters - a seductive advertising executive, a drab accountant and a wisecracking diva - are intended to be as ordinary as their hometown, Pittsburgh.īut Michael was right in the first place. We are soon meant to see the emotional longing beneath the friends' sex-with-a-stranger mentality. SHOWTIME'S made-to-shock series ''Queer as Folk'' begins with this voiceover from Michael, who has the innocent look of a teddy bear: ''The thing you need to know is, it's all about sex.'' As he speaks, he and his friends are in a gay disco called Babylon, where one dancing man wears only a silver-spangled thong, chains hang from the ceiling, drugs are common and everyone ignores the signs that read, ''No sex in the bathrooms, that's what the couches are for.''