Visible recounts history of LGBTQ TV depiction
Ryan White was worried. The filmmaker was about to put out in the world his latest documentary series, Visible: Out on Television, a look at queer culture’s intersection with TV, streaming on Apple TV Plus, and he had one nagging concern: that his history-laden documentary series would be viewed as too dry and academic.
White need not have worried. The Emmy-nominated director (The Case Against 8) and his childhood best friend, producing partner Jessica Hargrave, have pulled off an intimate, inspirational epic that radiates with emotion. The five-part series covers 50 years of LGBTQ history and tackles such unavoidable themes as homophobia, coming out in the TV industry, and the good and bad ways the power of television has affected the LGBTQ movement.
The secret behind the success of Visible, beyond its meticulous crafting, is the old adage that there’s safety in numbers. Almost 100 people, many of them household names to regular TV viewers, agreed to be interviewed for the series. Onscreen, they appear uniformly unguarded as they talk about their often-painful experiences of trying to stay true to who they are — sometimes at great risk to their careers.
The interviews often come off as a therapeutic experience for the subjects, and likewise for the audience.
Take the era-defining story of Ellen DeGeneres, who lost her popular ABC sitcom in 1998 after coming out, only to eventually become one of America’s most popular talk show hosts.
“I was doing all this meditation and deep soul searching about the shame I was carrying around because I was gay and thought if anyone knew, that I would lose my career and they wouldn’t like me anymore,” DeGeneres says in the series.
Her rise and fall and rise are television lore, but it’s still a revelation to watch her somber recounting of her well-publicized imbroglio. After all these years, she clearly has no regrets about coming out, but that doesn’t mean she doesn’t have scars. “Having a hit show and being a moneymaker for a studio, I was important to them, and suddenly I was poison to them,” she says.
Similarly, Wilson Cruz (an executive producer on Visible) revisits his adventure of being cast on the cult ’90s TV classic My So-Called Life, where he became the first openly gay actor on American television to portray an openly gay person in a leading role. But his father, learning that his son was gay, threw him out of the house, forcing Cruz to live in a car. Cruz bares his soul as he discusses his coming-out rejection, and then how his true-to-life TV role helped him reconcile with his father.
The series isn’t just focused on the decades past, though.
In a remarkable act of candor, Transparent creator Jill Soloway second-guesses the decision to cast Jeffrey Tambor in the lead role of Maura, the trans matriarch of the Pfefferman family. Soloway rues that the casting move unwittingly reinforced untruths about trans women that were weaponized as “bathroom bills” to curtail LGBTQ rights.
Wanda Sykes (another executive producer) employs a dose of humor, and her speculation about TV characters who were purportedly lesbian — Sabrina on Charlie’s Angels and both detectives on Cagney & Lacey, for example — is laugh-out-loud funny. But Laverne Cox, one of the stars on Orange Is the New Black, is part of the documentary series Visible: Out on Television. It is streaming on Apple TV Plus.
beneath that humor is a fear about the insidious nature of the closet, which dictated in the early years of television that lesbian characters had to be murderers and that gay characters had to commit suicide.
Straight allies weigh in on their experiences, too.
In one of the most memorable interviews of the documentary series, Hal Holbrook fights off tears as he describes his life-changing decision to accept the gay role of Doug Salter in That Certain Summer (1972), the first made-for-TV movie that dealt with homosexuality in a positive light.
“I turned it down,” Holbrook said of the role, a part that Cliff Robertson had also rejected. “But then I started to describe the story to my wife … and she said, ‘Holbrook, are you nuts? I said, ‘Yeah.’ She said, ‘When we get to the house, you go to the phone and you call and see if [they] haven’t cast the role, and say, ‘Yes!’”
A role that was considered by many to be career poison ended up garnering Holbrook an Emmy nomination.
Those who speak on camera include Caitlyn Jenner, Ryan Phillippe, Armistead Maupin, Oprah Winfrey, Laverne Cox, Billy Crystal, Anderson Cooper, George Takei, Janet Mock and Billy Porter, just to name a few.
What gives these interviews even more of a cathartic feel is the fact that White and Hargrave put their subjects’ personal stories in a historical context, helping us understand that these intimate moments didn’t happen in a vacuum.
For instance, around the same time that DeGeneres was going through her travails, Matthew Shepard was murdered in Wyoming and Will & Grace premiered on network television. It’s edifying to see all these events put on a timeline, complete with rarely seen television clips and archival footage of historical milestones in the LGBTQ civil rights movement.
All of these triumphant steps forward, and sometimes devastating lurches backward, have occurred during the television era, so it makes sense to chronicle LGBTQ history — from the Stonewall uprising and the AIDS epidemic to the Orlando, Fla., nightclub massacre — through the prism of TV. Although television has been a powerful force in making LGBTQ people more visible to the public, that power has carried a double-edged sword, allowing some people to exploit the medium for their own hateful purposes or anti-gay agendas.
In many ways, Visible is television’s answer to The Celluloid Closet, a seminal 1995 documentary that looked at how cinema dealt with LGBTQ people over the decades. But Visible points out that television, in some ways, is a more intimate medium, in the sense that viewers often watch within the confines of their personal living spaces, and frequently with family members. Furthermore, television, unlike the movies, often documents real life in real time, whether on talk shows (which over the years have had a huge influence on suburban women) or news programs (which brought concerns such as AIDS, same-sex marriage and transgender rights into the nation’s living rooms).
One of television’s biggest contributions to the LGBTQ movement was making AIDS front and center in the American consciousness. This happened, in part, because savvy ACT UP protesters understood the power of the medium, staging visually arresting protests that appeared on nightly news shows everywhere. The activists’ protests were so effective that AIDS research tripled under two Republican administrations.
Though Visible is clearly meant to inspire and serve as a tribute to the role of television in the LGBTQ movement, the documentary series makes clear that even groundbreaking shows of the past reinforced stereotypes and myths that are cringe-worthy in retrospect. The program is a cautionary tale, too. This is evident in the increasing violence against trans people, and the murders at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando.