From Bewitched to Modern Family, How Sitcoms Helped Shape $#@! History
Here's how some of the most popular sitcoms in America helped further LGBTQ+ acceptance.
Screenshot 2023-06-04 at 09-12-28 From 'Bewitched' to 'Modern Family ' How Sitcoms Helped Shape .png
In this excerpt from his new book, Hi Honey, I'm Homo!: Sitcoms, Specials, and the $#@!ing of American Culture, Them contributor Matt Baume outlines the untold history of how sitcoms helped Americans come to accept LGBTQ+ people, from a lesbian kiss on Roseanne to an early gay marriage on Roc.
Posner knew this meant trouble. It was 1977, and she’d recently been hired as a secretary on a new sitcom called Soap that was set to premiere on ABC that fall. Although the public had yet to see a single frame of the program, it already had the country up in arms, thanks to a Newsweek reporter who’d read a leaked script and declared that Soap was “impure,” full of sacrilegious sex, gay love affairs, nymphomaniacs, cross-dressers, and kink.
“Soap needs its mouth washed out,” fumed the head of one ABC affiliate.
A national outcry had ensued. Conservatives were furious that a television show would attempt such boundary-pushing themes; gay community leaders feared negative depictions of $#@! characters would set their movement back by years. Groups that were normally on opposite ends of the ideological spectrum now organized complementary nationwide protests and letter-writing campaigns against the show.
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Whether Americans tuned in to watch sitcoms, dramas, or the nightly news, TV reflected the prevailing belief that $#@! people were, at best, mincing freaks and, at worst, a public menace.
Exasperated by these portrayals and emboldened by a growing $#@! liberation movement, community organizers in the early 1970s began pressuring the three major networks to stop airing cruel stereotypes. Their tactics ranged from letter-writing campaigns to tense meetings with broadcast executives to sit-ins at network headquarters. And to everyone’s surprise, these methods sometimes worked, with occasional depictions popping up on broadcast television that were not entirely mortifying — and even, on a very good night, positive.
https://www.them.us/story/how-sitcom...c-012af06626e3