From Archie Bunker to ‘Ellen’ to ‘Will and Grace’: the straight eye for queer television has changed within the past 40 years.

‘The History of Gay and Lesbian Images on Television,’ a satellite teleconference broadcasted live from New York City, featured a panel of seven writers, producers and actors of television shows with lesbian or gay characters who discussed the changing portrayal, and challenges of integrating gay characters on TV in Bird Library last night.

‘I was really surprised by how much effort it took, and all the struggles (the panelists) went through to put these stories out there,’ said Brian Stout, a freshman broadcast journalism major who attended the event.

After some discussion led by the moderator, audience members from some of the 150 other schools throughout the country that tuned into the conference called into the panel with questions, ranging from minority representation to gay marriages.

The conference began with a short montage of clips from TV shows spanning from 1967 to 2004 with lesbian or gay characters, including ‘NYPD Blue,’ ‘All in the Family,’ ‘An Early Frost,’ ‘My So-Called Life,’ ‘Ellen,’ and ‘The L-Word.’

The earlier shows of the 1960s seemed more progressive than those of the 1970s, when they began to make gay characters more stereotypical and comical, said Stephen Tropiano, author of ‘The Prime Time Closet: A History of Gays and Lesbians on Television.’

‘But now we see the lives of people who are not only gay and lesbian, but also a lot of other things,’ Tropiano said.

The story lines of the earlier shows focused on a character’s admittance to friends and families that they were gay, but many of today’s shows have characters who have long accepted their identity, said Ron Cowen, executive producer and writer of ‘Queer As Folk.’

All TV viewers look for characters with whom they can identify, and for lesbian or gay viewers, seeing gay characters on screen makes them feel a sense of belonging, Cowen said.

‘These characters really do sort of validate you,’ said Eliza Kent, an SU audience member and professor at Colgate College. ‘You think, ‘Is that what I am? Could that be me?”

Two of the panelists spoke about how it felt to play a gay character and acting as a representation to so many viewers.

‘I didn’t go into it feeling a sense of responsibility,’ said Wilson Cruz, who played Rickie Vasquez on ‘My So-Called Life.’ ‘But once I was working on it I realized people were so hungry, and starving really, for some representation on screen.’

Winnie Holzman, who created and co-produced ‘My So-Called Life,’ said she did not introduce a gay character to make a statement but instead to make the show more believable and personal to high school life.

The panelists discussed the differences in what cable channels and networks would allow them to produce in their shows.

Showtime, the cable network that produces ‘Queer as Folk’ – a show set in Pittsburgh centering around the lives of gay men – approached the creators of the British version of the show and agreed to let the writers and producers do whatever they wanted, said Daniel Lipman, executive producer and writer of ‘Queer As Folk.’

But NBC made the creators of ‘An Early Frost,’ a show of the mid-1980s, tone down their scripts, prohibiting them from showing any same-sex kissing or touching.

‘What we’re dealing with now with ‘Queer As Folk’ is light years apart,’ Cowen said.

A person from Hofstra University asked when more lesbian and gay minority characters would grace the screen, and all producers agreed that shows slowly are integrating more.

‘But you can’t just pick people from column A, and then column B and put them together in this rainbow coalition,’ Holzman said. ‘Nobody wants to see that. It has to be done realistically.’

Reality shows like ‘Queer Eye for the Straight Guy’ raise the idea of being gay as a sort of performance, Tropiano said.

‘It’s really like a ‘gaydar’ game show,’ Tropiano said.

An audience member from Monmouth University raised the issue of gay marriage and sparked a discussion of the current gay rights movement.

‘We have a president that wants the Constitution rewritten to make certain individuals second-class citizens, which in fact makes us subhuman,’ Cowen said. ‘It would become unquestioned that you could beat up a fag because the president says we’re subhuman.’

Television representation of gay citizens has changed to represent the nation’s attitude towards them, and future programming will continue represent that, Holzman said.

‘TV is really this long conversation we’re having in this country, out loud and on screen,’ Holzman said.

Published on March 25, 2004 at 12:00 pm