THAT CERTAIN TV SUMMER
Who’s Buried in Grant’s Toomb? An Historic Prime-Time Character We’ve Long Forgotten, for Starters…
Swallowed up this past weekend by the gaping maw that is social-media-presented news (not to be confused with Wolf Blitzer-presented Breaking News on CNN, the network that’s re-defined the term once reserved for assassinations and earthquakes as “If I’m saying it for the first time since the last time I said it, then it’s breaking news”):
A much less incendiary but no less significant cultural event — the 48th anniversary of a summer-replacement sitcom that no one remembers.
ABC’s The Corner Bar lasted just 16 episodes over the course of its so-so two summers. Comedian Alan King produced. The premise: A guy runs a big-city neighborhood tavern “where characters from all walks of life parade through.” To say it was Cheers a decade before Cheers is to over-sell it (and to insult Cheers). Better to file it according to a different timeline: The show that arrived three years after Stonewall.
Because ABC’s The Corner Bar was the first prime-time series to feature an out gay character as part of its regular cast.
Actually, Peter Panama was more a recurring character than a regular one, especially since in the form of droopy-eyed actor Vincent Schiavelli he wasn’t exactly regular looking (which no doubt helped to define him to 1972 viewers as Other without having to get into unsettling specifics). Over the course of the show’s ten episodes in the summer of 1972, Panama never had his own storyline or even much of a focus. But three years after the Stonewall Rebellion in New Yorlk lit the fuse of the modern gay-rights movement, he was there alright. A gay guy hanging out at the bar. And on ABC’s prime-time schedule. Tell-tale neckerchief and all.
At a time where homosexual was still labeled a disorder — and one from which even a maturing TV-business was still mining laughs in the hands of straight men mincing it up with mock effeminism (emphasis on the mock) or dressing in drag (looking at you, Flip Wilson) — that hanging out at Grant’s Toomb marked an epochal shift. And if Schiavelli’s Peter Panama was both nattily dressed (of course) and flamboyant (duh) and worked as a set-designer (what else?), well then … so be it. Crawling before walking, and all that. Representation at any cost.
As daring (and criticized) as the character was for 1972, ABC didn’t exactly go out of business when Peter Panama showed up. But The Corner Bar didn’t do much of it for the network, either. Ratings and reviews were meh. It made it through the otherwise-rerun-heavy summer season and somehow got picked up for another summer-only run, but when it returned in August of 1973 it did so with a new cast. Peter Panama was no more. (And after these six episodes, neither was the show.) Still, the crawling — the representation on a regular basis — had begun.
The baby itself had been born a year earlier, when the hot-button topic of homosexuality was broached — and the presumption of it was turned on its ear — on just the fifth episode of then-experimental new sitcom All in the Family. And more crawling would come after The Corner Bar’s first season , the one that introduced Panama, when in the fall of 1972 the landmark and Emmy-winning movie-of-the-week That Certain Summer depicted TV’s first longterm adult-male relationship (however ill-fated, since, y’know, 1972).
A quadfecta of representation soon followed in early 1973: the off-handedly introduced gay brother to supporting character Phyllis Lindstrom on Mary Tyler Moore; the spotlight-stealing gay teen Lance Loud on PBS’s groundbreaking documentary An American Family; the married father tormented by his same-sex attractions in the controversial installment of Marcus Welby MD titled “The Other Martin Loring;” and the proudly swish queens lounging in Bruce Jay Friedman’s Steambath, shown on public television (or at least on the PBS stations that dared to carry it). Airing in a four-month span between January and May, each in its own way broke ground as it crawled across the prime-time landscape. Later that year, in December, homosexuality was removed from the DSM as a mental-health disorder. Just a coincidence? Maybe. But … Yay TV.
It wouldn’t be until 1977, though, that “gay regular” and “hit TV show” would be used in the same sentence. Soap, the Susan Harris parody of daytime dramas, was the hit. As played by Billy Crystal, Jodie Dallas was the gay character. Jodie was gay week after week, season after season. Not in anyone’s face about it, unless bullied, but not really hiding it either. (Admittedly, the less said the better about the character’s initial over-the-top effeminate depiction, in the show’s pilot, as well as Jodie’s marginalizing of his gay-ness in subsequent seasons.)
From there? Well, in fits and starts, including with Showtime’s unsung original sitcom Brothers in the 1980s, and depicting various shadings of happiness, TV settled back and had a gay old time in both sitcoms and dramas, even if advertisers often didn’t. thirtysomething helped. Ellen and Will & Grace did their parts in the 1990s. Representation a’plenty, however controversial. Walking now, not crawling. But in many ways it wasn’t until Modern Family in 2009, 37 years after The Corner Bar, that gay characters hit their strides — rolled up into the family unit, merely another member, sans statement. Just plain ol’ who-gives-a-shit dads, however quirky. (Oh, like the straight fathers in that sitcom were so normal.)
So there it is: June 21, an Historic Date on the alphabet-rich LGBTQ calendar. The date in 1972 when, opposite CBS’s The Melba Moore-Clifton Davis Show and immediately preceding The Marty Feldman Comedy Machine (it was SO the 70s), a gay character bellied up to the bar of television and said, “I’m here; serve me beer; get used to it.”
He appeared in quite a few popular films, but for most moviegoers Vincent Schiavelli will always be the subway spirit who bullies Patrick Swayze in Ghost (1990). He was just 57 when he died in 2005.
Photos: ABC, TV Guide, batman.fandom.com
