Cast Call for Role Models

This afternoon, on Showtime, I watched Rudy. You know, the movie -- boy with more heart than talent has lifetime goal of playing on the Notre Dame football team. Rudy is an inspirational sports movie and, like most inspirational sports movies, it's bad. Like all bad inspirational sports movies, it made me cry when the hero got what I knew he was going to get before I even put down the remote control.

Here's the deal: past the sappy, you-gotta-have-heart-kid message, I found a secret agenda in Rudy. A secret gay agenda. Here are the clues: Rudy goes for his dream after his best friend, the only who really understands his dream, believes in dream, dies in a fiery accident at some kind workplace hell that involves blow torches, big steel doors, and omnipresent hard hats. His friend, before death obviously, gave him a Notre Dame letterman's jacket and Rudy wears that jacket anytime he's not in a football uniform. Now is that male love and bonding or what?

This isn't the secret code breaking Jerry Fallwell expertly did on TinkyWinky, the homosexual Teletubby. This is trying to find a model for love in a world that believes, devoutly, certain things are right and others are wrong. This secret love finding is how I got through junior high, high school.

I raced home to watch Family on TV, searching in Kristy McNichol's character, Buddy, for some clues on how to be a tomboy and still be able to survive. I read and reread Little Women trying to find the same clues in Jo. I wanted to try and figure out how to act and I had no one who said, Hey, I want the same things you want. This is how I try and live my life.

I don't think any of the writers of Family or Kristy McNichol or Louisa May Alcott were trying to put across a secret homosexual agenda. I don't think they were trying to provide for a teenager in 1980s suburban America who was desperate to know that she was not alone. I think, in the dearth of other images of affection, I looked to those that, in some fashion, I could find a portion of myself.

Today, according to published reports, things have opened up. A recent spate of articles totes the number of "openly gay and lesbian" characters on television. Watch Will and Grace or Dawson's Creek for gay characters. That way gays and lesbians can have the same problems with their role models everyone else: that they are funnier, better looking, and seem to be able to resolve their problems to their satisfaction. As proof that gays and lesbians are accorded better treatment in the media, sponsors are no longer pulling their ads as they did from the infamous puppy episdoe of Ellen.

Of course, young men are hung upside down on a fence posts and left to die in a dark and cold Wyoming night, Pride parades in large cities are hit with tear gas, teachers are kicked out of the class room, and lovers are denied health insurance and survivor's benefits because of the people they have chosen, in their lives, to love. A mother makes well-publicized comments regarding the moral safety of her daughter in tennis locker rooms -- a well-known den of lesbian conversion. Teenagers continue to end their own lives because they are unable to conceive of integrating their sexual orientation into their everyday life.

So, gay men are funny and queeny and get to kiss on television and lesbians aren't the fat, bra burning, bunch of witches they've been made out to be. But are these role models? For whom?

Buddy, on Family, was a better role model than anything I see on TV today. She was a girl trying to live her life. Without anyone's prompting, I pinned my hopes and identity on to her and tried to learn something. Isn't this what a role model is about? Not watching someone quip about their lives but watching some live it and getting something for one's own life.

Here's a novel thought: how about gay and lesbian characters that are trying to have relationships with their parents and friends and aren't always burdened by talking about their sexual orientation? But how about their sexual orientation colors the way they see their world? Isn't this what we are looking for in movies and television and in books, how people like us choose to live their lives? And aren't we also, on the way, learning how people who are different live theirs?

Rudy is a bad sports movie but, in it, I saw a way for two people to care about each other, and, because I don't see enough images of my particular brand of caring, I made a secret life for the movie's characters -- a life beyond what we got to see on the screen.

It would be nice if writers, producers, and very large corportations with extensive budgets would portray some of that private life.