Michael Lewis MacLennan Канадский драматург, был исполнительным продюсером и сценаристом шоу со 2 по 5 сезон.
Его интервью журналу
GayCalgary® Magazine, March 2009, page 38
Looking back at Queer as Folk
Producer & Writer Reflects on Influential Gay Show
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Interview by Jason Clevett
(From GayCalgary® Magazine, March 2009, page 38)
From 2000 to 2005, the GLBT community and a lot of straight women were glued to their TV sets to watch the groundbreaking series Queer as Folk. Always thought provoking, at times controversial, and definitely revolutionary, at this point it is still too soon to know its long-term impact.
Canadian playwright Michael Lewis MacLennan was an executive producer and writer on the show from season 2 to its final fifth season. MacLennan recently chatted with GayCalgary and Edmonton Magazine to promote his play The Good Egg as part of the Enbridge playRites Festival that ran last month. In addition to QAF, he has been involved in Godiva’s, jPod, and Being Erica. He took some time to talk about his uniquely queer TV experience.
“They actually fired all of the writers off the first season so it was a whole new crop who were totally terrified and wondering if you were going to make it,” he recalled.
As a gay writer, he has always included gay characters in his shows - The Good Egg is his first to not include one. We asked how he has found, over the progression of his career, the acceptance of gay characters, shows and people, from the general public.
”I think there are two sides to that answer. There is a tremendous curiosity and appetite for that world. Queer as Folk was the number one rated show on Showtime in the United States. You aren’t anybody’s top rated show if you have a fraction of gay people watching it. In fact gay audiences were the hardest on the show. People enjoyed it and wanted to watch it. Women really responded to those characters without getting too wrapped up in them, and emotionally identifying with the woman getting treated badly by the man. It was a response to good storytelling. The first year was more about, oh my god look what we are seeing on television. But that isn’t going to keep people coming back week after week. It was about getting involved with the characters. It did wonders to create tolerance.”
The other side of the answer is the gay community itself, which gave the show a lot of flack.
“I can’t tell you how many people said things like, why do you have to show gay people in bath houses? Even though it was the first gay show that showed people adopting children, going back to school, getting justice against violence, overcoming addiction, using wealth to do good there would always be the, why do you have to show the guy having sex. I was like, guess what, you go to the bath houses. I know you do. They would reply, yeah I do but I don’t want people knowing that. There was this sense of, represent us but only do it using certain parameters. It was a TV show. Whose life is like Gossip Girl? Shows like that are way less realistic than Queer as Folk. Life is not a TV show, if your or my life was on TV I don’t think it would run for five years. “
What is acceptable for television and mainstream film has certainly come a long way, but not as quickly as one would expect, MacLennan says.
“I think that on the one hand it is getting accepted into modern popular culture. I find it is hard to point to a trend and see beyond exceptions to the rule. Whenever I have pitched things that aren’t even as gay as Queer as Folk, artistic directors at theatre companies tend to blanche at them. It is sort of like the Brokeback phenomenon. After that came out everyone expected a rise in gay movies, but we haven’t seen a big Hollywood gay film again until Milk. It is always seen as these strange exceptions to the rule but the rule never seems to change.”
He speaks from experience as a gay playwright, whose work contained gay themes and characters.
”I have been a widely produced playwright so I am not saying this out of sour grapes. But I have been told that a lot of my plays would be more widely programmed if they didn’t have so much gay content. So that was one of the challenges I gave myself with The Good Egg, to write about things I was passionate about and were socially relevant and also a lot of fun, and to do it in a way that doesn’t have any explicitly gay characters in it.”
Over the course of the five years, the show and its characters matured.
“If you look at that first year, the things they were doing were baser kinds of issues, there was more of a reveling of, look how much we can scandalize our viewership. When we got to places like being in a relationship where you are negative and they are positive, or fostering a child, changing a career, divorce…sometimes it wasn’t specifically gay issues. The characters themselves were growing up. I think that the show, for those that stuck with it, really allowed the characters to evolve. The exploration of the issues got more out there.”
The final season was one in which, in addition to the characters’ growth, much of the show was very political. MacLennan remembers the first meeting with the other writers to plan out the show.
“This was when Bush was at the height of his evilness. We were a room largely of Americans and we were really despairing what was going on in the world. I said, we have the opportunity right now to talk about things going on politically in the world and within the gay community and exposing a lot of hypocrisy. Nobody is stopping us so why don’t we be fearless? That last season we really went for it in terms of some of the issues that we explored and the discussions that we brought up. You are never going to see that on any show in terms of how frankly political we were. It exists as a bit of a time capsule in a way, at looking at that period of gay history. I don’t think it is dated yet but I think there will be a time when people will look at the show and go, wow there was a time when it was an issue to adopt? Those things will very soon be taken for granted.’
What is startling in retrospect about the final season is that much of it focused on a battle against “Proposition 14” a fictitious threat to outlaw gay marriage, adoption and civil rights. This was mirrored in several states in the 2008 election, most publicly with Proposition 8 in California.
“There was that hypocrisy within the political thing where people knew this would get votes. Even if they didn’t believe in the issues themselves they knew it was politically expedient to throw the queers under the train.”
Time will tell what impact Queer as Folk will have, on the gay rights movement, popular culture, acceptance, and even other television shows.
“We were the first show to have a gay marriage, to show gay adoption, to talk about the whole arrangement with Brian, Melanie and Lindsay. Now, what show doesn’t have someone being a sperm donor? At the time those things had never been done before. It is too bad that Queer as Folk doesn’t get a little more credit for it. When it first came out it got a bit of a critical drubbing and the gays were hard on the show. So far no one is really judging it well but I do think it will play an important role.”
“For me it is something that I am most proud of in my career. It taught me a great deal about not only being a writer but being a citizen and how you create something that is entertaining and compelling but also has some degree of social purpose. Ultimately it is a TV show and people have to enjoy themselves – good songs, hot bodies, juicy storylines – but within that there’s ways of really tackling some of the other issues.“
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