Q on the tube: Closet case

Salvatore Romano is a closet case. Bryan Batt is not.

The actor who plays the married but wildly on the down-low art director on AMC’s critically acclaimed “Mad Men” is openly and proudly gay. Batt’s character, however, typifies not just the lives of 1960s gay men, but many gay characters being portrayed on the tube today.

A full 40 years after Stonewall, coming out is still an issue in real life, but it’s even more problematic on TV, reflecting the conflict writers on both network and cable often have between wanting to portray gay men and lesbians realistically and facing producers’ queries about potential audience response. Too much “gay” might chase away straight audiences. Or at least that’s the prevailing attitude.

“Mad Men” has walked an intriguing if sometimes fine line with regard to Romano’s sexuality since the show began in 2007. Since its third season started a few weeks ago, “Mad Men” has put Romano’s storyline on the front-burner. In the premiere episode, Romano has a sexual encounter while he and Don Draper, head of the Sterling Cooper creative team, are on a business trip to Baltimore. The two are staying in a hotel — and Draper, himself having a sexual encounter with a woman — discovers Romano in bed with a hotel employee when a fire alarm forces everyone out of their rooms. Neither man acknowledges the event.

Like many gay men then and now, Romano is married. Batt had asked “Mad Men” creator Matthew Weiner to have Romano marry in season two, because that was the reality for gay men of that era: marriage to a woman to hide their gayness.

As “Mad Men” has evolved, the characters at Sterling Cooper have been revealed with all their personal, sexual and creative conflicts. The roles of women and queers in the most competitive business of the 1960s have been highlighted — as has the manner in which straight men treated both. Advertising was where creativity met corporate in the 1960s. But it was also where the past often refused to make way for the future, particularly when it came to women and queers.

The shifting mores of the period are reflected at Sterling Cooper. Birth control had just been legalized. Openly gay people were beginning to declare themselves in the workplace.

But the reactions among the straight men whose world this was were not welcoming. Women are still viewed as secretary and bed material only, not as possible peers. Gay men, regardless of talent or acumen, are the objects of ridicule. Last season, Romano stood silently as the team disparaged a newly hired advertising executive, Kurt, who had declared he was gay.

Looking over the upcoming fall premieres, the number of gay male characters is few. Some peripheral characters return in prime-time offerings like “Desperate Housewives” and “Brothers & Sisters” and TNT’s “Raising the Bar” retains its gay male attorney, Charlie. The new mockumentary “Modern Family” has a gay-male couple as part of its ensemble.

TV clearly has an easier time depicting bisexual female characters than gay men. Where “Mad Men” differs from other series is in evolving Romano’s character and his feelings for other men, and his internal war with what’s “normal” for his colleagues and what feels normal for him.

In 2009, the closet is still only slightly more open for gay-male characters on TV than it was in “Mad Men’s” era, when Don Murray starred as the closeted gay man in Otto Preminger’s film “Advise and Consent.” And Salvatore Romano is a character who isn’t in a time warp at all, but one who still represents a significant number of gay men in America today.

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Victoria A. Brownworth is a Pulitzer Prize-nominated award-winning journalist whose work has appeared in The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Baltimore Sun, DAME, The Advocate, Bay Area Reporter and Curve among other publications. She was among the OUT 100 and is the author and editor of more than 20 books, including the Lambda Award-winning Coming Out of Cancer: Writings from the Lesbian Cancer Epidemic and Ordinary Mayhem: A Novel, and the award-winning From Where They Sit: Black Writers Write Black Youth and Too Queer: Essays from a Radical Life.