LOGO’s new animated series, Rick & Steve: the Happiest Gay Couple in All the World, is as un-PC, crude, and hilarious as expected from the trailers.
Why, oh why, then, did they have to resort to the oldest gag in the “portrayals of LGBT parenting in television” handbook (a slim volume, to be sure, but including Season Three of The L Word and If These Walls Could Talk 2), lesbians in search of sperm?
I can ignore the technical inaccuracies, like the sperm being poured around in goblets. These are plastic posable dolls, after all, not subjects on The Learning Channel. It’s just that finding sperm in the first place is the least of it. The drama comes when it doesn’t work the first time, or the tenth, or when you happen to be traveling when ovulating, or when you’re donating an egg to your partner and have to leave a business dinner and shoot up hormones in the bathroom to release your eggs at the exact right moment. (Yes, I did this. Hypodermic and a bubble-wrapped glass vial in my briefcase.) And why doesn’t anybody ever do an episode about LGBT parents trying to adopt, or gay men searching for a surrogate? I suppose “sperm” is an inherently funnier concept than “adoption” or “surrogacy.” (Try saying each word five times fast, and see which one makes you laugh.) But really, show a little imagination!
To their credit, the writers do give us some never-before-seen twists in the search for semen, such as Kirsten’s “date” with a gay man, in which she poses as another gay man in order to retrieve a sample. (I won’t spoil it for you by telling you whether this works.) Based on some of the images on the Rick & Steve Web site, too, not all goes as planned even after they do the insemination. As Karman Kregloe notes at After Ellen, however, the show’s “spirit of irreverence is more successful in the gay men’s story lines than in the lesbians’ story lines.”
Still, the show promises to be one of the only new fictional depictions of LGBT parenting on television. (Reruns of Queer as Folk don’t count.) Although I found myself thinking “I can’t believe they said that” throughout most of the first episode, I think it’s a good sign that we as a community have gained enough strength to laugh at ourselves this way.
I’ll be tuning in again on Tuesday to see what happens next.
Back in 1999 when I first wrote the script, it wasn’t quite a cliche yet. Honestly, I’m so happy we’ve come so far that now lesbians having a child on TV is considered a “cliche,” when back then it was “inappropriate.” Even so, I decided to keep with the same storyline for the first episode because I still wanted set up the family that will be the center of the show for (hopefully) seasons to come. We plan to have many, many adventures in intricacies of parenting. And don’t worry, it don’t take the first time =) Thank you for writing about the show!
PS lesbian irreverence is coming, direct order from my sister. I just didn’t want to have BOTH couples falling apart in the first episode and still trying to have a baby.
Thanks, Allan! I’m flattered you wrote back yourself. Just to clarify, it wasn’t so much the lesbians having children that I thought was a cliche–it was the “wacky antics as they search for sperm” part. Please understand, though, that I’m thrilled to see another positive portrayal of LGBT families on TV, and suspect your show could in its own way be the most realistic depiction to date. (What’s up with those L Word moms, anyway? Don’t they ever get mashed Cheerios on their clothes like everyone else?)
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