After he played Emmett on the iconic gay series Queer as Folk , Peter Paige co-created The Fosters , about a family with two moms. Now behind the camera, he reflects on how much things have changed.
Peter Paige at the Alliance for Children's Rights 22nd Annual Dinner.
Jason Merritt / Getty
It's been nearly 14 years since Showtime premiered Queer as Folk, an American take on the U.K. series about the lives of gay men in Pittsburgh. Aside from its British predecessor, there was nothing quite like it. This was a time before HBO's Looking, ABC's Modern Family, and even the relatively wholesome antics of the boys on Bravo's Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. Seeing LGBT characters on television — especially as unapologetic and explicit as Queer as Folk — was still brand new.
And Peter Paige, who played flamboyant, sometimes flighty Emmett Honeycutt on the series, is all too aware of the evolution of gay representation on TV. He was there in 2000 when Queer as Folk felt like a risky experiment, and in 2013, he co-created The Fosters with Bradley Bredeweg. The ABC Family drama centers on a lesbian couple, Stef (Teri Polo) and Lena (Sherri Saum), and their children — and while it's not the raw, sexually provocative series that Queer as Folk was, it's arguably just as subversive to heterosexual cultural norms. Here is a family that could be yours, with two moms in a loving, committed relationship.
Having existed within the world of LGBT television over the course of his nearly twenty-year career, Paige is well equipped to offer the kind of context few outsiders can comprehend. Sitting outside at a coffee shop in Burbank, not far from where The Fosters films, he did his best to put Queer as Folk's humble beginnings in perspective.
"Will and Grace was on the air, so we already sort of had that moment," Paige said. "But there's something about the comic representation of gay people that, I feel like up until that moment, they had really left out an entire part of what it is to be gay, which is that we actually had romantic and sexual lives."
Even 14 years after Queer as Folk premiered, complicated, three-dimensional queer characters on television remain too few and far between. But we can still see the effect of shows like it, as Paige notes. Behind the camera, he continues the work he's been doing since he stepped into Emmett's sizable shoes and now that television is less resistant to LGBT stories, the struggle becomes finding the right stories to tell — and not limiting characters by their sexual or gender identities.
"It's an interesting balance," the affable, yet direct Paige noted. "It's one we try to find with The Fosters. Yes, it's not about the 'being gay,' but it's also not like 'the gay' is like an asterisk. It's not like 'the gay' is a footnote. And that's certainly my human experience. My life's not about being gay — although one could argue I'm pretty professionally gay — but that's not how I experience life. Being gay is a profound part of who I am, but it isn't all of who I am."
Showtime/Everett Collection
While The Fosters tends to address the issues that queer people face obliquely, Queer as Folk tackled LGBT life head-on. It was a different approach for a different time — a social statement more befitting Showtime's salacious programming than ABC Family fare.
When Queer as Folk debuted, some worried that it was too explicit, portraying a version of gay life in which sex was always front and center. As Paige has learned throughout his years, it's largely impossible to find a happy medium that will satisfy all television viewers. But he's quick to note that the controversial and, at the time, graphic depiction of sex on Queer as Folk was just as essential to the movement as shows like The Fosters are today.
"People within the community complained that the show was too focused on sex, but I think when you actually go back and watch the show, it wasn't," Paige said, leaning forward to deliver his point. "It was focused on relationships, but we definitely kind of shoved the sex in everybody's faces a little bit to say, This is who we are. We're fully sexualized people. Deal with it. Get over it. I really think stopping that apology was where the change happened."
Although there are still strides to be made in terms of how much queer sex television is willing to give audiences, shows like True Blood and Game of Thrones are a far cry from the chastity of past LGBT sex scenes.
"I think by stopping pretending that we weren't sticking our dicks up each other's asses that we then grabbed back a whole lot of power we had been giving away," Paige continued, smiling. "I call it the shaft of the gay rights movement."
For queer people who worry that their identity is reduced to what they do in bed, too much focus on gay sex remains contentious. At the same time, there's a concern from many that TV's most popular LGBT characters — Mitch (Jesse Tyler Ferguson) and Cam (Eric Stonestreet) on Modern Family, to cite a common example — are desexualized.
But Paige believes that's relative, noting that the sex lives of the characters on Modern Family are all quite tame, especially when compared to steamy cable fare. And yet, of course, there's always room for more gay sex, particularly since television insists on pushing boundaries on other fronts.
"I wish there was a lot more sex on TV and a lot less guns and a lot less murder. I wish we were talking about learning to have… meaningful sex in our lives rather than different ways that we can kill each other," Paige said. "Sex is amazing and confounding and dynamic and awful and beautiful and it's certainly worth talking about and worth exploring and helping people figure out where and how it's powerful and useful in their lives."
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