Hollywood: Gay marriage's best man

Marco della Cava | USA TODAY

Not long after the Supreme Court ruled in support of gay marriage Wednesday, Ellen DeGeneres tweeted a simple congratulations to "everyone. And I mean everyone." But she could have added: in Hollywood.

For while the landmark decision may have thrilled gay rights activists and vexed opponents of gay marriage, the news otherwise didn't have the thunderclap moment of court cases such as Brown v. Board of Education or Roe v. Wade.

Why? The nation's pop culture machine has for decades now chipped away at a once taboo topic so as to render it utterly familiar. Whether it's the antics of two gay men in the hit ABC comedy Modern Family or the brazen but heartfelt sexuality on display in HBO's Behind the Candelabra, same-sex unions seem – at least on screen and on stage – to be an entrenched part of our federal union.

"Storytelling is the only way to dispel myths," says Dustin Lance Black, a 2009 Oscar winner for his Milk screenplay about San Francisco gay rights advocate Harvey Milk. "Hollywood has had a rather important role in that. We are the world's storytellers."

Black says his work stands on the shoulders of pioneering TV and film moments, which for him include the inclusion of gays and lesbians in MTV's Real World reality dramas.

"They were human beings," he says. "It was a watershed moment. There was no going back at that point."

That point led inexorably to Modern Family, a sitcom whose gay characters (one played by a gay man, the other by a straight actor) feud, joke and love in ways utterly familiar to straight couples. For show co-creator Steven Levitan, the rewards have reached beyond Emmys to include testimonials of fans changing their attitudes as a result of the program.

"We've heard from many gay people, and families of gay people, that watching Modern Family has opened the door to those conversations and made parents more accepting of their gay children," says Levitan, who says that making Mitch and Cam's trials so normal "helps change minds and hearts."

Levitan lauds a few TV turning points that long preceded his show, including Will & Grace (1998-2006) and Soap (1977-1981), whose wisecracking ventriloquist, played by Billy Crystal, is widely considered to be television's first unmistakably gay character.

"People fell in love with those characters and they began to root for them," he says. "That opened a lot of people's eyes."

But for actor Harvey Fierstein, the seminal cultural shift was not when gay characters in TV or films became beloved, it was the instant they – much like a cultural Trojan Horse – slipped into our collective consciousness through a populist medium.

"There were people who thought that Will & Grace was godawful, that's fine," he says. "The psychology of television is that it's in your house, you're in your underwear. It's very intimate. So the exposure of gay people – no matter what they are – it shows them as the norm, as a normal part of life. All of those things really do add up."

Fierstein says the Tony-winning Broadway musical Kinky Boots, about a drag queen who helps a struggling shoe-factory owner, for which he wrote the book, is drawing straight, gay and transgender audiences. "Whether it's La Cage aux Folles or people watching Michael Douglas kiss Matt Damon (in Candelabra, HBO's Liberace tale), it's the familiarity, it's there in front of you. All this stuff just added up. Visibility, visibility. Let them see who we are."

It is saying something when gay and lesbian characters are glimpsed not just on screens large and small and on the stage, but also in comic books, perhaps the original form of populist entertainment.

While one might imagine the fantasy crime-fighter realm to be populated solely by straight heros and heroines, guess again, Bat-fans. In 2006, DC Comics gave Batwoman a girlfriend, and later re-introduced the Green Lantern as a gay man and offered its first transgender character in a recent issue of Batgirl.

What's more, Marvel Comics' openly gay hero Northstar married his boyfriend in Astonishing X-Men last year. While outside of the superhero genre, Archie Comics debuted its first gay character in 2010, Kevin Keller, a dashing blond Army brat who proved so popular the issue sold out. Now, he's got his own series and this August will have his first in-panel kiss.

But when it comes to the ultimate in visibility, the bigger the actors involved, the better the chances for making those big cultural bounds toward acceptance. That means star power.

Film historian Leonard Maltin says that while independent artists have for decades been pushing for broader acceptance of gays and lesbians, big strides were made when, for example, Oscar winner Tom Hanks took on the role of a gay man suffering from AIDS in 1993's Philadelphia, which co-starred Denzel Washington as his homophobic lawyer, or when Jake Gyllenhaal and the late Heath Ledger starred as gay cowboys in 2005's Brokeback Mountain.

"Philadelphia put a human face on the AIDS crisis, and Brokeback put a human face on repression and enabled people who hadn't thought about that to experience the pain and anguish that go along with that," says Maltin. "These are all milestones on a long path to complete understanding and tolerance."

Another mainstream arrow in Hollywood's tolerance quiver was Lisa Cholodenko's 2010 dysfunctional-family drama The Kids Are Alright, whose protagonists (Annette Bening and Julianne Moore) are a married lesbian couple whose decision to have children by artificial insemination brings a sperm donor played by Mark Ruffalo into the saga.

Kids was a touchstone for director Stacie Passon, whose soon-to-be-released feature film, Concussion, is about a woman in a gay marriage who hits her head and suddenly wants to escape her minivan life, surely a fear/fantasy not limited to gays and lesbians.

"We're past the stories of people coming out," says Passon. "We have now evolved so that people can see themselves in this married couple, because everyone has the seven-year itch or a midlife crisis."

She takes it as a sign of cultural progress that "people have told me that (Concussion) is not a gay movie. It's about something that all couples face when love dies. We can start focusing on the human problem rather than focusing on whether it's a gay problem."

For many artists, today's decision had its roots in their work. But for the most part, the news was too momentous to be about bragging rights.

For playwright Tony Kushner, who penned 1993's groundbreaking Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes, Wednesday was a "pinch-me-I-must-be-dreaming moment. I'm 56 years old, sitting on the couch in my apartment with my husband, watching the U.S. Supreme Court, a very conservative court, overturn this completely pernicious and homophobic law. … There's still an enormous amount of work ahead, but it's profound."

He says the theater has always felt like a place where "trickle-down really works, something that has an effect on a small number of people but can ripple outward to other forms of culture."

For Glee creator Ryan Murphy, there was simply great joy in knowing that his marriage "to my husband David will now not only be recognized by my home state of California, but federally as well, as it always should have been."

"Many have suggested that Hollywood, and particularly television, has helped move the country forward on the issue of marriage equality," he says. "If that is true, and my work played even a small part in that, I am humbled and reminded of the power of entertainment to enlighten as well as entertain."

Contributing: Elysa Garner, Bryan Alexander, Gary Levin, Brian Truitt and Donna Freydkin