“Kind of a Drag… “: Gender-Bending in Early 1970s American Sitcoms and Comedy Programs (with special focus on NBC’s The Flip Wilson Show, ABC’s The Odd Couple and CBS’s M*A*S*H)

International audienceAmerican television comedies, be they in the traditional sitcom format or more recent comedy-drama hybrids, have always been, to some degree, a mirror of the dominant cultural and social issues of their times, in spite of the fact that they are and have generally been viewed as light-hearted escapism. One of the most striking features of today’s television landscape in the United States is without a doubt the more open treatment and greatly increased visibility of a broad spectrum of LGBT characters and issues on primetime network and cable programming, a phenomenon that has risen in crescendo in recent years and has thus mirrored the American public’s growing acceptance of LGBT lifestyles and hot-button issues such as marriage equality or same-sex adoption. This current wave of transition perhaps started with Ellen DeGeneres coming out as a lesbian on the April 30, 1997, episode of her popular sitcom Ellen (ABC, 1994-98), followed by NBC’s sitcom Will & Grace (1998-2006) the following year, the situational humor of which was based on the madcap antics that ensue when a gay lawyer, Will Truman (Eric McCormack), begins sharing his New York apartment with his straight best friend, Grace Adler (Debra Messing). Showtime would then go far beyond this initially somewhat cliché representation of homosexual dating and lifestyles with two hard-hitting and sexually explicit dramas: Queer as Folk (2000-2005) and The L-Word (2004-2009). In the past five years or so, however, new and vastly popular comedies have brought other LGBT issues into American living rooms and thereby into broader acceptance, such as same-sex adoption through Modern Family’s endearing characters Mitchel (Jesse Tyler Ferguson) and Cameron (Eric Stonestreet) (ABC, 2009-present), or teenage homosexuality and bisexuality through the musical sitcom Glee (Fox, 2009-2015). Similarly, specifically transgender issues, which seemed to first make their mark through over-the-top ‘drag-queen make-over’ reality shows of the likes of RuPaul’s Drag Race (Logo, 2009-present) or Laverne Cox’s TRANSform ME (VH1, 2010), are now given more complex and mature treatment on current sitcoms, including the aforementioned Glee, which introduced its transsexual character Unique to the main cast in 2012, or comedy-dramas such as Netflix’s Orange is the New Black (2013-present), with Laverne Cox playing the transsexual inmate Sophia Burset with as much complexity as the rest of the cast of incarcerated homosexual, bisexual and heterosexual characters. Most recently, Amazon Prime has given us its award-winning Transparent (2014-present), which movingly deals with Mort, a middle-aged father played by Jeffrey Tambor, who is coming out to his adult children as female-identifying Maura—a premise that was strikingly mirrored just a few months later on reality television and in the news media when Bruce Jenner, former Olympic star and member of the Kardashian reality-show family, came out to journalist Barbara Walters as transgender. However, as recent as this remarkable trend of increased awareness and acceptance of transgender and broader LGBT issues may be, it should be seen as the strongest but only the most recent wave of gender-bending and of treatment of LGBT issues and lifestyles on American sitcoms, and when one looks for a period in which hard-hitting and once-uncomfortable social issues penetrated American living rooms through the Trojan horse of situation comedy, the 1970s would seem like the ideal period to which to turn one’s attention. The early 1970s are well-known as a key transition period in American television, notably for sitcoms, a shift for which CBS seemed to lead the charge through its ‘rural purge of 1971’, in which harmless and politically correct sitcoms appealing to an older, more conservative and generally rural audience were suddenly dropped in exchange for what was termed “relevance programming”—comedies that took on the most controversial issues of the day head-on, that openly mocked conservative prejudices, and that appealed to a younger and more urban demographic, all helping to reshape America’s identity and heretofore decidedly traditionalist values. Programming spearheaded by the likes of Neil Simon, Mary Tyler Moore, Gene Reynolds and most of all Norman Lear would indeed drastically change the face of the American sitcom, going from the comparatively bland, conformist and conservative fare of the 1960s to programs that focused on controversial issues like divorce, diversity, racism, feminism, anti-war protest, anti-establishment sentiment and scores of other topics. To what extent were gender-bending and budding LGBT issues a part of this new cultural revolution? Were LGBT issues at all a part of this surprisingly new landscape