“Right now we are in the Golden Age of queer TV,” says retired television executive Nicholas Belperio, who is teaching a course on the subject at the University of Cincinnati.
A few years ago, Belperio returned to Cincinnati from Los Angeles, after a successful career in television in Los Angeles, where he worked in various capacities in the profession as a writer, producer and senior vice president of marketing. An adjunct professor at UC, he is currently teaching a class there titled “Queer TV.”
The class traces the history and evolution of queer representation across all genres of television.
Belperio is drawing from his background in television to approach this class in a similar way to show writers developing stories for TV shows. Tracing the history and evolution of queer representation across all television, he has created a story arc for his class that begins in current times with the celebratory tomes, affirmations and positive imaging.
He uses all genres of television to document the progression of how queers have been portrayed through the decades.
The first two weeks of class showcase queer TV and representation for the past five years. Belperio then takes his class back to what he refers to as the “Dark Ages”, the early days of television, when queer characters were either portrayed as being sick or some type of a threat, or there was crisis in finding out someone was gay–or being gay was a joke. Sometimes, the characters were a combination of all of the above.
Belperio finds it extremely gratifying to see how shocked his students are by the early portrayals of queers on TV. Nick credits Norman Lear with driving the change to more positive portrayals of queer characters and story lines. Lear’s shows–including All in The Family, The Jeffersons and Maude–tackled subjects like race, class sexuality, inequality and politics and added human dimension to queer representation.
When asked what his motivation for the class is as well as his hopes for the students that take iti, Belperio said: “I think it’s important to document how we have arrived at the incredible place we are now where we have documentaries and series based on queer characters. I thought it would be great to trace how we got here.”
“For example, one of my classes focused on how television dealt with HIV. Television dealt with HIV in a way the government did not for years. I showed them clips of The Real World: San Francisco, Designing Women and The Golden Girls that were literally educating the public about what HIV was and wasn’t. After that class, a student came up to me and said in high school they had learned about HIV but not AIDS. That tells me why this class is so important. It challenges assumptions. “
The class has become much more than Belperio first envisioned.
“I initially thought this would be a version of another class I teach about sitcoms, and I could just insert queer content,” he said. “What it is or has become is a queer history of the United States told through television. It was not my aim in developing and teaching this class to be political, but with the real threats that are happening with our community right now, It feels political and a form of resistance.”
Nicholas emphasized that he wanted to present this course not only from a historical perspective but also from a human perspective, so his students could also see not just the pathologies they’ve heard about but also the joys of living a queer existence. He quoted a contemporary out comic, Hannah Gadsby, who was responding to a comment that laughter is the best medicine for queer folx.
Gadsby said: “Laughter is not our medicine. Stories hold our cure. Laughter is just the honey that sweetens the bitter medicine”.
Nicholas has found another way to tell our stories. 🔥
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- The course will be offered spring semester at the University of Cincinnati beginning in January. To learn more or to enroll, click here.