"The Outrage" is a 1974 episode of Marcus Welby, M.D., a long-running American medical drama on ABC. The episode tells the story of a teenage boy who is raped by his male teacher. The episode, which originally aired October 8, 1974, sparked controversy and anger for its equation of homosexuality to pedophilia. "The Outrage" was targeted for protests by LGBT rights groups and several network affiliates refused to broadcast it.
When teenager Ted Blakely's mother Marian finds blood on his sheets, she takes him to Dr. Welby. An examination of the boy's injuries confirms that he was sexually assaulted, but Ted is too ashamed to admit it. As Dr. Welby advises Marian, Ted sneaks away and returns to school. Ted's rapist, his science teacher Bill Swanson, convinces him not to report the assault, but Ted vows to kill him should Swanson ever touch him again. Ted's father George and stepmother Leah are unable to deal with Ted's assault. His father questions whether Ted could have stopped it, making Ted feel even more ashamed.
In addition to suffering psychological trauma, Ted needs surgery to repair the internal injuries caused by the rape. With Ted in surgery, Swanson is arrested while trying to molest a child. Ted awakens and is able to admit that the assault happened and that he is ready to speak out. Dr. Welby tells him that Swanson is in custody and, per his own request, has been transferred to a mental hospital. Police sergeant Buchanan reassures George that the rape had nothing to do with homosexuality and that Ted has handled himself like "a real man".[1]
Marcus Welby had been the target once before of gay protests. In 1973, the series featured an episode called "The Other Martin Loring". Loring, a middle-aged man, suffered from high blood pressure, diabetes, and alcoholism as a result of repressing his homosexuality. Dr. Welby is most concerned about the last and advises Loring that if he battles his sexual impulses he will not only enjoy improved health but will earn his son's respect. In response to this portrayal of homosexuality as an illness, the Gay Activists Alliance (GAA) organized a zap of ABC, with 30–40 members invading ABC's New York City headquarters and occupying the offices of ABC president Elton Rule and board chairman Leonard Goldenson. ABC made a few minor edits in response.[2]
Production and controversy
David Victor, creator of Marcus Welby, approached ABC in early 1974 with statistics compiled by the Los Angeles Police Department detailing the extent of child molestation. ABC gave him the go-ahead to order a script, which was written by Eugene Price.[3][4] ABC sent the preliminary script for "The Outrage" to Ronald Gold, media director for the newly formed National Gay Task Force (NGTF), in July 1974. Gold had been involved with the GAA's actions against "The Other Martin Loring". Gold advised ABC's Standards and Practices department that the script, which conflated homosexuality with pedophilia, effeminacy, and the rape of children, was unacceptable in its present form. ABC ignored NGTF's request not to proceed. When Gold learned that the episode was in production, he brought in Loretta Lotman, head of the Boston-area gay media activist group Gay Media Action, to organize a nationwide grassroots campaign while he continued trying to work with ABC.[5]
In response to the groups' concerns, ABC made some script changes. It removed some—but not all—references to Ted's "manhood" being violated by the assault.[3][4] It also inserted a speech from the police officer: "There's nothing homosexual about this. It's a case of violent child molestation...[the typical offender is] a guy with severe mental and emotional problems. He's often married, middle-aged, with a crummy marriage, a crummier sex life or both....Technically, we call him a pedophile, a child molestor."[6] The network believed that its changes addressed the problems with the episode and contended that the episode was about pedophilia and not homosexuality. Richard Gitter of the network's Standards and Practices department defended the episode's social value, saying that "the importance of the script is to present to the public the problems of coping with such a tragic situation by the young assaulted victim. Not only is the physical damage to be repaired, but the mental damage involved in facing the assailant after the attack, reporting the incident to his family and authorities, pursuing prosecution through the judicial system and the return to emotional stability in facing his peers and his friends."[7] In response to protest letters ABC sent a form letter claiming that gay leaders had approved the revised script, a claim that activists charged was false.[8] The National Association of Broadcasters, a trade organization that maintained commercial and program guidelines for member broadcasters, approved the episode.[9] Activists across the country remained concerned, especially since the episode's anticipated October broadcast date placed it close to several votes in state and local legislatures that would have extended anti-discrimination laws to cover sexual orientation. "We feel the program will definitely have a chilling effect on legislation which would protect gays from discrimination in employment and housing," stated NGTF executive director Bruce Voeller.[10]
With ABC remaining unresponsive, NGTF and other activists began targeting advertisers and affiliates. Forging alliances with the American Federation of Teachers, the AFL-CIO, and the American Psychiatric Association, the coalition was successful in dissuading 17 ABC affiliates, including those in Boston and Philadelphia, from running the episode.[11] This was the first known instance of network affiliates refusing a network episode in response to protests.[12] Demonstrations were held on the day of the broadcast outside stations in Dallas,[13]San Francisco,[14]Madison, Chicago, Denver, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., and in small towns in Ohio, Iowa, Mississippi, Texas, and Idaho.[12] The Washington, D.C., affiliate ran disclaimers before and after "The Outrage" to clarify that homosexuality did not equal pedophilia. Several sponsors, including Bayer, Gallo Wine, Listerine, Ralston-Purina,[10]Colgate-Palmolive, Shell Oil, Lipton, American Home Products, Breck, Sterling Drug, and Gillette, refused to advertise during the episode. Lower ratings and reduced ad sales translated into a good deal of lost revenue for ABC and, following another successful protest (against NBC, centered on "Flowers of Evil", a Police Woman episode about a trio of killer lesbians), the network decided not to rerun "The Outrage" (NBC also withdrew "Flowers of Evil" from its rerun schedule).[15]
Critical response
"The Outrage" and its attendant protests raised serious questions in the minds of critics. John J. O'Connor, writing for The New York Times, sympathized with the concerns of the demonstrators but asked, "At what point does the understandable anxiety of homosexual groups become censorship or prior restraint?"[3][4] Critic Frank Swertlow for United Press International, while recognizing the right of gay groups to object to the episode, echoed these concerns, asking, "In an era when pressure groups are demanding changes on TV, at what point does a group have the right to try to censor a show because it offends them? At what point should the program be dropped because of the pressure? And at what point should a network, given the sensitivity of the subject, sanitize or avoid a controversial topic because it offends a minority?" Ultimately Swertlow supported the right of the network to air the episode, saying that it deals with concepts that are "facts of life, and it is time we faced them openly".[16] Each critic suggested that Marcus Welby was not the proper venue for a serious discussion of male-on-male rape, pedophilia, or child molestation. O'Connor contended that ABC made a mistake trying to "force" the subject into the "rigid format" of the Welby program.[3][4] Swertlow was harsher, suggesting that Welby was the wrong format for any subject with "intellectual merit" and dismissed the premise of the episode as "exploitative trash".[16] Each believed that a documentary special or made-for-television film would have been a better forum, with O'Connor citing the recent Linda Blair vehicle Born Innocent as an example.[3][4]
Regarding the quality of the episode, response was largely negative. O'Connor called the script and the production "dreadful".[3][4] Swertlow was again harsher, saying the episode was about "a sensitive subject wrapped in a can of garbage [that] has been raised to a level it does not deserve".[16] Writing for the Associated Press, critic Jay Sharbutt dismissed the ending as a "cop-out" filled with "the usual kindly Welby blather". Calling the episode "poorly written and awkwardly acted", he sums up the episode as, while not "tasteless, offensive or sensationalized...a show you can afford to miss, unless you're really curious or a hard-core blather fan".[9]
1 2 3 Swertlow, Frank S. (1974-10-08). "Controversial Welby show to air here". The Ames (IA) Daily Tribune. United Press International. p.12.
Related Research Articles
Jesse William Dirkhising, also known as Jesse Yates, was an American teenager from Prairie Grove, Arkansas. He was staying with two men who bound, drugged, tortured, and repeatedly raped him. He died from drugging and positional asphyxia during the ordeal.
Marcus Welby, M.D. is an American medical drama television series that aired on ABC from September 23, 1969, to July 29, 1976. It starred Robert Young as the title character, a family practitioner with a kind bedside manner, who made house calls and was on a first-name basis with many of his patients; James Brolin as his partner Steven Kiley, a younger doctor; and Elena Verdugo as Consuelo Lopez, Welby and Kiley's dedicated and loving nurse and office manager.
That Certain Summer is a 1972 American made-for-television drama film directed by Lamont Johnson. The teleplay by Richard Levinson and William Link was considered the first sympathetic depiction of gay people on American television. Produced by Universal Television, it was broadcast as an ABC Movie of the Week on November 1, 1972, and received a number of television awards and nominations. The movie was also recognized as being the first network drama to depict a stable, same-sex couple; the first to depict a gay parent; and the first gay themed show to win an Emmy, with Scott Jacoby winning for his performance. A novelization of the film written by Burton Wohl was published by Bantam Books.
The North American Man/Boy Love Association (NAMBLA) is a pedophilia and pederasty advocacy organization in the United States. It works to abolish age-of-consent laws criminalizing adult sexual involvement with minors and campaigns for the release of men who have been jailed for sexual contacts with minors that did not involve what it considers coercion.
"The Homosexuals" is a 1967 episode of the documentary television series CBS Reports. The hour-long broadcast featured a discussion of a number of topics related to homosexuality and homosexuals. Mike Wallace anchored the episode, which aired on March 7, 1967. Although this was the first network documentary dealing with the topic of homosexuality, it was not the first televised in the United States. That was The Rejected, produced and aired in 1961 on KQED, a public television station in San Francisco.
"Steve Burdick" is an episode of the 1990 NBC television series Lifestories, an anthology drama that each week followed a new set of characters dealing with a medical issue. The episode revolves around Burdick, a gay television newsman with AIDS. When his lover dies of the disease, Burdick reveals his own diagnosis on the air to the displeasure of his station manager. The episode was loosely based on Paul Wynne, a newscaster out of San Francisco who died of AIDS in 1990.
The "lesbian kiss episode" is a subgenre of the media portrayal of lesbianism in American television media, created in the 1990s. Beginning in February 1991 with a kiss on the American L.A. Law series' episode "He's a Crowd" between C.J. Lamb and Abby Perkins, David E. Kelley, who wrote the episode in question, went on to use the trope in at least two of his other shows. Subsequent television series included an episode in which a seemingly heterosexual female character engages in a kiss with a possibly lesbian or bisexual character. In most instances, the potential of a relationship between the women does not survive past the episode and the lesbian or suspected lesbian never appears again.
The debate on the causes of clerical child abuse is a major aspect of the academic literature surrounding Catholic sex abuse cases.
A zap is a form of political direct action that came into use in the 1970s in the United States. Popularized by the early gay liberation group Gay Activists Alliance, a zap was a raucous public demonstration designed to embarrass a public figure or celebrity while calling the attention of both gays and straights to issues of gay rights.
"The Other Martin Loring" is a 1973 episode of Marcus Welby, M.D., an American medical drama that aired on ABC. It tells the story of a middle-aged man facing several health issues, which seem to stem from his repression of his homosexuality. The episode aired on February 20, 1973, and was met with concern and protests from LGBT rights activists for its equating of homosexuality and illness.
"After It Happened" is a 1988 episode of the NBC television series Midnight Caller. The controversial episode tells the story of a bisexual man who is deliberately infecting people with HIV, including series lead character Jack Killian's ex-girlfriend. Activists for HIV/AIDS awareness and LGBT rights disrupted filming, citing concerns over the negative portrayal of bisexual and HIV-positive people and fears that the show would make people with AIDS the targets of violence. Series executives made some changes to the script in response to these concerns, but activists were still displeased.
"Flowers of Evil" is a 1974 episode of the American police procedural television series Police Woman. The episode features Sgt. Suzanne "Pepper" Anderson going undercover at a nursing home to investigate a murder. She uncovers a trio of lesbians who are robbing and murdering their elderly residents. The episode, the eighth of the first season, originally aired on November 8, 1974.
Jodie Dallas is a fictional character from the 1977 American sitcom Soap. He was played by Billy Crystal. The son of central character Mary Campbell, Jodie works as a television commercial director. Jodie was among the first gay characters on American television. Despite being gay, Jodie fathered a child through a one-night stand, and many of his storylines throughout the series centered on his involvement with women. Jodie had relationships with two other women but maintained throughout the series that he was still gay. The series ended with Jodie, as the result of hypnotherapy, believing he was an elderly Jewish man.
"The Boys in the Bar" is the sixteenth episode of the first season of the American situation comedy television series Cheers. It originally aired on January 27, 1983, on NBC in the continental U.S.) and on February 10, 1983 in Alaska. It is co-written by Ken Levine and David Isaacs and directed by James Burrows. This episode's narrative deals with homosexuality, coming out, and homophobia. It was inspired by the coming out story of former Los Angeles Dodgers baseball player, Glenn Burke. In this episode, Sam's former teammate, Tom—portrayed by Alan Autry—reveals his homosexuality and Sam slowly becomes supportive of him. The bar's regular customers express their disdain toward Sam's support and fear that because of Sam's support of Tom, the bar will become a place full of homosexuals. The episode's Nielsen ratings at its initial airing were low but improved after subsequent airings on NBC. This episode has received more attention since.
In the 1990s, more LGBTQ characters began to be depicted in animated series than in any of the years before. The depiction of LGBTQ characters changed significantly compared to previous decades. Some of the most prominent Western animated series during this decade which featured LGBTQ characters were South Park, King of the Hill, Futurama, and The Ambiguously Gay Duo. The representation in 1990s series would also influence series in the 2000s.
References
Alwood, Edward (1998). Straight News: Gays, Lesbians and the News Media. Columbia University Press. ISBN0-231-08437-4.
Capsuto, Steven (2000). Alternate Channels: The Uncensored Story of Gay and Lesbian Images on Radio and Television. Ballantine Books. ISBN0-345-41243-5.
Tropiano, Stephen (2002). The Prime Time Closet: A History of Gays and Lesbians on TV. New York: Applause Theatre and Cinema Books. ISBN1-55783-557-8.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
