My Unexpected Life in the Mainstream

"You're only saying that because you're a radical Jewish lesbian and I'm a male Catholic priest."

—Bill Cain, executive producer, debating a story point with me at a script meeting for the ABC show Nothing Sacred

In my first career, I was a broke lesbian feminist filmmaker who spent twelve years making a feature film about my grandmother and death, starring a cardboard cutout. I wasn't aimed like a laser for a career in network television.

It happened by accident.

I'd gone to the Sundance Writer's Lab with an indie script I'd written after Grandma and the cutouts. Set in 1959, it interwove stories of clandestine gay life in bars raided by the police, transgressive female sexual desire leading to the terrified search for a safe, illegal abortion, and Nikita Khruschev at the U.N. At Sundance, I met fellow writer Jason Katims. A year later, he created (with Ed Zwick and Marshall Herskovitz of thirtysomething fame) a TV show called Relativity. He asked me to write for it.

Here are some guaranteed true stories from my unexpected journey into the mainstream. At first, I didn't know all its customs.

During my second week of employment on a network TV show, I casually mentioned my age in a conversation with one of the actresses on the show. The look of shock and embarrassment on her face told me everything. Apparently I was older than she thought I was. And I was clearly older than I ought to be and not lie about it. I had committed a faux pas. I had used the wrong fork at the dinner party; I thought the finger bowl was the soup. Out of kindness, we'd never mention it again. (I was forty.) And we never did. This was nine years ago—so that makes me, let's see, four years older—but I no longer worry about age.

The creator of the show American Dreams, set in the early sixties, was amused to find a parade of writers confiding their real ages to him in their interview as a leg-up for getting the job. Truth is, these days in drama TV, no one much cares about age. Age bias is a much bigger factor in network sitcoms–-and we know how well those are doing.

I'm glad this is going into a scholarly journal because there's a common omission in the historical record on lesbian kisses on network TV—a footnote to history, I know, but not to my life.

The first lesbian kiss featuring a lesbian character on network TV in primetime was actually broadcast on ABC eight months before the earth-shattering coming-out episode of Ellen. It was on a one-season show created by Jason Katims called Relativity. I wrote it.

Lisa Edelstein, an actress who appeared in the Fox drama House, played the out but unlucky-in-love lesbian sister of one of the two leads in Relativity. In the historic episode, she falls in love and exchanges a steamy kiss with another woman while on a date in an earthquake simulator at a local museum. The stage direction in the script said, "They kiss," followed by a line of dialogue, then: "They kiss again."

We got the following note from the network Standards and Practices Department on the production script: "On page 56, eliminate the line, 'They kiss again.'"

Kissing again would have meant they liked it, I guess. Okay, change happens in small steps. On the set, we shot it so we'd have options. Instead of locking lips twice, they nuzzled one another's necks. It worked for me.

The delivery of the episode to the network was a bit out of the ordinary. It had to be delivered directly into the hands of the executive in charge—no messenger service, no mailroom. I have no idea what the rationale for that was, but treating our little story like a state secret made it just that much more exciting.

There was a bit of tense negotiating over the mechanics and length of...