It's the way you love me, baby
Here it is! My vid on the history of gay kissing on US TV. This vid premiered at Escapade 36 this past weekend, and, after a whole lot of effort and relearning skills I haven't used much since college, it's finally here for all of you.
A lot of the reasoning behind this vid came from Oz and Xena simultaneously eating my brain over the course of 2025, and my curiosity to know where their respective Big Damn Kisses fell on the list of the first same gender kisses on American television, only to discover that there isn't actually a list, as such. There are an awful lot of listicles and nostalgic Pink News articles about whatever early kisses particularly moved the writer, and with that, a sort of ahistorical mythologizing of a few famous cases, creating a narrative that then gets perpetuated unthinkingly.
'First, there was endless homophobia, then in 1991 we got the kiss on LA Law. Men weren't allowed to kiss until 2000, on Dawson's Creek, then something something Willow and Tara, then Glee, and now we have Heated Rivalry and the rest is all history.'
The reality is a bit more complicated, and comes with a lot more caveats. My vast (and yet still almost certainly not comprehensive) spreadsheet full of every gay kiss I could find lists 39 same gender kisses from 1990 to 1999, covering network, first-run syndication, basic cable, and premium cable to get a fuller picture of the ways Americans watched TV in the last decade of the twentieth century, a breath before the rise of prestige TV and streaming services fundamentally altered the landscape.
Cable channels like HBO and MTV, and later on, Showtime, led the pack by a mile in terms of sincere representation. PBS aired groundbreaking documentaries like Tongues Untied and miniseries like Tales of the City, but was always at the mercy of conservative local stations for their funding. The networks lagged noticeably, beholden as they were to controversy-shy advertisers always quick to cut their losses. For about a decade from the late 90s through the late 2000s, the Sweeps Week Lesbian Kiss was a popular, albeit exploitative way to grab cheap headlines without having to commit to real queer representation, before more widely-available queer shows (and, let's be real, easier access to titillating lesbian action online) quietly killed the trope. The vid reflects just about all of these contrasting realities and more. There are also some clips in here from episodes of television that are just about unfindable in their entirety.
The content warning at the beginning of the video was taken directly from Ellen (1994), where it aired over every episode of the show's fifth season, after Ellen Degeneres, along with her character, Ellen Morgan, had come out as a lesbian.
My hope in the coming few weeks is to set up a basic website or a wiki with the contents of my spreadsheet and any and all else I manage to dig up and verify, and make this information available to whomever wants it, to interpret however they like. If I can, it'll have a submission form option as well, in case you notice a glaring absence and would like to clue me in. This vid has been a labor of love for about half a year at this point, and has been the catalyst to get me vidding again, after a decade and change fallow period. I hope you all enjoy it.
Also, yes, there's a lot of Oz and Xena. It's my vid, you have to watch my blorbos making out.
My deepest thanks to @ferronickel for patiently putting up with literal months of bitching, crashing out, and fugly wips. <3