If you’re noticing your TV screen turning pink, it’s not just your imagination. 

The new broadcast TV season includes 22 series featuring a total of 35 openly gay characters, according to the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD).  GLAAD, which rides herd over all Hollywood scripts dealing with homosexuality, says the number of series with homosexual characters is a record.  These series are on ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox and the CW networks.  The total figure does not include shows on cable, like The L Word on Showtime, or MTV’s all-gay LOGO network. 

A new Eye on Culture report from the Culture and Media Institute, “Lavender Propaganda,” reveals the depth and breadth of the current media campaign to promote homosexuality to average Americans.  But Hollywood became a uniformly pro-gay industry well before Will & Grace or the slew of 2008-9 network shows.

In 1996, the year before Ellen DeGeneres “came out” as a lesbian on Ellen, Los Angeles magazine writer David Ehrenstein boasted in a May cover story, “More than Friends”:

“There are openly gay writers on almost every major prime-time situation comedy you can think of … In short, when it comes to sitcoms, gays rule.”

Here is an excerpt from my book The Age of Consent: The Rise of Relativism and the Corruption of Popular Culture about the gay influence on TV:

“Ehrenstein, a professed homosexual, cheerfully admits that gay writers are attempting to influence viewers with a homosexual agenda:

‘The gay and lesbian writers of today have been pushing the envelope any chance they get. In fact, they’re encouraged to do so. Since current comedies are positively obsessed with the intimate sex lives of straight young singles, who better to write them than members of a minority famed for its sexual candor … as a result of the influx of gay writers, even the most heterosexual of sitcoms often possess that most elusive of undertones – the “gay sensibility”—‘Frasier’ being a case in point.’

“The ‘gay sensibility consists, according to two homosexual writers, of ‘a very urban, very educated, ironic, detached, iconoclastic attitude.’ Plus, a deliberate overdose of sexuality.” 

In her 1989 book Target: Primetime: Advocacy Groups and the Struggle over Entertainment Television, Kathryn Montgomery explains why homosexual activists have been particularly effective in Hollywood:

“Gays had one important advantage over other groups. They referred to it as their ‘agents in place.’ According to gay activists, there were a substantial number of gay people working in the television industry who were not open about their life-style. Some held high-level positions. While unable to promote the gay cause on the inside, they could be very helpful to advocates on the outside, especially by leaking information. These ‘agents in place’ became one of the linchpins of gay media strategy.”

In January 1973, Ron Gold, the New York-based Gay Activist Alliance’s Media Director,  wrote to all three networks, requesting meetings. Gold, who had been a reporter for Variety, also helped stage a hostile confrontation at ABC that was strikingly similar to the strong-arm tactics employed at the American Psychiatric Association convention in 1971, when gay activists openly threatened psychiatrists who viewed homosexuality as a treatable disorder. 

As Montgomery reports:

“Before a meeting had been scheduled with ABC, GAA members were smuggled a script by one of their agents in place. It was for an upcoming episode of Marcus Welby, M.D., entitled ‘The Other Martin Loring’ and it concerned a married man who asked Dr. Welby to help him with his homosexual tendencies. Welby assured the man that as long as he suppressed his homosexual desires, he would not fail as a husband and father. Continued...