When After-School Specials Go Gay
By Michael Jones | June 23, 2020
There is perhaps no greater teen nostalgia than the PSA melodrama of an “after-school special.” These powerhouse hours of television gave 70s and 80s teenagers everywhere heaping doses of anxiety, drama, and human misery.
High schools run so amuk with drugs that NARCs have to come in and pretend to be undercover students? You can catch that in High School NARC. (Starring a young Viggo Mortensen!)
Teens with parents so blown up by divorce that families are forced to live in seedy motels to get by? Oh yes, in My Dad Lives in a Downtown Hotel. (With Beau Bridges!)
Babysitters discovering that the children they watch are actually being physically beaten by their parents? We got that in Please Don’t Hit Me, Mom. (Featuring Nancy McKeon and Patty Duke!)
After-school specials are a real YouTube rabbit hole. And TV network ABC wasn’t the only one in on the game, either. Yes, they ran the eponymous Afterschool Special, but CBS also dabbled with teenage drama under the names CBS Afternoon Playhouse and, eventually, the CBS Schoolbreak Special. And that’s where our journey takes us today.
One episode of Schoolbreak is among the first after-school specials to touch on being queer. What if I told you the special starred a young Gabrielle Carteris (pre-90210 fame), an extremely young Evan Handler (nearly two decades before he married Charlotte York in Sex and the City), and Hill Street Blues actor and NCAA college football champion Ed Marinaro as a high school biology teacher who teaches students about parameceum? Now that’s a cast!
And then what if I told you that a crucial moment of the plot is the discovery of a gay porn magazine called... True Men? What if…. well, what if I just told you the title: What If I’m Gay? (Honey, if you have to ask, you definitely are…)
The Gay Agenda
Five teenagers walk out of a movie theater and into a pizza restaurant. At this point it feels very much like a Sex and the City brunch, where the most controversial opinion is that Allen (Handler) likes anchovies on his pizza and doesn’t want his friends meddling in his love life. (This feels very Miranda for someone who ends up marrying Charlotte…)
Then Allen drops a bombshell and expresses some sympathy for a pro basketball player who recently came out as gay. Hold the breadsticks, Allen must be the gay one. And sure enough the first 10 minutes all belong to Allen, who is subsequently ostracized for liking jazz and for preferring to look into a microscope than flirt with girls. (I live for the scene where Allen tells a girl named Nancy, played by Carteris, that he’s looking at fish tapeworm.)
But oh how things are about to change. Turns out Allen’s set-up is a red anchovy herring, and the real plot is going to center on Todd, the high school soccer captain. Todd looks like what John Mayer would have looked like in 1987. This is a plus; I would not kick him out of bed for eating crackers.
Allen, Todd, and a real bro named Kirk form a trio of friends who are going to take us through the rest of the movie. By 11 minutes into this special, these three are working out in Todd’s bedroom (imagine a bedroom big enough to fit a bed, a weight bench, a desk, and a closet full of homosexual skeletons). An explosive twist is about to unfurl. After some small talk about muscles, a magazine is discovered on Todd’s desk: True Men.
“This is a real fag mag, where’d you get it?” Kirk says to Todd. Kirk is almost certainly aroused repulsed.
“I bought it,” Todd says back to Kirk. “There’s a great weightlifting article in there. I mean, the only reason I kept it around is because I knew you guys would be turned on by it.”
This is the moment, dear reader, where I nearly pounded the aperol spritz I was sipping and stood up to give this Schoolbreak special a standing ovation. That is some pop trash dialogue there, the kind that sticks to your ribs like warm Cream of Wheat.
But as Allen and Kirk throw the magazine back to Todd, who says he’s going to toss it in the trash, you see in Todd’s eyes where the next 34 minutes are going to go. Is he? Isn’t he? (Spoiler alert: he is.)
Especially good
The set-up to all of this might feel slightly cliche—though likely based on many true stories that probably resonate for many LGBT folks. (FWIW, my mother also found out I was gay by finding a Playgirl magazine in my closet with Brian Austin Green on the cover!).
After Todd’s queerness is discovered via True Men, he tries to overcompensate by being a macho prick who shouts “Queer!” and “Fag!” a lot. I imagine many a closeted anti-gay politician connects with this. Is all homophobia rooted in insecurity about one’s own sexuality? *Shakes Magic 8-Ball* “All signs point to yes.”
Another plus is the importance of a loving friend or confidant. In this case, Allen, who really is the superhero of this special. No wonder Charlotte York fell in love with him years later! Allen is that high school friend who’s a nice guy but also a damn good therapist. He shares with Todd a story of his gay uncle. “I’m old enough to remember how hard it was for him to come out,” Allen says, noting that the family even tried to send him to ex-gay therapy to cure him. “It didn’t work.” (Given that ex-gay therapy, which is total garbage, is still practiced in many states today, for this to be said in 1987 does feel pretty ahead of its time.)
Let’s mancrush on Allen a bit more. Later in the special, when he’s on his first date with Nancy (Carteris), he’s having a crisis moment because he’s worried about his friend Todd. Imagine being so concerned about a friend, that you can’t even pay attention to your date with Gabrielle Carteris! Allen might be the perfect man.
Incidentally, Allen confides in Nancy about his concern for Todd, and she says: “Some of us are mature enough to know that the world is made up of different kinds of people. I’m not afraid of those differences.” Ah, Gabrielle Carteris. Always playing a mature high school student!
Especially bad
For 1987 standards this special was far ahead of its time. But that doesn’t let it off the hook entirely for catering to a bit of the, “It’s okay to be gay, as long as you’re not one of those disgusting gays” ideology.
For example, toward the end of the special Todd confides in Ed Marinaro’s biology teacher that he thinks he’s gay. “Look Todd, I'm not a therapist, I’m just a school counselor,” he says, before letting Todd know that just because he’s gay doesn’t mean he has to live a life of perversion. This is a recipe for a lifetime of vanilla sex and shame, and my only hope is that Todd finds better advice down the road (and/or sleeps with a boy who makes him see fireworks and feel electric, which with that 1987 John Mayer hair and soccer body, I’m confident he will).
There’s also a tragic lack of diversity in this film. That might have been business as usual for after-school specials in 1987, but it’s a core failure. Not one teacher, friend, pizza restaurant employee, or neighbor was a person of color?
The verdict
As far as queer storylines for teens go, What If I’m Gay? paved some history. And that’s not just because it’s one of the first after-school specials to focus on the “Gay people exist in high schools?!” tropes.
There are actually some really tender scenes in this special between Todd and his dad (Todd asks his dad if he knows any gay people, and a conversation ensues about how gay people also existed in the 1960s).
And there’s also a really direct conversation between Todd and his friend Kirk about how they fooled around as kids, which sounds like it comes out of nowhere (and it sort of does), but it also marks one of the only times I can think of where the subject of kids exploring their own sexual identities together was covered on network television—let alone an after-school special—and portrayed as something normal.
So while it may not pack the Disney charm of Love, Simon or the emotion of My So Called Life or the grade-A queer love story of Jane the Virgin, there’s a lot to like in the 45 minutes that is What If I’m Gay? (Though, really, no one could come up with a better title than that?)
Grab your own aperol spritz, think about the impact this special might have had on a gay kid who caught this at 3 p.m. on some random Tuesday afternoon during the Reagan presidency, and re-live this pop trash gem!
An unabashed 80s & 90s pop culture junkie, Michael Jones is a Brooklyn-based writer and co-host of the Pop Trash Podcast.