Dayton Daily News from Dayton, Ohio • 28

3 DAYTON DAILY NEWS Apr. 7. 1986 'My Two Loves' takes lesbianism one step further la TOM HOPKINS TELEVISION EDITOR 1 Three years ago, NBC found out the hard way how a large segment of America feels about female homosexuality. The network broadcast a four-hour mini-series based on the Judith Krantz novel Princess Daisy, with Merete Van Kamp as a woman who conquered the orld of commercial advertising. "There was a single lesbian encounter in the book and it was very graphic," recalls Ralph Daniels, NBC's vice president of standards.

"When we were developing the movie we said, 'Well, we don't need that it has no relevance to the main It would have been exploitive." No matter. The mere fact that NBC was planning a teleplay based on the book elicited by Daniels' estimation 300,000 letters of complaint to the network and its parent, RCA. Daniels speculates that backers of conservative minister Donald Wildmon and other conservative religious groups organized the letter-writing campaign without even seeing the film. Now ABC will explore female bisex-uality in My Two Loves, a two-hour movie to be broadcast tonight (at 9 on Channel 2). Mariette Hartley plays a recently widowed woman whose life is torn asunder when she has an affair with a co-worker played by Lynn Redgrave.

There is no explicit bedroom love-making, but in one tense scene Hartley's mother is devastated when she pain that she goes to a therapist. By the end of the film she is practically a basket case. It's the old TV cop-out: You can defuse the potential public outcry by making the homosexual look somehow "sick." "That serves a dual role," Wurtzel argues. "She goes to a therapist because she ultimately does not know who she is and needs help, but it works dramatically to give some information and perspective about the issue. "Our concern was twofold: We wanted to make sure that it was factually accurate with regard to the psychological and emotional ramifications, and we didn't want to take a position on lesbianism.

We didn't want to endorse it or condemn it. The mother (Sada Thompson) is aghast when she learns her daughter is having a lesbian relationship, and this articulates the feeling of many people in the audience that this is not an acceptable lifestyle." For authentication, ABC went to a' psychiatrist and a social worker at Yale University as well as Dr. Marvin Heller, the network's longtime psychiatric consultant. Unfortunately, My Two Loves seems content just to spend two hours talking about female bisexuality. The script is so simplistic that it resembles a primer on lesbianism, in the same way that the 1972 TV movie That Certain Summer (with Martin Sheen and Hal Holbrook as lovers) became the prototypical treatise on male homosexuality.

My Two Loves won't be television's first foray into lesbianism. In 1978, ABC broadcast A Question of Love, focusing on a child custody battle, with little public response. In 1983, the soap opera All My Children broke another taboo when Dr. Lynn Carson (actress Donna Pescow) became the first mature, reasonably well-adjusted woman to choose a homosexual lifestyle on a daytime drama. Male homosexuality has been explored in TV dramas from That Certain Summer to Consenting Adult to An Early Frost to St.

Elsewhere to Dynasty, not to mention sitcoms like Love, Sidney and Brothers, but lesbianism is still a topic that makes network moguls nervous and historically has brought out the stupidity in some of them. A 1974 episode of Police Woman was typical: It focused on three lesbians who ran a home for the elderly, where they quietly went about the business of ripping off and, in some instances, murdering them. After the National Gay Task Force complained, NBC deleted several references to the villains being lesbians. This resulted in a farce in which one mussed-hair "butch" type wandered through the story looking inexplicably like a refugee from Mars. Progress is slow.

Two weeks ago, Hill Street Blues added a homosexual policewoman who promptly was accused of trying to have sex with a prostitute. The show handled the topic with Lynn Redgrave (L), Mariette Hartley star in ABC movie walks in on the two lovers kissing. "Homosexuality is not a common topic on television, and it's a sensitive topic that requires very careful handling," says Alan Wurtzel, ABC's vice president of broadcast standards and practices. "We recognize that it's a lifestyle that's not necessarily endorsed or accepted by certain members of the public. But, Wurtzel says, My Two Loves is "not just about lesbianism.

It's about a woman's search for sexual identity. She's a recently widowed woman with a teen-age daughter, and she gets a job and becomes involved with a woman who's a homosexual. Basically, it's a story of her trying to figure out who she is. She ultimately recognizes that people have manipulated her and she has to begin taking on responsibility for herself." Gay organizations may be disturbed by the script's bottom line: Hartley's bisexuality nearly destroys her. The lesbian affair causes her so much almost painful restraint but did manage to confirm again for all us red-blooded Americans that, of course, female ho-, mosexuality is something awful.

April 20 when Lynn Redgrave's sister Vanessa portrays tennis player Renee Richards (nee Richard Raskin) in the CBS movie Second Serve. The important thing to remember, Daniels notes, is that you must not shock viewers by putting homosexuals in a program where they don't expect them. A program like Hill Street or St. Elsewhere can depict a homosexual relationship because "the general viewer-ship of that show is used to being on the cutting edge." Put a homosexual in Highway to Heaven and you may have a riot on your hands. Last season a gay female doctor moved in with Annie Cavanero (Cynthia Sikes) on St.

Elsewhere. The only thing that prevented them from engaging in sex for several episodes was a hassle between the producers and Sikes, who refused to go along with it. And an older lesbian couple was featured on Kate Allie. Transsexuality becomes TV fodder TONIGHT'S TV MOVIES a Ii IM i tj v7v7 (1 i1 nn lkt1j Lx LkyL-1 BOWSED Now Republic gives vou a free ticket to more places in less time than any other airline. Guttenberg, Bubba Smith.

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