Dear TV Diary,
It never occurred to me until last night that TV stands for televison and transvestite. There was Archie Bunker giving mouth-to-mouth to a cross dresser whom he (naturally) mistook for a woman. Unlike the de-sexualized drag of Milton Berle or Redd Fox, the queer text here was anything but sub-. Archie: "This freak took my breath under an assumed sex." Meathead: "The majority of transvestites are heterosexuals." Loved the good-liberal uplift, but who chose the Betty Ford drag? Paul Lynde?

Dear TV Diary,
When I came out in the seventies, the only queer TV I noticed was Monty Python's men in tights and/or frumpy wigs. (Phil Donahue travelled a slightly higher road then.) Less has changed than we think: Just turned off a smirking David Letterman who grilled Mariel Hemingway about her infamous smack-on-the-lips with Roseanne. "How could they have come up with that? A married woman?" Mariel invoked her 1982 film role as a lesbian athlete in Personal Best to point out that in the real (sex) world anything goes. I vainly hoped that Dave would ask how lesbians actually do it.

Dear TV Diary,
When was the moment when queers got to represent themselves? (Note: Find out and get big-bucks book-contract for The Cathode Closet.) Must have been AIDS and mid-eighties' hunger for independently produced (cheap) product. Emmy award-winning Before Stonewall was first aired on PBS in 1986 and, presumably, every June since. This year's press release calls it "part of public television's continuing effort to provide universally available programs that reflect the diversity of American life." I call it a history primer for queers in training.

Dear TV Diary,
May have to give up sleeping. Between Stonewall 25 and public television's queer docu-fest, my VCR and I are worn out. Especially enjoyed the POV-presentation of Francine Rzeznik's and Teodoro Maniaci's One Nation Under God and Peter Friedman's Fighting In Southwest Louisiana. The first is a disturbing look at the Hitlerian "ex-gay" or "change" ministry, two of whose male and married founders--get this--fell in love with one another. The second portrays Danny Cooper, an HIV+ salt-of-the-earth who delivers mail and shatters stereotypes. But neither compared with Blanche Weisen Cooke's taped, New York Public Library lecture about Eleanor Roosevelt and her queer circle. Dressed in tux-drag, BWC elegantly embodied subversion and erudition.

The folks at public television sure don't cotton up to queer fiction, do they? (Note: Give up fantasy about taping My Beautiful Laundrette and Taxi Zum Klo from broadcast.) Too bad PBS caved in to Rev Donald "bash a queer, make a buck" Wildmon re. a sequel to Tales of the City. But what can you expect from new PBS pres Ervin Duggan, former Bush appointee to the FCC and National Association of Evangelicals darling? Heard that Showtime is going to do Tales II. Will the corporate role in securing queer civil rights be greater than the judicial one? (Note: Consider removing "Gay Rights: A Movement Not A Market" button from my biker jacket.)

Dear TV Diary,
Hooray for the generation gap! MTV's The Real World is An American Family for a youthful audience and older voyeurs. MTV transported seven tremulous twenty-somethings (a first live away from home for some) to an opulent San Francisco Victorian. The one-of-everything, bomber crews of World War II-flicks have become todays's multi-culti casts. With queers. The first guy to appear was a cute, gay Cubano from Miami named Pedro, who turned out to be HIV+. The first woman was Cory, who's so sensitive that she asked Pedro whether he left a girlfriend--or boyfriend--for MTV's summer in paradise.