The following is an excerpt from the new book The Rainbow Age of Television: An Opinionated History of TV by Shayna Maci Warner, out today through Abrams Press. The book is celebration of the LGBTQ+ shows, their characters, and their creators that define television–from the very first televised queer kiss (we think) to the shows that are making household names and heroes of queer characters today.
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Unsurprisingly, our first dive into despicable but fascinating queer characters on television begins with premium cable dipping its toe into original programming. Two original HBO series produced two mesmeric gay male characters—Oz’s Chris Keller (Christopher Meloni) and The Wire’s Omar Little (Michael K. Williams)—who were incredibly good at being bad. Impulsive, intelligent, and at times without mercy, Chris and Omar were two fully realized, sometimes (often, in Chris’s case) reprehensible queer characters who still serve as references for originality in layered villainy.
For HBO’s very first hour-long narrative drama in 1997, playwright and St. Elsewhere and Homicide: Life on the Street (1993–1999) writer/ producer Tom Fontana swung big. Joined by Homicide executive producer Barry Levinson, Fontana aimed to push past the events of the familiar police procedural by introducing a steel-and-concrete world in which men were utterly dehumanized, authority was both grossly inept and corrupt, and anyone could die a grisly death at any time.
This was Oz, short for the fictional Oswald State Correctional Facility, where Fontana sequestered his tortured gangs of philosophizing inmates in an experimental über-Panopticon nicknamed Emerald City. Guided by paralyzed inmate Augustus Hill’s (Harold Perrineau) fourth wall-breaking narrations, Oz paired meditations on faith, power, and love with brutal rapes, race wars, casual murders, medical horrors, and a twisted gay romance of operatic proportions.
Tobias Beecher (Lee Tergesen) enters Oz as the audience’s everyman: a deeply regretful lawyer sentenced to fifteen years for drunkenly hitting and killing a nine-year-old girl with his car. Meek and melancholy, he quickly becomes a target of violent physical and emotional abuse and forms a lifelong nemesis in the terrifying neo-Nazi leader Vern Schillinger (J. K. Simmons).
By the end of the first season, Beecher loses his mind and his passivity, vowing revenge on Schillinger. The two continue to torture each other throughout the series, whittling down extremities, family members, and hope in a years-long battle. One of the more sadistic long games that Schillinger devises in season 2 introduces a new inmate to Oz: Chris Keller.
Explosively violent, mercurial, and charming, Keller is tasked with seducing, and then destroying, Beecher, which he does handily. Unfortunately for Keller and Schillinger, Keller also genuinely falls for his target, though not soon enough to keep Beecher’s limbs intact.
Keller and Beecher’s romance is often passionate, dangerous, and tumultuous, with Keller pulling the rug out from under Beecher (and almost any other character he takes a passing interest in) on multiple occasions. As the quadruple-married-and-divorced Keller, Meloni is a simmering pot of poison, switching loyalties with barely a warning blink. He’s a self-hating serial murderer of other queer men and a chronic, intentional heartbreaker who enjoys playing with his food; but somehow he manages to find genuine tender moments with Beecher, and in his ultimate betrayal, he would rather give up his own life than that of the man he loves. In an ensemble of standout characters, Keller dominates the screen and remains an original, memorable deviation from one-off queer villains and long-running straight placations alike.
Calling Oz positive queer representation is kind of laughable. The series is infrequently positive about any group of people, and only a few individuals really find redemption. Despite the obvious corruption and authoritarian abuse inmates suffered, in Fontana’s imagining of a prison system (which he wasn’t initially invested in abolishing), everyone was guilty of something, and it didn’t really matter what the initial crime was.
Given the violent, oppressive pressure cooker they were thrown into, the inmates would continually return to their guilty ways or find new ways to fall apart. This was certainly a boon for character building, but it also jostled uncomfortably with the many deeply political sentiments the characters espoused, particularly Kareem Saïd (Eamonn Walker), a Muslim leader and “political prisoner” whose fight to free Black men from all forms of carceral violence often found itself invalidated by his own selfishness.
Other forms of violence were crucial to Fontana, who believed the main issue with violence on television was that it was too sanitized and therefore inured an audience to its actual consequences—a framework that some critics bought and some viewed as a thin excuse for sensationalism.
The series depicts sex in particular at its most destructive and non-consensual, humiliating, dangerous, and deceptive, but the many queer recurring and background characters, including out gay and unspecified trans or gender-nonconforming inmates, were not portrayed as either moral or immoral for engaging in consensual sex. Where Oz’s Aryan gangs used anal sex, sodomy, and male gang rape as tools of torture, unexpected queer love and the “gay gang” of Emerald City found their ways to survive, die, and murder with the rest of them.
Oz, with its body count upward of fifty characters by the end of the series, piled Shakespearean tragedy on top of tragedy, shivving, poisoning, and burning its characters as agonizingly as possible. Everything, as Fontana told writer Elon Green in 2015, was done in order to “keep the audience off balance” and consistently overturn expectations of good and evil in an unjust world.
Because queer people were a given in Fontana’s world, and character was more interesting to the writers than total accuracy or political soundness, they were also able to join the rest of the Oz’s ranks as some of the most fascinating and unmanageable characters on television at that time. Oz also, arguably, laid out the red carpet for premium cable’s embrace of antiheroes altogether.
Though Oz was less critically and commercially venerated than The Sopranos or The Wire (and with good reason—Oz’s theatricality and commitment to hyperrealism sometimes overwhelmed its plot), both later shows certainly took pages from the urtext of HBO dramas. The Sopranos improved on the cartoonishness of Oz’s Italian American crime syndicates (and poached Oz cast member Edie Falco) to create one of the most well-regarded dramas of all time, which in its fifth season began laying the groundwork for a gay Mafia member’s subplot.
From 2004 to 2006, made man and longtime ensemble member Vito Spatafore (Joe Gannascoli) embarked on his own complicated journey, beginning with a blow job at a construction site and ending with a brutal murder and rape that was fashioned after the ends of real Mafia gays. What was perhaps most interesting about his character was not his surprise fellatio, or his frequenting of leather bars, but the fact that he simply could not work up the desire for a normal, monotonous nine- to-five and the unperturbed gay love life it guaranteed. Vito couldn’t fathom existence outside the family or his true self (a blackmailer and organized assassin), even if it meant his certain end.
The creators of The Wire were more explicit in naming Oz’s influence. David Simon, a former police reporter whose book was the basis for Homicide: Life on the Street (1993–1999), noted that Oz was ultimately what pushed him to forego Homicide’s home network of NBC and take The Wire to HBO instead. Aiming to expose the layers of corruption and devastation wrought by the ongoing, so-called War on Drugs, The Wire treated addicts and dealers, Nixon’s and subsequent presidents’ public enemies, as full, complicated people with sometimes impressive interiority.
With excellent performances from a sprawling ensemble cast (many of whom also appeared on Oz), The Wire boasted a host of memorable, difficult characters who broke with expectation. None is more synonymous with the show’s desired subversion than Omar Little, a gay, shotgun-toting, drug kingpin–robbing stickup man whose whistle was enough of a warning to send the neighborhood running.
Omar wasn’t the only queer character on The Wire, nor was he the only long-running, entrenched, and complex antagonist. On the other side of the law, Baltimore Police Department detective Kima Greggs (Sonja Sohn) is openly lesbian and less proudly devolving into workaholism, much to the chagrin of her girlfriend.
Beginning in the third season, Snoop (Felicia Pearson) is a new recruit-turned-cold-assassin and trusted member of one of Baltimore’s warring gangs, whose sexuality is casually acknowledged and has no bearing on her far more enthralling (and repulsive) string of murders. All are fascinating, and Omar is rightfully remembered as a standout of the series and a breakthrough for depictions of queer men of color on the small screen.
The Wire made a splash with Omar’s deeply devoted relationships to other Black queer men and queer men of color, three years before the premiere of Noah’s Arc, Patrik-Ian Polk’s far lighter Designing Women– and Sex and the City–inspired fare that put queer Black men in conversation, community, and romantic relationships with one another. Where Oz made physical relationships between Black men violent and purely attributed to sociopathy or prison power plays, Omar is driven by a strict moral code, impeccable survival instincts, and love for his “beautiful boy.” That love is subject to particularly malicious external violence, with Omar’s first onscreen love, Brandon (Michael Kevin Darnall), withstanding torture and choosing death before giving up any information about Omar’s whereabouts.
Brandon’s murder sets Omar on a course for vengeance, which takes an at-first puzzling turn toward Omar becoming a confidential informant for the Baltimore PD. It’s here that the audience gets a taste of Omar beyond his robberies. Performer Michael K. Williams’s unblinking, unnerving stare and smooth delivery makes for one of the most terrifying presences in a show full of very real threats.
However, when he’s put on the stand to testify against members of the gang who killed Brandon, audiences are treated to Omar’s unexpected charisma, stinging wit, and ability to calmly push anyone toward utter frustration and madness simply by finding their weaknesses and needling them with a butter-wouldn’t-melt smile. Though fearsome with a shotgun (in later seasons, his reputation for bloodshed so precedes him that he can’t even go out on an errand for the Honey Nut Cheerios his lover finished without being treated like he’s on the warpath), the series displays early on that Omar is often the smartest in the room.
Omar would go through several lovers throughout the series, many of whom are targeted by gang leaders in ways both common to The Wire’s world and distinctly homophobic (many characters are put off by Omar’s “faggotry”). Omar is rarely shown to have any sort of compunction about his sexuality, instead flaunting any aspect of himself that might throw his enemies off balance.
Williams initially had reservations about his role, but when he realized Omar was a distinctly non-stereotypical portrayal of a gay man, the actor reportedly fought for more physical intimacy for his character. According to Williams’s memoir, he and scene partner Darnall improvised their first unscripted kisses, pushing the script’s tentative treatment of queer Black men’s physicality and sexuality to a tangible onscreen space. Thanks to Williams, Omar and his sexuality were real, which would have crumbled if the script continued to balk at the idea of showing queer male intimacy.
Omar is a multidimensional, interesting, cruel, smart, handsome, and complicated antagonist who in many ways set a precedent for queer antiheroes and antagonists to participate in really nasty, violent exploits—and not because they were tortured by their own sexuality like in previous iterations.
Echoes of Chris Keller and Omar Little can still be heard across the more successful contemporary iterations of television’s queer villains. These characters are driven, cunning, and, unlike the heterophobic killers before them, are not flatly motivated by their hate for their own queerness or the unfairly lucky, unbothered straight people around them—though that may still be a part of their lore. Like Chris and Omar, they play entirely by their own rules and often are motivated by their fierce, borderline-obsessive love. Above all, whether chilling, charming, chaotic, or a combination of all three, they are enrapturing, often pro- viding their actors with delightful material and a dedicated fan base.
If we continue to embrace the category of villain, queers can really do anything! We can be sardonic, lawless, sexually fluid vengeful vampires willing to upend tenuous social contracts to avenge a staked lover, or similarly warped blood drainers trapping our soulmates for all eternity (True Blood, 2008–2014; American Horror Story, 2011–).
Straight-up murder is still an option, too—as long as it’s creative and done in the name of the greatest love story ever told (Jane the Virgin, 2014–2019; Killing Eve, 2018–2022; Harley Quinn, 2019–) or if the murderee really deserved it (Chucky, 2021–). Of course, if the pursuit of traditional romance is less your speed, there’s always the option to fatally abandon your partner in order to fulfill your true destiny as a Chechen crime magnate (Barry, 2018–2023) or callously betray everyone you’ve ever claimed to love in the name of assuming political power in ancient Rome (Spartacus, 2010– 2013).
Or if something as simple but effective as bullying insufferable theater kids (Glee, 2009–2015) is just a little too pedestrian for your tastes, you can always opt for trading in your morality to become a homophobic talk show host or an off-kilter brainwashing, kidnapping mastermind or the leader of a suicidal free-love zombie cult—maybe even on the same show (Search Party, 2016–2022). Or maybe you’re just misunderstood and continue to have really bad, gruesome days at work—you can’t help it if you’re the boss (Shrill, 2019–2021; Ratched, 2020).
The preceding are only a few of the explicitly queer villains in the Rainbow Age whose f*ckery has disarmed and decapitated the affability of assimilationist queer characters who came before, but they aren’t the only archetype to complicate the rise of the friendly neighborhood television gay. Thanks again to premium cable, all-out villainy wasn’t the only avenue a queer character had to take in order to expand past the constraints of self-censoring cleanliness. Sometimes, a queer just has to dip their toe somewhere between moral perfection and murder to get a little bit messy.
Excerpt from the new book The Rainbow Age of Television: An Opinionated History of TV by Shayna Maci Warner published by Abrams Press ©2024.
