June, as we all know, is Dairy Month. Or maybe you didn’t know that. But you certainly know it is Gay Pride Month, which never occurs in the Bay Area without numerous commemorations and celebrations, some of them outrageous, some of them somber. In recent days, we got examples of two ways that non-gay people can play a role in Pride — one of them negative, one of them positive.
On June 12, at the San Francisco Giants’ game, a handful of players expressed their disagreement about the game’s designation as Pride Night by either writing Bible verses on their special rainbow-colored caps or declining to wear the hat altogether. Major League Baseball (MLB) got upset at the players, many gay fans got upset at the players, and the U.S. Department of Justice got upset with MLB, which is unlikely to bring clarity or calm.
Some calm came from two of the people who were there at Pride night. My friend Michelle Meow and her wife, Tookta, renewed their vows on the field. If the name Michelle Meow sounds familiar, that’s because she produces and hosts a weekly eponymous TV show on KPIX+, hosted the SF Pride telecast for years, and hosts numerous programs at Commonwealth Club World Affairs. She and Tookta (a celebrity in her own right, as a professional Thai singer) were married a decade earlier, but this was an opportunity for a public celebration.
In the days following the players’ actions (or inactions, as the cap-case were), Michelle issued a statement, saying “While the 4 players’ actions were deeply disappointing, I’m not going to let that take away from the impact Pride night had for me and my family. If I could sit down and share this story, I would hope that they see, you can be Christian and loving. Professional athletes should have more than Bible scriptures to believe in, they should also have moral values that teach our future generation love and acceptance.”
What made the Giants’ actions cross the line from heartfelt expression into simple jerkiness is that they hid behind Christianity.
Frankly, I don’t have a problem with players refusing to wear special theme hats; if they really dislike homosexuality, then they have a right to not appear to celebrate it, just as your employer shouldn’t force you to wear a hat extolling the virtues of Charlie Kirk or any Los Angeles sports franchise.
But what made the actions of the Giants players go over the line from heartfelt expression into simple jerkiness is that they hid behind Christianity to explain their actions. As a gay man and a Christian, I’m fine with them citing Bible verses on their uniforms, as long as the verses quote Jesus on homosexuality. (Spoiler alert: Jesus never said anything about homosexuality, which you’d expect he might have found some time to complain about if it’s as bad as the naysayers insist.)
And they don’t get to claim Christianity as their own private religion. It’s shared by about 2.5 billion people around the world. Including me. Including Tookta, who is not only a believer but is the daughter of pastors who love and support her.
A better example of a straight man wading into the gay world was brought to mind this past week with the death of James Burrows. His name is definitely familiar to you if you watched situation comedies over the past 50 years. He helped create Cheers and directed almost every episode of that classic series; in fact, he directed more than 1,000 TV episodes overall, including every single episode of the groundbreaking sitcom Will & Grace.
He loved the show when he was brought in to be the resident director. In 2022, when Michelle and I interviewed him, he told us “It was a situation comedy that happened to have two gay characters, and I knew that would turn off 25 percent of the country. But I thought if it was so funny, I thought if I could get people just to watch maybe 10 minutes of a show they’ll see how funny it is and they’ll hook into it.”
He said he and the show’s writers never tried to proselytize on the show. “Again, it was a sitcom that happened to have two gay characters. Occasionally we did a show about conversion therapy, or a show where Will got so upset with Jack he called him a fag — so it was the relationship with two boys, how they dealt with it. But it was never a proselytizing show, and we never set out to change the world. We like to say Ellen opened the door and we came through and busted it wide open.
“I didn’t know how much of an effect that show had until, on Thursdays, which was the night that Will & Grace was on, I would drive carpool for my 13-year-old daughter. I would pick up three other kids and we’d be on their way to school, and invariably one of the kids would say to me, ‘What’s on Will & Grace tonight?’ And I knew that this show was being watched by kids before they had a precondition of gay people.”
Burrows took great pride — there’s that word — in 2012 when Vice President Joe Biden said, “Will & Grace probably did more to educate the American public than almost anything anybody’s ever done so far.… People fear that which is different. Now they’re beginning to understand.”
“I was shocked and incredibly flattered that came out, because we never set out to do that,” Burrows told us. “We set out to do a funny show. We like to say we did a fairy tale, literally and figuratively. We did a show with jokes that broke the television screen; the laughs were so big by four characters; you could have never done those jokes on other shows.”
Following its initial 1998–2006 hit run on NBC, Will & Grace returned for a three-season encore 2017–20, with James Burrows again helming each episode. Things had changed, for the characters and in the wider society. “When we first started the show, gay rights wasn’t where it is now; it’s come a long way now,” he said. “So we were dealing with different things back then. There were a lot of people who weren’t aware of it, so by dint of the show, people became more aware of it. With the reboot, it didn’t do as well because the agenda isn’t the same; gay people are more accepted now. It was equally as funny in the second incarnation as it was in the first incarnation, and I think the stories were better because it was stories about older people, especially older gay people, Will and Jack, and the loneliness maybe and what’s involved with that. It probably wouldn’t work if we rebooted it again, because it doesn’t carry the same cache that it had back when we originally started.”
Maybe Will and Jack attend a Giants game?
Anyway, the Giants lost that game 5 to 1 to the Chicago Cubs, and Burrows is remembered as a legend.
