Norman Lear, TV pioneer and LGBTQ+ ally, dies at age 101

TV pioneer and LGBTQ+ ally Norman Lear died Tuesday at the age of 101. In addition to creating groundbreaking sitcoms that tackled social issues — like All in the Family, The Jeffersons, Good Times, Maude, and One Day at a Time — Lear blazed trails when it came to TV depictions of LGBTQ+ people.

The first out gay character on American television is widely considered to have appeared in a February 1971 episode of All in the Family. Co-written by Lear and airing just five episodes into the show’s first season, “Judging Books by Covers” saw irascible bigot Archie Bunker (Caroll O’Connor) stunned to learn that an old friend and former football player is gay. As Matthew Gilbert wrote for the Boston Globe in 2021, the episode “fought against the gay stereotypes” prevalent at the time.

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The show also introduced the character Beverly LaSalle, a drag queen played by real drag performer Lori Shannon, in its sixth season. The character went on to make several appearances on the show before being killed in an anti-queer attack in 1977, devastating Archie’s wife Edith (Jean Stapleton).

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“Suddenly, a character clearly identified as queer was no longer the butt of a joke, but a human being whose life mattered, and whose senseless and violent death left a hole in the [life] of someone who loved them,” The Los Angeles Blade critic John Paul King wrote of the two-part Season 8 Christmas episode.

Another Lear-created series, the short-lived Hot l Baltimore, is credited for introducing the first gay couple on American network TV. What’s more, George and Gordon (played by Lee Bergere and Henry Calvert) were not just guest stars or recurring characters, but were series regulars. The series, which only ran for a single 13-episode season in 1975, “was one of the first to depict a gay couple not as a comedic punchline, but as legitimate human beings,” Alex Huffman wrote for CBR earlier this year.

Lear achieved another first in the 1977 soap opera spoof All That Glitters by featuring TV’s first transgender character, model Linda Murkland (Dallas’s Linda Gray). Though played by a cisgender actress, Gray told Fab magazine in 1999 that Lear arranged for her to meet with a real trans woman both to prepare for the role and during production.

Lear’s social justice advocacy extended beyond his work in TV. In 1980, he founded the non-profit People for the American Way to champion liberal causes in opposition to conservative organizations like the Moral Majority. The foundation has published several editions of its Hostile Climate: Report on Anti-Gay Activity over the years.

Among the many awards he received throughout his life, Lear was honored with Equality California’s Ally Leadership award in 2020, and with the Pioneer Award at the 2014 GLAAD Media Awards.

Reflecting on the impact his shows had on LGBTQ+ rights in a 2015 interview with Variety, following the Supreme Court’s decision establishing the constitutional right to marriage equality, Lear was humble.

“Do I think All in the Family changed things or made a big difference? I would be some kind of fool to think my little half-hours did something more,” he said. “But the show called attention to what people were thinking; it got the conversation rolling.”

“You can’t have a fair culture without understanding the Bill of Rights, the Constitution, the First Amendment — they’re there to protect everyone,” he continued. “Can two people of the same sex buy a wedding cake or appear on that wedding cake? It’s about equal opportunity under the law and making sure nobody is better off under the law than the next fella. If you take that seriously, there is only one way to answer those questions: What is fair here?”

At the time of his death, Lear had been developing new LGBTQ+-centric projects. Last year, Amazon’s Freevee gave the green light to Clean Slate, a sitcom starring Laverne Cox about a man who discovers that his adult child is transgender. And in May of this year, Netflix ordered 10 episodes of The Corps, a dramedy about a bullied gay high school student who joins the Marines in the 1990s during the era of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.”