“Suzanne, I don’t know what you’ve heard, but gay people are not out to convert the
rest of the world.
I’m just your friend.
Do you understand what I’m saying?”
“Yes, you don’t find me attractive!”
When we think about gay characters on sitcoms, we usually picture people in big Northern
cities.
But season four of Designing Women features an unusual southern and conservative take
on having queer friends.
And it also set the stage for Ellen’s coming out episode, just a few years later.
“Oh Susanne, loosen up.
It’s the ‘90s!”
“Well, it’s not the gay ‘90s!”
All aboard and welcome to Matt Baume’s culture cruise, where we take a deep dive on LGBT
themes on TV, in movies, in books, games, and more.
This time we’re looking at “Suzanne Goes Looking for a Friend,” a 1990 episode of
Designing Women that marks a halfway point on TV between gay characters as crisis and
gay characters as stars.
Culture Cruise is made possible by the folks who pledge a dollar or more a month on Patreon
-- folks like Michael Cole-Schwartz -- thanks Michael!
There’s rewards for backers, head over to Patreon.com/mattbaume or click the link in
the description to join the folks who make Culture Cruise possible.
The episode starts with a little foreshadowing of the gender expectations to come:
“You can’t fight chromosomes.
Little boys like little boy things, little girls like little girl things.”
This is a pretty reductive way to think about boys and girls, and Mesach Taylor espoused
a very different attitude a few years earlier in the movie Mannequin:
“Two things I love to do is fight and kiss boys!
Come on!
… This is what being a man is all about, honey!
Oh yeah!”
Anyway, Susanne has a problem: she has an extra ticket to the theater and needs to bring
a friend, but since none of the main characters are available, that leaves her with … nobody.
“I don’t have any other girlfriends, you three are it”
Susanne, it seems, simply never learned how to make friends.
So she starts flipping through her address book and lands on a name she hasn’t thought
about since her pageant days.
“Eugenia Weeks!
I trusted her to spray my backside before the swimsuit competition.”
“You what?”
“You know, sprayed my rear end with glue so my suit wouldn’t ride up.”
That’s very intimate.
You’d think that after going through an experience like that together, she’d feel
quite close to Eugenia.
But they haven’t spoken in years.
And when she does invite Eugenia over to catch up, Suzanne doesn’t seem to catch some very
obvious signals.
“My lover and I broke up a few weeks ago.”
“Everybody else from the pageant circuit won’t have anything to do with me since
I came out.”
“Seems like the only places I go anymore are to work and of course my Sisters in Sappho
meetings.”
In case you hadn’t picked up on it, SHE IS A LESBIAN.
Seems like it would be pretty hard to miss after all that, and yet we STILL get the familiar
scene of a straight person in denial about gay people.
“You know, if all the women in the world were like her I’d have no trouble finding
girlfriends.”
“Suzanne you do realize that Eugenia swings the other way, don’t you?”
“Yeah sure.
What does that mean?”
“He means Eugenia is a lesbian, Susanne.”
“Oh well that’s ridiculous.
Who ever heard of a lesbian debutante?”
“What did you think she meant when she mentioned Sappho?”
“I didn’t know!
I thought it was a detergent.”
Sure, Suzanne.
She goes out once a week to a sisters in detergent meeting.
As a viewer, you might have a little deja vu here, like you’ve already seen a clueless
straight person fail to recognize someone obviously queer in their midst.
That’s because you probably have seen that scene.
“A marriage?
Oh it couldn’t be.
You and cousin Liz was both g…”
“I’m quite fond of you.”
“I’m fond of you too.”
“Listen carefully.
John is a ho… mo…”
“Right.”
“Sexual.”
So, we can add Designing Women to the collection of shows where the existence of a gay person
is the most shocking thing to have ever happened.
Suzanne has a lot of, shall we say, old fashioned opinions:
“Suzanne, we can’t go around in blackface!
That’s racist!”
“Why?
If Dustin Hoffman was going to play Martin Luther King, you don’t think he’d wear
black makeup?”
“Suzanne, Dustin Hoffman would never play Martin Luther King, that part would go to
a black actor.”
“Well I think that’s racist.”
So, not exactly the most sensitive of the Sugarbakers.
And now that she accidentally made a lesbian friend, her reaction is one of panic -- especially
since she and Eugenia are supposed to go to a big banquet in a few days.
“I trusted her to spray glue on my butt!”
“What do you think she meant by the little hug at the door?”
“What’s everybody going to think if I go to that dinner with her tomorrow night?”
This is where the episode departs from very special gay episodes of sitcoms past.
All of the characters in this scene think that Susanne is overreacting.
That she’s being silly for rejecting a queer friend.
That’s quite a change from how televisions shows used to depict gay characters.
In the 70s and 80s, it was more common for a queer character to throw everyone into crisis.
There might be one person who was OK with them, but in general, it was unusual for everyone
to be accepting and open-minded.
But in this episode, it’s Susanne who’s unusual for rejecting her friend.
She’s presented as the problem, rather than Eugenia being a cause of trouble.
That puts Designing Women at a unique midpoint in the way queer characters are depicted on
TV.
When this episode aired, shows had moved past gays as a crisis to show them being accepted.
And that cleared the way for a gay character to be more than a one-off guest, and in a
few years, to be the star of the show.
At any rate, Susanne was supposed to meet Eugenia for drinks, and terrified of going
to a lesbian bar, she drags the other ladies along with her.
I have to say, this establishing shot makes it look like the world’s fanciest lesbian
bar -- look at those columns, is this place actually ON the island of Lesbos?
Everyone’s a little shocked by how nice it is:
“I sort of pictured this kind of dark little cave tucked away under a staircase where you
need a secret knock to get in, women in gangster suits dancing the tango, pictures of tennis
stars all over the walls.”
That sounds AMAZING, someone please open that lesbian bar so it can become my new favorite
hangout.
The longer the women stay, the more empathy they start to feel:
“I hope it’s not rude to be in a gay bar and not be gay … I mean I’m starting to
know how homosexuals must feel, not being able to be open about who they are.”
And while that new understanding is nice, it’s not really extending to Suzanne.
She still refuses to go to the dinner with Eugenia, and she’s got a novel excuse:
“Eugenia is in love with me.
It’s as plain as a pig in a parlor, how can you all not see it?”
“Oh Suzanne, you’re imagining things.”
“She calls me up on the phone.
She laughs at my jokes.
She invites me to go places.”
“Oh no, that does sound suspicious.”
What Suzanne is describing is more commonly known as “friendship,” but for sitcom
reasons she just never learned the simple elements of being nice to another person.
To her, there’s some secret lesbian seduction going on.
So Suzanne concocts a plan to hide from Eugenia, and I have to say, it is probably the world’s
worst plan even if Eugenia WAS trying to flirt with her.
Suzanne scurries away to hide in the steam room of a local spa -- a place where the whole
point is to be virtually naked and therefore affords no opportunities for disguising oneself,
and where everyone is at their most physically vulnerable.
So, good thinking, Suzanne.
Eugenia is able to track her down, which is frankly a lot of work to go to for someone
who’s been acting like an jerk.
And there in the steam, Eugenia gives Suzanne a little gay 101:
“Suzanne, I don’t know what you’ve heard, but gay people are not out to convert the
rest of the world.
I’m just your friend.
And even though I’m free at the moment doesn’t mean I’m desperate enough to go barking
up the wrong tree.
Do you understand what I’m saying?”
“Yes.
You don’t find me attractive.”
That’s a solid joke.
And it was a solid joke four years earlier on The Golden Girls.
“I don’t believe it.
I do not believe it.”
“I was pretty surprised myself.”
“Well I’ll bet.
To think Jean would prefer Rose over me?
That’s ridiculous!”
When Suzanne realizes that Eugenia doesn’t exist solely to validate her pride, she’s
a bit miffed.
She’s still making this all about her and it seems like she’s never going to come
around and simply accept Eugenia as a friend.
As we’ve seen, Suzanne just has no idea what friendship is -- her behaviour is ignorant
and cruel and dismissive.
But then she she sees someone else behaving even worse.
“There should be three saunas here.
One for men, one for women, and one for people like you.
I am never coming back here again.”
And Susanne suddenly realizes what she’s been doing.
“Guess you’ve got to put up with a lot of stuff like that, huh.”
“Not too much.
It only really hurts when it comes from friends.”
Good one.
This is a moment that comes down to friendship -- and that’s something that’s universal
whether the very special homosexual episode is set in Los Angeles or Miami or Springfield.
Susanne had been struggling with the realization that she doesn’t have any friends, and now
she sees her opportunity to finally change that.
To finally start being a decent person to someone else.
Friendship means standing by the people in your life, and standing up for them.
“I hope you don’t think I’m like that.
Listen I can accept you for what you are.
I just don’t want you to, you know, direct it towards me.”
Okay, that’s not a perfect response -- does Suzanne say that to every straight man she
meets? -- but it’s a start.
Not just for Suzanne, but for the TV shows that we watch in general.
By 1990, this formula of the benevolent straight person learning to accept queers was getting
a little stale.
TV shows had examined gay one-off guests from just about every possible angle.
So it was only a matter of time before they tackled a new kind of story.
Rather than focus on straight people learning to deal with an occasional gay person, within
a few years TV would be ready to try something truly groundbreaking: turning the focus to
gay people living their own lives.
But for now, it’s enough that Suzanne has accepted Eugenia, and is ready to move on
to more advanced forms of friendship.
“It just occurred to me, too -- if we were to go around together, say to that dinner
tonight, well not only would we be the two most beautiful women in Atlanta, but we wouldn’t
be cutting into each other’s territory.
You’d have yours, I’d have mine.
That would be okay!”
Congratulations to Suzanne for discovering friendship, discovering empathy, and discovering
wingmanning.
Land ho!
We’re pulling into port.
Thanks for cruising along with us!
And thanks to everyone who makes the Culture Cruise possible with a pledge of a dollar
or more a month on Patreon, folks like Michael Cole-Schwartz.
There’s some lovely rewards for folks who pledge their support -- head over to patreon.com/mattbaume
or click the link in the description to check out the perks available to backers.
And now if you’ll excuse me, I’m late for my gangster suit tango class.
“Ole!”