Showtime's 'Queer as Folk': True To the End

It took guts. That's the least that can be said for it. And if it sometimes stooped to the soap-operatic and melodramatic, so do most TV series -- even comedies. "Queer as Folk" was still revolutionary, the first American TV drama to portray gay characters as credible, dimensional and fully functional human beings.

Homosexuals had been depicted on many, many shows by the time "Queer as Folk" premiered but usually as the equivalent of fig-leaved nudes. It was in the tradition of sitcoms from TV's first two decades: Bathrooms had no toilets, and even married couples slept in single beds. The characters in "Queer as Folk" had sexual relations, some of them often, some of them too often, and they weren't just stick figures. They weren't castrati.

In the end, ironically or not, the show comes out squarely for family values, albeit its own definition of them. And "the end" lies just around the proverbial bend. When "Queer as Folk" returns to the Showtime cable network tonight at 10, it will be for its fifth season and its last. It will bow out with a special two-parter on July 31. Ron Cowen and Daniel Lipman, the creators and executive producers, have decided to move on to other projects, and moving on becomes a theme for many of the characters in the piece. Doors close, doors open. Relationships are born, relationships die -- sometimes in the same night, actually.

"Nothing changes, everything's the same," moans a major character in one of the first scenes from the season premiere. "It's all like an illusion, [like] theater." He and a friend are standing amid the frantic frolic -- momentarily frozen by a remarkable special effect -- of Babylon, a dance bar in Pittsburgh that has been a second home for many of the characters since the series began. The dialogue parodies Lewis Stone's famous ironic speech in "Grand Hotel": "People come, people go. Nothing ever happens."

Much has happened in the show's run, and the final 13 episodes look to be, if anything, even more eventful than those of previous seasons.

There is a bittersweet undertone to the proceedings, even perhaps to the comic relief. Cowen and Lipman sent an open letter to critics along with copies

of the new season's episodes, and in it they laud some of the social progress and consciousness-raising that have occurred during the show's run but also sound a despairing note about the present and the future.

"With the last election," they write, "the advancement of gay rights has taken a severe setback. The issue of gay marriage has ignited an explosion of invective, hatred and prejudice. Constitutions have been changed in at least a dozen states to prevent gay people from ever having the right to marry. . . . In Michigan, a law may soon pass that permits doctors to refuse to treat gay people.

"And, unbelievably, the president wants to change the Constitution of our country to prevent certain citizens from having the same rights as other citizens -- to legally create a second-class citizenship."

"Queer as Folk" (originally adapted from a two-season British series that it now only nominally resembles) has never pretended to be an objective, clinical view of gay life in America. The producers and writers deal with the hullabaloo over same-sex marriages by portraying such unions positively in the series, but the show isn't propaganda; one of those relationships unraveled last season and still looks irreversibly kaput in the first episodes of the new one.

As for onerous laws and constitutional amendments and such, they're represented, starting in the seventh episode, by "Proposition 14," a local initiative designed to prohibit gay marriage. The characters had to fight a reactionary mayoral candidate in an earlier season and wound up defeating him, putting a progressive in office. This fight will be harder.

That the social environment has changed in lamentable ways since roughly the latest turn-of-a-century is evident in tonight's two-hour premiere (actually two episodes airing back to back). Justin (Randy Harrison), the still-boyish blond whose coming out engendered a lot of strife in the first year, is in Hollywood working on preproduction of "Rage," a film based on his own comic book about "the first gay superhero." But fate, or rather a fat cat, puts the kibosh on that: The tycoon financing the film decides to pull out.