NEED TO KNOW
The Golden Girls didn’t shy away from LGBTQ+ storylines, but there were consequences.
Marc Cherry, who created Desperate Housewives, appeared on the Aug. 19 episode of Soapy, hosted by Days of Our Lives’ Greg Rikaart and The Bold and the Beautiful’s Rebecca Budig. During the interview, Cherry reminisced about working as a writer on The Golden Girls, alongside his then-writing partner Jamie Wooten.
Cherry, 63, said that he hopes that as a writer, he can “at the very least, entertain people” but hopes to “sometimes move them into reflections upon their own life.” When fans talk to him about how meaningful shows are for them, it feels like “an honorable way… to make a living.”
That brought him to one of the episodes of The Golden Girls he wrote: season 6, episode 14, “Sisters of the Bride.”
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“They had introduced the character of Blanche’s gay brother in a previous season,” Cherry said. The character, Clayton, was played by Monte Markham. During his first appearance in season 4 (titled “Scared Straight”), he visits Blanche (Rue McClanahan) after he’s gotten divorced. He confides in Rose (Betty White) that he’s gay, then lies to Blanche and tells her he slept with Rose. He finally tells her, and she says she “doesn’t know” him anymore. Though they’re on better terms by the end of the episode, Blanche hasn’t fully accepted him.
“We came up with the idea, let’s bring him back. And she thinks it was a phase and he’s probably over it,” Cherry said. “But he comes back with a guy, and the premise episode is he’s announcing they’re getting married.”
Gay marriage was “very much illegal,” Cherry, who is gay, said, but noted many gay couples would have non-legally binding ceremonies at the time. “So we do our episode and, if we weren’t the first, we were only the second show to do something about gay marriage.” It was also the sixth episode of the show to showcase LGBTQ+ people, per Decider.
In the episode, Blanche says Clayton being gay was just a “phase” and struggles to accept his relationship. “What did you mean when you told me you could accept my being gay?” Clayton asks her. “Did you mean it was okay as long as I was celibate? Okay as long as I don’t fall in love?”
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She ultimately tells Clayton she wants him to be happy and will support him, though she still hasn’t worked through all her homophobia.
Cherry remembered the major response the episode got when it aired. “They called us up to the office a few days after the episode aired, and they said, ‘So you guys are getting death threats.’ ”
They also got letters where they were called slurs. “They literally showed us a letter that was written ‘to those f—– Jew producers of Golden Girls.’ To which I responded, ‘That’s weird. I’m not Jewish,’ ” he said. They also had to tell the writers that since they were writing for a “hit show,” they had to have their numbers unlisted, after Wooten received a call from someone saying “horrible things” to him.
“Sometimes the progress comes at a little bit of a cost to those who do it,” Cherry said, though he knew it was worth it. He and the podcast hosts also discussed the groundbreaking Days of Our Lives storyline where Deidre Hall’s Marlena learns her grandson Will is gay and an All My Children plotline where Ruth Martin (Mary Fickett) becomes pregnant over 40, had daytime’s first amniocentesis, and met a mother whose child had Down Syndrome.
“It’s a privilege to be in this business and to be a part of those things, with the occasional death threat thrown in just for fun,” Cherry said.
