Designing Women

On a chilled-out weeknight in a chilled-out gay bar, you wouldn’t be surprised to see clips of Designing Women or The Golden Girls playing on the big-screen TVs. That seems intuitive, right? Gay culture has long embraced these shows, to the point that seeing Rose and Blanche eat cheesecake while we sip a gin and tonic would barely register.

And yet these shows are not explicitly gay at all. They’re about groups of empowered women, most of whom are over 40. They are, in fact, built upon relationships forged post-widowhood. What’s the connection?

A gay character or two may have sauntered in on occasion (or a maybe-gay character, in the case of Meschach Taylor’s Anthony on DW). Some episodes even tackled real gay issues, particularly Designing Women, which was known for its strident political bent. But that wasn’t the crux of any of these shows. And gay rights plotlines don’t feature in the clips I’ve seen gay men chanting along with—say, Dixie Carter’s famous-among-fans rant about how her beauty-contestant sister’s flaming baton-throwing caused “the night the lights went out in Georgia.”  

It's surprising that we currently have so few female entrepreneurs on TV. In real life, women-owned businesses grew by 20 percent from 1997 and 2002. Sadly, the jump in female entrepreneurs hasn't been reflected on TV, which sends a dangerously inaccurate message to young female viewers. The lack of female entrepreneurs on television now suggests that men, not women, take care of business.