Is Jodie no longer gay after the first season? Reading episode descriptions for the second season it certainly seems this way, which doesn't make much sense considering he was committed enough to the idea of spending his life with a man that he was going to have a sex change operation.
shareJodie's sexuality during the course of the show did seem to go up and down. In the first few episodes he was wearing Mary's clothes and then wanted a sex change operation to be with Dennis, his quarter-back boyfriend. Not all gay men want to become a woman!! And most gay men would rather be with a man not a woman who used to be a man, so this never made much sense to me. Jodie then of course fathered a baby which was supposed to be ironic as it's generally considered that gay men can never be sexually aroused by the opposite sex. The fourth season was a real cop-out for Jodie making his character turn pretty much heterosexual and end up making love with and then wanting to marry Maggie - something no openly gay man would really want.
Susan Harris had a knack for writing funny lines and situations but Jodie's character development always bothered me slightly.
So I guess bisexuality doesn't exist in your eyes....
I take your point. I suppose he could have been bi-sexual. But it still seems a little bit of a cop out not to make him exclusively homosexual.
shareFrom what I've seen on the show, It was made very clear that with Jodie's own words he said he was homosexual. Bi-sexual was never expressed or spoken of on the show. If his character progression was in that direction, it should have been explained more within the dialogue of the series just to avoid any confusion about why he started off so gay and ended up wanting a woman.
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I think they also tried to cram in every gender identity/orientaton possibility with just ONE character. As a result, in trying to expose the public to real issues faced by gay and transgender people, the show sort of played right up to every stereo type--gays are confused and unhappy, gays want to be women, gays just choose to be gay and can go straight if they really wanted to.
--Daniel W. Kelly, author, "Closet Monsters: Zombied Out and Tales of Gothrotica"
I think he wanted to become a woman to be with his boyfriend who was a famous football player and definitely never going to out himself. So it really had nothing to do with him wanting to be a woman, it had to do with him wanting to be with his boyfriend.
shareJodie started out gay but in later years he did eventually fall in love and marry a woman. I was never quite sure if the writers copped out because of negative reaction to a gay character on prime time because Jodie was the first. Or if Billy Crystal had become uncomfortable with the role and requested that Jodie go straight. It would have been nice if Jodie had stayed gay throughout only because people changing their sexual orientation is just not realistic. On the other hand, SOAP wasn't exactly a show brimming with realism either.
shareI heard that it was because of viewer backlash more than anything else that caused Jodie to become "straight." Of course, "Soap" was true to its television soap-opera satire above all else.
And it was an especially prescient piece of satire in that no more than a couple years after the demise of the program, a character on ABC's "Dynasty" became "straight" (Stephen Carrington) over the course of the series.
I haven't rewatched Season 4 since it first came out on video. I had forgotten just how straight Jodie got toward the end. Just another reason to see Benson's farewell as the end of the series.
shareYeah, that bothered me, too. It seemed...cowardly, in a way, that Jodie should magically "straighten up" just because he happens to investigate the h0le instead of the p0le, a couple of times. I thought it was fine (and even more LIKELY) that he slept with a woman, because...as he says "Just because I eat a burrito, it doesn't make me Mexican," and variety is good. I wish they'd have made the women much more boyish, though. However, when they showed him starting to "turn" in the second season, I think it made him less funny. I don't think it was Billy Crystal, though--he really seemed to enjoy going all-out (so to speak!) with the character's homosexuality. I think the whole idea was just too uncomfortable, for the writers and the censors at the time.
share"I think the whole idea was just too uncomfortable, for the writers and the censors at the time"
'At the time' is right on the money. This was less than ten years after the Stonewall riots, HBO and Showtime hadn't been invented, and there was simply no way a network in the US (or in the UK, where I watched it) would show a gay couple kiss, or have any sexual contact at all, so once we had the jokes about Burt's reaction to Jodie and the quarterback, there was no room for more development or irony. Jodie was still talking the talk – "Are you a practising homosexual?" "I don't have to practice, I'm very good at it!" – after he became a father, he just wasn't allowed to walk the walk.
Good point about Stephen Carrington. Quite a lot of the really outrageous stuff on Soap turned up for real on Dynasty and the Carringtons later. Alien abductions? Murderous terrorists? You betcha!
Not to mention that only a year after the show premiered, the nation wound up dealing with the Moscone-Milk assassinations and the subsequent White Night riots. (These events were later parodied on the Law & Order season 5 episode "Pride.")
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The show is supposed to make fun of soap operas...Jodie's changing sexuality is just one of many twisting plots and odd occurrences - possessed babies, alien abductions, people "returning from the dead" (Chester), cults, murders....
sharelisten to you all rambling on.
Political Correctness: the Left Religion.
if you're the salt of the earth, then the earth is a slug
In one of the 4th season episodes,Burt was wondering about the sex lives of Carter and Reagan,and Mary says,"I don't think Republicans do it." At the very end of the series,a friend of the Governor named Gene(Jay Garner)claims to own "6 Governors,18 Congressmen,4 Attorney Generals,11 houses,12 cars,but not one Senator!" When Burt asks "Own?" Gene responds "well now I'm just joshing with ya,ya can't own people,that misguided fella Lincoln saw to that!" Fortunately,they kept politics out of the show,at least until Sheriff Burt became "Bat," but everything else was fair game,one reason why it hasn't dated as much as SNL or other groundbreaking shows of the time.
shareIt seems that the only reason to have a gay character on Soap was to make stereotypical jokes at the expense of gay people. Jodie Dallas protested a lot that he was gay, but his actions were for the most part heterosexual. There were plenty of comic/melodramatic situations that a truly gay Jodie could have found himself in without resorting to the "I'm so confused about my sexuality" tripe.
shareJodie kept swearing he was gay, but ended up with women. If things wasn't going well with being with men, he should have just been happy with women, and Maggie I believe loved him for who he was. Obviously it was a part of him that liked women because he did sleep with two of them, and it wasn't against his will, really. Dennis just wanted him to have a sex change so they could be together. He get a sex change to be a woman so they can be married, HELLO he wouldn't be the same person anymore.
In the beginning Jodie acted more flamboyant, but later on him being gay seem to have been mentioned less and less. I wonder did the show get a lot of letters wishing they would stop the Jodie is gay storyline.
My job is to inform, not persuade- Dan Rather
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Being gay had just been taken off the list of psychological disorders a few years before! ;-/
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