TV's Coming-Outparty

Mutchnick, Ball and Williamson are mum on how much of their characters' love lives audiences will see this season, and network execs' willingness to show air kisses among actual gay characters is vague and jittery at best. Weirdly, both Wasteland and Oh Grow Up have sent their gay men on dates with men who turned out to be straight. Williamson says Russell will have an active love life, but Ball and Mutchnick say they're not that interested in entering the bedrooms of their straight or gay characters. True, that's convenient. But in a sense, to focus on the Kiss Question casts the issue in terms of the schoolyard obsessions of homophobes: What do they do together? Do they kiss on the lips? Ironically, dialing down the sexual controversy has allowed W&G's writers to nurture the title pair's "sexless marriage," one of TV's richest male-female relationships. "We were interested in exploring what happens between a man and a woman when sex isn't a factor," says Mutchnick. It has also enabled the writers to develop the wonderful bipolar characters of straitlaced Will and his unapologetically flaming pal Jack (it's as if you spun one gay man's personality into two in a centrifuge) and to show that physical love is not the sum of a gay person's identity.

Of course, physical love ain't chopped liver, either. Avoiding all one-on-one contact is a lacuna that will become all the more glaring as babes like Will and Ford remain unattached. Even actor McCormack said this summer that he felt Will was ready for an on-air kiss. As Ford tells his estranged wife, "Sooner or later, I'm going to end up naked, in bed, with another man." But when he does, he may be bound by TV's answer to the military's fumbling version of tolerance. Go ahead and ask, and please do tell. Just, for the love of God, don't show.