As though there weren’t enough gay on TV already, ABC just hired gay screenwriter and LGBT activist Dustin Lance Black to write a new gay rights miniseries based on his life. The Hollywood Reporter announced that the new show is planned to be a “semi-autobiographical” drama “based on and told from Black’s background and experiences as a gay rights activist.”
Huffington Post picked up the story and reported that the miniseries “will be told from Black’s perspective about his life growing up gay in a Mormon household to becoming a leader in the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) rights movement.”
Black, who was supposedly raised in a “strict Mormon” home, has made a career of writing gay material: he scripted Milk, a film about California’s first openly gay politician, and also J. Edgar, a biopic portraying the famous FBI director as a closeted homosexual. Additionally, he wrote the play “8,” about the downfall of Proposition 8 in California.
According to the Hollywood Reporter, Black “has worked tirelessly for marriage equality and gay rights as his career in Hollywood continued to rise.” He is a founding board member of the gay marriage activist group American Foundation for Equal Rights which sponsored the legal team that opposed Proposition 8.
Series with gay themes appear to be a favorite with the ABC TV team. Also in development is a miniseries adaptation of a documentary about AIDS activism which follows a group of HIV-positive (mostly gay) men.
But aggressively pro-gay material is nothing new to ABC, which has blatantly pushed social acceptance of gay marriage in its shows like “The Fosters,” and other series that lead the way in all things gay. With the anti-Prop 8 HBO documentary already set to reach the small screen soon, it looks like pro-gay propaganda will continue to take up a sizeable chunk of TV time.
