‘Law & Order” franchise once again handles gay characters coming out as an afterthought

I watched Law & Order: Special Victims Unit this week because I wanted to catch Rosie Perez’s riveting performance as the mother of a young boy being molested by his stepfather.

I expected Rosie to be good and she was, giving the kind of performance that wins people Emmys. What I did not expect was for Dr. George Huang (played by Tony winner B.D. Wong) to describe himself “as a gay man” at one point in the episode when he was objecting to something that was going on that he found offensive.

I thought to myself: “Has he ever acknowledged being gay before?”

Apparently not which is astonishing since Dr. Huang has been a character on the show since 2001! I can only hope that now that he’s been established as gay instead of being asexual, his sexuality will be portrayed more extensively in a future episode.

This reminds me of what happened on SVU’s parent show Law & Order back in 2005.

Assistant District Attorney Serena Southerlyn (played by Elizabeth Rohm) was fired from her job for being too personally involved in her work.

In her final scene, after being fired, she asks: “Is it because I’m a lesbian?”

No one saw that coming.

It was a bizarre exit because nothing had previously indicated that the character was a lesbian and nothing was developed because her coming out were literally her last words.

That episode was directed by out director Paris Barclay and earlier this month at a Screen Actors Guild panel discussion about gays in TV and film, he talked about the incident with Rohm’s character.

Barclay said the exit was written in a way to “punish” the actress (I think (they) thought that would be excruciating for her”) as opposed to it having anything to do with the character being developed.

“We were told to clear the set and that this scene was top secret and everything and we couldn’t see the [script] pages until the day,” Barclay recalled. “We saw the pages and we went, ‘This is ridiculous.’ [Rohm] was not happy about it. … Nothing had been thought of until maybe the day before that that would be the storyline.”

Barclay called it “exactly the wrong way” of trying to have more gay characters on TV series.

“If you’re actually going to put us there, put us there as humans,” he said. “Invest in it. Don’t make it cheap. Don’t do it in a way that is sensational just for the sake of being sensational.”

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