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Cincinnati.com上滴一篇文章★★Cowen说了结尾是那样滴原因（2005-06-17）
来源http://news.cincypost.com/apps/p ... FE/506170335/-1/all
Pioneering gay series drawing to a close
By Rick Bird
Post staff reporter
It's a familiar rite-of-passage storyline that has long been tapped for TV drama and comedy: Hormonal 20-somethings play the singles scene experimenting with drugs and sex. At some point there is the impulse to settle down, have a family and career.
That journey has played out in a groundbreaking way for five seasons on Showtime. It's a familiar soap opera story, yet radically different, since this show is "Queer as Folk," the sexually explicit series about the coming-of-age exploits of a group of gay friends in Pittsburgh.
As the fifth and final 13 episodes currently unfold (10 p.m. Sundays), these friends are worried about family, career and custody battles. It's essentially an American middle-class story, says Ron Cowen, the executive producer and writer of the series. He ought to know about "Midwest values," raised in Paddock Hills and North Avondale, a 1962 Walnut Hills High School grad.
(There are two other Cincinnati connections: Actor Hal Sparks, who plays Michael, was born here and raised in Peaks Mill, Ky.; New Hampshire native Randy Harrison, who plays Justin, is a graduate of the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music.)
While the series is set in Pittsburgh, Cowen says viewers can think Cincinnati.
"Cincinnati was my first idea. We wanted some second-tier Midwestern city. We didn't want San Francisco," Cowen said. "We didn't want them to be in the big city glam or entertainment industries. We have shopkeepers, lawyers, accountants -regular people. They were in their 20s dancing, partying, having sex. We wanted to show these guys had a busy sex life, like any guy in his 20s, instead of the way (gays) are usual portrayed as being asexual."
Cowen, along with his co-producer and life partner, Daniel Lipman, are no strangers to TV firsts. In 1985 they wrote "An Early Frost," the first TV movie about AIDS, and "Sisters," the Emmy-winning NBC series that was, perhaps, the first to focus on the hopes and fears of a group of women, arguably a precursor to "Desperate Housewives."
"Queer as Folk" will go down as the first gay drama series and the first TV show to graphically depict homosexual sex. But Cowen sees the series as groundbreaking in another sense: It was the first to immerse viewers in a gay culture that shows gays have the same hopes and dreams - and yes, hormones - as straights. While gay characters have popped up everywhere on television, they are usually portrayed as the comic foil or the AIDS victim.
"These are guys now getting married, having children. They are concerned about their jobs, buying homes," Cowen said about his characters. "We took these guys on a journey from their 20s to 30s. I think for most men of any sexual persuasion, they undergo a huge change at that age."
For the first time the series is getting overtly political leading up to the finale, with life-altering consequences for some of the main characters because of their political activism. Cowen says it reflects the current debate over gay marriage, as his characters will lobby against a referendum designed to prevent gay marriage similar to what was passed last November in Ohio.
Cowen thinks with the last election the advancement of gay rights has taken a severe setback. Cowen even says the current climate is so anti-gay that he thinks, "We had a window of opportunity five years ago to do this show. I don't think we could do it today."
Ironically, Cowen said most criticism of the series when it launched has not come from religious groups or the straight community, but from gays. Some homosexuals were uncomfortable their lifestyle was being depicted so graphically. It was a reaction Cowen was unprepared for.
"There is a lot of shame out there, especially from older gay men. You are showing their dirty laundry. 'I don't want my coworkers and straight friends to see what you are showing,' I was told," Cowen said. "But that criticism is really not about the show. It's the problems with their own personal issues, especially in places like Cincinnati or Pittsburgh where people had to live very private and secretive lives."
The series has always explored in a soap opera way - often with campy humor - the conflicts and different values within the gay community.
In the final episodes, Cowen and Lipman are doing that even more brilliantly, presenting different gay concepts of family that also can raise the "dirty laundry" of the gay lifestyle.
They are depicting the messy custody battles that can exist when lesbian women artificially inseminate, then split up, and the case of a gay man, coming out late in life, who has custody of his teenage son, who has HIV.
The overriding theme in these final installments is acceptance and how that's defined.
"Some want to be able to move to the suburbs and assimilate, and there are others who want to remain living in a gay world, in a gay community," Cowen said. "I think every minority group goes through that. Jewish people, blacks, every minority in our history has that conflict at some point. Do we assimilate or stay true to our cultural identity."
Cowen takes greatest pride when he hears from the heterosexual community, which he estimates is about half the audience. "People always come up to me and say, 'Before I saw your show I was very prejudiced toward gays. I didn't know a lot.' "
Cowen says he's been able to take a novelist's approach to the series, always knowing he had a five-year deal and that would be it. His says the ending won't be nice and neat, just as life isn't: "Nothing really ends. I feel it's an honest and satisfying ending. I don't think it's melodramatic. Lives go on."（在偶看来这是个烂理由，偶喜欢happy ending） [s:217] |
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