Flashback: Linda Lavin on That 'Risky' Gay Storyline on 'Alice' in 1976

The actress talked about the second-ever episode of her iconic sitcom that tackled the subject matter when it was very rare on television

It was the summer of 2013 and one of the most anticipated new sitcoms coming that fall was NBC’s Sean Saves the World, which brought Will & Grace star Sean Hayes to his own sitcom. In the series, Hayes played a gay father whose teenaged daughter (Samantha Isler) suddenly comes to live with him and much of the comedy came from his juggling fatherhood with his career and dating.

Despite a solid cast including Hayes, Isler, Megan Hilty, Echo Kellum and Linda Lavin, the comedy didn’t last long due to low ratings and was cancelled with only 13 episodes having been shot. But one of the bonuses of the series was that it afforded me the chance to sit down in person with Lavin, who was playing Hayes’s sardonic mother, Lorna, during the summer Television Critics Association press tour at the Beverly Hilton hotel in Beverly Hills. (One regret - I didn’t get a photo with Lavin!)

This interview originally appeared on the now-defunct website The Backlot (sadly, I couldn’t find this story so I’m glad I found the transcript in an old email) and at the time they had only shot the pilot to Sean so I remember the interview didn’t really inform too much about the new show so I haven’t included that here.

But given I was writing for an LGBT-centric website, I did want to ask her about Alice and how her character would have reacted if her young son had come to her and told her he was gay. To be clear, that never happened on the show but it was a way to ask her about a potential gay storyline in the mid-1970s. Here’s the excerpt from that 2013 interview:

Sean Hayes and Linda Lavin in the 2013 short-lived sitcom Sean Saves the World (NBC)

Jim Halterman: I have to ask an Alice question because I was just thinking, even though the times were very different then, what if Tommy (Phillip McKeon) came to Alice all of a sudden and said, ‘You know, Mom, I think I’m gay.’ How do you think Alice would have reacted?

Linda Lavin: I can answer that question, not because [Tommy] came to her. But after the pilot, the first episode of Alice and this was 1975, there was a football player friend of Mel’s (Vic Tayback) who came to town.

I remember this. Oh my God.

LL: He was big, and tall, and handsome and blonde (and played by Denny Miller), and he invited me out to dinner, and I went to dinner with him. And then he came back to the apartment, we’re sitting on the sofa, and Alice is very fond of this guy and wondering why he is not more attentive or affectionate. So she starts asking him little questions like ‘Are you married?’ ‘No,’ he says. ‘Are you engaged?’ ‘No,’ he says ‘I’m gay,’ and that’s the end of act one and this was 1975. [Editor’s note: the year was actually 1976.]

It was a big deal back then.

LL: And that was black out. We go to the commercial, we came back up and Alice says, ‘And that doesn’t mean just happy, right?’

That’s a good line.

LL: Isn’t that a great line? That was the first. The second episode of Alice was after the pilot, so the first on the air. That was how risky it was.

Here’s the clip from the Alice episode “Alice Gets a Pass":

LL: Now, she says to Mel the next day ‘What?’ and he says ‘You’re crazy. He’s a football player, and he’s all man and he’s not gay’, and that’s Mel. That’s his small minded, bigoted…he has his opinions based on his narrow thinking, and he says ‘We’re going on a hunting trip.’ And he had planned this hunting trip with his friend and they were going to also take Tommy hunting. Alice didn’t want Tommy to go hunting with this guy so it did deal with her homophobia, her ignorance, her fear. And so she deals with that, and then she submits to the reality that they have made this plan and they’re going to go, and she grows up. She grows up. She accepts the situation. In a half hour, she grows up in what took us maybe as a generation, 100 years.

Then, Tommy comes back from the hunting where they did shoot a deer. And this young actor, Philip McKeon, looked in my eyes, and his eyes filled up with tears when he told me the story about shooting this deer and how it felt to him. So, it went from the place of homophobia, of fear, of a strange invasion into her life of something she didn’t know how to handle, to something even more serious, which was a child’s loss of innocence. In the world of where men were men and hunting, it took care of all of that in a half hour, and so, yes we had dealt with it.

So that’s how Alice would deal with it. She would deal with it the way most people deal with it. They don’t know, and so they have an opinion that is not educated. And the more people I think are willing to admit that we all have gay family members… ‘We are gay. We don’t want to hide. We have secrets. We are whatever we are, that we have hidden from ourselves or each other.’ The more we come out of those closets, the more we accept each other, and I think that’s what television can do.

And just for memories sake, here’s the opening credit sequence for Alice, which was sung by Lavin.

Until next time…