by Doug Sanford
“I’m pumped up about it. This is a chance to do something new and exciting and worthwhile. You don’t get many opportunities like that on a soap. You think I’m being foolish, Les?”
“Not at all. I’d be really disappointed if you didn’t take this on,” she answered.
“So when does this all happen?” I asked.
“Probably the fall when the new season starts.”
“Why? You guys run through the summer.”
“Yeah, but they’ve got to get the scripts written and approved, and they want the biggest audience possible.”
“Makes sense, I guess.”
Chapter 40
But without question the major event of 1996 occurred on July 14, Bastille Day, with the birth of Zachary Shaun Rastin-Miller—what a mouthful—at 2:32 A.M. after a fairly short and happily uneventful labor. Both Bart and I were present in the delivery room thanks to an understanding OB/GYN. We’d told her about our relationship early on when we had to explain why all three of us kept showing up at every one of Leslie’s exams.
Although Jeanine wanted to be in the delivery room as well, the doctor felt she was stretching the rules far enough to let me in, so she stayed in the waiting room just outside the delivery area. It didn’t seem fair because Jeanine had been indispensable during the pregnancy. She took care of Leslie the same way she must have taken care of her own daughters and was able to anticipate the few problems Leslie had. An ache, a pain, a soreness, a discomfort—Jeanine had probably heard of it before and knew what to do about it.
After Zach was born, she was, for Leslie, pretty much the final go-to for everything Zach-related. Ada or Marian, when they were around, might have their own opinions about what this cry meant or what to do about that irritability, but it was Jeanine to whom Leslie paid attention.
Bart and Leslie chose Zach’s name. I was careful to stay completely out of that decision. Reversing his character’s soap name was originally a joke of Bart’s, but Leslie, strangely enough, went for it. She liked both names and said that Bart’s character had been lucky for him, so why not for his son. That surprised me. I’d have thought Leslie would have wanted something more intellectual or literary or familial. And invoking luck was totally unlike her. But though they went on to talk about lots of other names, it somehow always came back to Zachary Shaun.
Months before Zach’s arrival, other plans had to be made as well. Leslie scheduled sick leave for the summer, and beginning with the fall semester, she would take maternity leave for at least three months.
Bart’s case was different.
“According to the personnel guy at the studio, I’m now entitled to twelve weeks of unpaid leave under the new Family Leave Act or whatever it’s called that they passed a couple of years ago.”
It was after dinner, and the three of us were in our usual places on the big sofa as we called it, although Leslie’s lap wasn’t as spacious as before.
“So?” I said. “We can afford the cut in pay.”
“We’re looking at the middle of July, right, Les?” As if he didn’t know that already.
She nodded
“Those would be the weeks leading up to Shaun’s coming out right after Labor Day. I’m not sure Jay would let me do that.”
“Legally,” said Leslie, “I’m not sure he could stop you although he might try to claim you were essential to the show. But more importantly, much as I want you here, first, I don’t think it would be a smart idea in terms of your career, and second, I can tell from your voice, that it’s not something you really want to do, is it?”
Bart sat up, put his arm around Leslie and kissed her.
“You know me too well. I love you,” he said.
Bart ended up taking just two weeks of his unpaid leave off from the show: Doctors without Borders needed his services again.
After Zach’s arrival, life changed pretty drastically for all of us. Before the birth, we were all wrapped up in each other, our relationship, and our life together. Afterward, Zach was the center of our universe.
Bart was walking on air. His life—well, all our lives—revolved around that crib in their bedroom that was near enough to the door between our rooms that I, or Bart if he was with me, could hear Zach and share in the duties. Since Zach was being breastfed, neither of us could help much in that department—although I did learn more about breast pumps than I’d ever have expected I would—but we did what we could.
Changing him, playing with him, or just watching him sleep—Bart was there, and I wasn’t far away although I never felt quite the same hearty joy about diapers and good poops that Bart did.
Jack and Ada flew out for a visit, and even Marian stayed over at the house for a few days right after Leslie came home from the hospital. She was too excited to drive back home every night, afraid she’d miss something. As Leslie had said, a grandchild was the one thing, with all his money, Phil couldn’t buy for her.
About a week after Zach was born, Robin and Doug moved into their new home. Johnny was only seven and a half, but he got as big a kick out of seeing Zach as Bart had gotten out of seeing him when he was born. Johnny was an only child, and as Zach got older, the two spent a lot of time together, and Johnny tended to treat him as a little brother.
In August, Robin passed the California real estate exam, and so 1996 also saw the beginning of serious plans for Romarc Realty, our own company, which we’d talked about ever since we first met in Tucson.
At about the same time, Bart was getting ready for what turned out to be, in ways we couldn’t even anticipate, the second biggest event of the year. A week after Labor Day, Shaun Zachary would begin his slow coming out process on Mt. Sinai Heights.
One evening after dinner, Bart said, “I need some advice.”
“What’s up, kid?”
“They’re putting the final touches on the early scripts and working on later ones. They’ve made some changes from the original concept. It’s now a whole lot more gradual, but I think there’s a problem with it. I’ve talked to the writers, but they’re being pretty insistent that we stick with their version—and since two of them said that because they’re gay, I should accept their version, I don’t have a lot of ammunition to fight with.”
“What is it you want to fight about?” asked Leslie.
“Well, instead of starting with Shaun’s coming out to his brother and sister-in-law, it begins with some new characters: Ray, an out gay guy, a cancer patient at the hospital—I was glad he didn’t have AIDS—and Chuck, his partner and caregiver.
“Shaun takes a liking to the two of them because he admires the way Ray is dealing with his illness in an upbeat, positive way with no trace of self-pity and also the way Ray and Chuck are both so honest and open about themselves and their relationship.
“When the hospital won’t recognize Chuck’s right to be involved in Ray’s care, Shaun takes their part and successfully gets the policy changed.”
“Interesting subplot considering all the stories in the news lately about just that kind of problem with AIDS patients,” said Leslie. “Even though this Ray doesn’t have AIDS, it’s still applicable.”
“Yeah. That part is fine, and it’s a clever touch because it fools the viewers into making them believe that the story is about Ray and Chuck. It introduces the gay theme, but most of the audience will never guess where it’s going.
“But here’s where I begin to have a problem.
“The writers want Shaun to be fooled also—about his own motives. He thinks that what he did for Ray and Chuck was just out of concern for Ray and for Shaun’s own sense of what’s right.
“But Ray and Chuck think that Shaun’s actions are related to his curiosity about them, their homosexuality, and their relationship. They think that his fight for their cause comes from the fact that he’s a deeply closeted gay man himself—and probably doesn’t even realize it.
“That’s my problem. I just don’t see that. How could a guy be almost thirty years old and have
no idea that he’s gay?”
“I understand why you’re puzzled,” I replied. “But it does happen. I’ve known I was gay almost since I could breathe, and there was a time when I felt the way you did. How could a person be gay and not know it?
“But that was before I met Norval back in Chicago. He was a friend of Marty’s, an accountant who at the age of forty-six, with a wife and a grown son and daughter, fell totally and completely in love with a twenty-eight-year-old client named Teddy who, as it happened, was into older men.
“By the time I met Norval, he had divorced his wife, and he and Teddy had been together for five very happy years. We became friends, and he was insistent about the fact that he’d had no idea he had physical and emotional feelings for men. He admitted to being aware of what he called male beauty and of not having had an active love life with his wife—which apparently was fine with her. But he’d never thought about having sex with men before Teddy appeared on the scene.
“So it may not be common, but it happens. And of course there are lots of guys who come out really late because they purposely ignore feelings that they know they have but won’t acknowledge—even to themselves.”
“So you think I should accept their ideas?”
“Probably. It might even help to bring about a more serious discussion of coming out.”
“So where does Shaun come into all this, other than fighting for Ray and Chuck?” asked Leslie.
“I don’t think they’ve actually written those parts, but according to the storyboard or whatever they call it in writer-ese, Ray and Chuck confront Shaun about his motives. He denies their explanation. But then—new character—he meets a friend of theirs who comes to visit Ray.”
“And he falls head over heels in love with him,” suggested Leslie.
“Yep. Pretty much. He falls for the friend, realizes that Ray and Chuck were right, quickly comes to accept himself, and finally comes out to his brother and sister-in-law, and eventually to the hospital staff.
“Man, they really are stringing this thing out,” I said.
“And this isn’t the only sub-plot,” said Bart. “This all gets woven in and around all the other stuff that’s going on in the show, including problems between Shaun’s brother and his wife, the arrival of a new hospital administrator, and an anesthesiologist with a drug problem.”
“Those are three separate storylines—not all the same one,” Bart explained with a smile.
“I’m not a soap opera expert or even fan, but it seems to me,” said Leslie, “that that’s what their audiences expect.”
“They couldn’t keep me interested for that long,” I replied.
“I’ll bet they could if you weren’t already sleeping with the hunky young resident who keeps taking his shirt off,” laughed Leslie.
There had been lots of teases planted in the soap fan magazines and on the soap opera web sites that there were some changes coming at Mt. Sinai Heights after Labor Day, but security was tight and no specifics had leaked.
Although Leslie and I seldom watched the show, we did tape and watch the Shaun coming-out episodes at least for the first couple of weeks, but we always sped through any scenes Bart wasn’t in. He still refused to watch it.
“Once I’ve done it, it’s over, and I move on. I don’t want to analyze it. There’s nothing I can do to change it.”
Realistic, yes, but it seemed odd to both of us. We later found out that it was a common reaction for a lot of actors.
I realize that the plot line sounds a bit tame today, but in 1996, the idea of gay characters on television was still new. After all, Ellen would not come out until the following year, and Will and Grace would not appear for two years. So Shaun’s coming out was a really big deal.
Because the story was as convoluted as it finally ended up being, Bart wasn’t involved in the publicity at the beginning. It was more general, concerning gay characters on television and, giving credit to the publicists, the problem of care provisions for partners of gay patients.
But when it finally became clear that Shaun himself was coming out, Bart couldn’t avoid the spotlight.
Before it began, Jay told Bart that he was assigning Dorie to be present at all of Bart’s interviews since she was much more experienced in handling the press. He asked Bart’s permission, and received it, to tell Dorie about Bart’s actual situation so that she’d never be caught off guard. But that was safe, as Jay explained to Bart, because publicists are right up there with clergymen and lawyers as far as keeping secrets is concerned.
So Bart and Dorie spent a lot of time at the studio giving interviews and answering questions from the media. With Dorie just offstage, he also had many appearances on late-night and daytime talk shows—both TV and radio. Those, of course, we taped and watched. Leslie and I were both impressed with the ease and professionalism Bart displayed. It was a side of him that neither one of us had really ever seen before.
It all paid off. Once the storyline took off, the producers of the show were more than satisfied with the reaction. While there was the expected negative response on the extreme right, the soap opera world welcomed Shaun’s new identity with unprecedented positive ratings which went through the proverbial roof. Even the actors on the show not involved directly in the gay storyline were excited because they were benefitting from the greater attention being paid to the show overall.
At the same time and in a strange way, some aspects of the soap’s plot began to affect Bart. The storyline was Shaun’s discovery of who he was and his need to be honest about that. All his life, Bart had had the same need for honesty, hence rule number two. Lying about his personal life in the interviews eventually began to weigh on him.
As he said to Leslie one evening during our after-dinner time together: “It’s so strange—this labeling business. Everything Marc and I put aside back when I was in college—straight, gay, or bi—I thought we were finished with having to answer those questions, but all of it has come back to haunt me. Just like back then, none of the labels fits. The interviewers all assume I’m straight, and if they did know about my feelings for Marc, they’d call me bi. Neither one is right, and I don’t know why I have to be labeled.
“They want to know what it’s like for me to play a gay guy, to pretend to be something they’ve been told I’m not. Hell, I understand Ray and his feelings for Chuck completely. But I can’t explain that to them. I’m back to having to lie about myself.”
“What do you say?” asked Leslie.
“Mostly I tell them I’m an actor and can play lots of roles. I point out that I’ve played a murderer twice and no one ever has asked me how I can play a murderer if I’ve never killed someone. I play a doctor on the show, and no one’s ever asked me what medical experience I’ve had or if I’ve ever really examined anyone. Why should it be different if I play a gay man?”
“Sounds to me like the perfect response,” said Leslie.
“You’d think so, but they won’t leave me alone. They keep pushing and come at it from different directions. In the last interview, the woman wanted to know how my wife would react if I had to kiss another man on the show. I told her that she wouldn’t be any more concerned about that than she would be if I kissed another woman on the show.”
“Well, that’s true,” she said, a bit amused.
Despite his frustration with the process, he and Dorie managed to make it through the first couple of months, and then things began to return to normal.
Chapter 41
And things might have stayed normal if one of my clients hadn’t decided that he just had to take a second look at a house he was interested in and the only time he could possibly do it was at 4:30 P.M. on January 18, the day of the annual Southern California Association of Realtors dinner which I couldn’t miss.
I’ve always been struck by the way small events like that can have such far-reaching consequences.
This is how it all played out.
The studio had been receiving repeat
ed requests from both Soap Opera World and Soap Opera Digest for photographs of Zach with his parents. Bart and Leslie had firmly resisted them until they finally gave in for one photo session to mark his six-month birthday in January.
But they insisted it had to be on their terms. They wouldn’t bring Zach to the studio: it had to be done at the house, and they would have final say on which photographs were used as well as the poses in which they would allow Zach to be placed. Dorie, of course, would be present.
Because they wanted the shoot at the house, it had to be done on a Saturday, and the morning of January 18 was decided on. It turned out to be the date of the Realtors’ dinner, but that was no problem since only I would be attending.
But around ten that morning, my client called me and insisted on the 4:30 showing that day. With all I had coming up, there would be no way I could get home after showing him the house to change for the dinner, so I decided to run home in the morning, pick up my clothes and whatever else I’d need, and bring it all back to the office so I could change there and then head directly to the dinner after showing the house.
I knew about the photo session, but I didn’t think I’d be in the way. As Leslie would have said, “Little did I know…”
When I walked in the door, they were still setting up cameras and lights. Apparently the front hall at the bottom of one of the curving staircases had been chosen for the location. Leslie was sitting on the third step, and Bart was playing with Zach on a blanket at the foot of the stairs.
“Hey, guys. You still at it?” I asked as I closed the front door behind me.
“We’ve barely started,” replied Leslie. “What brings you home?”
“I’ve got to show a house late this afternoon, so I came to pick up my tux and stuff. I’ll get dressed at the office,” I said as I walked over to Leslie, kissed her without even thinking about it, and turned to Bart who blocked any attempt I might have made to kiss him in front of everyone by handing me Zach to kiss and hold instead.