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The same can be said of QTN, owned by Palm Springs-based Triangle Multimedia—and which has only been available as a "premium channel" to New York City cable subscribers for a few weeks. By the way, why is a pay-per-view channel that charges $7.95 airing paid commercials?
From what I’ve been able to see of it, the news on QTN, what little there is—10-minute segments of the rip’n read variety, with little out-of-studio reporting, produced in cooperation with Planet Out, and repeated a couple of times a day—is almost exclusively entertainment-and-celebrity and gossip oriented, with an occasional few seconds thrown in on gay marriage, the only queer issue which QTN appears to think is worthy of more than one or two sentences.
QTN does have lots of talk shows—for primetime viewing, between 7 and midnight, it has nothing else, and they’re frequently repeated. But the guests are, for the most part, show business figures who would have trouble making the D or even E lists, spliced by diet chat and other inanities that don‘t even rise to the level of daytime banter chez Ellen, and both the hosts and their guests are—as Truman Capote (above right) once said of Marlon Brando—so dumb it would make your skin crawl. The half-hour so-called "political" chatshow is hosted by a sun-baked, constantly-hollering lesbian who appears to have trained at the Fox News school of high-decibel screeching: she’s named Chrisanne Eastwood (left), and judging by her questions and comments is clearly not the sharpest knife in the drawer—and she says she went to law school, which reminds me of Shakespeare’s famous line, "First, let’s kill all the lawyers."
As the host of what’s billed as QTN’s "avant-garde" chat show, "Queer Edge"—a portly, 50ish gentlemen named Jack E. Jett (right) who thinks wearing one glove and a multi-colored Mohawk and repeatedly climbing on top of his desk makes him avant-garde—said the other day, "You don’t have to be talented to do this show." How right he was. Only occasional glimpses of semi-pulchritudinous go-go boys gyrating on the set provide any relief from the utter mindlessness of these talk shows. And for this garbage we also have to endure commercials?
QTN does have films one might not have seen before on TV—some of them are even interesting and not from Hollywood, with a sprinkling of foreign gay films. Unfortunately, QTN airs all these films only in the daytime or well after midnight—when nearly anyone who has to work for a living is busy either earning or sleeping. Call it Slackers TV?
Of the Here network, the less said the better. If you purchase most of their offerings you’re asked to pay $3.95 for, you’re a sucker. Most of their films are gaysploitation idiocies where the writing is dreadful and the acting is worse—that’s especially true of a particularly leaden horror soap opera they’ve produced called "Dante’s Cove" (left)—and only about one in 10 are watchable. And their idea of a talk show is that indigestible endorser of Republicans, Elizabeth Birch (right), talking to Pat Buchanan. How enlightening. I’m not going There.
When one considers what gay TV could be, and then spends any time looking at what it is, all that’s been proven is that gay TV can be even more repellently mediocre than straight commercial television. Newton Minnow's famous phrase calling television "a vast wasteland" certainly applies to the U.S. versions of gay TV. And we’re supposed to call that progress. But didn’t the stereotype always maintain that we are supposed to be the creative ones?
The above was written for the new issue of Gay City News -- New York's largest gay weekly -- out tomorrow
