Hoooo boy. Billy Crystal has angered plenty with some poorly-worded statements he made about the portrayal of gay sex scenes on television. According to The Independent, during a panel on the Television Critics Association this weekend promoting his upcoming FX series The Comedians, Crystal said he can do without all the gratuitous P-in-the-B scenes that TV keeps shoving in his face:
Speaking during a panel interview in Pasadena, the actor said: “Sometimes I think: ‘Ah that’s too much for me’.
“Sometimes, it’s just pushing it a little too far for my taste and I’m not going to reveal to you which ones they are. I hope people don’t abuse it and shove it in our face to the point where it feels like an every-day kind of thing,” Crystal added.
Yet, during the same panel, Crystal spoke about his character Jodie Dallas on the series Soap. Running from 1977-1981, Crystal portrayed one of the first-ever gay characters on television and back then, it seems (for the time, anyway), he had a much more progressive attitude towards gay characters on TV:
“It was very difficult at the time,” said Crystal. “Jodie was really the first recurring [gay] character on network television and it was a different time, it was 1977. So, yeah, it was awkward. It was tough.”
“I did it in front of a live audience and there were times when I would say to Bob [Seagren], ‘I love you,’ and the audience would laugh nervously. I wanted to stop the taping and go, ‘What is your problem?’”
So in summary, Billy Crystal has no problems with gay characters on TV just as long as they’re not enjoying themselves between the sheets. Like so many things in life, I feel like the whole thing can be summed up with the following image:
(Via The Independent / Yahoo!)
