‘The War Widow’: U.S. TV’s First Lesbian Love Story

Frances Lee McCain (left) and Pamela Bellwood in ‘The War Widow’ (1976)

As long as we’re celebrating Gay Pride Month...
 
Quite a few LGBT+ characters populate prime-time network television these days.  Where gay and lesbian characters were virtually banished from the small screen in previous decades, sitcoms like Ellen and Will and Grace in the 1990s gradually established room for a gay presence in TV comedy.  By today, TV audiences now have a few prime-time network dramas with openly LGBT+ leads and supporting characters shown in relatable romantic situations.  This marks a great sea change from when the female buddy-cop show Cagney & Lacey (1981-88) replaced one of its lead cast members because the network executives thought the actress, Meg Foster, was giving off too much of a lesbian vibe.  Prime-time network television — the kind you can see without a cable subscription — stands as a modest microcosm of how we see ourselves as a society.  And the fact that microcosm now includes LGBT+ lead characters confirms that it has grown to be more inclusive. 

Still, given this relatively newfound presence of romantic LGBT+ lead characters on our living-room screens, not much acknowledgement is made of the first network broadcast to push that particular envelope; not much acknowledgement is made of the teleplay that Wikipedia calls the “first lesbian love story on mainstream American television,” which initially appeared all the way back in 1976.  I’m referring to the shot-on-video drama The War Widow, which was first presented as part of PBS’s dramatic anthology series Visions (1976-80).  Directed by Paul Bogart and written by playwright Harvey Perr, The War Widow appeared in a TV environment that made clear its hostility to non-heterosexual expressions of desire.  As the New York Times TV critic said in the paper’s review of The War Widow:

There probably isn’t a group in the nation that, at one time or another, couldn’t complain about being portrayed offensively, but the award for most battered must belong to lesbians.  On [the TV series] Policewoman [1974-78], they have been seen ripping off and murdering the helpless residents of an old-age home.  In [the TV movie] Born Innocent [1974], they brutally raped hapless Linda Blair in a shower room.  They puff cigars.  They snarl.  They are outrageously distorted. 

Onto this unwelcoming terrain ambled The War Widow, the story of an upper-middle-class American woman, in the closing months of World War One, stagnating in her stultifying life in a large house with her mother and daughter, while her absent husband is in Europe.  On an errand, the woman meets a free-spirited female photographer, and they gradually fall in love.  Given the production’s setting — and anticipating TV clichés to come — one might expect The War Widow to have a tragic ending, but while bittersweet, the two women finish the story alive and together, a progressive narrative ending that other network shows would be slow to emulate.  However, after its broadcast on PBS, the teleplay has only been revived once (as far as I know) at a gay film festival a couple decades later and has never had an official video release.  The War Widow remains fondly remembered by the lesbian viewers who saw the broadcast, but one is hard-pressed to find much mention of the drama in writings about the history of LGBT+ films and TV.

Bellwood and McCain in ‘The War Widow’

To some degree, the teleplay’s paucity of acknowledgement is understandable: today’s LGBT+ audiences want to see gay characters who openly display affection for their partners, visible proof that these characters are indeed attracted to the same gender.  But The War Widow is very much a product of its time: the lesbian leads barely touch each other, and their “romantic” scenes together come across as rather chaste, reflecting PBS’s apparent fear of alienating an audience unused to seeing unreviled same-sex attraction on TV (or virtually anywhere else, for that matter).  One can easily imagine a present-day lesbian audience losing patience with The War Widow’s reticence in showing two women in love with each other.  

However, The War Widow’s story is set in a repressive environment — the American upper-middle-class during World War One — where most of the characters are hesitant about expressing any kind of emotion, so the absence of more ardent romantic scenes between the two women encourages the viewer to question what other expressions of passion are being veiled by the conventions of polite society.  In short, I think The War Widow is due for reappraisal as both a trailblazing depiction of alternative sexuality on TV, and as an affirmative but understated view of lesbian romance, especially in contrast to TV’s more recent and more frank portrayals.

Fortunately, all one hour and eighteen minutes of The War Widow have been posted on YouTube, so viewers can see for themselves if the teleplay’s oblique view of same-sex romance antiquates the drama beyond all use, or survives as a coy but compelling narrative strategy that can still engage LGBT+ audiences.