Working title

I’ve been watching L.A. Law on Hulu. I don’t think I’ve watched it since it’s original run, and what I remembered most was wild HR violations and shoulder pads.

Watching it again, I’m reminded of how progressive it was.

In the very first episode, one of the partners at the central law firm is discovered at his desk dead of a heart attack. At his funeral, one of the firm’s secretaries reveals that he was gay, and that she is transgender (in 1986 terms, transsexual). She is subsequently fired by one of the surviving partners, who refers to her as him, and as a freak of nature. Another partner calls him homophobic. I guess transphobic hadn’t entered the lexicon yet.

In the late 80’s, the most prevalent issue facing the gay community was the AIDS crisis. L.A. Law addressed it head on, with sensitivity, and without sugar coating. Later in the first season, ADA Grace Van Owen prosecutes a gay man with AIDS for the mercy killing of his partner who also had AIDS. During the trial, they discuss in detail what happens to someone in the late stages of AIDS.

(In an odd bit of very specific typecasting, four years later, during the first season of Law & Order, the same actor, Peter Frechette, played a gay man with AIDS prosecuted for the mercy killing of other gay men with AIDS.)

Several seasons later, the defense attorney in that case, now suffering with AIDS himself, sues his insurance company when they deny an experimental treatment. Sadly, insurance companies denying treatments recommended by doctors is still an issue, maybe even a worse one.

Over the course of the series, L.A. Law addressed numerous other issues that the queer community faced, and to varying extents, still faces 30+ years later: being unwillingly outed, gay bashing, lost employment, families refusing hospital visitation rights to gay partners, and child custody.

In non-legal queer matters: L.A. Law aired American television’s first same sex kiss between two women and had the first bisexual character as a regular cast member. Slurs like homo and faggot probably wouldn’t fly today, even from non-sympathetic characters. And Jimmy Smits, as Victor Sifuentes, wears a single earring, in his left ear, which everyone in the 80s knew signified straightness. I had a single earring in the 80s; now I have five.