I’m doing this Blogging A to Z thing for the month of April 2026. I did this 10 years ago, and it was pretty random. For this month at least, I’m focusing on queer media – movies, books, TV, etc., by, for, or about queer people.
Doing Time on Maple Drive is a 1992 made for TV movie about a perfect American family imploding over the discovery that the golden child is gay.
Matt Carter is the youngest sibling and golden child of the family. A student at Yale, Matt is recently engaged and brings his fiancee, Allison, home to meet his family – parents Phil and Lisa, and siblings Karen and Tim. Phil is a successful restaurateur and Lisa is a homemaker. Tim, the oldest child, is an alcoholic college dropout who works for Phil’s restaurant business. Karen is married to Tom, a photographer, who it’s very clear is seen as not good enough for her.
Allison pretty quickly picks up on the toxic vibes in the Carter family, which are confirmed by Tom, and realizes Matt is secretly gay when she finds a letter from a former boyfriend. After confronting Matt (“Don’t lie to me, I’m not your family!”) and breaking off the engagement, she promises not to tell anyone that he’s gay and sneaks out of the house, leaving it to Matt to tell his family.
Unable to tell his family the truth, Matt attempts to kill himself by running his car into a tree. Everyone assumes it was an accident, and a few days later he returns home. In the meantime, Lisa has received a thank you note from Allison, in which she apologizes for breaking off the engagement.
Lisa blows up at Matt for embarrassing the family (“…invitations have already gone out!”) Matt hollers back that it wasn’t an accident, that he’d tried to kill himself for being gay, and that Lisa already knew, having caught him with the boyfriend two years earlier.
Lisa simply refuses to accept that Matt isn’t choosing to be gay and sees that as a reflection on her. When Phil asks if she’d rather see her son dead she doesn’t answer. Things between Phil and Matt are slightly better. He tells Matt that he’d rather he be normal, and forces himself to say the word homosexual, but won’t say gay (“a perfectly good word that’s been destroyed”).
There’s no happy ending here, but at least Matt knows where he stands.
I think anyone around my age who grew up in the suburbs in the 70s and 80s will recognize the Carters. You either were them or you knew them.
A note on casting:
William McNamara, who played Matt at a time when playing gay really was risky for young actors, has had a long career in films and television, though mostly in supporting roles since the 90s.
Allison is played by Lori Laughlin, most famous for her roles in Full House, Fuller House, and the 2019 college admissions bribery scandal, for which she did actual time.
The older brother Tim is played by Jim Carrey in the middle of his run on In Living Color, a few years before his career took off with Ace Ventura, Mask, Dumb and Dumber, and other over-the-top comedic performances, and many years before his thankfully brief anti-vaccine crusade.
Working title 