Unprecedented in concept, An American Family was one of television’s milestones, the first program to simply point a camera at average people and record their unscripted, unplanned, day-to-day lives, something that would catch on with alarming regularity in the new millennium. Over a seven-month period the Loud family of Santa Barbara, California, allowed producer Craig Gilbert and filmmakers Alan and Susan Raymond to record their most personal moments, with three hundred hours of footage eventually pruned down to twelve, hour-long episodes that were broadcast on PBS starting in January of 1973. This forerunner of “reality television” also broke ground by offering the first regularly seen gay person on a weekly program, the family’s eldest son, twenty-year-old Lance Loud.

Very much his own person who embraced the free-spiritedness of the time, Lance made no apologies for his sexuality, nor was it ever brought up as a problem or issue on the show. In actuality, there was no direct discussion of his gayness of any kind; it was simply there for viewers to pick up on, as Lance was flamboyant in manner, was seen applying his sisters’ makeup, took his mother to a drag club in New York, and made it clear that he grew up feeling like an outsider. In fact it was in interviews connected with the series that he was open about the matter; the series itself pretty much avoided the topic mainly because it was not something his family wanted to talk about.

Nevertheless, by being part of a highly-rated show that purported to be a glimpse into everyday American lives of the early 1970s, Lance Loud became a gay icon at a time when members of the gay community were starved for role models or spokespersons who did not try to hide or make apologies for their differences.

With the passing decades, as reality programming became a genre unto itself, many a series made room for gay participants, notably MTV’s The Real World, and its 1994 season in San Francisco which found viewers compassionately following Pedro Zamora coping with AIDS, and Survivor, whose very first winner was out and proud Richard Hatch, although his image as a deceitful and arrogant competitor was hardly thought of as a positive one where many gay viewers were concerned.

Bonus Audio: Speakers talk about real-life gays as seen in such reality programs as An American Family, The Real World, and Survivor.   

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