Diva of the week: Sharon Gless "Paving the way"

I would so love to meet her. I hope one day our paths do cross and I get the chance to tell her thank you. Her character Debbie on queer as folk is defenitely one of my all time favorite characters.


Paving the way
Sharon Gless, a PFLAG mom on ‘Queer as Folk,’ will be presented with HRC’s Humaitarian Award

By BINNIE FISHER
Friday, April 01, 2005


Hours before dawn on a chilly morning in March recently, the entire cast of Showtime’s “Queer as Folk” gathered on the set to watch the taping of a scene, the last scene in the five-year-old drama.

“We all went in at 2 a.m. because we wanted to end it together,” says actress Sharon Gless, who plays Debbie Novotny. With the words, “Ladies and gentlemen, that’s a wrap,” she says, the show was over.

Gless, 61, whose character is the mother to a gay son, admits she can’t help feeling a little sad. The final season for a series that she maintains is more than just a TV show will begin airing May 22.

“I understand a lot of people’s lives have been changed because of this show,” she says in a telephone interview.

For Gless, “Queer as Folk” is groundbreaking television, something that doesn’t happen every day. It happened to her once before.

It was the early 1980s, and TV producer Barney Rosenzweig kept trying to sign her for a new series about a couple of sassy female police detectives.

She couldn’t accept the part because she was already in a series. He asked again, just as her show was cancelled.

The mutual admiration between Gless and gays and lesbians began when she was cast in the role of New York City Detective Christine Cagney on the hit series, “Cagney and Lacey.”

She realized that she and co-star Tyne Daly, as Mary Beth Lacey, were breaking new ground. Never had two women been cast together in a serious drama.

She also saw that her fan base was different from that of her co-star.

“I got all the fan mail from lesbians, and Mary Beth got all the fan mail from men because they thought she was such a good wife and mother,” Gless says.

Though some female celebrities have been known to recoil from their lesbian fans, Gless says, she loved the fact that lesbians responded to her character.

“It was the lesbians who kept Cagney alive,” she says, noting that the network tried more than once to cancel the series but relented each time after avalanches of mail poured in demanding that “Cagney & Lacey” remain on the air.

To any celebrity who doesn’t appreciate her fans, Gless says, “I never understood actors being rude to their fans. How the hell do they think they got where they are? If not for their fans, they might as well go home and waitress.”

The series remained on the air from 1982 to 1988, and in 1991, Gless married producer Barney Rosenzweig.

Since then, Gless has starred in plays, in another TV series and in numerous TV movies, three that revisited “Cagney & Lacey.” She reunited with Daly for an appearance on “Judging Amy,” in which Daly plays the mother of a judge.

THE CHEMISTRY WAS STILL there, and she says, the two might tackle another project one day, perhaps a TV movie.

When the last scene in the “Queer as Folk” diner where Debbie works had been completed, Gless says, she was told she could take a couple of mementos. She chose the glass straw holder on the counter and the neon clock on the wall.

From the kitchen in Debbie’s home, she asked for a white ceramic cookie jar in the shape of a slug.

“It’s grotesque,” she says. “It’s so bad, it’s good.”

She was handed a box as she prepared to leave the set, and a crewmember mentioned that he had also packed up the matching teapot.

“I didn’t know there was a teapot,” Gless says, “I said, ‘Bring it on.’”

She taped her last scene with the knowledge that once again, she played a woman who changed lives for the better. Years after “Cagney & Lacey,” she heard from female police officers that she had inspired them to join the force.

From the minute she heard Showtime was casting for “Queer as Folk,” she knew she wanted the part of Debbie.

Gless says she got on the phone to Showtime and asked, “Who do I have to do to get this part?”

“It was ground-breaking television,” she says. “To be on two ground-breaking series in a career, that doesn’t happen very often.”

From the time she was cast as Debbie Novotny, Gless says, she spent time getting to know the woman she would play.

“I made up this whole back story for her,” she says. “She wanted to go to beauty school and open her own beauty salon, but then she got pregnant.”

She decided that Debbie should wear kooky wigs and buttons. Gless went on a thrift-store shopping spree for cheap wigs (“That’s all Debbie could afford,”) old, worn-out T-shirts and buttons with slogans.

Debbie Novotny may be short on class, but she has become the mother that many gay men wish they had.

“She always functions from the heart, this woman,” Gless says. “She saw before her son did that he was gay. She told him so he wouldn’t have to tell her.”

As a member of Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays (PFLAG), Debbie is supportive of gay civil rights.

SO IS SHARON GLESS, AND FROM time to time, gay rights organizations present her with awards.

On Saturday at its annual gala, the Human Rights Campaign’s Houston Chapter will present Gless with the Humanitarian Award. She says she’s humbled, and she’ll be there to accept.

“I’m just an actress,” she says. “They put a wig on me, and I do the scenes. I’m not in the trenches. There are thousands of PFLAG moms who are out there every day.”

Although she knew from the outset that “Queer as Folk” would be paving the way for future gay-themed shows, Gless says, “I had no idea how
much of an impact this character would have.”

Shortly after the series started airing, something happened one day as she walked down the street that revealed how much Debbie was reaching out to gay men. From there it happened again and again, whenever Gless ventured out, most recently as she and her husband were walking down a street in New York City. A gay man approached her and asked, “Can I have a hug?”

“That had happened often, but never before in front of my husband,” Gless says.

Whenever it happens, her answer almost always is, “Come here, honey.”