Glenn Jordan | Rites of Friendship (Season 2, Episode 10 of the ABC TV series Family) / 1976

a glass snowball vision of a radical past

by Douglas Messerli

 

Gerry Day, Bethel Leslie, and Lawrence Konner (screenplay), Glenn Jordan (director) Rites of Friendship (Season 2, Episode 10 of the ABC TV series Family) / 1976

 

During the period in which this ABC series ran, I was in graduate school finishing by PhD, and my husband Howard was then a curator of art at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. I had also just begun publication of the journal, Sun & Moon: A Journal of Literature and Art. In short, neither of us had much time for television. I had never even heard of this fairly popular series with ran 1976-1980 until my Facebook friend Eric Henwood-Greer.

     This particular episode was schedule to premiere early in the second season, on September 28, 1976, but because of its controversial subject is postponed until the week following Christmas, a time recognized for very small audiences.

     Today the plot of this episode hardly even seems head-turning, let alone shocking; but it its time it was far ahead of most other TV fare. What is shocking is that even almost a decade after Stonewall, young men were still being arrested to simply showing up in a gay bar.

     In this plot, the middle school daughter Buddy Lawrence (Kristy McNichol) and her old brother Willie (Gary Frank) are rounding up their favorite Mexican food at a fast food restaurant since their parents Kate (Sada Thompson) and Doug (James Broderick) are spending an evening out at a restaurant.

   Suddenly while waiting for their order, they spot Willie’s best friend of many years and a regular visitor to their house, Zeke Remsen (Brian Byers), evidently having returned home temporarily from school to Pasadena from college in San Francisco. Willie immediately invites him to return home with them to share their Mexican meal, but Zeke declares he has other plans, and will join them the next day.

      Later that evening, we discover what those plans were, when Zeke calls Willie from jail, after he has evidently struck a policemen in a bar. Willie immediately runs to the jail with for a bail-out, his father, a lawyer, soon to follow.

      But when Willie queries him as to why the incident occurred, Zeke, after several pauses, explains the severity of the situation by sharing the fact that he was underage at a gay bar, and that, in fact, he himself is gay.

      Willie is immediately taken aback, and pulls away from his best friend mostly out of homophobia, but also, in the case, taken aback that after all these years when he thought they both had shared everything with each other, he discovers that the boy he has thought of his brother has not revealed such an important aspect of himself.

      Actually, Zeke has returned to Pasadena mostly to reveal his sexuality to Willie, and not previously been able to bring up the subject for fear of precisely what now happens as Willie pulls away from his friend and refuses even to talk with him.

      At one point, Zeke even further scares off his friend when he suggests that Willie is afraid of contracting what he sees as a social disease, particularly given their long friendship.

     Doug agrees to represent him in court, convince that he will be better treated by the judge if Zeke’s father appears along with him. But Zeke has not come out to his father, who he knows is even more homophobic than Willie. Yet Doug convinces him it will be best if he now explain to his father. When he does so in Doug’s presence, the father orders the lawyer friend off their property, and with Zeke queries does that mean him as well, he answers “I don’t care happens to you.”

     Doug invites him back to the Lawrence household to stay until the trial is over.

    Yet Willie continues to ignore him, bowing out of even sharing the family dinner with his former best friend.

    Finally, Kate tells her son just how ashamed she is of his behavior, even though in casual conversation she suggests to her older, recently divorced daughter Nancy, that she can’t imagine a worse thing to happen to someone, presumably referring to his homosexuality. Nancy doesn’t see it as quite serious, and Kate, given her ability for sympathy, quickly comes around. But her comment still stings even today, a belief commonly held still in 1976, six years after Howard and I had been openly living together in a gay relationship.

      Eventually Doug, rather surprised given the standard behavior of the presiding judge, gets Zeke off without any mark on his record. And Zeke heads off to the airport to return to college.

      When Doug returns home, he also tells his son just how disappointed he is with his behavior, attempting to explain the difficulty Zeke must have had in sharing his own sexual doubts given that it might mean—and apparently does mean—that he would lose the love of his best friend.

     Chastised, Willie hurries off to the airport to catch Zeke before his flight. The two talk, Willie apologizing, and apparently a rapprochement does occur, although as he is called for his flight, Zeke’s wave of goodbye looks far more like he is waving off the former friend forever, having realized that he will never be seen the same way by Willie ever again.

      A weak subplot was written in, apparently to provide some sense of “normality,” in which Buddy is asked out to a major school dance by the most popular boy in her school. But not knowing how to dance, she begs her older sister Nancy to teach her. But when the time comes, the distracted older woman with her own child and still facing divorce problems, forgets, distancing her even more from her little sister. Zeke finally teaches her to dance.

      While, it is heartening to see such a scene on TV, the fact that the network chose to air it when they did, that just being in a gay bar could possible mean imprisonment for a college kid or, at the least, end in a stretch at a home for juvenile delinquents, or that a generally positive, intelligent woman like Kate Lawrence could not imagine a worse fate for a young man—all of this just a few years for the sudden recognition that young gays were dying of AIDS delimits my joy of viewing this ground-breaking TV episode. I was certainly attending gay bars regularly (albeit in the liberal college city of Madison, Wisconsin as opposed to Pasadena, California) at Zeke’s age without even imagining such possible consequences. TV makes what I believe was a relatively open-minded time now seem so antiquated and retarded. Zeke even declares that he is unhappy in college, presumably while living in one the gayest cities in the world. Watching this video makes me feel somewhat like staring into glass-covered snowball depicting a world that I never realized still existed, an upper privileged middleclass world that could not even imagine that gay men and women might be among their neighbors and friends.

 

Los Angeles, June 2, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (June 2026).