A future in which a queer person can be elected president of the United States may seem dismayingly out of reach at the moment. President Donald Trump won the White House last November after a campaign fueled in part by transphobia and anti-LGBTQ+ sentiment, and since taking office he has made dismantling diversity initiatives and rolling back hard-won rights and protections for transgender people a major part of his agenda.
But in a political climate that seems dire for most queer people, a new Netflix show offers an encouraging fantasy. The Residence, a new mystery series from Grey’s Anatomy creator Shonda Rhimes’s Shondaland production company, centers on eccentric detective Cordelia Cupp’s (Uzo Aduba) investigation of a murder at the White House. Among the cast of colorful characters — and suspects — are President Perry Morgan (Paul Fitzgerald) and his husband, First Gentleman Elliot Morgan (Barrett Foa).
In a recent interview with LGBTQ+ outlet Gaety, both Fitzgerald and Foa speculated that the show might be the first ever to depict a gay American president — though, as the Daily Beast notes, AppleTV+’s For All Mankind features a lesbian president played by Jodi Balfore.
“I love that I am part of one half of maybe the first queer presidency on television,” Foa said. “I’m queer and the guy playing the president is queer. So in real life, we have that great representation. It’s such a cool time for this to happen.”
“They wanted it grounded in reality,” Fitzgerald said, adding that he loves the fact that his character’s sexuality is not “foregrounded in any important way other than the fact that it’s just a reality.”
“No one’s like, ‘Let’s talk about how these people are gay,’” Foa explained. “You’re just like, no—that’s the setup of the show. And there’s something so natural about that. It doesn’t have to be a thing.”
But the show’s matter-of-fact depiction of a gay POTUS and First Gentleman is important in other ways. As Fitzgerald recently told the Daily Beast, “TV plays a really important role in helping people see a future that they may not have otherwise seen.”
To Fitzgerald’s point, it wasn’t all that long ago that then-Vice President Joe Biden cited NBC’s Will & Grace for having introduced a wide audience of network TV viewers to queer characters, leading to greater public approval of LGBTQ+ people and the fight for marriage equality.
In his interview with the Daily Beast, Fitzgerald suggested that seeing a gay U.S. president in The Residence may do something similar, helping American viewers get used to the idea of a queer person in the White House.
“If Barrett and I representing this can enlarge the culture of imagination by seeing it mirrored in real life, it would be the proudest moment of my entire career,” he said.
And perhaps most refreshingly, The Residence depicts Fitzgerald’s character as a capable leader who also has a genuine connection to LGBTQ+ culture — as illustrated in a scene in which President Morgan is thrilled to see gay icon Kylie Minogue perform at a White House state dinner.
“Ultimately, I want to represent that gay people are a multiplicity of things,” Fitzgerald told the Daily Beast. “We can be deadly serious and straight-acting, and we can also jump out of our f**king seat at Kylie Minogue.”
Link to original story by John Russell for LGBTQNation.
