At this point in my life, I had never been to California I’d never even left the East Coast. The pilot, which aired in November 2005, follows a teenager named Spencer Carlin (Gabrielle Christian) who moves from the middle of nowhere, Ohio, to Los Angeles with her parents and her two teen brothers, Glen (Chris Hunter) and Clay (Danso Gordon). Around the same time, I accidentally-on-purpose stumbled upon my first gay books in the YA section of my beloved hometown library - David Levithan’s Boy Meets Boy and The Realm of Possibility, Sara Ryan’s Empress of the World, Stephen Chbosky’s Perks of Being a Wallflower - I also began watching South of Nowhere, one of The N’s original series. When I was 13 or 14, we got more channels and my television allegiances switched from the more wholesome ABC Family to the darker, grungier The N, which would eventually be rebranded as TeenNick. Less obvious to me at the time, I must have also had a thing for Jessica Biel, who, as Mary, was the basketball-playing long-haired butch of my dreams.Įven though the show was basically just 11 seasons of Christian propaganda, it took me years to finally get turned off by the heavy-handed moralizing sewn into each issue-themed episode I really believed, for a while there, that a loving two-parent household and the not-so-sneakily conservative values they espoused might have been the things I was missing from my life. Mostly I had an enormous crush on Simon (David Gallagher), who in earlier seasons was the exact sort of floppy-haired, androgynous twink who lulled me into a false sense of heterosexuality for so long. But on the surface, I was in it for the long haul for less lofty reasons. On a more subconscious level, that sense of comfort probably drew me to watch a hundred-plus episodes. My reality was different from the comforting universe of 7th Heaven, in which, “when the world don’t treat you right,” the one place you could always go was home. The older I got, the less both my mother’s and father’s houses served as my shelter eventually, they instead became places to escape from. Camden and his wife, who were always sweeping in and saving the day for their children, sheltering them from sex, drugs, and other plagues of modern life. Plus, my parents weren’t anything like Rev. I was the oldest of five kids, and for a few years as a preteen, I had four extra pseudo stepsiblings, my mom’s boyfriend’s children I loved the happy chaos of my big family, but we were also plagued by petty jealousies and money problems. I envied that manufactured ease, that stability. Like basically every television family, the Camdens had their squabbles, but any major issue - most caused by bad-seed guest stars who didn’t share the Camden’s values - would be resolved by the end of every episode. He was allowed to be married with children! (It would be another decade before Collins admitted to sexually abusing three underage girls, and by then, I’d have long since lost my faith in Christianity, men, and the world in general.) Camden (Stephen Collins), couldn’t possibly get into any similar sort of scandal. So I nursed my Catholic guilt and budding sexual repression with wholesome doses of 7th Heaven. I was angry and sad, but I also felt ashamed - ashamed to be thinking about sex in any context, but particularly sex involving my priest. I didn’t know the details at the time I was under the impression, for some reason, that Father Morrissey had been suspended and disgraced because he’d had a (consensual) relationship with an adult woman - maybe my mom told me that, to spare me the truth - and I felt angry at the church for denying him, and all priests, the right to (consensually) love whomever he’d like. I started watching the show around the time our local church was weathering its first major scandal (of my lifetime, anyway): My favorite priest, who’d recently overseen my First Communion alongside the priest in our family, my beloved great-uncle, had been removed from active ministry following sexual abuse allegations. Having grown up Catholic, the Camden family’s Protestantism seemed positively chill in comparison. I watched all seven kids grow up through the years as my own big, chaotic family did the same in real life. Camden, his wife, and their ever-expanding brood of children. Created and produced by Brenda Hampton, the WB drama series set in the fictionalized town of Glenoak, California, follows a minister, Rev. After graduating from Nickelodeon cartoons, the first television drama I watched regularly as a kid was 7th Heaven.
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