Our Siblings, Our Secrets
The Brothers of Six Feet Under and how the hottest show on TV uncovers our family secrets: gay and straight siblings.
The Advocate
3.19.02

David and Nate Fisher, the 30-something mortician heroes of HBO's Six Feet Under, enter the somber parlor of their funeral home and walk smack into a hoedown. Desperate for money, Nate has rented the space to a local square-dancing group coached by the frisky young roué Kurt. David eyes Kurt, Kurt eyes David, and Nate just smiles. "OK, if you haven't slept with that guy yet, would you start?" Nate whispers to his straitlaced, semicloseted younger brother. "Because I think it would do you a world of good."

It's a throwaway moment in a show full of these kinds of moments: knowing, needling, and right in step with sibling life. The show, created by TV veteran and screenwriter Alan Ball (American Beauty) and on the cusp of its second season, is ostensibly about one family's misadventures in the funeral trade. Soulful, straight Nathaniel (Peter Krause), his uptight gay brother David (Michael C. Hall), and their mother (Frances Conroy) are trying to keep the business going while sorting out their own love lives. This involves drugs, booze, sex, and robustly dark humor: Last season, when teenage Claire (Lauren Ambrose) got mad at her boyfriend, she stole a foot and put it in his school locker.

Six Feet Under has been praised as an unabashed portrait of the "death industry," covering the rituals of embalming and the benefits of cremains. But there's another dissection at work here, less about the craft of dying than the art of living. The Fishers are a family of secret-keepers, and none looms larger in the plot-or more autobiographical for executive producer Ball-than David's tortured homosexuality.

Ball, 44, grew up in a small town in Georgia with two older brothers and a sister who was killed in a car accident when he was 13. Like his character David, "I spent a long time trying to be straight and actually succeeding in a certain way," the effusive Ball says. "I didn't come out of the closet until I was 33. I woke up and said, 'Who am I fooling?'" While the media portrays gays as "out, proud, and not having sex," says Ball, he's more interested in the struggle toward acceptance. In the first season, David's life becomes so compartmentalized, he can't keep all the drawers straight. It's a long, artful disclosure, which crescendos when David comes out to his mother in episode 12 of 13.

But what distinguishes Six Feet Under isn't just that slow creaking-open of the closet door. Rather, it's the way Ball and his team of writers put David's brother and sister at the center of the realization, right in the middle of David's emotional hoedown.

This sibling factor is largely overlooked in gay and lesbian studies, as if their acceptance were irrelevant or their rejection harmless. This might be because siblings play so many roles-substitute parent, coconspirator, tormenter, confidant-that the gay-straight relationship impossible to categorize. Take Nate, for example. In one episode he's stunned when he bumps into David brunching with his boyfriend. In the next he catches David kicking back with gay porn, and it's David, not Nate, who is ashamed. "We wanted to erode that myth that if you're a straight guy, you have to be threatened by gayness.," Ball says. If anything, the show expertly captures the strange, contemporary paradox of coming out: Nate and Claire (and Mom too) are more accepting of David's gayness than David himself.

Taken in a larger context, clinical insights about homosexuality and siblings are a hodgepodge of evocative conclusions: Gay men tend to come later in the birth order and have more older brothers than heterosexual men, while lesbians tend to be the only child or the oldest; gay brothers (especially gay twins) stay more closed-off to the family about sexuality than do straight siblings.

One of the more groundbreaking studies, conducted by professor Esther Rothblum at the University of Vermont, compares the lives of 762 pairs of lesbians and their straight sisters. She found that lesbians tend be more educated, live in cities and farther away from the parents, and have higher self-esteem than their sisters. The straight sisters, meanwhile, are more likely to be homemakers, identify with a religion, and be in longer-existing relationships. "As one became more open," says Rothblum, "the other became more traditional."

The coming-out process is rich with sibling involvement. Cornell professor Ritch Savin-Williams studies emerging patterns in coming out, finding that siblings-sisters particularly-play a key role. For his book Mom, Dad, I'm Gay: How Families Negotiate Coming Out, Savin-Williams interviewed 164 sexual-minority teens and young adults. He noticed the importance of a "favorite sibling"-usually a sister-in the rehearsal for telling the parents. "In too many cases, we lump siblings together," he says. "There can be a huge difference in their reactions."

The "favorite sibling" relationship isn't without its difficulties. Annie K., 32, of New York, has two older brothers who are now completely supportive of her and her partner. But there were challenges in the beginning. She recalls taking a girlfriend to a college graduation dinner with her family.

"I looked across the table, and my [younger] brother was totally French-kissing my girlfriend," she says. She bounded over the table and knocked it down. "I was so stunned," she continues. "It was as if because I was with a woman, the relationship was less valid [to him]-that he could test it and see how 'straight-leaning' we were... I think some of his identity was wrapped up in my choice to be with women-it felt like a rejection of him at some level."

So then why are sisters often the first to know? Don Barrett, a sociologist of sexuality at California State University, San Marcos, believes that at the moment the gay brother is rethinking masculinity, the straight sister may be coming to terms with femininity-and that may make sisters more accepting. Teenage brothers are "more likely to be trying to define themselves by other men and their relations to women," Barrett notes. Sisters, meanwhile, tend to be working on "empathy development," he says. "To be warm and welcoming to a gay sibling reaffirms their sense of femininity."

Sisters also tend to be far more observant of family dynamics. In Six Feet Under young Claire realizes David's orientation in the very first episode. In some ways this maps onto Ball's own experience. "My sister had dolls, and I wanted to play with them. I would put G.I. Joe in his dress whites and wonder why he didn't have a tux," he says. His sister obviously took note. "When I was 11, she gave me a poster of Thoreau that said, 'If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer.' She knew [about my sexuality], I'm sure."

But there's another asset to sisters. Part therapist, part gossip, they often act as back-channel information gatherers, a kind of family newswire. "Sisters know how to spread information in a safe manner," says Barrett. Jay Heavner, director of development for Parents, Families, and Friends of Lesbians and Gays, tells the story of a gay minister in Kentucky. He told his sister first, and they arranged that she would go home and tell the parents. "If the light was on in his room," Heavner says, "that meant the parents were OK with it. If the light was off, and her car was gone, they weren't. So he drove around the block and came back to the house...and all the lights were on."

While siblings may smooth over the coming-out process, gay sexuality may cause tensions later, when straight siblings start their own families. In 1993, San Francisco entrepreneur Al Farmer, now 31, told his older brother he was gay. The brother's response was, "If it's what makes you happy, I don't care." But days later, when Farmer visited the brother, his wife, and their two boys, his brother pulled him aside and said, "I have talked this over with my wife and we have to ask that you don't touch our kids. I don't want them getting AIDS.' "

It seems a particular cruelty to be rejected by those you grew up with, who should share a generational understanding. But a sibling's becoming a parent can stir up latent prejudices "given the polluting association of gays and child molestation," says sociologist Steve Seidman, who's writing a book analyzing problems gays face after they're out of the closet.

Peter Welch, 41, who lives in Kittery Point, Maine, knows this well. He has a gay twin and an older, straight sister. Before she became a parent, she was "gay-positive," he says, never being judgmental about her brothers' sexuality. But after she came home from giving birth to her first child, their relationship began to strain. "Her son was 3 weeks old, and she said, 'I really hope he doesn't turn out to be gay,'" Welch recalls. "I was floored." She chose a distant friend over Welch to serve as a godparent to her boy. "I offered to baby-sit and she flatly turned me down," he says. "I don't know if it's a conscious fear, but there is something there, that she wanted to keep us away." The three siblings are currently working toward reconciliation.

Six Feet Under's Ball has his own anecdote about family acceptance. One of his brothers, a "good ol' boy and redneck," lives in a Georgia county that "prides itself on being all white," he says. This past Christmas, Ball brought back his lover for the first time. They were at his brother's house with "the farting dogs" and Ball's nephews, who are now parents themselves. A nephew's wife told a story about bringing her young son to the beauty parlor. He grabbed for his mother's purse. "She said, 'I started to get a little worried,'" Ball recounts. "I wanted to say, 'Worried of what?' I was right there with my lover." Much as he likes her, Ball confesses that with that one "unthinking comment, you just realize you're in different worlds."

Still, those worlds are more complex than we appreciate. Just as Six Feet Under's Nate acts as matchmaker for David, Ball's brother is capable of surprising empathy. Ball says, "He keeps asking me, 'When David and his boyfriend going to get back together?'" All Ball will reveal about the second season is that they'll "remain in each other's lives." Like family.