A gay actor outs his character on ‘CSI’ only to learn producers plan to keep Bobby Dawson in the closet, at least for the time being.

By Brian Moylan
Friday, December 19, 2003

Gay actor Gerald McCullouch was premature in announcing that his character, Bobby Dawson, a ballistics expert on the popular CBS show CSI, was going to come out on the air.

ONE OF THE joys of CBS’s forensic drama “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation” is that the messiness on the show always has to do with dead bodies rather than the characters’ personal lives.

Like the long-running “Law & Order” on NBC, “CSI” is almost completely plot-driven. Viewers can watch any episode of either show and not feel like they’re out of step with a character’s personal dramas.

So imagine the shock when gay actor Gerald McCullouch recently announced that his recurring character on “CSI,” ballistics expert Bobby Dawson, was going to come out on the show and acknowledge he is in a committed relationship with another man and that the couple has an adopted daughter.

A press release from his public relations team said that the big moment would happen on the episode that aired Dec. 11and McCullouch himself confirmed the story in an interview on Sirius Satellite Radio’s gay news channel, Out Q.

McCullouch, 36, has been on the show for four seasons, portraying one of the experts in the lab, and they don’t usually get lives. They’re only there to inform the investigators about various crimes.

After watching last week’s episode, Bobby Dawson does appear in one scene but he didn’t talk about his personal life at all.

“WE SHOT [THE scene where Bobby comes out], and it was very true to life,” McCullouch told the Blade from his home in Los Angeles. “It wasn’t until I got phone calls when the show aired on the East Coast that I learned it wasn’t on the show. I thought, ‘What? I’ve been doing two days of press on this.’”

A rep from CBS confirmed that the scene was shot, but that producers always film more material than it takes to create an episode. The cut could have been made for either time consideration or content.

The network rep said there are still plans for the character to come out on the show, but that decision could change at any time.

“Our personal lives never come into the story, so it stuck out like a sore thumb. Because of that they decided to nix it,” McCullouch said, adding that producers of the show called to apologize that his big scene got cut.

Regardless, McCullouch said it wasn’t a part that he’d lobbied for.

“My job as an actor is to pretend to be other people, for me to guide where it’s going isn’t as much fun,” he said.

He also said the producers decided to give the character a daughter, and that he supported this decision. And when they told him that the character is raising the child with a gay partner he supported that decision, too.

“It was very natural and very healthy, I thought,” he says.

DOES IT MATTER why CBS cut the storyline? Not really.

The network is no stranger to positive portrayals of gay characters, and probably wasn’t concerned with possible backlash against a gay character on television’s highest-rated drama. While this is the network responsible for gay actor Nathan Lane’s ill-fated sitcom, “Charlie Lawrence,” a show about a gay senator, CBS also has allowed gay characters to appear on “The Guardian,” “Two and a Half Men,” “Without a Trace,” “The Amazing Race,” and “Survivor.”

Does it matter that McCullouch jumped the gun with his announcement? Not really.

While it did get a lot of gay viewers’ hopes up, TV is gay enough these days without a recurring character on “CSI.” Next time, however, he should confirm the event is going to take place before his team whips up a press release.

Sure, it would have been nice to have a gay presence on “CSI.” After all, it reaches a larger audience than almost every show on the air, and an accurate portrayal of a gay professional (a gun expert, no less) certainly wouldn’t hurt.