Throwback Thursday Remembers That Gay Couple on Barney Miller

November 20, 2025
HANK ORSO

Yer boy Hank here is old enough to remember a host of negative representations on TV back in the day. I mean, way back in the day. No...further...THERE ya go! Rare were the moments of even apathetic or neutral representations, much less outwardly positive ones. But that was back when any representation we saw, we grasped at. We didn't care if what we were seeing put us in a positive light or not. (Well, maybe a little.) But to actually see us there on TV or in movies, well, it felt like something. There was a show in the 70's called Barney Miller, about a precinct house in Manhattan's West Village. Yes, that West Village, home of The Stonewall Inn and a mecca of gay life. And one episode featured a gay couple, and boy, was it a first!

I loved the show growing up. Instead of a squeaky-clean Brady house, you had a scruffy, dirty police precinct filled with regular-looking dudes that were a nice cultural mix. Also, Hal Linden, who played the title character, was hot as hell! The New York Times recently reported on the fiftieth anniversary of a pivotal episode in season two, a groundbreaking episode, one unlike the audience had ever seen.

"Discovery" aired October 30th, 1975, and centered around swishy gay couple Marty and Darryl, played by Jack DeLeon and Ray Stewart, respectively. They entered, as mainstream flamboyant as has ever been seen, wearing a brightly colored cardigan on Darryl and a powder blue jacket and matching pants for Marty, a striking contrast to the drab colors the detectives wore. Their complaint was that Darryl was the victim of a "fruit hustle," a shakedown of gay men by cops, a common practice that preyed on the fears of being outed.

What's common as seen in the clip is the snide aside of Wojahowitz, his "You ain't kiddin'" with the audience's raucous laughter. What was decidedly uncommon was the fact that their complaint was taken seriously. As the Times states, this is due to series creator and former Marine Danny Arnold, who "tried to make the show a social mirror and a corrective, akin to what Norman Lear did in his hit sitcoms." Arnold was often at odds with television censors over content they felt was too sexual, while Arnold and his writers felt they were simply displaying real life. “The networks considered any acknowledgment that gay people existed as talking about sex,” (Stephen) Capsuto said (author of Alternate Channels: Queer Images on 20th-Century TV.) “Even using the word gay made the networks nervous.”

The character of Marty had appeared a few times before, but this was the first time he appeared as part of a couple. Marty and Darryl were possibly the first gay couple the audience had witnessed, and they would make several more appearances, including in the series finale. So the audience got to know and like this character in this Emmy-winning show that ran for eight seasons and was a perennial favorite.

“'I didn’t realize how innovative the episode was, (Stewart) said over the phone from home in his native San Benito, Texas. 'We really were the Wright Brothers in a sense.'" Stewart, at 94, (DeLeon died in 2006) would like some credit for being such a TV trailblazer. He left TV in the early nineties and still acts and directs stage productions in Brownsville, TX, and South Padre Island. He always kept his private life private, but says now, "In my old age, I've realized that I'm basically gay." And what about that long-ago episode that was so ahead of its time? “It’s one of my proudest moments."

Check out Matt Baume's take on this groundbreaking couple of queens and how they "defeated the network censors" through the entire Barney Miller series.