Did the 80’s TV show Miami Vice change television as we know it? Was Miami Vice pushing the envelope on many topics? Is there an episode (arguably one of the best according to fans) that is not available on streaming? Did this banned episode have queer coding laced through the episode? Is it possible that Sonny Crockett is bi? Yes.
What Miami Vice Was (not)
Michael Mann’s Miami Vice was a cultural phenomenon that tapped into the 80’s and created much of the 80’s. The first thing people often think of is the music. There is a reason for that. When the pilot episode premiered audiences got to see the longest period of no diologue on a television show up to that point. Toward the end, the main characters, Crockett and Tubbs are driving to the climatic moment in the night as In the Air Tonight plays. Like John Hughes, Michael Mann and his creative team understood the power of music in the story.
While people remember the flashy glamour and fashion of Miami Vice that had us wearing pastels and gold watches, there was the masterful filming of the night and the darkness.
The show’s recurring theme was a bunch of underpaid Vice cops with failing marriages, gambling addictions, and other frailties having to fight the powerful. Behind the drug and arms dealers were Wall Street executives and other Government agencies. The good guys did not always win and even when they did, it came at a cost.
At the center of it all was James Sonny Crockett played by Don Johnson.
Canon Crockett and Popular Crockett
The character of Crockett is not what casual fans and media portrayals think he is. In media and nostalgia Crockett is the tough fashionable hero who always got, and shot, the bad guy and got the girl. But Canon Crockett was deeper. When he was undercover as a drug or arms dealer or even a neo nazi, he was tough, but it was a role. Crockett himself was sensitive and often needed his partner, Tubbs, to look after him.
When Crockett was in a relationship Tubbs was often concerned and protective. With good reason. Sonny got lost in relationships. He was often taken advantage of and could be hurt easily. That would affect his job, which could affect his life. If an episode involved a woman who was a victim of domestic violence or rape, Crockett’s own pain would be visible in the character. Episodes that involved children would affect him deeply as well.
In more than one episode he would find himself in Lt Castillo’s office speaking of his compromised feelings or being emotional about the things going on in a case. Tubbs, in his own way, would speak about how the job of being a cop does not offer proper resources for what they experience emotionally and never prepared them for how to deal with people in real pain and their own pain.
Crockett and Tubbs would find themselves in friendships with people who were in the bottom of civilization. Sex workers, addicts, small time criminals with no options, and others.
Sonny Crockett was not a guy running around being macho. This is a man who sits outside a senior center playing gin with a bunch of old men he knows by name and has comical rapport when he loses as he has to leave to take a call on his police radio. Even his pet alligator is a rescue. When his pet gets loose and damages his neighbors’ property he explains that he is not spending enough time with him and giving Elvis the alligator enough attention.
Canon Crockett has depth, sensitivity, and struggles with the things he experiences.
Queer Code
For decades, and even now, queer people speak in code. In the 80s you could be discharged from military service and a great many other careers. Relationships could lead to arrest, denial of essential rights, and many other things. Being out was more dangerous than it is today. So queer people and their allies often spoke in code and used symbols.
A comical example of this was the term “Friends of Dorothy”. This is from the Wizard of Oz. Dorothy had friends rejected from the society of the land of Oz and Judy Garland was a gay icon who would give her gay fan base a coded wink and a nod to let them know she knew they were her fans and she loved them. So the code to tell another you were gay was to say you were a friend of Dorothy. The Navy found out about this.
A New York Times article from 1993 wrote, “Agents of the Naval Investigative Service (N.I.S.) discovered that homosexuals sometimes referred to themselves as “friends of Dorothy.”…The N.I.S., however, did not know the phrase’s history and so believed that a woman named Dorothy was the hub of an enormous ring of military homosexuals in the Chicago area. The N.I.S. prepared to hunt Dorothy down and convince her to give them the names of homosexuals.“
Despite millions of tax payer dollars spent, they never did find Dorothy, nor did they figure out the code.
Characters in television and movies that were queer could rarely be portrayed as queer, they had to be coded.
Decoding Crockett
In season one and two there are moments where code for Sonny exists. In the season 2 opener you find Crockett waking up in a luxury Manhattan apartment after having slept with a woman played by Denise Crosby. He wakes up hearing three gay men setting up for an art show in her apartment. They are sexualizing him and even wondering if she left him as a gift for them. He does not do what most straight men would do and get defensive. He merely responds softly that “it” (as the men referred to him) didn’t even know her name.
In another episode he invited another male officer to come to his houseboat and spend time together. In the code of the conversation and Crockett’s body language, there is potentially more to this offer than hanging out.
There are more codes strewn out in the show, but they do not carry the same level of impact and consistency without the only episode you are not going to get on streaming service. Episode 21 of season 1. “Evan”.
To verify that the research I had been doing had teeth I played the episode, which I have on DVD, to two Gen X gay men, a Gen X female ally, 2 queer Millennials, and 3 queer Gen Z people I know, including my child. They watched the episode cold without my researched preface. All of them saw the same thing and came to the same conclusions. The conclusions were not just about Crockett as a bi man, but they saw the code in the same plot points and scenes.
Evan
Most descriptions of this episode you have not been able to see streaming for over a decade follows what Wikipedia has to say about it. “The Vice Squad’s investigation of an arms dealer (Al Israel) is complicated when Crockett encounters Evan Freed (William Russ), a former Vice cop-turned-ATF agent, whose past history with Crockett has left them both with a mutual hatred for each other.“
The following synopsis is viewed through a coded and queer lens as confirmed by my panel and research the last few months.
In the first scene that Evan and Crockett are in together, you see Crockett lost in the scene where he is supposed to be undercover. His emotions are visibly compromised and he is shaken.
Later in the episode you see the first coding. Castillo and an ATF head are meeting with Crockett and Tubbs and makes a reference to wanting to know which one of them used to be Evan’s “playmate”. Shortly after the meeting Crockett meets with Castillo in private and quietly asks to be taken off the case. He cites that he feels he has a right to ask this one thing that he has never asked for.
In this coded conversation his boss knows that Crockett is bi, but tells him that this job needs to done to keep small automatic weapons off the streets where people could be hurt in things like mass shootings. Crockett makes allusions when pressed as to why he wants off the case that he does not want to make confessions here, he sarcastically tells his boss “thanks for the support” and storms out of the office and the vice department building. Tubbs tried to find out what is wrong and Crockett does not engage.
Tubbs, who is protective of Crockett, is not used to not being invited in. He asks another officer, Gina, to look up Evan’s files from his time in Vice. The next day Gina tells Tubbs that Evan, Sonny, and a cop named Mike served in vice together and Mike was killed in action. Around that time Evan left vice and went to the ATF and took on dangerous missions.
Later that night Crockett and Tubbs are driving and Tubbs asks Crockett who Mike was. Crockett screeched the car to a halt and they have an argument that leads to them agreeing to sever the friendship and just be co workers. Crockett is unusually defensive.
The following night Tubbs is in a nightclub and he is about to take a women named Michelle to his place when Crockett enters looking sullen. He tells Tubbs his emotions are all over the map and he would like to explain. Tubbs tells him when office hours are. Crockett walks out without another word and Tubbs feels this moment, tells Michelle he has to go, and follows after Crockett.
Coming Out at a Gas Station
Crockett drives them to a gas station that is closed for the night and a coded conversation begins. Sonny tells Tubbs that at this gas station a man with a shotgun was high on PCP, violent, and threatening people. Mike was off duty and ran into action and was shot to death point blank. He also tells Tubbs that Mike has committed suicide that night in this act.
Tubbs asks him if he and Mike were “tight”. Tubbs already suspects. Crockett tells him that Sonny, Evan, and Mike were the three musketeers. They had an uncover operation to shut down a drug ring that was distributing at nightclubs. Some of the bars were gay bars. Mike, like Sonny earlier in the episode, asked to be taken off the case without stating why. Evan teased Mike saying, are you afraid of being recognized? At that point Mike came out of the closet. He was gay and would be recognized.
Everyone had an opinion on the matter. The police force shuffled Mike to a desk position while seeking ways to fire him and Evan went into full homophobic mode saying horrible and hateful gay slurs and demanded to be reassigned. Sonny was silent. If you are in the closet and see someone else in the closet outed and going through hell, it was not unusual for someone to keep their head down and stay quiet because you cannot deal with it. Supporting Mike puts Sonny at risk. And if someone you had a romantic crush on turns out to be homophobic, that is going to mess with you too.
If we view the episode in code and through the queer lens. Crockett has come out to Tubbs and expresses his guilt for not standing with Mike. Tubbs reminds him police training and society does not teach you how to deal with these feelings. You have to learn it “in the streets and in your heart”. Tubbs reassures Sonny that this is not his fault and he is accepted by Tubbs as he is. Then Tubbs makes a joke about missing out on a night with Michelle, they laugh and they embrace.
Office Scene With Evan
The next morning Evan comes to the Vice office drunk. Crockett pulls him into the office to talk. Evan expresses his guilt over how he treated Mike and says he has grown in his understanding but that understanding came too late for Mike. He assures Sonny there is no guilt trip he can lay on him that is worse than what he does to himself.
He then approaches Crockett and you can see his facial expression full of….not sexual tension…but something intimate that was lost. And then as Evan reaches out to hug him and beg for forgiveness, Sonny does something you never see in all five seasons. He flinches. He flinches much the same way gay and bi men do when they fear violence from a homophobe.
The Final Act
As Crockett and Tubbs wait alone in the night for the undercover arms deal to go down, Tubbs tries to tell him that he can tell Evan his truth. The truth he has been holding in all these years. Sonny keeps trying to change the topic but Tubbs keeps going in an encouraging and sensitive manner. Crockett finally says he will think about it. In the code it feels very much like Tubbs is saying, “Tell him you are bi. Tell him you had feelings for him. I know you can do it. Life is short and you may never see him again. You can do this job, you can live your truth.”
In the final moments the main bad guy pulls a gun on Sonny to shoot him. Evan sees it before anyone else does and runs towards the antagonist and takes two bullets meant for Sonny at point blank range to the chest. A few moments later he dies in Sonny’s arms as Tubbs put a comforting hand on Sonny’s shoulder with a look of empathy as Sonny has pure anguish on his face.
The Outing With My Child
I showed this episode to my 24 year old child on father’s day, which was also their birthday. I told them something that I had only told a very small list of people the last few months while researching this article. I’m bisexual.
I have known the code of this episode for decades. This episode set a tone for me in my youth. Like Sonny I could still be in relationships with women, and this other part of me could be there too because it just was.
When I was a teenager I felt I could not come out because it was the 80’s. I knew my friends. They would not have been safe to come out to. It would have ended some friendships and been my defining characteristic to others. There is other bullshit that an already suicidal teen would have been tipped over the edge.
My religious indoctrination made me ashamed of this other side of my sexuality. Maybe it was a sin and it had to be buried.
Then there was my molestation as a young person. Did that make me feel this way? Did I on some level “ask” for it? Of course I know now that is bullshit, but there was a narrative out there.
When I was no longer married my child had come out transgender. Throughout their middle school and high school years I was fighting for my kid’s life and civil rights. It took everything, including my retirement, to protect my child. And part of my power to fight for them was as the cis het father who would dive into schools and other settings armed to the teeth with lawyers and other advocates to leave unemployed educators and other figures in our wake who would not do the right thing so my kid, and others, could be safe.
I got my column that ran in Patheos for five years because I was the cis het father driven to be an advocate for Queer Gen Z youth. My straightness gave me a platform about queerness. The fucking irony of Patheos and media in general.
But wait! There’s more. Most of the women I have dated post divorce would not have been safe to come out to. Most of them would not have understood. I did tell one once and she felt threatened. She could never elucidate why and dumped me a few days later. So I stayed in the lane where I was safe.
Finally, there is definition. You come out and that is what you are defined as. The gay writer, the bisexual artist, the trans musician, the lesbian athlete, and on and on. The token. Allies love to talk about their queer pal or co worker.
Yes I am bi. But that is not who I am. I am Pat Green. A writer, an artist, a good friend, a father to kids who are not his because their parents cannot love them as they are, a sarcastic and sardonic asshole who often overreacts, overshares, and is stubborn to a fault. But I am a hell of a friend when you need one. These are the things I am and how I want to be remembered. My sexuality? Sure. That is a part of me. Defining me by that standard? May as well define me by my hair color and the shape of my feet.
Why Now?
Because this column and project called Gen X Watch is not just a column full of great articles. It is my yellow diary and it is me being the time machine. It is also me saying the unsaid because I do not know how much time I have left. I know there are more days behind me than ahead of me. I’ve found that if I say the things that matter, others say things that matter.
I was going to tell my friend Erika after the holidays earlier this year. Because of all my friends, she was the one I wanted to tell this truth to first. But she died on Christmas day. Like Sonny with Evan, if you do not say the unsaid, it will be too late too often.
Decades of shame and deferring to shitty friends and insecure girlfriends or my insecurity while dating them also cost me opportunity.
I do not have regrets anymore. But the exposure and fear I have writing this article is fierce because for some, everything changes. I have held space for others who have experienced that.
But maybe…just maybe…someone is reading this and knows exactly what I have experienced and will say, me too. Maybe they will find what they need inside to speak the unspoken to the right people before time runs out.
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