Queer sex had been relegated from general audiences for so long, that viewers (both straight and possibly even queer) couldn’t visualize it. I think of what Jonathan Groff once said in an interview about Looking, how straight people often told him “they didn’t know gay people could have sex while facing each other until they saw the show.” It might sound silly to say, but there’s something about the capacity to see humanity here. What’s important is that people actually learned something. This isn’t just about titillation, of course. It featured dialogue and plotlines about hookup apps, storylines about consent in queer culture, and serodifferent relationships. The show featured not just butt stuff, but threesomes, and, in the second season’s eighth episode, our two men coming up from 69-ing - a moment I gasped at among friends when I watched. While Annalise Keating’s immortal line “Why is your penis on a dead girl’s phone?” remains etched in the show’s reputation, equally table-shaking was “He did this thing to my ass that made my eyes water,” uttered by Connor’s hookup in the series’ fourth episode (just in case viewers were oblivious to Connor’s sex act of choice).
For this, it should be remembered as queer-TV royalty.
How to Get Away With Murder risked putting queer sex front and center for an audience that may not have been asking for it. It was something that felt impossible with these qualifiers - because until then it was. While HBO’s Looking had one of premium cable’s first male-on-male anilingus scenes since Queer As Folk in 2000, How to Get Away With Murder did the same thing only eight months later, but on broadcast television, in its first episode, with a TV-14 rating.
There is no nudity, of course, but if if you know how two men have sex, it’s obvious what’s happening: He’s getting rimmed. After making out naked and in bed, Connor tells Oliver to “turn over.” When he obliges, Connor pecks his back with kisses, moving downward until Oliver arches his back and moans in pleasure. In the pilot, Oliver (Conrad Ricamora) brings Connor (Jack Falahee) home and the pair does something hitherto unseen on American broadcast TV. Now in 2020, it might be easy to take for granted, but HTGAWM and its out, gay creator and showrunner Peter Nowalk made history. I was shocked to be watching something like it on primetime network television, even in 2014. When the show first started airing, I jokingly called it How to Get Away With Gay Sex Scenes to friends (and on my burner Twitter account). It’s as if through this interruption, How to Get Away With Murder is reminding us of the unsung legacy it’s leaving behind as a show that slid queer sex front and center, embedded into the stories on our screens. Across six seasons, Connor and Oliver’s sex has not been infrequent, though this is the first time we heard their residual moans long after their initial disrobing. It’s funny, but it’s also slightly annoying: The show is forcing us to listen to their lovemaking to momentarily ignore the murder-y plots afoot. It happens offscreen, but Connor and Oliver’s moans of pleasure float through floor and wall, disrupting the conversation downstairs. In the first episode of How to Get Away With Murder’s final season, two men have loud sex.