‘Housewives’ mirrors real life

When “Desperate Housewives” creator Marc Cherry came out of the closet to his mother on his 31st birthday, Martha Cherry looked at her son and said: “I would love you even if you were a murderer.”

On tonight’s new episode of “Housewives” (9 p.m. on ABC, KXLY-4 in Spokane), Bree Van De Kamp (Marcia Cross) delivers those same double-edged words of support to her teenage son Andrew (Shawn Pyfrom), who came out to his parents in last week’s show.

Cross, 43, and Pyfrom, 18, share a much closer bond than their combative characters. He calls her “Mama Marcia”; she calls him “my boy.”

The two sat down together in the “Housewives” production office to discuss the ramifications of Andrew’s bombshell – the latest shocker to rock TV’s most sexually surprising clan. (Earlier story lines revealed Bree’s husband, Rex, to be a masochist and daughter Danielle to be contemplating the loss of her virginity.)

In real life, Pyfrom has been dating his girlfriend, aspiring actress Eliana Reyes, 17, for a year.

Cross confirms she has been dating Tom Mahoney since January. He is not, as several media outlets have reported, a 57-year-old actor but a 47-year-old wealth manager.

That should put to rest the gay rumors that swirled in February, which Cross denied on “The View.”

“I’m very happy,” she says.

Cross has gay people in her family, including her uncle and his partner, who are founding members of L.A.’s Gay Men’s Chorus.

She recalls “watching my parents accepting (homosexuality) into the family. Eventually, it just becomes OK.”

But in the early ‘90s, Cross volunteered at Cedars Sinai hospital’s AIDS clinic, where she encountered many real-life Brees, who believed their dying sons were going to hell.

On tonight’s show, Bree, a Southern Baptist, will repeat two additional lines of religious condemnation first coined by Cherry’s mother: “The word’s not ‘gay’; it’s ‘sodomy’!” And: “You won’t be going to heaven!”

“If you take it from Bree’s point of view, you can understand why she would fight to save him,” says Cross. “(She fears) she won’t be with him in heaven.

“It’s very complex. I know she loves him no matter what, but it will take some time to change her deep-instilled beliefs. Maybe this is all a lesson in tolerance.”

Because he came out in his 30s, Cherry was able to hear his mother’s harsh words with humor and empathy. But Andrew, whom Cherry describes as a “narcissistic sociopath,” will go to “a far darker place” and use his sexuality to further torture Bree.

Cherry cautions that Andrew should not be viewed as anyone’s role model.

“What he’ll do in the fall to get back at his mother is so unpleasant,” he says.

Agrees Pyfrom: “This story shows (gay youths) what not to do.”

Coincidentally, Cross also once played a gay villain, a murderous lesbian on a 1990 episode of “Quantum Leap.”

Might such negative representations prove harmful to the acceptance of gays?

The media watchdog GLAAD (Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation) thinks not.

“It’s a soap opera,” says GLAAD executive director Joan Garry. “There’s probably no better place to have a character like Andrew who’s discovering himself. We hope he continues to be as complex and multilayered as everyone else on Wisteria Lane.”

And how would Cross react were she to one day become the mother of a gay son?

“I wouldn’t care at all,” she says. “I’ll be lucky to have a child. May they be whatever they want to be.”