Our siblings, our secrets: they're often first to know we're gay, and their acceptance or rejection touches us to the core. What's the big deal about brothers and sisters?

David and Nate Fisher, the 30-something mortician heroes of HBO's Six Feet Under, enter the somber parlor of their funeral home and walk smack into a hoedown. Desperate for money, Nate has rented the space to a local square-dancing group coached by the frisky young roue Kurt. David eyes Kurt, Kurt eyes David, and Nate just smiles. "OK, if you haven't, slept with that guy yet, would you start?" Nate whispers to his straitlaced, semi-closeted younger brother. "Because I think it would do you a world of good."

It's a throwaway moment in a show full of these kinds of moments: knowing, needling, and right in step with sibling life. The show, created by TV veteran and screenwriter Alan Ball (American Beauty) and on the cusp of its second season, is ostensibly about one family's misadventures in the funeral trade. Soulful, straight Nathaniel (Peter Krause), his uptight gay brother David (Michael C. Hall), and their mother (Frances Conroy) are trying to keep the business going while sorting out their own love lives. This involves drugs, booze, sex, and robustly dark humor. Last season, when teenage Claire (Lauren Ambrose) got mad at her boyfriend, she stole a foot and put it in his school locker.

Six Feet Under has been praised as an unabashed portrait of the "death industry," covering the rituals of embalming and the benefits of cremains. But there's another dissection at work here, less about the craft of dying than the art of living. The Fishers are a family of secret-keepers, and none looms larger in the plot--or more autobiographical for executive producer Ball--than David's tortured homosexuality.

Ball, 44, grew up in a small town in Georgia with two older brothers and a sister who was killed in a car accident when he was 13. Like his character David, "I spent a long time trying to be straight and actually succeeding in a certain way," the effusive Ball says. "I didn't come out of the closet until I was 33. I woke up and said, `Who am I fooling?.'" While the media portrays gays as "out, proud, and not having sex," says Ball, he's more interested in the struggle toward acceptance. In the first season, David's life becomes so compartmentalized, he can't keep all the drawers straight. It's a long, artful disclosure, which crescendos when David comes out to his mother in episode 12 of 13.

But what distinguishes Six Feet Under isn't just that slow creaking-open of the closet door. Rather, it's the way Ball and his team of writers put David's brother and sister at the center of the realization, right in the middle of David's emotional hoedown.

This sibling factor is largely overlooked in gay and lesbian studies, as if their acceptance were irrelevant or their rejection harmless. This might be because siblings play so many roles--substitute parent, coconspirator, tormenter, confidant---that the gay-straight relationship impossible to categorize. Take Nate, for example. In one episode he's stunned when he bumps into David brunching with his boyfriend. In the next he catches David kicking back with gay porn, and it's David, not Nate, who is ashamed. "We wanted to erode that myth that if you're a straight guy, you have to be threatened by gayness.," Ball says. If anything, the show expertly captures the strange, contemporary paradox of coming out: Nate and Claire (and Mom too) are more accepting of David's gayness than David himself.

Taken in a larger context, clinical insights about homosexuality and siblings are a hodgepodge of evocative conclusions: Gay men tend to come later in the birth order and have more older brothers than heterosexual men, while lesbians tend to be the only child or the oldest; gay brothers (especially gay twins) stay more closed-off to the family about sexuality than do straight siblings.

One of the more groundbreaking studies, conducted by professor Esther Rothblum at the University of Vermont, compares the lives of 762 pairs of lesbians and their straight sisters. She found that lesbians tend be more educated, live in cities and farther away from the parents, and have higher self-esteem than their sisters. The straight sisters, meanwhile, are more likely to be homemakers, identify with a religion, and be in longer-existing relationships. "As one became more open," says Rothblum, "the other became more traditional."

The coming-out process is rich with sibling involvement. Cornell professor Ritch Savin-Williams studies emerging patterns in coming out, finding that siblings--sisters particularly--play a key role. For his book Mom, Dad, I'm Gay: How Families Negotiate Coming Out, Savin-Williams interviewed 164 sexual-minority teens and young adults. He noticed the importance of a "favorite sibling"--usually a sister--in the rehearsal for telling the parents. "In too many cases, we lump siblings together," he says. "There can be a huge difference in their reactions."

The "favorite sibling" relationship isn't without its difficulties. Annie K., 32, of New York, has two older brothers who are now completely supportive of her and her partner. But there were challenges in the beginning. She recalls taking a girlfriend to a college graduation dinner with her family.

"I looked across the table, and my [younger] brother was totally French-kissing my girlfriend," she says. She bounded over the table and knocked it down. "I was so stunned," she continues. "It was as if because I was with a woman, the relationship was less valid [to him]--that he could test it and see how `straight-leaning' we were ... I think some of his identity was wrapped up in my choice to be with women--it felt like a rejection of him at some level."

So then why are sisters often the first to know? Don Barrett, a sociologist of sexuality at California State University, San Marcos, believes that at the moment the gay brother is rethinking masculinity, the straight sister may be coming to terms with femininity--and that may make sisters more accepting. Teenage brothers are "more likely to be trying to define themselves by other men and their relations to women," Barrett notes. Sisters, meanwhile, tend to be working on "empathy development," he says. "To be warm and welcoming to a gay sibling reaffirms their sense of femininity."

Sisters also tend to be far more observant of family dynamics. In Six Feet Under young Claire realizes David's orientation in the very first episode. In some ways this maps onto Ball's own experience. "My sister had dolls, and I wanted to play with them. I would put G.I. Joe in his dress whites and wonder why he didn't have a tux," he says. His sister obviously took note. "When I was 11, she gave me a poster of Thoreau that said, `If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer.' She knew [about my sexuality], I'm sure."

But there's another asset to sisters. Part therapist, part gossip, they often act as back-channel information gatherers, a kind of family newswire. "Sisters know how to spread information in a safe manner," says Barrett. Jay Heavner, director of development for Parents, Families, and Friends of Lesbians and Gays, tells the story of a gay minister in Kentucky. He told his sister first, and they arranged that she would go home and tell the parents. "If the light was on in his room," Heavner says, "that meant the parents were OK with it. If the light was off, and her car was gone, they weren't. So he drove around the block and came back to the house ... and all the lights were on."

While siblings may smooth over the coming-out process, gay sexuality may cause tensions later, when straight siblings start their own families. In 1993, San Francisco entrepreneur Al Farmer, now 31, told his older brother he was gay. The brother's response was, "If it's what makes you happy, I don't care." But days later, when Farmer visited the brother, his wife, and their two boys, his brother pulled him aside and said, "I have talked this over with my wife and we have to ask that you don't touch our kids. I don't want them getting AIDS.'"

It seems a particular cruelty to be rejected by those you grew up with, who should share a generational understanding. But a sibling's becoming a parent can stir up latent prejudices "given the polluting association of gays and child molestation," says sociologist Steve Seidman, who's writing a book analyzing problems gays face after they're out of the closet.

Peter Welch, 41, who lives in Kittery Point, Maine, knows this well. He has a gay twin and an older, straight sister. Before she became a parent, she was "gay-positive," he says, never being judgmental about her brothers' sexuality. But after she came home from giving birth to her first child, their relationship began to strain. "Her son was 3 weeks old, and she said, `I really hope he doesn't turn out to be gay,'" Welch recalls. "I was floored." She chose a distant friend over Welch to serve as a godparent to her boy. "I offered to baby-sit and she flatly turned me down," he says. "I don't know if it's a conscious fear, but there is something there, that she wanted to keep us away." The three siblings are currently working toward reconciliation.

Six Feet Under's Ball has his own anecdote about family acceptance. One of his brothers, a "good ol' boy and redneck," lives in a Georgia county that "prides itself on being all white," he says. This past Christmas, Ball brought back his lover for the first time. They were at his brother's house with "the farting dogs" and Ball's nephews, who are now parents themselves. A nephew's wife told a story about bringing her young son to the beauty parlor. He grabbed for his mother's purse. "She said, `I started to get a little worried,'" Ball recounts. "I wanted to say, `Worried of what?' I was right there with my lover." Much as he likes her, Ball confesses that with that one "unthinking comment, you just realize you're in different worlds."

Still, those worlds are more complex than we appreciate. Just as Six Feet Under's Nate acts as matchmaker for David, Ball's brother is capable of surprising empathy. Ball says, "He keeps asking me, `When David and his boyfriend going to get back together?'" All Ball will reveal about the second season is that they'll "remain in each other's lives." Like family.

Bunn also writes for The New York Times Magazine.

BROTHER TO BROTHER

Michael C. Hall and Peter Krause, who play the gay and straight brothers on HBO's Six Feet Under, share insights on their characters' sibling tug of war 

If, as Tolstoy has postulated, every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, no unhappy family has ever been quite so idiosyncratically unhappy as the dysfunctional Fishers of HBO's acclaimed series Six Feet Under. Created by openly gay screenwriter Alan Ball (American Beauty), the show is set in a Pasadena, Calif., funeral parlor run by two brothers: returned prodigal son Nate (Peter Krause) and his uptight gay brother, David (Michael C. Hall). With their somewhat addled mom, Ruth (Frances Conroy), and rebellious teenage sister, Claire (Lauren Ambrose), completing the quartet, the family plays out a complex four-part disharmony.

Often the dominant fugue in this family opera is between the two brothers. Taking over the business together after their father's sudden death (in the pilot episode) has forced them to deal with tensions that have been growing for years, including the issue of David's sexuality, which the rest of the family gradually discovered over the course of last year's 13 episodes. During a break from shooting the show's second season--which began March 3--Hall and Krause sat down with The Advocate to discuss the ins and outs of brotherly love and sibling rivalry.

Before we start talking about the brothers you play on the show, what's your own sibling situation?

Krause: I'm a middle kid. I have an older sister by three years and a younger brother.

Hall: I'm an only child. So no siblings.

Six Feet Under continually confounds expectations. Instead of the straight brother being the responsible family man and the gay brother being flee of obligations, your show turns that formula upside down. How did the gay son, David, come to be so responsible, while his straight brother is the seemingly free spirit?

Krause: Nate and David grew up discovering the world together. They were close enough in age that they were true contemporary siblings. Nate's leaving home at 17 created a sense of abandonment in David.

Hall: There's the whole issue of the business and the obligations that David feels that Nate ignored. I think Nate, more than any other person in David's life, was someone he could have confided in and might have brought him out of his shell a bit more. Nate's leaving and David's awareness of his conflict over his sexual orientation coincided, so I think David's resentment of Nate is all the deeper because of that. I'm sure that David idolized Nate and still does on some level.

Is part of David's playing "the good son" compensation for his homosexuality, or was David fated to play that role even before he became aware of his sexuality?

Hall: I think they go hand in hand. I think his identifying himself as the good son, the one who behaves, who does what's expected of him, has so much to do with the relationship with Nate. If Nate had stayed, I don't think David would have felt this panic that he was the only one to do the things that were expected of him. He also would have had a confidant. David is inherently conservative-minded in terms of his goals. As he says to [his policeman boyfriend] Keith that he wants to be like the guy in his church with a kid on his knee. But his sexuality is a fundamental contributing factor to who he is.

The irony is that when Nate realizes David is gay, it humanizes David for him and he's more accepting of David's sexuality than David himself

Krause: I think prior to that [realization], Nate feels he can't reach David anymore. Then he realizes there's all this going on inside David that he didn't even know about. There is a veneer, a protective coating, but Nate realizes David is still in there, he's just uncomfortable about owning who he is because he's afraid the family won't approve or that he's not going to be able to take part in church the way that he wants to.

Hall: We've talked together about the fact that David was the second son. Growing up, Nate was probably was the more serious one, David was a lot more animated. And then Nate left and David changed. When Nate comes back, he thinks, What the hell happened?

Being in the funeral business may have had some effect on David's personality as well. How comfortable have you become around the embalming-room scenes?

Hall: I know a lot more than I did, but I'm certainly not prepared to embalm anyone. When it comes to scenes where we are sewing up this and that, we have people on set to make sure we're legit. And they're good to talk to, to find out what it's like to do that sort of work.

Have either of you given consideration to what should happen to you when you die?

Hall: Everyone who has died in my fatally has been embalmed and for the most part has had an open-casket viewing, but I don't plan on it.

Krause: I didn't plan on it before I got the job, and I certainly don't plan on it now. But the chemical process aside, I personally think there's something beautiful about coming by and saying goodbye to the body: "That was a good little home for that soul, but it's run out of gas."

In the course of running the funeral home together and living in the same house again in the first season, the two brothers do reestablish a bond and show a mutual respect for one another.

Krause: There's a positive relationship between the two that Alan is partially responsible for. David is not always accepting of Nate, but Nate is pretty accepting of David. Whatever David has to do to be happy, he doesn't have to live up to Nate's expectations. Nate doesn't really care.

Hall: It's interesting that David's homophobia is so deep. Traditionally a heterosexual male phenomenon, homophobia is grounded not so much in a fear of sexual intimacy with another man but a desire for emotional intimacy, which is something that Nate seems very much up for with David. David seems to be the one with the demons and no desire for that emotional connection.

Krause: David is the person that Nate trusts the most When Nate finds himself in an emotional panic, the person he'll go to first is David, even if he doesn't necessarily stay with David after the panic has subsided. But I think that's pretty accurate--having grown up together and discovered the world together, there is a sense of trust.

Hall: That's what's nice. There's an ebb and flow to Nate and David's connection. They come together and then they fight. Things are continually resolved. But it's not like they make up at the end of episode whatever and from there on out they are communicating perfectly. That's never going to happen.

So will David be any happier in the second season?

Hall: David's on a journey toward a discovery that maybe he's his own worst enemy. And just as that is seemingly resolved at the end of the first season, the fantasy that his life will crack open and fall into place is not realized. I'm thankful for that.

And will things go any more smoothly between David and his sometimes-boyfriend, Keith?

Hall: Keith likes the idea that David's a funeral director. Both characters spend their day confronted with people in moments of crisis and grief. They see a lot of different sides of the same coin. Keith's a guy whose life isn't all about whimsy, and that's appealing to David and vice versa. I think David also idealizes Keith, and it puts him in touch with some ideal of what he thinks he can be when he sees himself through what he imagines to be Keith's eyes. But Keith loses patience with David. He's initially attracted to the idea that he can help David out, but that dynamic sort of gets flipped on its head in the second season. But I shouldn't say anything more.

Kilday is the film editor of The Hollywood Reporter.

Adam goes Under

Adam Scoff talks about moving from teen roles to his turn as David's boyfriend on Six Feet Under

"I take off my shirt, but that's about it--nothing you couldn't see on Leave It to Beaver," reports Adam Scott about his state of undress in an upcoming role on HBO's dramatic series Six Feet Under. And no, he doesn't play the corpse of the week. Instead he'll be appearing as one of lovelorn mortician David's string of post-police officer boyfriends. "He's the kind of guy who wants a little too much too soon, and David is still in love with the cop, but--well, t don't want to give it all away."

Adam Scott's face will be new to all but the most ardent film festivalgoers, since he's appeared in several independent features that have yet to get much screen time. Even so, the Santa Cruz, Calif., native hasn't stopped working in the past eight years and will soon be seen with Ashley Judd and Morgan Freeman in the thriller High Crimes. He got his start on the MTV program Dead at 21 and the teen sitcom Boy Meets World, "which for some reason I still get recognized for being on, even though I'd get home at night from that show and wonder what I was put on this earth for."

From there Scott spent time on Party of Five and paid his portion of every actor's dues: being mangled in a schlock horror film. If Hellraiser: Bloodline was forgettable, at least Scott's on-screen moments weren't. He wore an 18th-century French manservant's outfit and, in his own words, "got my guts ripped out. And now it's going to be in this article, so it'll keep haunting me."

Understandably more excited to be appearing on the Golden Globe-winning Six Feet Under, Scott admires the show's complex characters. "I like how the older brother is always trying to be hip with the gay thing, but he's so self-conscious about it, and you can see that." It's a self-consciousness Scott himself lacked when it came to playing a gay character. "It's such a nonissue," he says. "And then in the press, it's weird that you have to announce your straightness. It does a disservice to the story. If you're that freaked out about it then don't take the job."

As for shooting the more intimate moments of his story line on the series, Scott was equally laid-back. "It's not a very explicit show, so all you see is us making out. If I was doing a straight sex scene it's not like I'd be getting off," he says, laughing. "I don't really care at all. Maybe if it was something stupid and exploitive, I'd feel differently. But it's not. And besides, a mouth's a mouth, you know? Ultimately, it's just a great feeling to be able to say I was in something really cool instead of saying, `Yeah, I was in Hellraiser 4.'"

White writes about film for E! Online.