Kerry Weaver - Season Seven

Season Seven

ER was no stranger to realistic gay and lesbian characters as staff, patients or other characters. Dr. Maggie Doyle (Jorja Fox) was identified as a lesbian through cryptic dialogue and a humorous scene where she takes Carter to a shooting range and eventually hides from her jealous ex-girlfriend.

Yosh Takata (Gedde Watanabe), a nurse, was identified as gay in a similar fashion as Doyle, and was a recurring character until Watanabe left the show in 2003. Doyle and Takata never got the chance to demonstrate that they had romantic lives, however, and thus remained asexual characters that always played second fiddle to the series' heterosexual characters. This changed when Weaver took very slow steps to come out as a lesbian.

In mid-season, Weaver fell in love with staff psychiatrist Kim Legaspi (played by Elizabeth Mitchell), but was afraid to admit it to Legaspi or herself. While Legaspi was openly lesbian and willing to pursue a romantic relationship with Weaver, she became frustrated that Weaver was not only in the closet, but also suffered from internalized homophobia and thus the relationship got off to a slow start. Once Weaver was able to admit to herself that she was gay, she was still paranoid about her coworkers finding out and the discriminatory consequences it might have on her career. This was despite their relationship becoming an "open secret" among most of the people in the ER.

During that story, we also learned that Kerry had been married to a surgical resident before her career at County General started.

The first coworker Weaver came out to was Dr. Robert Romano, who planned to fire Legaspi over trumped up allegations that she sexually harassed a female patient. Weaver's act of courage kept Romano from firing Legaspi, but it also emotionally drained Weaver, whose fears of discrimination ruining her career resurfaced. She was therefore unable to provide emotional support to Legaspi, who kept her job, but at the cost of seeing the entrenched homophobia of the hospital administration and her own girlfriend, who remained in the closet. Legaspi broke up with Weaver and decided to take a job offer in San Francisco rather than face the homophobia from Romano or the lack of emotional support she received from Weaver.

Kerry also runs afoul of Elizabeth Corday in Season 7 when she has Mark Greene evaluated for professional competency after he shows noticeable personality changes after returning from brain tumor surgery. As a result, Kerry is not invited to Elizabeth and Mark's wedding, and while she and Mark seem to mend fences in Season 8, she and Elizabeth remained mostly unfriendly until Kerry's partner Sandy Lopez died. Elizabeth sympathized and the two doctors were on better terms until Dr. Corday departed the show in Season 11. They were never close friends though. In fact, Elizabeth's departure comes when she deliberately performs an illegal, life-saving transplant from an HIV+ donor into an HIV+ individual and does so in large part because she knows it'll anger Kerry, leading to Kerry to offer a demotion that Elizabeth declines before quitting.