Saturday, November 29, 2014
Every Single Week
According to Anna McCarthy, ABC’s president, Robert A Iger, said of Ellen that it “became a program about a character who was gay every single week, and… that was too much for people.” McCarthy describes this perspective as maintaining the “fantasy of queer identity as something that can be switched on for special occasions” along with a “fear of a quotidian, ongoing lesbian life on television.” Since Ellen’s coming out episode in 1997, a number of queer characters, generally secondary characters, have appeared on both broadcast and cable television. Choose a program with a queer character from the 2000s that you are familiar with and examine whether or not that character’s relationship to their sexuality is truly serialized or only focused on during “special occasions,” whether to play up a particular stance on sexual identity or for eroticizing reasons.
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Ryan Murphy, in all his criticisms and glory, ushered 19-year-old Chris Colfer to a Golden Globe nomination and win after Glee's 2nd season with a character based after himself. Colfer plays the adored Kurt Hummel, a then-out but somewhat hesitant high-schooler who, that season, struggles with a homophobic bully, his first love, and his father's health problems. It was a rough season for Kurt, and young Colfer, publicly out, took the role with stride.
ReplyDeleteThough many of his plot points revolve around his sexuality, Kurt also struggles with things his heterosexual peers could relate with. He wants to get a solo at his new school and struggles to find his place, he chases after a crush, his single father has a heart attack, and the list goes on. But often these boil down to an issues with his sexuality: he goes to a new school to escape a homophobic bully, his crush is male and at one point thinks he might be straight for Kurt's friend, he deals with the topic of religion when his father is near death in a coma (bringing up the topic of church and sexuality). However, many of Kurt's most impactful moments come from issues having to do with his sexuality: coming out to his father, standing up to his bully, finally kissing his crush, showing the school what's up and dancing with his date when he gets voted prom queen.
So to answer the question, Kurt's relationship with his sexuality is not a "special occasion." Often the issue with Glee is that characters and their identities get lost in the thousands of overlapping storylines, but Kurt and his identity as a young, gay male, stands out. You can blame it on producers/writers pandering to fans, you can blame it on Ryan Murphy's favoritism, but Kurt's sexuality isn't a side note left for a couple two-part specials over the show's run. Then, in terms of taking a stance or eroticizing: that Golden Globe is pretty clear that something's making a stance.
It is ironic that ABC cancelled Ellen because of the pressures that surround having a lesbian character who is gay every because their biggest hits at the moment, specifically those that are part of the Shondaland Thursday night block. These shows feature prominent gay characters whose lives involve gay-specific character arcs as well as more universal arcs. On this season’s breakout hit (in terms of Nielsen ratings), How to Get Away With Murder, one of the four main college student characters, Connor, is a gay man.
ReplyDeletePlayed by Jack Falahee, Connor’s arc is groundbreaking for a network television show in how unapologetically promiscuous Connor is. In at least seven or eight of the episodes that have aired of HTGAWM, there are explicit gay sex scenes between Connor and the men that he dates, seduces, and steals information from for court cases. The show easily features as many gay sex scenes as heterosexual sex scenes, but neither is distinguished from the other as special, better, worse, or kinkier. Sex, gay or straight, is normalized across the board in the world of the show.
What HTGAWM does that is even more impressive is build a gay-specific character arc out of Connor’s promiscuity. Connor is not a sex addict, but he does rely on his good looks and sexuality to get his way and uses it as a crutch when seeking information or tips during the show’s weekly court cases. Over the course of the first ten episodes, Connor’s reputation catches up with him as he loses a boyfriend, someone he actually cares about, because of his philandering and degrades his reputation as a law student in the eye’s of Annalise, the professor. The arc resonates with the issues of promiscuity and anonymous sex that the gay male community often deals with, but it can also play to a broader audience with its themes of self-destruction and bad choices leading to consequences. In this regard, what HTGAWM is doing with its most prominent gay character is truly groundbreaking for the world of network tv.
As the presence of LGBT characters on television becomes increasingly normalized over the last few decades, so have the roles queer characters play in TV show storylines. No longer does the issue need to be overtly highlighted or play a controversial and/or significant role in the television narrative. In the show Brooklyn Nine-Nine, the character of Captain Ray Holt goes against other representations of gay men in multiple ways.
ReplyDeleteCaptain Holt’s relationship with his sexuality fails to be serialized or focused on for a particular motive, but is rather simply another characteristic that makes up the enigmatic police captain. Holt opposes many previous stereotypical portrayals of gay men with his outward hegemonically masculine appearance and his position of power within the precinct. His sexuality is merely referenced to note his past difficulties reaching his position as police captain as both a gay and black man. Other mentions of his sexual orientation appear to attempt to standardize the topic, making it a “non-issue.” There remains to be seen in Brooklyn Nine-Nine an episode with a story line dominated by an emphasis on his sexuality. Instead, treatment of Holt as a gay character does not change in comparison to the shows other cast members as he remains an equal part of the equation.
My older sister and I, when we were younger, would watch Degrassi: The Next Generation every week before our parents told us we couldn’t watch it anymore. The show itself is a kind of soap-opera for teenagers, so many of the issues explored on the show as a whole are serialized. At the same time, the show featured an ensemble cast, so characters rotated in and out as the main focus of episodes. So, at times the show felt like it was only focusing on a character, especially LGBT characters, on special occasions for exploring a special issue. It was a mixture of both.
ReplyDeleteOn Degrassi, or at least when I was watching, there were several LGBT characters. The main LGBT character was Marco Del Rossi. Many of the stories that he was involved in served to take a stance on LGBT issues, such as being in the closet and gay bashing. Many of the episodes in one season had a subplot of him “dating” his friend Ellie to prove to the other, especially the more homophobic characters, that he was straight. In this instance, Marco served specifically as an reason for the show to talk about the acceptance of LGBT people in high schools and more broadly, the rest of the country (which in this case is Canada). In other episodes, Marco’s relationship problems with his boyfriend is discussed and became the main plot of a few of these episodes. In this instance, Marco’s situation is portrayed just as the other characters and the fact that he is gay isn’t the focus of the situation.