Originally published by The Huffington Post, 23 October 2012.

Wrapped in the "bucket of blood" theme from Brian De Palma's Carrie, intrepid young reporter, Lana Winters (Sarah Paulson), ascends a large wooden winding staircase at Briarcliff Manor, a stereotypical Catholic criminal mental institution in the early 1960s, hoping to get a story on a new inmate, a serial killer named Bloody Face. As she climbs level after level in a spinning, dizzy sequence, she's surrounded by an outcast of "crazies" pulling her into a queerer world -- like Dorothy sucked up into a vortex and dropped into Oz. For those of us familiar with the song's use in Carrie, it feels detached hearing the music without Piper Laurie's haunting words, "they're all gonna laugh at you" underscoring the slow-motion insidiousness of Carrie's classmates. The tension is so tight -- like stretching back a rubber band -- that anticipating the moment in which everything snaps becomes exhausting.


But even if you're unfamiliar with Carrie, living in this music and scene alone is the premise of this season of American Horror Story: Asylum. When she reaches the top of the staircase and meets the matron nun, Sister Jude (Jessica Lange), punishing a promiscuous woman, she learns Briarcliff's ideology in one phrase "Mental illness is the fashionable explanation for sin." As a closeted lesbian, "sin" hits Lana hard.

AHS drags us into the dark world of a mid-century mental health system, the disparity of deviancy and homosexuality, and the under-shadows of the Catholic Church with exorcisms in tow -- a kind of 1960s that Mad Men could never invoke. Still, these two series do have fascinating intersections, namely the parallelism they draw with the present day as well as the way they, like Carrie, depict utter alienation.

Beginning in the modern day and flashing back to the past, an inverse from last season, the present is used in the first episode mostly as an expositional device to explain the importance of the Briarcliff in a way that is obvious without feeling heavy handed. The horror in this season, much like last season, is tied to place. A now-abandoned Briarcliff, said to be one of the most haunted places in the world, was where the criminally insane were brought in the 1960s; 46,000 people died there; its most famous inmate was Bloody Face; once people were admitted, they didn't make it out alive; and when the good Lord did see fit to take them away, it was through a secret tunnel in Briarcliff's bowels called the "death chute."

But let's not forget this is a Ryan Murphy production (read: Is Ryan Murphy an Activist?), and while the narratives of his series are rarely consistent, you can always expect that every episode will be drenched in an "after-school-special" goo. Lana Winters is a lesbian with, what my grandmother in the '60s would have called a "live-in" lover, Wendy (Clea DuVall), and a pre-serial-killer Bloody Face had secretly married an African American woman before he was abducted by aliens (allegedly). Murphy braids together these two storylines because both homosexuality and miscegenation (black/white marriage) were illegal in many states at that time, and in doing so, tugs on the decades-old tradition of "marrying" gay civil rights and black civil rights. Or perhaps more problematically, tying "civil rights" to marriage itself.

While these lessons feel like they take place in classrooms on Glee and The New Normal, what makes AHS truly appealing is the way it sets up a queer world beside but apart from our own world, where we can go to freely criticize the mores and systems of oppression that bind us without fear of prosecution for our speech. This notion of a sideways world, what Mikhail Bakhtin famously called the "carnivalesque," pulls us not just out of place in AHS, but also out of time, even if it sets up that world as the only allowable site of transgression.

As children of television, we are wont to believe that what we see on TV accurately reflects what's happening in the era. When you think of the 1950s, you might call up images of I Love Lucy or The Honeymooners to color in what you might never know -- what life was actually like in the 1950s. Out-gay men didn't show up on national primetime television until the late 1960s, even while inexplicit characterizations of them had been present since the earliest days of radio. Lesbianism, however, was remarkably more stigmatized than male homosexuality (something that more or less changed with the onset of AIDS) and almost entirely invisible in broadcast. Implicit lesbian characters, such as Miss Brant, a lesbian sniper in The Asphalt Jungle (1961) or a mentally despondent Hallie Lambert, The Eleventh Hour (1963) set up the two tropes lesbian representations would follow well into the mid 1980s. To conservative of minds, homosexuality was a damnable sin, but even to the most liberal of minds, it was still presented as an illness.



In Murphy's sideways world, however, we get to go back to the 1960s and fuck with that system. Yes, we have a representation of a lesbian in a mental institution, but the sickness isn't with Lana and her homosexuality; she is a well-adjusted, if closeted, lesbian woman who is involved in a committed homophile partnership ("gay" was more pejorative back then). The sickness lives instead in the heads of the religious wack-jobs locking her up and tying her down. In this sideways world, we're invited to witness a different kind of experience of the 1960s, from a queer positionality that demonstrates how lesbians may have felt -- tied down and prosecuted by the majority and the media -- thrust into a burgeoning gay rights movement hoping to challenge these dangerous characterizations. Meanwhile, the parallelism of the series suggests that this fight is far from over (even if Murphy is, himself, often complicit in the same archetypal oppression for other queer identities).

If you take nothing else away from the show, I hope you'll become more sensitive of other oppressed queer individuals today, considering the anguish and alienation lesbians must have felt looking for themselves on their television screens and seeing reflected back only that their sexuality would lead them to kill or cry out their final days strapped to a cold metal table in an asylum.

Notes:
1. This article was originally published by The Huffington Post, 23 October 2012.

Originally published by The Huffington Post, 31 October 2012.

 What would you tell your teenage daughter if you suspected her new boyfriend might be gay? Would you sit her down and explain complicated issues of identity politics? Would you pull him aside and ask him yourself (even if you realize he may not understand what it means to be gay)? Would you tell her nothing and hope she doesn't get hurt? Claire (Julie Bowen) faces this dilemma in tonight's episode of Modern Family (a rough cut of which I previewed last week).

Jay (Ed O'Neill) and Gloria (Sofia Vergara) are hosting a yard sale as a school benefit, and each of the families are pitching in. Alex, Claire and Phil's 14-year-old daughter, wants to invite her boyfriend Michael over to help. Claire is hesitant because, as she says, she likes him but she's "90 percent sure he's 100 percent gay" and that he "plays for the pink team." When Michael arrives at Jay and Gloria's in flames, so to speak, Claire seeks the advice of her gay brother Mitchell and his partner Cameron.

They assure her that the nature of masculinity has changed, something the story clunkily ties to Phil's endless pursuit to impress his father-in-law. Gay men are much more difficult to identify, Mitchell says, because "they care about their clothes, they groom, everybody's hairless..." but after Michael greets them saying only, "Hi," they abandon their new-world ideologies, "Yep, he's gay; we stand corrected."

Ultimately, Claire insists that Cam and Mitchell "teach" Alex how to spot a homosexual, and although she's convinced he's straight, she decides to take their advice and ask Michael herself. "Michael, I have to ask you something. I want you to know it's okay either way but, are you gay?

"What?! No, I'm not. I took you to prom. I kissed you. Unless you're a boy, I'm pretty sure I'm straight. Are you a boy? Right, so then I'm straight!"

Representing effeminate heterosexual masculinity in such a character could be a really transgressive move for ABC. But we know Modern Family; we're familiar with its tropes, we know where it's headed, and given that people like Ann Romney are watching, we know that ultimately, this kid is going to come out, and Claire will feel vindicated and right in challenging him on the basis of his sexuality. "If [Alex] wants to get her heart broken by a gay guy she can do so when she's 18 or 19 and can drink her way through it."

I want to preface by saying that I love Modern Family and although on the surface, this situation feels not unlike any other wacky scenario (moments of it are funny), it's also quite a dangerous scene for questioning LGBTQ youth because of the way it makes it okay to subpoena a young person's sexuality in the name of protecting one's family -- of standing your ground. Perhaps the scene is even more insidious given that it is funny.

Its danger comes from the ways in which it breathes new life to the old association between gayness and deceit... that homosexuals who are not out, open, and honest with themselves and with the public are living a secretive life that could pose heterosexuals harm, and that's where the buck stops. Our culture has a coming-out imperative. Just look at the way closeted gay stars were harassed and bullied by the news media until they came out (often before they were ready). But young, vulnerable teenagers growing up in homes that don't understand what it means to be LGBTQ -- very likely homes that are watching this exact episode of tonight -- will see it and be informed by the situation as if it were reality.

People are quick to tell media scholars that they're just "reading too much into things" -- but the programs that people watch every night are constantly informing their opinions and views about the world. You might feel as though you have an idea of how an emergency room works because of Grey's Anatomy or how the CBI works because of The Mentalist. We use television to color in what we don't know about the world around us, and television, in turn, changes the world around us, particularly when it comes to representations of LGBTQ folks (as with the discursive cultural shift that happened after Ellen came out). Given this awesome responsibility, I would think writers and producers would want to exercise extreme caution when representing gay youth in such a tempestuous time of bullying and suicide.

You can imagine my disappointment, then, when I recently asked Modern Family writer and co-executive producer Ben Karlin if the writers read or are concerned with the many issues queer viewers have lodged against the show.

It's kind of insulting to say that, we're going to depict a gay couple so therefore it has to speak for all gay couples. [...] Any member of a community that is underrepresented on television, sometimes their [...] sense of humor kind of ends at the shores of their own self interest. So, we don't really put too much stock -- the barometer that you use is really your own point of view and your own sense of decency.

This is the kind of pre-packaged response you'd expect from any currently working media professional: writers, producers, directors, etc. If you don't like the question, as the old adage goes, change it. Gay representations will always already be problematic, that much is true, and you can't please everyone, duh. But critiques of Modern Family by the LGBTQ community are not few; even Mark Harris over at Entertainment Weekly recently wrote how tired he was of TV shows trotting out the same trite archetypes year after year.

I think I would have just been annoyed if he had said they don't take the time to read critiques of the show. But to then insinuate that underrepresented communities don't have a sense of humor and in effect, really need to "lighten up" -- that was truly insulting. Particularly given that later on in his speech he mentioned that the gay writers in the room and the straight writers in the room had a heated debate over this particular scene given its cultural and social relevance.

It used to be that we, as a public, could hold networks accountable and responsible for the ways in which they represent minority characters. Indeed, historically the government has had to drag commercial American television past its bottom line when it wasn't serving the public's best interest. But given the way in which Reagan pounded the final nail into the coffin of regulation, can we still do that?

In the early days of broadcast, the airwaves were flooded with amateur radio enthusiasts eager to make their voices heard. To tame the chaos, the United States passed the Radio Act of 1927, which implemented a licensing, programming, and regulatory framework that contained broadcasters to their government-assigned frequencies and time periods. Because the electromagnetic spectrum over which broadcast is transmitted is a limited resource -- but one that belongs to the public -- the Radio Act included a provision that networks (radio and later television) had the duty to create programming that served the public interest since the public had surrendered control.

This "trusteeship" model of broadcast carried through to the 1980s when, with the advent of cable and satellite, networks began to be "let off the hook" in terms of programming responsibility. This was particularly salient with news media, which had been held to high standards of objectivity, reporting stories of serious concern for the country, that Reagan-era deregulation broke down, resulting in the commercial, sensationalistic news climate we are used to today.

Although what counted as the "public interest" was always contested, scripted programming was also responsible for what it broadcasted into America's living rooms. Networks had the responsibility of serving the public's interest, and although TV in the '50s, '60s, and '70s was far from a paean of progress, the public could always contest a character or a representation based on that "best interest" philosophy. But can we anymore?

Are writers of our current television fare no longer held accountable for the characters they create? Do writers of popular network television shows no longer have a social and cultural responsibility to serve the public's best interest? And with such representations, are we laughing at the LGBTQ characters or with them?

Toward the end of the episode, in order to console Claire, Cam tells her that the situation reminded him of his first girlfriend, and how he arranged a beautiful corsage for her, "It was gorgeous," he says. "'Til she pulled it apart and spelled homo on my porch."



Notes: 1. This article was originally published by The Huffington Post, 31 October 2012.

Originally published by The Huffington Post, 6 September 2012.

 With little competition, gay showrunner Ryan Murphy (Popular, Glee, American Horror Story) has brought more LGBT characters to American primetime than perhaps any other industry executive in broadcasting. Already during his tenure in Hollywood Murphy has given airtime to several gay men, a few lesbians, at least three transgender folks, and a smattering of other unlabeled non-straight characters. But what is he doing, exactly? In creating shows that continuously push the sexual boundaries of a prudish broadcasting landscape, is he performing activism? Is he, in fact, pushing the boundaries? And if so, is he doing us any favors?

Murphy certainly has his fair share of critics: Conservative viewers were upset he was bringing "sexual deviance" into living rooms across America. Gay viewers were miffed that his shows seemed to trot in old and offensive stereotypes. Young bisexual viewers were devastated and alienated when Blaine, a character from Glee, had a "bisexual scare" that resulted in Murphy assuring the masses of pissed-off Tweeters that Blaine was "one of them" and not, in fact, a bisexual.

This season of Glee also saw the coming-out-lesbian storyline of Santana, who earlier had professed being uninterested in labels unless they were on something she shoplifts. Early viewers had celebrated Santana because she inhabited a more fluid sexual identity, one not gay or straight but somewhere in between. She became a model for a kind of unlabeled independence many Gleeks felt was missing from the show's rainbow of other identities. (Note: For them, Brittany is a caricature and not a character).

Also upset were lesbian viewers who were disappointed that in the sensitive moment of Santana's coming out and declaring her "true" not-a-phase lesbian identity, that she would then sing a song (Katy Perry's "I Kissed a Girl") that is all about straight women parading around in lesbian costumes in order to titillate straight men, namely Finn.

And that brings us to Murphy's newest endeavor, The New Normal, which premieres on Tuesday, Sept. 11, at 9:30/8:30c. The show features a well-adjusted, upper-middle-class gay couple who are prepared to drop copious amounts of money to acquire a baby. In the process they cross paths with a disillusioned Midwestern mother trying to make it in L.A. who will undoubtedly be referred to as their "oven." After viewing the pilot, I think the best review I can give of this show is that it will at once offend everyone as it offends no one. And it may become polemic in this, an election year with a supportive presidential candidate.


The New Normal made news a couple weeks ago when an NBC affiliate in Salt Lake City refused to air the new show stating that it is excessively "rude and crude" and that the scenes might be too explicit for the family hour. But there is little new about The New Normal ; it follows a classic (almost generic now) trend of pairing a flamboyant homosexual with a "normal" masculine gay man that both tames him and answers the question, "Who is the 'woman' in the relationship?"

You can stretch this trend back to at least the late 1970s when Billy Crystal's "fruity" character Jodie Dallas dated a professional football player. We've seen it over and over again in the 35 years since.

What's more, there is little offensive about the homosexuality in The New Normal . Main characters Bryan (Andrew Rannells, of broadway fame) and David (Justin Bartha, The Hangover) are a committed, monogamous and (and thus) asexual couple that share only one brief kiss not unlike Cameron and Mitchell over at Modern Family, a show that Republicans apparently love. And they are single-minded in settling down and wanting to create a family. To be in the new normal, as outlined by the show, the traditions of love and marriage are only slightly edited but still upheld. In this new normality, straight society will be alright with you being gay as long as A) They don't have to bear witness to sexual acts (like holding hands or kissing) B) They still want the same things "everyone else" wants.

I just have to say: I think it's fantastic that we have a president who has come out in support of gay marriage, and I am grateful to have a first lady who can eloquently articulate that people should be able to love whomever they want to love. But both of these declarations put terms and conditions upon what kind of LGBT individuals we should tolerate and accept. "If gay people want monogamy, the white picket fence, the garage, the dog, and two and a half children, like any straight American dream, who are we to stand in their way?" they might say. This is a message I am at once glad gay advocates are working tirelessly to disseminate as I am disappointed by them. What about people who don't want those things - what about people who don't fit within categories like "gay" "bisexual" or "straight"? How does tying "gay rights" to marriage equality affect gay people who aren't able or desiring of this new normality? And who is advocating for them? Indeed, do shows like The New Normal further marginalize audiences who are not so easily labeled? I think that, yes, in fact they do.


Outside of all that, as a self-identified gay man, what concerned me about the episode is that, even if the show is trying to create an activist message (that loving gay couples should be able to have children), it does so in a cringe-worthy way. The couple decides they want a child after Bryan (the flamboyant one) is shopping and sees another family's baby as a shiny new object (I believe there's even a sparkling sound effect). For Bryan, having a child becomes another fad, a trend, the new "black" as it were, and he broaches the subject with his partner not unlike Veruca Salt's "I want it now!" approach from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. "Abnormal is the new normal!" he claims, taking his partner to a playground to show him a variety of other "non-traditional" families.

The show also features an updated Archie Bunker - a bigoted blonde Sarah-Palin-esque character (Ellen Barkin) who claims she's not homophobic because "a gay" keeps her hair perfectly coifed. Naturally, she hails from the Midwest, re-inscribing the heartland as America's closet while portraying the coasts as the place to escape homophobia.

As the show's audience, we are supposed to look at her and think, "What an idiot." But, as with any comedy, the problem with such a character in such a show is that she poses the danger of straight America laughing with her (with her homophobia) and not laughing at her (for her homophobia).

And lastly, and perhaps most importantly, it isn't funny. The gay jokes are trite - garden variety. A Cher ringtone and references to broadway can really only go so far at this point. And if they're not funny for me, who will they be funny for? Who is in on the joke and who is the butt of it?

At the end of the day, The New Normal is a good-intentioned albeit problematic show that should change its tagline to read: "If a straight family can have a Honey Boo Boo why can't we too?"

So: Is Ryan Murphy an activist? Is he doing anything different enough to be boycotted? Watch the pilot (already up on Hulu), leave a comment and let me know what you think.

 Notes:
1. This article was originally published by The Huffington Post, 6 September 2012.

Originally published in Antenna from the University of Wisconsin – Madison, 10 August 2012.
I imagine these words whispered back to all the moving tributes from family, friends, and fans of Alex Doty, an influential scholar whose generosity exceeded any metrics of greatness and whose untimely passing will be mourned by many generations of scholars to come. These words I use because they preface a lyric with which Alex introduced himself: “I was born in a trunk at the Princess Theater in Pocatello, Idaho.” But I also use them here because they were first uttered by one of Alex’s own early inspirations, Judy Garland, in the same number in the same film, A Star is Born (1954), which also happens to be the year in which Alex was born.

I did not know him personally as many of you did, nor do I share the library of memories you may have of him. But I wanted to write a piece about how his life and his work has inspired my own as a young academic to demonstrate the ways in which, like such diva figures as Judy Garland, he will continue to inform and empower young queer individuals such as myself long after his or my time.

The first article I ever presented in a graduate seminar and one of the first queer theory pieces I ever read, was the first chapter of his book Making Things Perfectly Queer entitled “There’s Something Queer Here.” I found myself fervently and excitedly highlighting passages as though they’d been written especially for me and jotting them down on a legal pad so as not to lose them in the sea of other articles I was struggling to read week after week.

I come back to it often and reference enough of his other work that Alex seems to hold a consistent spot in my bibliographies. Indeed this chapter made me recall one of the first moments in which a media text informed my own struggle with sexuality and the feelings of difference I was beginning to experience as a young child raised in a rural, homophobic environment, which I wrote about later that fall:

“I can, with great clarity, remember the precise moment when everything fell into place: I sit motionless on the couch, staring at the TV, images flickering before my glazed but pensive adolescent eyes. Bewitched is on, and I’m left alone in the dark basement, sheltered and away from the homophobia and hate shouted at me all day in school. I’m in a sort of meditative state—receptive to what I’m watching, laughing on cue, performing my role as the audience but understanding only the face value. Something snaps, and I think, ‘Why should she have to hide a part of herself to fit in?’ And then there comes this single, beautiful, intimate moment. My eyes water, my nostrils flare, and I breathe out a sigh as I begin to smile. Samantha is me.”

I did not have the language at that young age to describe my experience of Bewitched as a queer reading nor did I give any other interpretation of it much more than a passing thought. I might not have understood what sexual identity meant or in what ways I was different, but something about dissolving myself into Samantha’s colorful world with her unwed, flamboyant, and powerful mother along with a parade of queer magical beings made me covet life outside her broom closet. These sorts of reading strategies–of finding or making a space for queerness on television (perhaps not strategies at all)–are not, as Alex writes, “‘alternative’ readings, wishful or willful misreadings, or ‘reading too much into things’ readings. They result from the recognition and articulation of the complex range of queerness that has been in popular culture texts and their audiences all along.”

Building on Alex’s influence, I am launched into scholarship invested in finding other rural queer individuals and relaying their stories of using the media for identity work. Drawing from a pool of other reception scholars, Alex encourages the use of ethnographic work to re-imagine the audience not within pre-established categories but rather to investigate their daily life and how they integrate media into it. Putting the “I” back in our work in feminist tradition and being reflexive of our own media practices and subjectivities, as Matt Hills argues, is useful in conveying “the tastes, values, attachments, and investments” of the communities from which we write that our own voices can help illuminate. These are the stakes involved in our research, and as Alex himself writes defending his use of the word queer, “I want to recapture and reassert a militant sense of difference [and] suggest that within cultural production and reception, queer erotics are already part of culture’s erotic center.”

Alexander Doty presented on what he called the "Beefcake Paradigm" at Console-ing Passions 2012. He noticed a challenging of dominant understandings of narcissism as feminine, and that men in such shows as Spartacus, Jersey Shore, and Ultimate Fighting Championship were attempting to assert conventional masculinity while allowing themselves and others to admire men's bodies, often themselves engaging in queer behavior.

My future in research will be difficult as it cannot rely on essentializing or over-theorized assumptions about audiences and does not have many precedents from which to be informed. I am often subject to a feeling of “imposter syndrome” and constantly worry that I will be “found out” as a fraud. In our email exchanges, however, Alex's magnanimous generosity with me by showing interest in my work has and will continue to make me feel as though I’m on the right track. Found in the lyrics that open this post, which I imagine to be true of Alex’s life, success comes from years of hopes and dreams and tears, “it didn’t happen overnight,” and as I move forward, I like to think I'll remember and be encouraged by the words that close his song: “This is it kid, sing!”

Notes:
1. This memorial/tribute was originally published in Antenna from the University of Wisconsin – Madison, 10 August 2012.

Originally published by The Huffington Post, 18 July 2012.

Last year in an interview with BigThink.com, Jonathan Franzen said, "The world ... divides into people who have one opinion of Oprah Winfrey and people who have ... the diametrically opposite opinion. That's a remarkable thing to achieve, to divide the world in two; it's like parting the seas."

Franzen is partially right: Vocally, people seem to express either categorical love or hate for the once "queen" of daytime. As a cultural critic, in my eyes, her supposed polarization is actually unremarkable. Our talking-head, confessionalist media culture, which she admittedly helped create, demands of us a dedication to one-side-or-the-other opinions and perspectives. This seems to hold true for most aspects of our articulated public lives; you're either all in or you're all out: politics (presidential candidates and party devotion), legislation (gay rights and healthcare reform), news sources (Fox News vs. CNN), religion (fundamentalists vs. agnostics), geography ("city folk" vs. "country folk" or coasters vs. heartland); and even sexuality (gay vs. straight, read this piece about Anderson Cooper).

Although we've now had widespread color TV for half-a-century, our mass-mediated world has never been so black and white. In a climate dependent on fervency, my job as a scholar, as I see it, is to sell doubt and/or hesitation and to encourage people to furrow their eyebrows and truly consider other intentions and perspectives.

The new two-part OWN documentary Oprah Builds a Network, (if you can get around all the promotional plugs for other OWN series) is actually a poignant exploration of our culture's dedication to this mob mentality.

Since its inception, the word "struggling" has managed to inundate stories about Oprah's network in such a way I've been surprised SOWN has not been a pun that caught on. We are so bombarded by stories of OWN's failures (such as firing 30 employees, canceling Rosie, and suffering low ratings) that we falsely historicize the birth of now-successful networks as instantaneously popular when that's simply not the reality (did you know Bravo used to be all about ballet?). In so doing, we also set a trend for potential like-minded networks (and programming) to recoil in fear of following where Oprah has failed. But at the end of the day, has she failed and is OWN struggling, and if so, by what metrics? Are we so far gone from the days of hoping to use television as a mechanism of change and progress that we now only consider ratings when determining the successes and failures of a particular media product?



These articles are almost assuredly chased by hundreds of (often misogynistic) comments from users who seem gleeful at the prospect of Lady O's fall from grace. And in a way I'm not sure would be the case with a male TV executive (such as Al Gore's Current TV which had its share of troubles). Oprah's network could easily play the ratings game by programming trashy reality television. If you think she doesn't know how to do "trash TV" (to stifling popularity), you have a short memory. The O Empire was built upon nearly a decade of such programming before she parted ways with Ricki Lake and company when she overhauled her syndicated talk show in the mid-'90s (again to a drop in the ratings).

Although I certainly have my critiques of Oprah and her media's trajectory (which I can articulate without hate and exclamation marks), her dedication to featuring series she sees as part of her life's mission (ratings to the wind), actually, is remarkable. In its first two years, OWN created programming that brought a variety of new perspectives to the table, hosted by or featuring LGBT individuals (often the perspectives of B&T are lost on the airwaves), folks with non-normative, other-raced, and non-abled bodies, and frequently tackled issues relevant to feminism and women's rights. Lisa Ling's documentary series, Our America, is in my not-so-humble opinion, some of the best programming on television. By giving these disenfranchised voices a spot at the table, OWN can and does make an impact in innumerable lives, which, as a researcher, I have had the opportunity to witness firsthand.

I recently completed two years of work on a project studying the impact of television in the lives of rural gay youth and was blown away by the many stories of people transformed by Oprah programming, everything from a young boy excommunicated from his Mormon community to a rural Missouri teen forced to partake in "pray the gay away" conferences. These young men were able to find solace in the representations of other sexualities constantly treated with dignity by the Oprahsphere and thus able to rethink "commonsense" to make homophobia the pathology instead of homosexuality.

Imparting the potential of television as a tool for social change, in 1958 Edward R. Murrow offered a seed of optimism:

This instrument can teach, it can illuminate; yes, and it can even inspire. But it can do so only to the extent that humans are determined to use it to those ends. Otherwise it is merely wires and lights in a box. There is a great and perhaps decisive battle to be fought against ignorance, intolerance, and indifference. This weapon of television could be useful.

Does Oprah programming meet this rubric? I concede, not always. But at least it's headed away from the Jersey Shore. Oprah as an executive herself has attempted to create progressive television that's not solely driven by ratings. As she says, she wanted to deliver programming that would "drop little pieces of light into people's lives.

There is certainly a utility in expressing hate, and I do think it is important to do so. I'm not saying I've been above absolutely detesting something or someone for no reason (I'm looking at you, Zooey Deschanel!), but in writing this article, my intention is to express the importance of doubt and encourage the taking up of middle ground. While I use Oprah as a case study, this can really apply to any of our cultural either-or imperatives. Why are we so quick to declare an unchanging, steadfast belief before considering the weight of our words? Have doubt! Humor a variety of perspectives. And don't be unyielding, because it's unfortunate that in our modern black and white public media culture, being 50 shades of gray is considered a fetish.

Notes:

1. This article was originally published by The Huffington Post, 18 July 2012.

Originally published by The Huffington Post, 10 July 2012.

From the moment "GOD HATES FANGS" flashed across the screen in the title card of the first episode, True Blood has been accused of being riddled with gay metaphors and analogies. Academics eagerly pounced on the narrative in the first season, claiming, for example, that it is an epic fable meant to illustrate the struggle gays and lesbians face in their pursuit toward "normality."

The supposed allegory (vamps = gays) hasn't been lost on many of the show's gay fans, who celebrate its campy melodramatics and fang-in-cheek humor. Sunday night Jessica even consoled Tara, a newly-minted woeful vampire, by assuring her that "it gets better" -- reminiscent of Dan Savage's now-famous campaign. Some of its straight viewers have been less forgiving, like Todd Herremans, who last year tweeted complaints about the show's "barrage of homosexuality" (he has since apologized).

But if we buy into this analysis, now five seasons later, what has happened to the allegory? In the second season when we had fundamentalist Christians fighting vampires, the analogy was simple and relatively easy to follow; I would have called it a brilliant critique on the fundamentalist conservatism beginning to brew in the formative years of Obama's administration. In the third and fourth seasons, however, things became decidedly hairier when the vampires began to shed the delicate veil of "goodness" to reveal that, at their core, they're pretty evil and dangerous. Infectious, if you're holding true to the allegory.

So far this season we have had a sneak peek into the office of The Authority, an organization against vampire defamation that is dedicated to ensuring equal rights for vampires using a mainstreaming motto to the tune of "we suck just like everybody else!" What does it mean that these "good guys" are narratively positioned as bad guys, willing to torture and kill any fellow vampires who would give "the agenda" a bad name (as a sidebar, let me now just publicly pledge my fealty to GLAAD).

The Authority (VAD?) kills an order of fundamentalist vampires known as the Sanguinistas who are devout followers of God and his immaculately conceiving first vessel, Lilith. For the Sanguinistas, humans (Adam and Eve) were made by God only to serve as food for the vampires, which every single meat-eater has matter-of-factly argued to me ever since I stopped eating it. In short, the crazy fundamentalists have gone from being fang-hating Christians to card-carrying vampires, which has made me wonder, what's the allegory picking up on now?

And then I remembered something. Back in February, I ran across a casting call for this season of True Blood. They were casting the character "Joe Bob" who fit this description:

CAUCASIAN, EARLY 30s, White trash. An anti-vampire terrorist wearing an Obama mask to hide his identity, he shoots one vampire with a hunting rifle and takes his victim prisoner. Recurring.

In last night's episode, that character (or a band of drunk-Obama-mask wearing characters) premiered in the back of a pick-up truck shooting shifters. (I know I'm supposed to hate them, but so far they ARE taking out all the characters I really hate).

Although there are political masks for everyone from Hillary Clinton to Sarah Palin, Alan Ball came to play at a time when the now-famous Richard Nixon mask with the "classically caricatured nose" came to prominence. It was often worn by anti-Nixon protestors as a sign of disaffection for his crumbling, Watergate-infested administration. Basically, their scary Halloween costume. Is Obama to the Tea Party what Nixon was to hippies?

True Blood has always and probably will always have a socio-political agenda. It's interesting that now Ball is flipping the Nixon-mask (and numerous other metaphors) to demonstrate the way in which fundamentalist conservatives and Tea Partiers are manipulating and buying into the image of Obama as a wicked man. For these "anti-vampire white trash," the face of Obama himself has become the "big bad" who is to be feared for the devastation and chaos he will surely leave in his wake. I suppose, as heathens, our only means of salvation at this point are daily doses of Hail Liliths.

What do you think of the supposed True Blood allegories, and how do you see them playing into this season?

Notes: 
1. Originally published by The Huffington Post, 10 July 2012.

Originally published in FlowTV (16.01): 2 July 2012.

Most of Flow’s quality-concerned readers will probably remember actor Randee Heller from her role as Miss Ida Blankenship, Don Draper’s illustrious elderly secretary in the AMC series Mad Men. But long before she was incensing Draper by calling his daughter chubby and announcing his toilet visits, Heller created controversy with a nine-episode arc (( Heller acts in only eight episodes, but her character is referenced twice in a ninth. )) of the half-hour hit ‘70s sitcom, Soap, as American broadcast’s first recurring lesbian character, Alice. I had the opportunity to speak with Heller about the show and her part in it.

Soap originally aired weekly on ABC between 1977 and 1981. The creators of the show (Susan Harris, Paul Junger Witt, and Tony Thomas, who later created The Golden Girls) crafted the primetime sitcom into a parody of the daytime soap opera with a basic serial narrative that followed the lives of two sisters, one wealthy and one working class. As the series evolved, it began to incorporate more and more bizarre and melodramatic plot elements, from demonic possession to alien abduction and everything in between.

Soap: A Quick and Dirty History


Even before it premiered, Soap was controversial on both sides of the fence for its deployment of a homosexual series regular, Jodie Dallas, played by a young Billy Crystal. Jodie was involved with a closeted professional football player, Dennis (Olympic pole vaulter Bob Seagren) and spent much of the first season toying with having a “sex change operation,” as he continually calls it, in order to be able to be with his man openly.

Both gay advocacy groups (such as the National Gay Task Force) and religious conservative groups (Southern Baptists, United Church of Christ, United Methodist Church, National Council of Catholic Bishops, etc.) objected to Jodie’s portrayal.  According to Rodger Streitmatter, the series was reportedly so controversial, it generated 56,000 protest letters by the time it premiered in September 1977. (( Rodger Streitmatter. From "Perverts" to "Fab Five" The Media's Changing Depciction of Gay Men and Lesbians. New York: Routledge, 2009. pp 39. )) But this controversy also largely inspired its ratings success.

At first news of the series’ potential gay content, the Washington Post wrote, “If this situation comedy makes it into the ABC schedule, it will be a breakthrough in prime-time network television programming” (( ibid. )). Later stories were decidedly more critical: Newsweek called Soap “99 and 44/100% Impure” noting that affiliates were “understandably uneasy,” while the New York Times quoted a minister as saying, “By scheduling this program in prime time, ABC will be exposing children to something they really can’t handle.” In a later published memo, ABC execs allegedly said that as a gay character, Jodie must “at all times be handled without negative stereotyping” ((ibid.)) (even though many scholars and protestors think he was all stereotype), and that his relationship with the football player “should be handled in such a manner that explicit or intimate aspects of homosexuality are avoided entirely.” ((ibid.)) The result was that the two never touch.

Because of the magnitude of the break-out role, the character of Jodie has been extensively explored in most queer histories. Scholars like Larry Gross (Up From Invisibility: Lesbians, Gay Men, and the Media in America (2001)) as well as Stephen Tropiano (The Prime Time Closet: A History of Gays and Lesbians on TV (2002)) are critical of the character’s flamboyance and how it conflates homosexuality with transgenderism. Other scholars, namely Suzanna Danuta Walters (All the Rage: The Story of Gay Visibility in America (2003)) and Steven Capsuto (Alternate Channels: The Uncensored Story of Gay and Lesbian Images on Radio and Television (2000)) applaud the character as non-stereotypical and a welcome role model for isolated gay viewers. Most of these reviews are centrally focused on the first season because even as the series progressed with more and more outlandish storylines, Jodie’s character became increasingly tame: He decides not to have sex reassignment surgery (after a failed suicide attempt), and he and his boyfriend split for good. He never seriously dates another man but becomes confusingly involved with at least three women, one of them a lesbian named Alice.

It Gets Better, Alice

"At that time, perms were very big. ... They hired me with the perm -- they probably thought it was my natural hair ... There was a day when [my perm] was such an issue that they wanted to straighten my hair because they were so concerned about Alice's appearance, and because she was the first homosexual that she can't be too "out there" like a perm was out there. Like, too hip, or too much like a rock star, whatever it was they attributed to a perm. So they spent the day straightening my hair. ... It was just ridiculous, but that's the way it was in those days. Yet [at the same time] they were so forward and so brave ...

Heller said that even though she appreciated the producer's bravado in creating the character, as an actor she was limited by what she could do on the set. For instance, Jodie invites Alice to live with him in his apartment while she gets back on her feet, and the two become loving, if frustrated, roommates. In one scene, Alice returns from a night with her date, Maxine, (who Heller described as her character's "girlfriend") and interrupts Jodie on a date with another man. In the scene neither Jodie nor Alice physically interact with their companions (not even a hug).

"I went to kiss her in rehearsals and they said, "No no no ... you can't do that." I said, "But she's my girlfriend!"

"No, no no no, we can't do that, we just cannot do that." So it was so careful, it was so delicate in those days that you couldn't really do your thing. ... They wanted me to be a heterosexual homosexual ... I don't know! [she laughs]. They wanted me to appear very straight and very middle of the road.

Mutually jealous, both Jodie and Alice end up becoming involved in their own relationship. Alice regularly appears through the end of the second season and again at the beginning of the third season when we learn that the two have lived together for several months. Interrupting their (homo?)normative bliss, however, the Texan grandmother of Jodie’s child (he had a drunken one night stand that resulted in a baby, as they do) offers him custody of his child only if he kicks Alice out. She is uncomfortable with Jodie’s homosexuality, but believes that being raised in the company of two homosexuals will be catastrophic for the baby. Or as she says, "that's just one homo too many!"

This she can do because, as she says, “no jury in the world” would award custody to a homosexual. Overhearing this conversation, Alice runs off, never to be seen again, and Jodie devolves into yet another confusingly hetero(non)sexual relationship before he is finally hypnotized into a past life as a ninety-year-old Jewish man. Confused? You still will be, even if you watch all the episodes. ((This is my attempt at humor based on the show's other famous tagline, "Confused? You won't be after the next episode of Soap.")) Heller remembers being ambivalent about taking the role because she was aware it was so controversial, it could potentially devastate her career:

"When I got the role, I was tentative in accepting it, NOT because I had any issues with ... sexuality, but I was worried that it would limit a career that hadn't even started yet ... [Soap] was like the third thing I did, so I was concerned it would be an issue in my career ... and I spoke to a few people who were further along in their careers, and then I just said, "Oh, the hell with it! This is a great role, and it's fun, and I get to be on this fabulous show that is doing things that no other show had the guts to do, and I want to just do it, and see what happens."

While Alice’s portrayal and narrative trajectory are fraught with issues and activists were critical of the character, Heller says she was warmly received by viewers who were similarly struggling with their sexuality.

"I've run into people that have said, you know, 'Thank God they had your character" and 'it really helped me.'"

Additionally, we do witness a few things through the harmony of Jodie's and Alice's characters we would rarely see on today’s television: By becoming involved in a relationship but continuing to maintain their homosexual identities, both characters demonstrate a kind of sexual fluidity that doesn’t fall within the comfortable rubric of the kind of archetypes token LGBTQ characters seem to have to fit into today. Also, even though by all standards Alice and Jodie are happy as a couple and want to raise the baby as a two-parent family (a homo/hetero/neither? normative relationship), a conservative, gunslingin’ Texan mama splits them up in favor of a gay man raising the child by himself, which, again, you would almost never see on TV today.

On the one hand, Heller's memories of the creation of Alice demonstrate how the danger of harsh critiques and censure paralyze earnest producers with fear even about things like hair styling. But on the other hand, quite simply, what does it mean if we don't make demands of our media?

Ultimately, these questions remain and will remain: Did it, in fact, “get better” for Alice? And if we have been throwing this expression out to a presumably suicidal LGBTQ audience for more than 30 years, has it or will it ever “get better”? Have homosexual representations on TV changed for the better or can we project Alice's limitations onto a couple like Cameron and Mitchell from Modern Family. To take that a step further, even though we now have a sitting president who has vocalized his support of gay marriage (and gay marriage specifically) has our culture really changed for the better, or has it instead only made acceptable a certain kind of "perm-free" gay? Unlike the show’s famous tagline, these questions and more will [not] be answered in the next episode of Soap!

As for Miss Blankenship, Heller says she found the inspiration for the character, "I swear she inhabited me. One day on the set I just felt this spirit come into my body [she laughs]." But Heller remembers working as a young woman on Madison Avenue and believes the experience was very similar. "It was everything you see in Mad Men ... and more." Listen to my entire interview with the captivating Randee Heller -- it includes a special beyond-the-grave message from one Miss Ida Blankenship.

Originally published in Antenna from the University of Wisconsin – Madison, 5 July 2012.

Anderson Cooper's "outing" this week beautifully illustrates something I have been writing about for a while: the imperative of coming out. The paradox of homosexuality is and has been that one must at once not be gay while at the same time publicly (confessing/admitting/declaring) that (s)he is. But what does that mean, exactly? If the presumption is that we are straight until we say otherwise, then why are the most common reactions to Anderson's outing, "We already knew!" or "It’s about time!" Hollywood legend might describe the alleged homosexuality of figures like Agnes Moorehead or James Dean as an "open secret"--something about which to argue at pretentious dinner parties. But I bracket "outing" with quotations marks because if everybody already knew Anderson was gay, why was he constantly hounded to declare it? And why aren't people satisfied with his declaration?

I'll admit some guilt here; as an Oprah scholar, I've long thought Anderson’s semi-successful talk show suffered by his Donahue-esque journalistic fourth wall, something Oprah deflated by making herself always already one of her own guests. I draw this parallel because soon after his "outing," Star Jones quite ickily suggested on The Today Show that Anderson outed himself to boost his ratings just like when Oprah admitted she used crack, got pregnant as a teenager, and considered suicide.

"I’m a little bit of a cynic; you know I've been in daytime television a long time.... There are times that you generate information for ratings." Shame on you, Star Jones.

But why didn't Anderson come out on his talk show, instead choosing to write a letter to Daily Beast? Will that letter be good enough, or will he be expected now to discuss it on television? And, indeed, can he discuss it without the kind of appalling accusations constantly volleyed in the news? That afternoon, Anderson, his syndicated talk show, was a rerun (it's on hiatus) and he was absent from his late night news program, Anderson 360. If he came out to help his ratings, he sure has bad timing.

Anderson in a 2008 issue of The Advocate that I also contributed to.

Our media culture often portrays coming out as this great moment of personal achievement--a bourgeoisie notion of psychological wholeness or self-actualization after which (and only after which) we can become our true, complete selves. This trope is then used to justify our demand that celebrities (and by extension our culture of celebrity mimics) come out of the closet "for their own good." Just look at Ellen DeGeneres, people (like Oprah) often say, ignoring the six or so years after her outing that she was out of work and out of money. We can throw all kinds of Foucault at this: although he never specifically addressed coming out as we understand it today, confession for Foucault functions not only as a mechanism of articulating but also making truth as well as establishing one’s own credibility and authenticity. In other words, the lie we tell ourselves now is that we come out for ourselves, when in reality, we’re mostly supplying the demand.

The coming out imperative comes from an old association between gayness and deception, dating back at least as far as McCarthy and the 1950s (the Lavender Scare) when homosexuals were indicted as deceptive individuals prone to blackmail. After gay activists in the '60s and '70s made the coming out process (as a political tool to combat invisibility) relatively commonplace, talk shows began quietly suggesting openness which ultimately became a demand when AIDS and HIV made homosexuality a "dangerous deception" for unsuspecting heterosexuals (see Gamson, Freaks Talk Back). We might say we're coming out to our friends and family just for ourselves, but if that were the case, I might ask why the repeating line "they deserved to know the truth" is such a staple in coming out stories.

In her remarkably articulate response to Anderson's outing, "fruit fly" Kathy Griffin deftly discusses the continuing dangers of outness: "[D]espite the very real, the very necessary, and the very life-changing progress we have made in this country ... America--the world--is not fully represented by Chelsea in New York City ... [it] is, in larger part, small towns like ... Wichita, Kan., where I was [asked], 'Kathy, how do you deal with so many goddamned fags?'" Foucault writes that our society believes confession "exonerates, redeems, and purifies ... unburdens [us] of [our] wrongs, liberates [us], and promises [us] salvation." But none of those attributes are particularly true of many coming out narratives in certain areas of the country (or the world) where outness can and does lead to greater isolation, bullying, suicide, or homicide.

Anderson's sensible closet (photo parody).

In his letter, Anderson writes: “It’s become clear to me that by remaining silent on certain aspects of my personal life for so long, I have given some the mistaken impression that I am trying to hide something -- something that makes me uncomfortable, ashamed, or even afraid. This is distressing because it is simply not true.... The fact is, I’m gay, always have been, always will be, and I couldn’t be any more happy, comfortable with myself, and proud.”

Anderson is an astute television personality--he could have exploited his outing for ratings, and who knows, maybe he will discuss it openly when his show re-premieres in Nate Berkus' former studio this fall. But instead of folding to and perpetuating the cultural myth that public confession psychologically liberates us, Anderson decided to address his sexuality in a well-crafted letter that demonstrates a new, old reason for coming out: to break down invisibility. I applaud him for it.

As a culture we must be more sensitive of our demands and our expectations (of both our celebrities as well as our friends), for the realities of queer individuals all across the world are different--and just because someone isn't out to you or your family, doesn't mean they are living their life in a closet.

Notes:
1. Originally published in Antenna from the University of Wisconsin – Madison, 5 July 2012.