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.