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.