Last year, TechCrunch turned the social media circus on its side by reporting that Facebook was strongly considering integrating a "hate" button ahead of their IPO to boost interactions with the site. Scores of Facebookers, Tweeters, and Tumblrs alike took to their profiles to praise, debate, and/or protest the move by the social media giant because of its inevitable impact on our increasingly corporate-controlled culture.

Those in favor argued that integrating such a button would tear an already-polarized world to extremes, bringing unnecessary bullying, fighting, and negativity to a cyberspace and social media sphere long overrun by hate.

Those in support of the button believed it would give them a platform from which to publicly air their grievances with big businesses, political leaders/political movements, celebrities and media products, as well as to encourage a culture of "talking back" to those in power.

But all was for naught: TechCrunch fabricated the story as an April Fool's Day Joke fooling thousands of readers. To quote T.S. Eliot, April is the cruelest month!

The debate did, however, open up a new cultural conversation: What are the benefits of a public display of hate, and how able are we now to display it? After all, the "like" button, incorporated across-the-web two years earlier, protected the interests of corporations, allowing them to market their products to an even wider audience while stifling would-be boycotters and isolating protestors to uncentralized pocket groups without much exposure.

Marginalized and subjugated communities have long taken to the streets in protest. Feminists, black civil rights leaders, and gay liberation fronts have historically had a vested interest in publicly protesting problematic media, protected by a first amendment right to free speech in the public sphere. Their "hate" was inconvenient, a problem for businesses and politicians (and their customers/constituents) in brick and mortar establishments who had to physically walk past and confront the protest to perform their daily duties.

But the social media sphere, and Facebook in particular, has changed all that, moving causes and protests to online forums and to cyberspace. Here, seemingly "public" spaces (like Facebook and Twitter) are for the most part actually "private" spaces owned not by governments that must answer to the people, but to private corporations that must answer to their shareholders. Speech in these private spaces is not protected and can, indeed, be censored at will as businesses and Facebook itself sees fit. Indeed, the voices of the inconvenient can be silenced with a few clicks.

If Facebook has integrated itself so well into our lives that it now decides elections, and if we now take to "the Facebook" instead of "the streets," as our modern-day public square, what does it mean when such displays of hate and protest aren't equally incorporated into the Facebook platform? What information is lost when we can't see the number of "dislikes" a company has? And how can we, as media and culture researchers-as cultural historians-write about the present?

Last summer, for instance, Chick-fil-A Chief operating officer, Dan T. Cathy fueled a firestorm with several statements indicating that the brand did not support marriage equality and argued that those who "have the audacity to define what marriage is about [were] inviting God's judgment on our nation."

As Cathy's statements erupted into a news media maelstrom, Facebookers "liked" Chick-fil-A's page at alarming rates, giving a false sense of support for Cathy's comments by silencing statistics that would show how many "unlikes" the comments encouraged as well as how many "dislikes" and even "hates" would have been generated as well. Of course, what followed was also a stampede of posts by those in favor of marriage equality, but it would be impossible to know how many were posted given a business' ultimate control over its page, including the ability to delete comments and ban users.

In other words, quantitatively speaking, while we can more or less measure the positive impact of a media event on a business, a media product, a political movement, or a celebrity, those same statistics are not available to measure the negative impact of the same event making it impossible to find acceptable metrics with which to measure hate-to understand and make sense of our world where hate is a key human response.

As an audience researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, I do a lot of work to analyze the way in which people engage with television shows, storylines, or actors to see how they are interpreting such texts and how they are informed by them or make sense of them in their day-to-day lives.

For instance, in one study conducted last year, I learned that rural gay men completely isolated from "gay culture," often found and watched The Oprah Winfrey Show in order to identify with gay guests and reframe the notion of homosexuality as a sickness to one of homophobia as a sickness. Many of these same men, however, felt the need to "come out" because rhetoric on the show suggested being closeted was to be lying and inauthentic to the truth of yourself. Several of those viewers then decided to come out, even when it could and did pose physical and emotional danger or even homelessness.

Another study (conducted during the first season of Glee) found that many gay male viewers rejected Kurt's character as an offensive stereotype, and would have preferred to not have such a representation at all as opposed to the one offered. In response, Glee producers ushered in several more gay characters in the following seasons to create a spectrum of masculinity.


And a forthcoming study, also on Glee, found that bisexual and queer viewers are continually devastated by the show's privileging of "coming out" storylines that encourage a "gay or straight" binary. Much like with Oprah's fans, these viewers are critical that the show is teaching parents and youth alike an either-or sexuality where trans and bi identities are delegitimated.

Much early audience work looked at fan engagement with shows to get a sense of how people were watching media. But this method left out a range of spectatorship practices for those who might watch programs inactively or decide not to "hate-watch" shows or not watch them at all for specific "anti-fan" reasons. The people over at Ring Wing Watch, an organization dedicated to "monitoring and exposing the activities of the right-wing movement" so we don't have to, are a good example as well as the gay and bisexual viewers of Glee mentioned above.

So, after years of studying who (s)he "likes," we now want to study (s)he who "hates" but given the extensive limitations to finding those people outlined above, we turn to qualitative research aimed simply at talking to people about what they watch, what they don't watch, what they love, what they hate, and why. We want to study the "anti-fan" every bit as much as we study the "fan."

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, 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 FlowTV (14.03): 6 July 2011.
NOTES

1. This article was originally published in FlowTV (14.03): 6 July 2011.
2. Glee Season 2 Episode 1: Audition [↩]
3. Dyer, Richard. Gay Icons. London: National Portrait Gallery Publications, 2009. Print. [↩]
4. Becker, Ron. “Gay-Themed Television and the Slumpy Class: The Affordable Multi-Cultural Politics of the Gay Nineties.”Television & New Media. Vol. 7 No. 2. May 2006. [↩]