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.