Originally published by The Huffington Post, 11 September 2013.


Jeanne Robertson is contagious-contagiously funny! When this 6-foot-2-inch-former Miss North Carolina (50 years ago!) was told she'd gone viral (on YouTube), she joked, "I don't think so, I've had all my shots?!" But the metaphor is fitting, y'all: I spoke with a long Southern drawl for a good two weeks after our first encounter, which raised more than a few eyebrows in my state of Wisconsin.

On a rare visit north of the Mason Dixon line, Jeanne performed her one-woman show at the beautiful old Orpheum Theatre in the tiny town of Galesburg, Illinois. I, of course, arrived late for our meeting-constantly braking for Illinois' endless supply of cleverly-hidden patrol people. I raced into the lobby of her Holiday-Inn Express frantically searching for a quiet place I could find to interview her on camera. Although the sitting room promised aesthetics, country music blared from a speaker behind the front desk, and so I reluctantly moved on to the breakfast nook, dragging studio equipment behind me like an overwrought caddie and struggling to fit through doors.

The breakfast nook was quiet and dark but windows promised natural lighting behind their heavy blinds. It was empty except for a single hotel housekeeper who stood two inches from the television with her arms crossed. She was tapping her foot with annoyance as it failed to spring to life and side-eyed me as I shuffled in. "Are you going to be using this room?" I asked, gingerly, hoping somehow she'd learn of my interview and beg to assist on production. "I'm on my break. When this TV works I'm going to watch television," she informed me, and, turning away she added, "and it's going to be loud."

Witnessing as she haphazardly stabbed at buttons on the "clicker," I felt some confidence she wouldn't have success, and so I began re-arranging tables with one hand as I dialed Jeanne's phone number with the other. The hotel had reeked of drabness-the 50 shades of brown that was the carpet matched the bored personalities of much of the staff. They moved through the motions lifelessly without an abundance of crises to excite their attention in the tiny town, and so this made the television incident all the more poignant because things weren't supposed to go wrong.

I-myself-was already annoyed at the hidden patrol people, my tardiness, and this "over-it" housekeeper. I was edging toward fury as I dragged tables from here to there across the carpeted floor of the nook, until something stopped me: My arm muscles relaxed, my knees weakened, and my stomach pushed up a giggle as the booming Southern voice reached around the corner and tickled my ear. "Ohhh ma goodness will ya have a look at that un-yoo-zhall little puppy! What's his name?!"

When I peeked around the corner, it was as if everything had changed. As when Dorothy opened the door on Oz, the sepia tonality had readjusted into vivid color and something in the air made everything feel lighter. Jeanne stood smiling at a new family of guests as front-desk employees gathered around to join in her warmth. The once-annoyed housekeeper looked downright bashful as Jeanne sashayed by, greeting her with a smile and a simple, "Hey 'thare'!"

Somewhere between quizzically furrowing my eyebrows at the housekeeper and Jeanne striding confidently toward me with an outstretched hand, I "got it." So many of the most famous quotations are about this moment. Jeanne's own, "Smile; have a sense of humor, and accept the things you cannot change," paired beautifully with Toni Morrison's " Does your face light up when [people] come into the room?" to create for me a new realization: Do I bring my humor and colorfulness into the room to "infect" others with joy, or do I bring my burdens into the room to bear upon the people already there?

Although we don't say so, in my experience smiles and laughter are even more contagious than yawns, and so the metaphor of "virality," when it comes to viral videos like Jeanne's, falls short of illustrating the power of joy and happiness. We have so many words to articulate the sickness and negativity one body can infect upon another, yet so few for such a welcome contagion as Jeanne brings-as I will strive to learn to bring myself. She didn't enter the room with a sense of entitlement, expecting to be received in any particular "positive" way. She instead brought it with her, sprinkling little pieces of sunshine into the lives of people she passed along the way.

This lesson I gleaned was strengthened later that evening as I watched Jeanne greet guests both before and after her show. The hundreds of patrons were drawn to her, many sharing stories of their own left-brained family members or rehashing some of their favorites of her own. Words failed others who stumbled through stories to illustrate how her humor helped them struggle through some of their darkest hours. She hugged those people and assured them she was just as grateful for them as they for her.

Although Jeanne is hysterical and a magnificent speaker, she assures audiences that her life isn't much different than theirs. Humor is all around, and if you look for it, you'll realize that so much of the funny we miss is shrouded in expectation. Had I been pulled over by one of those patrol people or had that housekeeper's television set suddenly switched on, I would have expected everything to fall apart. But at the end of the day, everything would still have been okay. So, a little while later, when her vacuum did whirr to life, I couldn't help but smile and think how funny life can really be. She really was contagious, and I can verily say, I caught a "Jeanne" and laughed.

-- Limited tickets are still available for Jeanne's one-woman show at the Alabama Theater in Birmingham and the Cobb Energy Center in Atlanta, celebrating her 70th birthday. And her "Jubilee Year" of winning Miss North Carolina.

"People say, 'Jeanne, what do you want for your birthday?' And I say, 'If you're 70, you don't want anything. You want to get rid of stuff!'" So Jeanne and her crew are asking instead, for guests to bring a new, unwrapped toy for Toys for Tots.

Jeanne has many other public appearances coming up-and-she is available for private speaking engagements, so hire her. Really. Here are a couple long clips from my interview with Jeanne, the first, our general overview with "unusual questions" and in the second, Jeanne accepts the Regional Dialect Challenge. Keep smiling!

He watches the computer monitor over his son's shoulder as web-embedded images from his life scroll across the screen interluded with tributes typed over a jarring green background spattered with stars. He's a father, a husband, and a teacher, the headline announces; he's Walter White, and he's "in trouble. It's lung cancer."

As Walter White, Jr. (Junior), presents his website to his father, his mother, and his aunt, the immediate sense emoted is touching: Walt's face reveals his admiration, his adoration, and his deep-seeded pride in what his son is able to accomplish given the limits of the Cerebral Palsy that restrains him. But when his aunt whispers out the link to the site, "SaveWalterWhite.com," Walt's countenance quickly changes from honored humility to tentative panic: "Uh, wait a minute. You're not asking for money, are you, son?" he questions. "Ye-yeah, that's the whole idea" ("Phoenix").

Although Walter White stumbles in and out of wealth at the hands of villains and crippling betrayals, he is driven by an ego that will not allow him to accept financial help from others, and his son's "little website" is no exception. "This was all his idea. He worked so hard on it; just let him help. You can't ask him to take it down," Skyler, Walt's wife says. "Skyler, it's charity," he answers, grimacing as if the thought sickens him. "Why do you say that like it's some sort of dirty word?"

Of course, the frequent utterances of the website address throughout the episode and others to follow piqued the interest of viewers, curious to see if such a site really existed and delighted to find that it did. The real website of the same address is an exact reproduction, including Walt's biography, his lessons, and what he means to Junior, all in the type face Comic Sans.

There is even a donate button at the bottom of the page, same as in the show, except instead of redirecting to a PayPal address to offer visitors a chance to give to Walter White himself, the page redirects to a donation page sponsoring the National Cancer Coalition (NCC), vastly smaller than the more well-known American Cancer Society but with better ratings.

After the episode's premiere, the website delivered more than a million unique visitors to the NCC's website, a huge surge for the medium-sized North Carolinian charity, and in the three years since the episode aired, continued clicks from the site have filled a donation pool of more than $125,000, about 5,000 of whom find or continue to visit the site every day.

NCC president and chief executive officer Robert Landry told me he was just as surprised to learn about the website as I was. "We (NCC) did not know [creator Vince Gilligan] had done this at the time. We are not connected to the show or AMC. Then, AMC developed the site and linked it to our site, which we happily discovered when we noticed the site traffic hugely spiked," Landry told me. "Can you imagine the efforts we would have had to go to and the expense to direct such a large number of people to our cause?" For the NCC, nothing more than a link on a fictional website delivered staggering results for the charity, becoming an example of a new, unintended breed of cause marketing that charity workers and media industry professionals are beginning to champion, Cause Placement.

Philips McCarty, founder and principal of Good Scout, along with Erik Lokkesmoe, founder and principal of Different Drummer, coined the term "Cause Placement" as "the accurate and authentic integration of cause into entertainment content in a way that is mutually beneficial, and ultimately, good for society."

"Our priority is to help social good initiatives and organizations connect with the games, music, movies, books, television and theatrical shows, and personalities. In many ways we are the Match.com for non-profits and entertainment content. The opportunities really are endless," says McCarty.



While continued technological advances make 3D aesthetics feel more and more like reality, "quality" audiences are beginning to demand a fourth dimension from their media choices: Are they doing good? In a culture of growing political and cultural sensitivity, Millennial audiences especially are questioning the greater cultural relevance and footprint of the ever-growing television, music, and film choices available to them.

Since media choices abound from network, cable, and now even online distributors, viewers are no longer constrained by a lack of products to choose from, and are becoming more loyal to options they think are not only entertaining, but doing good. The strategy of Cause Placement (think product placement) allows media producers to weave in their own activist and/or charitable goals without abrupt PSAs or overwhelming plot points that cloud their narrative goals.

The quality cause placement, then, works because it rewards fans who do the work to uncover it and share what they have revealed with others. Had Breaking Bad relied on a post-show statement by one of the actors supporting the NCC (as is often done in network dramas), the actual results may have been vastly different. The clever cause placement reached the right viewers, buoyed the right word-of-mouth strategy, and resulted in more than a million unique clicks to the site as well as more than $125,000 in donations. Most telling of all, people felt good about watching Bad precisely because they felt it was doing good work.

One viewer, for instance, was particularly moved discovering the placement: "I am crying savewalterwhite.com is an actual website and it has the pictures of walter jr's message and it's set up for donations and everything but if you click to donate it sends you to the national cancer coalition and you can actually donate for real people i'm serious there are tears streaming down my face." Another pointed to the show's use of the cause placement as a marker of its quality, "Holy shit! www.savewalterwhite.com ACTUALLY EXISTS?!?! This show keeps getting better and better!"

According to a joint study performed by Achieve and Johnson Grossnickle and Associates, 75 percent of Millenials made a financial gift to a nonprofit organization in 2011, some of which was "in response to an emotional reaction." The study also found that Millenials were loyal to nonprofits and when nonprofits built strong relationships with them, they were compelled to act as fundraisers; indeed, more than 70 percent reported raising money on behalf of nonprofits. Even though the majority of Millenial donations were gifts of $100 or less, reaching Millenials is perceived as an important strategy precisely because they are so well connected and likely to share information about responsible charities with their networks, as the fans above had done on Tumblr when they discovered the donate button on SaveWalterWhite.com.

Realizing that their work was a viable and rich area for doing good, McCarty and Lokkesmoe teamed up to create the first ever annual Cause Placement event last year in D.C. The interactive presentations carrying the subhead "Entertaining Good," brought together more than 200 foundation representatives, industry professionals, agents, managers, and publicists interested in the opportunities that new cause marketing strategies could open.

"[We started] thinking about how we could integrate causes into content in a way that was far more powerful and purposeful than just gala fundraisers or red carpets," Lokkesmoe explained. "We see it as a seamless, integrated approach that begins early on - at scripting, in the recording studio, in the green room, on set, in the draft. It cannot be a tactic to market content to an existing affinity audience; too many partnerships are 'window-dressing.' It has to ring true for the audience."

This year's "Entertaining Good" event will take place October 10 in New York City and includes presentations from HBO, Warner Bros., MTV, WME, and dozens of others. Sevenly, The Non-Profit Times, and Conscious Magazine are sponsors. Limited tickets are still available. Breaking Bad's finale episodes premiere August 11 on AMC.

Help support the NCC, donate today.

"Some people might say, though, that the gay rights movement has come such a long way. It wants everything all at once, and it just doesn't happen that way!" --Carol Costello, CNN



I didn't give the FLOTUS heckling much thought until I ran across CNN Newsroom anchor Carol Costello's condescending interview with CNN analyst LZ Granderson. In the video, Costello mentions Obama's rising popularity, but, as Costello dismissively puts it, she's still subject to hecklers. In this introduction, we've a clear sense of how Costello will approach these "hecklers" throughout the rest of the interview, as if they are nothing more than nuisances who don't know their place.

Costello makes a dismissive grimace when she reports the cause of the heckler, Ellen Sturtz: The LGBT community is not protected from workplace discrimination.

Both of these moments seemed strange coming from an anchor on a series called Newroom, but Costello's condescending views on the heckling are crystalized later in the interview: "Some people might say, though, that the gay rights movement has come such a long way. It wants everything all at once, and it just doesn't happen that way!"

Let's be clear. Costello is among those "some people." Let's also be clear that Costello's remark is shameful and embarrassing: She suggests that equal rights groups should be happy with the glacial march toward progress and equality (a trajectory that, if you will notice, is mostly related to marriage equality). "It wants everything all at once, and it just doesn't happen that way!"

Yes, Carol Costello. The LGBTQ community wants equality all at once. You can bet we will demand it. And to suggest that we should be satisfied with the successes we've had (namely the march toward marriage equality, which isn't a high priority for many LGBTQ activists) in the past few years as adequate and that we should essentially stop rocking the boat is to suggest that the fight for equality has a timeline. And not only a timeline but a proper venue for that timeline.

I've seen many comments saying things like:

"Yes, well, it was just disrespectful..."

"It was in a room with children..."

"The First Lady doesn't set policy..."

"It wasn't fair..."

"It was the wrong time and place..."

These arguments are confusing to me, because where is the time and place to make demands of our leaders? Where do civil rights happen?

But these weren't just outbursts. They weren't just hecklings. Sturtz was not making demands of Michelle Obama; she was making demands of an American public -- the same public that Michelle Obama in part represents as an American symbol. The FLOTUS is a political being and constantly inserts herself into politics. Heckling her at a public event is not an individualized attack any more than throwing a pie in Anita Bryant's face was in 1977. It's not about the people themselves but what (or whom) they represent.

The "gay lobbies," as they have been affectionately called, do not in fact represent the voices or concerns of all members of the LGBTQ communities, many of whom have different priorities than marriage equality. These include attention to issues like poverty (queer youth homelessness), social services (denied coverage to transgender people), institutional negligence (prison rape), workplace inequality, etc.

When the rhetoric of "gay equality" is tied uniquely to "marriage equality," we have people like Carol Costello reporting its successes and figuring "gay equality" is a Supreme Court decision away from coming to fruition. But, again, gay equality and gay advocacy groups do not always have the needs and concerns of the other LBT and Q folks prioritized.

And so I ask again: Where do civil rights happen? Should the folks at the Stonewall Inn have waited for their day in court to argue for rights? LGBTQ activists have a long history of these so-called inappropriate disruptions, because we also have a long history of silencing. Before a mainstream "gay lobby machine" became a permanent fixture in Washington, D.C., gay rights activists had to disrupt the status quo in order to overcome that silencing. How else were they supposed to draw attention with a media moratorium on their issues? These were often called "zaps," public demonstrations designed to confront or embarrass a public figure while calling attention to human rights.

These zaps and other inconvenient "out of time and place" protests are precisely the reason something like marriage equality is now so close to passing, because they brought into the public consciousness a previously ignored or silenced conversation. We cannot and should not presume that equal rights will be fought and won by following a tried-and-true and convenient timeline, because that has never happened.

To be sure, our current fight toward marriage equality is built upon the backs of these zaps, on the crust of Anita Bryant's "fruit" pie, and on the receiving end of the shouts by a powerful public figure into the face of a woman demanding equality before she dies. No one should take for granted inconvenient activism and all it has made possible, least of all the gay community and the Obamas.

So, yes, Carol Costello, we want it all at once.

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."

A small Kansas carnival, 1905: From the four corners of the earth, acts to delight, to thrill, and to mystify. There’s a fire breather, a strong man, a stilt walker. A mammoth hot-air balloon looms in the distance and beyond that clouds promise a wicked storm. A magician cowers in his wagon after a young paralyzed girl begs him to walk again. She naively believed in his powers, as did her parents and all the good, simple-minded Kansans in attendance.

A knock on the door reveals the magician’s sometimes-love, Annie, who has come to tell him of her engagement–to see if he wants her back.

“You could do a lot worse than John Gale, he’s a good man,” Oz explains. “I’m not. I’m many things, but a good man is not one of them. See, Kansas is full of good men: church-going men that get married and raise families. Men like John Gale; men like my father, who spent his whole life tilling the dirt, just to die face down in it. I don’t want that Annie; I don’t want to be a good man. I want to be a great one.”



So begins the story of Disney’s Oz the Great and Powerful, but its tale isn’t new. Everyone is trying to get out of Kansas, to get the heck out of Dodge [City, Kansas]; to get over the rainbow. And it’s no wonder, really, given what the pictures show.

Hollywood is baffled by Kansas and represents it as a simultaneously old-timey homeland as well as a sideshow of rural curiosities. Audiences watch their screens with wonder as Kansans willingly endure the plight of their harsh geography. These voyeurs know their visit to the prairie will be brief, and they’ll delight in retelling its banal but bewildering splendor: men tilling dirt just to die face down in it.

Kansas has become a carnival unto itself.


All black and white photography is abstract. Likewise, when Kansas is represented, monochromatic or not, it’s always an abstraction from an urban reality, and one saddled with disaster:

It could be something like a tornado (The Wizard of Oz, Oz the Great and Powerful, Greensburg), or a meteor shower (Superman, Man of Steel [upcoming]) that destroys your town and leaves you battling an unending parade of hybrid alien “supers”(Smallville). Maybe you’re attacked by nomadic American vampires (Near Dark), renegade Indians (Custer, Four Feather Falls), or just good old-fashioned aliens (Mars Attacks!).

If you’re lucky, you might only have to face down the occasional bandit (Gunsmoke, Winchester ’73, Dodge City, The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp, etc.), or mobster (Prime Cut, The Ice Harvest), or time traveler (Looper), or errant supernatural being (The Ghost and Mr. Chicken, Courage the Cowardly Dog).

If you’re not so lucky, you’ll be confronted with domestic homicide (In Cold Blood, Murder Ordained) the American Civil War (Dark Command, Touched by Fire: Bleeding Kansas), the Great Depression (Paper Moon), racial segregation (The Learning Tree; Good Luck, Miss Wyckoff), nuclear catastrophe (The Day After), or the subsequent post-apocalyptic world (Jericho).
But more often than not, yours will be a crisis of identity. Dorothy, Superman, Oz: As queer figures unable to assimilate, they struggled through the exceedingly mechanical, zombie-esque homogeneity of Hollywood’s Great Plains, where idle-minded Kansans are born and die without living–a spectacle so unspectacular, it’s a kind of curious queer rurality. But Hollywood’s representations of Kansas go far beyond the mere trope of the rural vs. the urban. Kansas is at once more sinister as it is more sympathetic.

In the pictures, Kansas’ story is one of Bildungsroman, where a character completes a coming-of-age moment, a transition from naiveté to maturity that often involves leaving the state in one capacity or another.

It is only in so doing that they too will learn of Kansas’ banal allure. Superman doesn’t become the Man of Steel until he leaves his small farming community to help those who really need him in Metropolis. Oz doesn’t understand the power of goodness and the 2.35:1 widescreen aspect ratio until he crash lands in his future kingdom. And, sure, Dorothy heads back to Kansas, but does so knowing that on the other side of the rainbow is a splendid world of technicolor with yellow brick roads, giant lollipops, and a wicked witch who skywrites.

Dorothy’s unyielding pursuit to return to banality only proves Hollywood’s rule: Something’s the matter with Kansas. Its bearded ladies and conjoined twins, its dog boys and elephant men, all dressed over to appear as paeans to normativity. But their queer particularity shows at the seams, and queerer still is that they’re all willing participants in their own spectacularization. They all want to be in Kansas where they could be meteored, bombed, abducted, or tornadoed at any moment, and “isn’t that queer?!”

As a gay Kansan (and I’m talkin’ tumbleweed Kansas) with a weakness for Judy Garland, few people can identify with Dorothy’s journey more than me. Given the nature of the film, I should think it would surprise some of you to hear that The Wizard of Oz is a highly cherished icon-cum-commodity for the Sunflower State. We have regarded it as a great love story to Kansas. But it’s not really, is it?
It isn’t Oz, the munchkins, the witches, or even the eccentric Emerald City dwellers that are queer to the “mass audience” of the film. Not really. The world they know is in color; it’s filled with good and evil, and often draws those lines based on appearance. The world of wonder, then–the queerness of The Wizard of Oz–was always in the telling of Kansas–it was always on this side of the rainbow. There really is no place like home!

In the 1970s during the height of the American network regime, Raymond Williams’ theories of flow helped crystalize television as a field worthy of study. The new direction would not be limited to studying shows as discrete “texts” but would critically recognize the connections and fissures between programming blocks and commercial breaks.

His conception of flow as “the defining characteristic of broadcasting simultaneously as a technology and as a cultural form” articulates the importance, indeed, the centrality of commercials and contexts.

Nick Browne built upon the notion of flow to suggest that “the network is basically a relay in a process of textualizing the interaction of audience and advertiser” (74) and that the audience is active not “directly by what it wants, but through the figure of what is wanted of it.” To “read” flow as a whole for Browne is to read what he calls the “(super)text.” It is to recognize that television is not a medium of a priority in which programming is surrounded by commercials, but a medium in which commercials are surrounded by programming. Television shows thus become the connective tissue of the flow of advertisements, but are themselves really incidental to what television means within a commercial context.

But while Browne’s and to a greater extent Williams’ theories helped coalesce our field around a particular framework in these early years, there is not really an overwhelming body of flow work; indeed, I’m surprised by how infrequently I see it actually deployed (please share good counterexamples in the comments!).

Perhaps because of technological convergence through DVRs and TiVo, television fragmentation, and the so-called post-network era, for many television scholars working on “important” texts – most often masculinized shows that air in primetime – flow has become passé, bygone, and moved beyond in television studies. Choosing not to engage with the (super)text and focusing only on the narrative elements of a show makes for concerning, unremarked-upon assumptions about “quality” audiences and spectatorship practices with strong implications for erasures of class and gender beyond what I can cover here.

But flow is, of course, alive and well and even, as I’ll argue, desired. Moreover, it’s not only characteristic of network broadcasting (especially in daytime), but cable and non-network spaces are themselves begging for ‘flownalyses.’ For instance, I’m an avid viewer of Logo’s #sitcomtherapy nights, which air old episodes of queer-friendly sitcoms like The Golden Girls and Roseanne, punctuated by bumpers showing gay men and couples, PSAs by gay puppets educating audiences about AIDS, and programs for queer shows with queer bodies like RuPaul’s Drag Race, all the while overlaid by Tweets, hashtags, and queer trivia.


This syndicated flow with its rich semiotics of queerness legitimates the queer readings long, though less-explicitly, tied to such shows by queer folks. I admit to becoming willfully complicit in my own exploitation as a live viewer, choosing to sit through commercials instead of popping in a DVD because I find the experience of flow pleasureful, and I long have. And I’m not alone.

Syndicating queerness, as I’m calling it, is something I’m exploring as part of a larger project and in the process of researching it, I’ve found many other instances of the derived pleasure and nostalgia of flow in the post-network, digital era online, one of which I’d like to remark upon here: nick reboot.
 
nick reboot is a 24/7 online live-streaming “channel” for 1990s and early 2000s Nickelodeon programming – both live action and cartoon. Fan activists (many from the so-called millenial generation) have long petitioned Nickelodeon to revive this nostalgic programming (shows like Salute Your Shorts, Legends of the Hidden Temple, and Rocko’s Modern Life) but every time shows have been revived, they’ve been situated within the wrong flow context, matching twenty year old programming with present-day commercial breaks. So in an effort to recreate the flow of the era, the creators of nick reboot scoured the web to assemble user-uploaded original and syndicated programming (once aired on Nick but perhaps later syndicated elsewhere) as well as commercials, station IDs, and bumpers from the era, VJing them in such a way as to create a mechanics and performance of 90s-era flow.
 


While DVDs and YouTube videos promise old programming, they remain scarred as edited – incomplete texts without commercials, bumpers, etc. that thus read as less televisual (the problem of the DVD archive). Fans long for flow and the (super)texts of their childhoods, finding in nick reboot pleasure from a place of nostalgia as they re-imagine and relive the subjectivities they inhabited as children viewers.

The single video stream “channel” is accompanied by a live chat room where users reminisce about the shows and advertised products in real-time, virtually recreating the communal characteristic of network television lost, some argue, in the present-day Netflixian era. What’s more, flow is illuminated in nick reboot by its somewhat random nature that seems itself unscheduled. You watch nick reboot, particularly in commercial transitions, often just to see what’s on nick reboot without the luxury of a digital guide that lists all the shows for at least seven days. Users can follow nick reboot on Twitter for a broadcast schedule or have it delivered to their inboxes but only a few hours ahead of air times – a newfangled variance of TV Guide.

TV scholars much stronger and smarter than I have long and successfully defended against the notion that television in the post-network/Hululian era is dead. To the list of the living and, indeed thriving, I add flow itself and encourage us all to challenge ourselves by keeping these “(super)texts” complete in our classrooms and our research where possible. Put down those clickers, put away your video editors, and bask in the flow of television.

In 1956 New York, Professor Richard D. Heffner aired one of the first television programs in the our nation's history about homosexuality on NBC. The airing marked the opening of a national conversation on homosexuality, and the response was electric. At a time when being gay was a felony, viewers queer and straight alike wrote in to sound off with their opinions - resulting in a colorful quilt of American voices regarding 1950s "sex deviance." Many of them are funny -- many more, heartbreaking. Their words reveal to us the strangeness of their time, but in so doing, reveal also the strangeness of ours, for the past is no clearer than the present and the present, no clearer than the past.