11

Film and Television

LEARNING OBJECTIVES

Upon completion of this chapter, you should be able to do the following:

· 11.1 Review the history and value of media representations of queerness and trans identity.

· 11.2 Examine the varieties of representation in queer and trans films.

· 11.3 Critique two important films in the history of queer cinema.

· 11.4 List the significant contributions of televisual representation of queer and trans lives.

In the early days of moviemaking, Magnus Hirschfeld [λ Chapters 2 et al] introduced the film Different from the Others (1919), a German production by the Scientific Humanitarian Committee, which had been founded in 1897 to help bring about the abolition of Paragraph 175 by “eliminating false prejudices against homosexuals.” Hirschfeld’s introduction to the first showing of Different contained these lines:

The matter to be put before your eyes and soul today is one of severe importance and difficulty. Difficult, because the degree of ignorance and prejudice to be disposed of is extremely high. Important, because we must free not only these people from undeserved disgrace but also the public from a judicial error that can be compared to such atrocities in history as the persecution of witches, atheists and heretics. The film you are about to see for the first time today will help to terminate the lack of enlightenment, and soon the day will come when science wins a victory over error, justice a victory over injustice and human love a victory over human hatred and ignorance. (Russo 20)

Now, a century later, Hirschfeld’s hopes for the film’s impact have not been completely realized. What has happened, however, is that commentary about LGBTQ presence in film has continued to use Hirschfeld’s ideas; critics have repeatedly called for visibility and representation in the same ways that Hirschfeld did when he introduced Different from the Others.

Film and television—two of the most important venues of contemporary mass media—serve as sites of intense cultural work. Through film and TV, larger cultures clarify their dominant values and ideological investments, while subcultures and minority groups negotiate their place at the table through positive representation or through critical interrogation of negative images. Much of the discourse around queers in film and television has focused on questions of visibility and representation. Do we see LGBTQ people in film and on TV? How often do we see them? Are these representations of LGBTQ people positive or negative? What do we mean when we use the terms positive and negative? Do those representations show LGBTQ people in realistic ways? In this chapter, we focus on a relatively small number of films and TV shows that feature LGBTQ characters to raise questions about the “cultural work” of film and television with LGBTQ content—explicit or not. We begin with some information about the way scholars and critics have talked about film; then we offer several analyses of recent films, moving from reality-based subject matter to fiction to fantasy. From there we shift to television, analyzing significant moments when shows and characters appeared (or disappeared) and asking what these trends might mean. This chapter does not engage in exhaustive historical listing of LGBTQ characters in film and TV productions; rather, our focus will be on providing some specific analyses of the cultural work accomplished by a variety of representations of queers in mass media. We intend to adhere roughly to the three criteria identified by Harry Benshoff and Sean Griffin regarding what queer cinema involves: auteurs (it is made by queers), forms (it displays a queer aesthetics and is concerned with queer issues), and reception (it is widely embraced by queer people). Our assumption is that absent these three elements, we are not dealing with queer work. All three may not be present together in every film or television show we discuss here, but queerness must be foregrounded.

Figure 11.1 Still from Different from the Others (1919).

VISIBILITY AND REPRESENTATION

Vito Russo’s The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies, written in 1981 and revised in 1987, was in its time the most comprehensive discussion of gay characters in U.S. film. In 1990, it was made into a documentary film featuring interviews with people connected to Hollywood. Russo’s book covers nearly a century of films with homosexual characters, asking whether they are presented in a positive or a negative light. Russo’s account, written before the explosion of queer characters and issues in the mass media of the 1990s, depicts a startling and unsettling reality: When gay people were represented on film, they were often sad and suicidal or unstable and psychopathic. One prime example Russo cites is William Friedkin’s controversial 1980 film Cruising, in which Al Pacino portrays an undercover cop assigned to infiltrate New York’s gay leather underworld to catch a serial killer. By the end of the film, Pacino’s character is seemingly seduced into becoming gay himself. Russo explains, “[T]he unavoidable conclusion is that Pacino becomes a murderer of gay people. The audience is left with the message that same-sex attraction is not only contagious but inescapably brutal” (259). What’s more, for Russo, “[t]he fact that Pacino’s girlfriend ends up in the last shot trying on his leather gear says that his lifestyle is seductive and contagious, threatening to what’s good in the world” (261). Others agreed with Russo’s analysis, and at the time of its original release, many gay people picketed the film, which ultimately did poorly at the box office: “Usually, when gay people complain about this sort of thing their concerns are dismissed as partisan, but this time everyone complained because the evidence was too overwhelming to ignore” (261).

Figure 11.2 Al Pacino in Cruising.

John Springer Collection/Getty Images

Certainly, Cruising created a stir, but we must remember that moviemakers’ intentions only tell part of the story of how films and other mass media work in a culture. Stuart Hall’s notions of “encoding” and “decoding” are useful here. For Hall, encoding refers to the messages deliberately included in cultural products by their makers; decoding refers to the messages cultural consumers glean from these products—not necessarily the encoded ones. Russo may be correct in ascribing homophobic intent, or encoding, to Cruising’s makers, and the gay picketers who protested the film read it in that way. But since the film’s release, many gay video distribution companies, such as Theatre of the Living Arts (TLA), have marketed the film specifically to gay audiences. Many in the contemporary gay world find Cruising a rather sexy and provocative look at leathersex, despite the homophobic story that frames it. Different gay viewers thus decode the film in ways that make its message more interesting and complex to them as viewers or “readers.”

In the revised 1987 version of The Celluloid Closet, Russo discusses the blockbuster film The Color Purple (Warner Bros. 1985, directed by Steven Spielberg). Russo, like many other LGBTQ reviewers, criticizes the film harshly for diluting the lesbian material that figured prominently in its inspiration, Alice Walker’s 1982 book. The book had already been slammed by Black male critics such as Mel Watkins, Courtland Milloy, Tony Brown, and Spike Lee for its unflattering portrayal of Black men and for airing “dirty laundry” about domestic and sexual abuse in Black households (Iverem, Bobo). Feminists criticized Spielberg’s film for rehabilitating the principal abuser to the point where his smiling silhouette dominates the reunion between protagonist Celie and her long-lost sister Nettie. Moreover, as Russo observes, Spielberg “took a sexually explicit love affair in an existing work and, by his own admission, sanitized it into a series of chaste kisses to beg acceptance from a mass audience” (278). Andrea Weiss writes, “The joke in lesbian circles while the film was in production was that Steven Spielberg wasn’t intimidated by creatures from outer space [in his 1982 movie E.T: The Extra-Terrestrial] but a lesbian relationship was more than he could handle” (79). Molly Hite goes still further, accusing Spielberg of erasing nonhegemonic behavior to the point where, unlike the book, the film insists on “restoring the patriarchal status quo” (141 n).

Using Russo’s terms, many LGBTQ viewers have criticized films such as The Hunger, Bound, and Basic Instinct for their lesbian characters who are portrayed as violent outsiders. Beginning in the late 20th century, as attitudes toward LGBTQ people began to shift, some filmmakers worked to provide more sympathetic characters. Longtime Companion, Philadelphia, Claire of the Moon, and The Incredibly True Adventures of Two Girls in Love are probably the best known among these rehabilitative films. Russo himself acknowledged at the end of the revised version of Celluloid Closet that “[g]ay visibility has never really been an issue in the movies. Gays have always been visible. It’s how they have been visible that has remained offensive for almost a century” (325). But even when such images become markedly less offensive, as in the dramatically increased gay and lesbian mass media visibility of the 1990s, critical questions remain. In our discussion of the following three films—Monster, Unveiled, and Shrek 2—we probe beyond the binary of good representation versus bad representation to ask the following:

· How are representations of queer lives constructed?

· What complex realities do they depict?

· What biases or blind spots remain?

VARIETIES OF QUEERNESS IN CONTEMPORARY FILM

Monster (KW 2003, directed by Patty Jenkins) stars Charlize Theron, who won an Oscar for her portrayal of lesbian prostitute and serial killer Aileen (Lee) Wuornos. The film is “loosely based” on the two years of Wuornos’s life during which she met and became involved with Tyria Moore (renamed Selby Wall in the film) and during which she murdered seven men (Kalwani). Monster depicts Wuornos as a psychologically unstable survivor of childhood sexual violence who kills her first victim after being beaten and raped by him. The Selby Wall character is played by Christina Ricci as a doe-eyed and willfully blind young lesbian, who whines, “I just want a normal life” and feigns ignorance of Wuornos’s murders. After Wuornos’s arrest, Wall sells her out, engaging her in a telephone conversation in which Wuornos, realizing the phone is bugged, implicates herself and exonerates Wall. As Wuornos is sentenced to death in the film’s final scene, we understand her life as a series of truly tragic circumstances.

As a film, Monster replays earlier representations of the man-hating lesbian and the psychopathic homosexual to provide psychological and social class context for the characters. Viewers see how lives can be tortured through a nexus of sexual abuse, devaluation of women, homophobia, and poverty. The film, then, is a complex intersectional portrait of social class, gender, and sexuality, which invites us to understand queer lives made desperate through interlocking oppressions. Regardless of the actual events upon which it is based, the film asks viewers not only to understand but also to sympathize with Wuornos. We begin to understand why she kills the men she does, and we come to see her relationship with Wall as an attempt to achieve intimacy and love. Wall’s desire for a “normal life” seems abnormal, as it can only be achieved at Wuornos’s expense. At the very least, Wall’s return to normalcy is presented as a refusal to understand the systems that can immiserate queer lives, driving them to desperate acts. Ultimately, Wall’s idea of normal and Wuornos’s rage and violence are presented as equally pathological.

Attempts to negotiate a “normal life” also lie at the heart of the German film Unveiled (Wolfe 2005, directed by Angelina Maccarone), which tells the story of Fariba, an Iranian woman who flees to Germany to avoid punishment—imprisonment, rape, torture, and possibly even death—after the discovery of her affair with a married woman. In Germany, Fariba takes on the identity of Siamak, a (male) Iranian refugee who has committed suicide. She becomes involved with Anne, a coworker at the sauerkraut factory where Siamak/Fariba is an undocumented employee. Germany turns out to be an unsatisfactory sanctuary for Fariba as a toxic combination of government bureaucracy and threatening working-class men conspire to force her back to Iran. In The Globalization of Sexuality, Jon Binnie points out that “movement across national borders is restricted for some sexual dissidents because of heteronormative and homophobic migration policies” (99). Unveiled illustrates the impact of immigration policies that discriminate against LGBTQ people; it does not allow us simply to demonize the repressive country, in this case Iran, for Fariba is persecuted and ultimately denied asylum in “progressive” Germany as well. Fariba is suspended not only between two countries but also between two genders as she seeks her freedom. In fact, the film’s intersectional analysis [λ Chapter 8] of sexuality, gender, and class—Fariba must pose as a man among working-class Germans and other immigrants to secure any possibility of sanctuary—depicts the multiple dangers that some queers must negotiate to find freedom from sexual-, gender-, and nation-based repression.

The German title of the film, Fremde Haut (Strange Skin), foregrounds at once the protagonist’s fraught immigrant Iranian condition, her passing as a male, and her removal of the chador—a covering of the skin for women in conservative Islamic cultures. It also positions Unveiled as a contemporary link to the lurid sensational titles of 1950s pulp novels—Strange Sisters, Veil of Torment, Three Strange Women, The Black Veil, and so forth. Interestingly, the portrayal of Fariba as a darkhaired butch and Anne as a light-haired femme also recalls typical pulp covers [λ Chapter 9]. We see this pattern in popular queer films as well; clear examples are the classic lesbian romance Desert Hearts (1986), the Brandon Teena biopic Boys Don’t Cry (1999), and the “true-life” German film Aimée and Jaguar (1999). The nod to pulp fiction and popular films underscores the apparently intentional derivativeness of Unveiled; many reviews of the film and even the publicity poster reproduced on the DVD box mention the similarities to Boys Don’t Cry, for instance. And these are striking, beginning with the bleak, inhospitable landscapes in Germany and Nebraska but also including the perils of passing in a world populated by menacing, potentially murderous men and institutions.

Filmmakers sometimes treat oppression, including anti-queer intolerance, in subtle and even humorous ways. Right-wing conservative organizations such as the Traditional Values Coalition (TVC) have condemned Shrek 2 (DreamWorks 2004, directed by Andrew Adamson, Kelly Asbury, and Conrad Vernon) mostly because they see the film as an attempt to “mainstream abnormal behaviors” (“A Gender Identity Disorder Goes Mainstream”). Shrek 2, they point out, “features a male-to-female transgender (in transition) as an evil bartender. The character has five o’clock shadow, wears a dress and has female breasts. He is a ‘she-male’. His voice is that of talk show host Larry King” (“Parents Beware”). Note the strange, even transphobic reference to “she-male.” The film does indeed contain “subtle sexual messages,” as the TVC suggests. But Larry King’s MTF ugly stepsister bartender is merely a surface gag (and hardly subtle).

Shrek 2’s central story revolves around newlyweds Shrek and Fiona seeking acceptance from the king and queen, Fiona’s parents. In the first Shrek movie (2001), Princess Fiona—doomed by a curse to live as a human by day and an ogre by night—”comes out” by choosing full-time ogre identity to be her true self and to marry Shrek. This film, however, mitigates its potential queer theme. For one thing, Fiona was attractively unconventional—athletic, powerful, and eccentric—as a human but more conventionally “wifely” as a (married) ogre. For another, the “happily ever after” heterosexual marriage plot defuses and domesticates Fiona’s potential queerness. Shrek 2, however, places the “coming-out-to-parents” plot squarely in the middle of the filmic message. The king and queen are confronted with a daughter who has chosen to live openly as an ogre and who brings her ogre husband home to meet the folks. We might observe that, in this case, the ogre identities seem to stand in for race, not necessarily queerness; after all, green skin and bulky physique are clearly marked on the ogres’ bodies. Still, as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick points out in Epistemology of the Closet (1990), the tropes of the closet and coming out have become central metaphors in Western, particularly U.S., culture. Emerging from concealment into a true (even essential) identity symbolically characterizes any number of life trajectories: coming out as an alcoholic, as a Jew or a Muslim or a Christian, as the parent (or child) of a gay person, and so forth. Shrek 2 finally places queerness at the center of its concerns, and it elaborates on the coming-out theme in ways that resonate powerfully for LGBTQ people. The queen, for example, is more accepting of Fiona and Shrek than her husband the king. This not only reflects the general tendency for straight women to be more open to sexual nonconformity than straight men (see, e.g., Herek, Kite, and Morin and Garfinkle), but it also highlights an interesting subplot in the movie. It turns out that the king is only human on sufferance of the scheming Fairy Godmother, who has threatened to turn him (back) into a frog if Fiona fails to marry her son, Prince Charming. The king’s straight masculinity—even his humanity—is thus shown to be fragile and quickly revocable, and we are reminded of queer theorist Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble (1990), where she observes that gender—particularly masculinity—is a precarious masquerade that can be reinforced only through performance and re-performance. Shrek 2, despite the TVC’s focus on its transgender bartender, does far more than simply offer some possibly LGBTQ images. Rather, it is constructed around the central queer cultural trope of coming out to family, and its final message of acceptance (even of the king, who is now a frog) is assumed to resonate with gay and straight people alike.

FIRE AND CAROL

The development of cinema about LGBTQ and queer people continues, with films becoming increasingly complex and sophisticated in their representation of queer lives. At times, even in the recent past, such films have faced backlash— sometimes overtly so, and sometimes less obviously. We can see the deployment of multiple protectionist rhetoric to censor queer art in the moral panic surrounding the release of Canadian Indian Deepa Mehta’s 1996 film, Fire (Kaleidoscope). The film tells the story of the evolving relationship between two sisters-in-law whose unhappiness in their marriages and growing attraction to one another take place in an oppressive environment where families live together in confined spaces and where women’s lives are controlled by their social circumstances. Before the release of Fire, Daniel Lak of BBC Online, while clarifying that the film is “not meant to be about gay life,” acknowledged that “one group of people in [India] is awaiting this film eagerly—the Indian lesbian community, which for years has maintained a silent, almost secret existence.” Perhaps partly as an effort to maintain that silence, protesters reacted strongly to the film’s 1998 release in India, claiming that it represented an affront not only to Indian sexual mores but to Indian culture and nationhood. Conservative Hindu activists called the film “un-Indian” and warned that portraying lesbianism will “spoil our women” (“Deepa”).

This notion is reminiscent of the 1928 suppression of The Well of Loneliness not on the grounds of obscenity but solely on account of its lesbian subject matter [λ Chapter 8]. The intersectional moral panic around Fire raised issues of nationalism, sexism, and heterosexism. As in other countries where same-sex attraction has been silenced until very recently, the Hindu protesters figure India as a land of heterosexuals, where gay men and lesbians present a powerful challenge to the national self-image. Moreover, as a danger to “our women,” the film is seen as an “attack on the privileges of patriarchy” in India (Morris). Fire, however, gave voice to the “unhappiness of women in traditional families” (“Deepa”) and thus exposed the pervasive sexism and misogyny of the culture. Finally, the vandalism and violence attending Fire’s release in Mumbai revealed profound homophobia—disguised as a concern that the movie would “corrupt Indian women”—and unleashed a spate of gay bashing. This homophobic backlash occurred in the context of a general belief in the sanctity of marriage and related disapproval of pre- and extramarital sex.

The Indian Censor Board’s decision to allow Fire to be shown may have led in the short term to right-wing protests and vandalism. But eventually, it opened the door for other homosexed art in India. We note, for instance, that Girlfriend, a Bollywood film about a lesbian relationship, opened in 2004. The same right-wing protesters claimed that “such movies pollute the culture and should not be made” (Singh). However, Censor Board approval of Girlfriend and state protection of theaters showing it suggest that the moral panic around Fire did not completely squelch lesbian-themed filmmaking in India. We argue that this trajectory typically follows moral panics; the very rhetoric designed to muzzle transgressive art also tends to spur the creation of new work with similar themes.

The reception of the 2015 film Carol (Number 9, Killer, Film4), directed by openly queer filmmaker Todd Haynes, offers a more complex example of how a film about queers can both gain praise and face less explicit forms of backlash. Based on Patricia Highsmith’s 1952 novel The Price of Salt, and with a screenplay by Phyllis Nagy, Carol is about a lesbian relationship. As we noted, Highsmith’s novel was important for its time in that it presented lesbianism in a positive light; its protagonists, Carol and Therese, seem to find happiness in their relationship by the end of the book, unlike many other novels from the mid-20th century that treated homosexuality [λ Chapter 9]. Haynes’ film is a faithful adaptation that re-creates the period of the novel, the early 1950s, and that movingly portrays the dilemmas faced when a married woman in an unhappy marriage, Carol, falls in love with a store clerk, Therese. Particularly moving scenes include Carol’s discovery that her husband has hired a private investigator to spy on her and Therese and a final confrontation among Carol, her ex-husband, and his lawyer arguing over custody of their child. The film thus offers contemporary viewers a sense of the personal and legal traumas that many 20th-century queer people faced—and that some still do in many parts of the world, including parts of the Global North.

On one hand, critics and viewers appreciated the film’s attention to period detail, although some found that its representation of lesbianism wasn’t historically accurate. References to emerging gay subcultures in postwar New York are absent, for instance. Still, the film powerfully focuses on a lesbian relationship— something still relatively lacking in contemporary major motion pictures. The beauty of the primary actors, Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara, as well as the lush sets and staging of their lovemaking, create a visually moving experience. At a symposium on Patricia Highsmith and Carol at the University of Cincinnati in April 2016, Margaret Breen from the University of Connecticut suggested that one of the most important aspects of the film is its beauty; in her words, we as queers “deserve” a “beautiful film” about our lives and loves. As Breen asserts, the aesthetic quality of the film might serve a political purpose in that it represents queerness not just in terms of our fight for rights and recognition but also as a deeply pleasurable experience. We might note that Fire’s beauty as a film also serves a similar political effect.

On the other hand, though, Carol was left out of the U.S. Academy Awards nominations for Best Picture. Some critics, such as Marcie Bianco, argue that “2016’s biggest Oscar snub proves Hollywood overlords cannot deal with female sexual desire.” The fact that the females in the film are also lesbians probably didn’t help. Other critics suggested that the Academy snub might stem from a sense that the film’s subject—queerness itself—doesn’t merit as much sustained treatment given the recent civil rights gains for lesbians and gay people in the United States. Perhaps Haynes’s choice to make Carol, a film about queers before their attainment of some civil rights, is a stark reminder not only of how far we have come but of how fragile those rights are.

SMALL-SCREEN AND STREAMING QUEERS

While films are frequently critiqued in terms of type of representation, television is more often critiqued in terms of number of representations. Bucking this trend, in All the Rage: The Story of Gay Visibility in America, Suzanna Danuta Walters critiques the way gay people were represented in television shows, films, and advertisements throughout the 1990s, the seeming “golden age” of gay representation, by discussing, for instance, Ellen, Will & Grace, and other shows. The sheer number of examples she can call upon is surprising: we are, apparently, everywhere. Walters identifies a pervasive “normalizing” trend in these representations: gay people as good neighbors, gay people placed in situations that highlight the liberal tolerance of straight friends and family, and gay people as sick, dying, and alone (76). Lesbians and gay men are represented, but how—and what can be learned from this inclusion?

For decades, shows such as ABC’s The Corner Bar (1972), Hot L Baltimore (1975), and Soap (1977–1981) had gay characters, but until the latter part of the 20th century, queer representations on television were rare—so rare, in fact, that beginning around 1990, popular television shows such as Roseanne (1988–1997) and Friends (1994–2004) made news with episodes that not only featured gay characters but focused on queer behavior. In one episode of the sitcom Mad about You (1992–1999), Jamie Buchman observes the gay pride parade from her apartment window and ponders the difficulty of living in a world that proscribes public displays of affection between same-sex romantic partners. In 1993 and 1994, public broadcasting stations in the United Kingdom and the United States screened Tales of the City, a miniseries based on Armistead Maupin’s novels about gay person (and straight) life in San Francisco. Roseanne introduced a minor recurring gay character, played mostly for comic relief by a swishy Martin Mull (1991), and followed up in 1994 with TV’s first woman-to-woman kiss, between Roseanne and Mariel Hemingway, who had gained popularity among lesbians for her starring role in the now cult film Personal Best (1982). Also in 1994, MTV’s hugely popular pseudo reality show The Real World featured Pedro Zamora, an HIV+ man who shared a house with other young people for several months. The show offered the United States one of the first “real-life” views of how a gay person lived with HIV and negotiated relationships and intimacies with others. The popular graphic novel Pedro and Me (2000), written by Real World participant Judd Winick, chronicles the friendship between Zamora and Winick that lasted until Zamora’s death and that inspired Winick to devote his energies to AIDS prevention.

The sitcom Ellen (1994–1998) was the first network television show to feature a main character who comes out as a lesbian. Noting that the lead character, Ellen Morgan, seemed uninterested in dating, one producer suggested she get a puppy. When that suggestion was cast aside in favor of Ellen’s professing her love for a woman, the idea stuck, and still today, the coming-out episode is called “The Puppy Episode.” Malinda Lo writes in “Back in the Day: Coming Out with Ellen” that

[i]t wasn’t until March 1997, after the first version of the coming-out script had been rejected, that Disney executives gave the official go-ahead to tape “The Puppy Episode.” What followed was a media blitz: DeGeneres went on The Oprah Winfrey Show, was interviewed by Diane Sawyer, and was featured on the cover of Time with the headline “Yep, I’m Gay.” At the same time, DeGeneres had just met Anne Heche, a heretofore straight actor whose career was beginning to take off. DeGeneres and Heche also made the media rounds, even attending the White House Correspondents’ Dinner together in late April.

Despite the enormous amount of attention paid to that episode, though, the show survived only one more season. Some claimed that the show lost momentum after “The Puppy Episode,” and others said that the show’s considerable attention to gay issues undermined it. Ron Miller of the San Jose Mercury News, for instance, argued that “DeGeneres is a funny and inventive woman, whose sexual orientation is only an important aspect of her life, not the sole purpose of it. Maybe the Ellen writers would have retained more viewers if they had let her gayness take over only when they really had some fresh and funny point to make” (“GLAAD”). Despite the cancellation, the impact of DeGeneres’s real-life and fictional coming out prompted other producers to include a growing number of queer characters in their shows. Between 1997 and 2001, the number of recurring gay characters in television shows was consistently in the double digits (Walters 96–97). Such characters were no longer the simple buffoons or suicidal psychopaths depicted in earlier decades; they were, like Ellen in her show’s last season, increasingly nuanced and complex characters, confronting discrimination and working on relationships. Seemingly, queers were beginning to achieve the kinds of media visibility that critics like Russo had longed for.

For instance, Will & Grace, about the friendship between a gay man and a straight woman, began on the heels of Ellen’s cancellation; its main characters were gay male Will and his zany, redheaded best (straight) female friend, Grace. The show also featured Jack, a flaming gay man, and Karen, who was wealthy and shallow but campy and served as Jack’s foil. Interestingly, the show was touted as “gay,” but the visual representations told a hetero-sexualized story. Though Jack and Will were sometimes shown in scenes where they discussed their sexuality or their romantic exploits, more often Will and Grace appeared together, with Jack and Karen forming another platonic couple. Queer sexuality was often presented either as a kind of joke (as in the campy character, Jack) or erased altogether. For example, one slapstick episode focused on a sexual competition between Will and Grace, who were both attracted to a man who had just moved into their apartment building. The outcome of the competition was that the man in question, while never revealing his sexuality to either Will or Grace, proclaimed that he wanted friendship and not romance from them and scolded them for their shallowness. This is meant to be a lesson to Will and Grace to de-emphasize sexual attraction as a basis for relationships. Several other episodes feature Will and Grace’s friends, Rob and Ellen, a heterosexually married couple. In one episode, Will and Grace compete as a charades team against Rob and Ellen, a move that allows the writers to present Will and Grace as a hetero-sexualized couple, a dynamic that plays out in many episodes. Will & Grace was wildly popular (according to a blurb on the DVD cover, its final episode in 2006 is estimated to have drawn 18.1 million viewers), and the show kept sexual difference, camp, and interactions among professedly gay characters in the public consciousness. Queer responses to it, though, were not entirely positive. John Lyttle told The Independent on Sunday that

“[i]n a few years’ time, we will look back on [Queer Eye, Will & Grace and a UK version of Queer Eye called Fairy Godfathers] in the same way we look back on [the book] Uncle Tom’s Cabin. People will cringe. The thing about camping it up [is that] it’s gone from being very subversive—without it we wouldn’t have had gay liberation—to being the norm on TV. Gay culture is not all about that stereotype. It’s like gay men are only acceptable if they play the court jester. (“Edinburgh”)

Figure 11.3 Ellen DeGeneres and wife Portia de Rossi.

Christopher Polk/Getty Images

Figure 11.4 The cast of Will & Grace.

Brad Barket/Getty Images

Complex and nuanced queer characters are slowly emerging on major American broadcast channels such as CBS, NBC, and ABC, cable channels and streaming services have hosted a variety of long-running series with significant queer content, some focused primarily on lesbian and gay lives. Showtime’s Queer as Folk (2000–2005), based on a short-lived British TV series, offered a sometimes explicit and frequently controversial look at the lives of several gay and lesbian friends in Pittsburgh. Featuring some of the most graphic same-sex erotic scenes in a television drama, Queer as Folk pushed boundaries and showed audiences some of the issues facing contemporary urban gay people, such as drug addiction, nonmonogamy, job discrimination, homophobic assaults, and difficulties encountered by same-sex parents attempting to raise children. A comparable show focusing on lesbian friendships and relationships, The L Word (2004–2009), also on Showtime, focuses on a group of lesbian-identified friends living in Los Angeles. In 2005, Logo aired the African American–themed Noah’s Arc, which was described in promos in this way: “From new boy-friends to strained friendships to career changes, these men persevere and live their lives with grace and wit” (“Noah’s Arc”). Noah’s Arc foregrounded issues common to urban gay men, such as attraction to a man who is coy about revealing his sexuality, living together in a tiny apartment, and adjusting to a new lover’s straight friends. The pay-for-TV location of these shows permits them to present queer lives in more depth and complexity than would be permitted on free channels, but it also limits the size and diversity of the audiences they reach and thus the conversations they can prompt about queer lives.

With that said, the move in the last decade toward television streaming services, such as Netflix and Hulu, have made an extraordinary amount of LGBTQ content available to television viewers, including older films and series as well as indie works, and content originally designed for the World Wide Web [λ Chapter 12]. Such services have also begun producing their own original content, and have allowed writers and producers such as Ryan Murphy, to name only one of several content makers, the opportunity to craft narratives that foreground a diversity of queer and trans characters. Murphy’s first major “gay” television hit was Glee (2009–2015), which initially aired on the Fox network but quickly moved to streaming services. It features a cast of young people in a high school music club and has major storylines focused on gay characters, especially Kurt Hummel who struggles to adjust to his identity as gay and faces intense bullying from some classmates.

Murphy also co-created the groundbreaking series Pose (2018–2021), with Brad Falchuk and Steven Canals, which concerns the lives of a group of Black and trans queers who participate in New York’s ball culture during the height of the AIDS epidemic in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Inspired in part by Jennie Livingston’s 1990 documentary, Paris Is Burning, which was one of the first documentaries to explore ball culture, Pose is notable not just for its subject matter but for its large cast of Black and trans actors. The Huffington Post could declare in 2017 that “Ryan Murphy’s New Show Makes History By Casting Record Number Of Trans Actors,” including Mj Rodriguez and Dominique Jackson in leading roles, each playing Black trans “house mothers” who lead their families of choice in competitions during the balls. As Pose is set during the AIDS epidemic, it often depicts the homophobic, transphobic, and racist oppression that Black and trans queers of color faced at a time when the larger culture was mostly content to let such people get sick and die. While many of the characters persevere in creating their own families of choice and communities of care, they also show contemporary, younger viewers a crucial part of the history of the AIDS epidemic—this time told from the perspective of Black and trans folks, whose experiences are often neglected in more white-washed histories of the epidemic that focus on white and cis gay men. Pose is also significant for its representation of Black and brown trans folk given how often they are targets of homophobic, transphobic, and racial violence[λ Chapter 7].

In addition to Pose, a few other shows have broken ground in the intersectional representation of queerness. Josh Thomas, a white Australian comic, has had enormous success with Please Like Me, which ran for four seasons on Australian televisions, starting in 2012, and became widely available through streaming services. The show follows a group of young people, with Thomas himself playing the gay lead, and their attempts to find love and happiness in Melbourne. What’s perhaps most striking about the show is its frank portrayal of mental illness. The lesbian comedian Hannah Gadsby plays in a recurring role a character who is hospitalized for self-harm. Gadsby herself became famous on Netflix for her 2018 release of her standup routine, Nanette, in which she describes her ongoing trauma from sexual abuse and her struggle with mental health. Thomas went on from Please Like Me to write and star in Everything’s Gonna Be Ok, which started airing in 2020 and concerns a young gay man, played by Thomas, who is left in charge of his two younger sisters once their father dies. (Their mother had previously died much earlier, before the series starts.) What’s notable about Everything’s Gonna Be Ok is its inclusion of autistic characters, played by autistic actors. In fact, Thomas himself “came out” as autistic and, as of this writing, had plans to “out” his character on the show as autistic too.

The gains over the last few decades in the representation of LGBTQ people have been significant. But some critics offer counter views. Walters, for instance, maintains that such increased media visibility is a mixed blessing. On one hand, she argues that it is good because “cultural visibility can really push the envelope, bringing complicated and substantive gay identities into public view. And sometimes these cultural images slowly, almost imperceptibly, chip away around the edges of bigotry, never really getting to the core but perhaps revealing it all too clearly” (15). On the other hand, “We may be seen now, but I am not sure we are known” (10); “visibility does not erase stereotypes nor guarantee liberation” (13); and “[i]f gays are now a regular part of the visual landscape, then they too can be mocked and ‘dissed’” (117). In fact, as Walters points out, the newfound media visibility might backfire: “Gay as chic can be used in ways that deflect attention away from more substantive concerns about lesbian and gay civil rights” (17). For instance, the media in general fail to represent homophobia as it moves through and even destroys some queer lives; this may be the most serious shortcoming of the new gay representation.

As we reflect on the films, television shows, and critical commentaries that we have discussed in this chapter, we see that filmic representations of queers, particularly in the past two decades, have been significant for a number of reasons: they provide LGBTQ people a set of images with which to relate and identify, they serve pedagogically to instruct the larger culture how to respond sympathetically to queers, and as in the case of Shrek 2 and its “queer” storyline, they offer metaphorical ways of thinking critically about culture and difference. While we view these as salutary uses of such images, we also wonder about their limitations. For instance, we find that many contemporary fictional representations of queerness in the movies and on television are freighted with what we might call the “imperative of the happy ending,” that is, the insistence that plotlines featuring gay people, queer relationships, or LGBTQ romances end happily. While such endings serve the pedagogical purpose of showing straights and queers alike that LGBTQ people can—and should—be able to lead happy, healthy, and productive lives, the happy-ending imperative seems like merely the inverse of the negative representational patterns that Russo observed two decades ago. In the fictional film Ma Vie En Rose (1997), for example, the happy conclusion involves the “conversion” of adults and other children to the protagonist’s point of view that “he” is a girl born into a boy’s body because of the accidental loss of his second X chromosome.

In contrast, the based-on-real-life movies, such as Boys Don’t Cry, have room for less imperatively happy conclusions; in some cases, their grounding can license a more complex rendering of queer lives and experiences. Finally, the widespread use of the coming-out narrative that we identified as a key theme in Shrek 2 allows viewers to build empathy with those who have secrets and are trying to negotiate their differences with the larger culture—a situation many LGBTQ people face today. At the same time, we wonder whether the extension of the metaphor of the closet to all differences dilutes a more specific consideration of the difficulties faced by queer people as they navigate sexist and homophobic systems, institutions, and ideologies.

Still, ground seems to have been gained. Over the past half century, queer people and their stories have moved from nearly invisible to strikingly commonplace on the big and small screens. So dramatic has been this proliferation of queer images that a recent website lists the top 175 must-see queer films; an LGBTQ person in the 1960s or 70s would have been utterly unable to imagine such a wealth of possibilities. As these images flood the media, it is tempting simply to ignore most of them. “Oh, another sappy coming-out movie,” we say, or “Look at those straight women making goo-goo eyes at Ellen!” Rapid advances not only in queer visibility but also in civil rights can tempt us to take U.S. queer privilege for granted. It will be incumbent upon future generations of queers to use their visibility effectively—not to forget the decades, even centuries, of erasure in the past. Film and television produce snapshots of possible presents; the nature of that production matters, and will continue to matter, to queer viewers.

QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION

1. Traditionally, the assumption has been that there is a clear relationship between visibility—in film, television, and other mass media—and movement toward equality. But is the path from visibility to equality so direct? How might it proceed by fits and starts? And whose equality, specifically, are we talking about? Gays and lesbians? Bisexual people? The transgender person? White LGBTQ folk? Middle-class LGBTQ folk? And to complicate things even further, how do we define equality, and why do we assume that equality is a laudable goal? Think intersectional about the visibility of LGBTQ people in the mass media to problematize and nuance your ideas about this issue.

2. We acknowledge that this chapter, by necessity, deals with a ridiculously small number of films and television shows. We note, for instance, that well-known feature films The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert; To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar; Hedwig and the Angry Inch; and Transamerica (all focused on transgender characters) did not make it into our narrative. How might you use the critique of representation and visibility that we present in this chapter to understand the cultural work around transgenderism in one or more of these films?

3. In this chapter, we have focused on major motion pictures and television series, ignoring a mixed genre: made-for-television movies. Consenting Adults (1985) depicted a mother trying to come to terms with her son’s disclosure of his gayness, and An Early Frost (1985) showed a middle-class family dealing with a gay son’s AIDS. Such movies served a pedagogical function in bringing some awareness of queer lives, however limited and sentimental, to the larger American (and Western) culture. Such movies taught the public about queerness by focusing primarily on family members’ struggles to deal with same-sex attraction, as opposed to the individual lives of queers themselves. These movies are currently available on DVD. Locate one or more made-for-television movies and contrast the cultural work they do with the cultural work done by recurring queer characters in sitcoms or ongoing TV dramas.

4. A common tool for rating films and TV shows on a feminist scale is the familiar Bechdel Test (named for Alison Bechdel, author of the long-running comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For). It works as follows:

To pass, the film or show must meet the following criteria:

1. It includes at least two women,

2. who have at least one conversation,

3. about something other than a man or men (“Useful Notes”).

Think of several films or TV shows you have seen recently. Do they pass the Bechdel Test? Is this a valid method of evaluating media products?

Images of queers in film and TV have had a long and complicated history. The explosion of lesbian and gay images beginning in the 1990s represents a turning point in queer visibility. This chapter examines how visibility can operate as a double-edged sword, potentially diluting the power of underground community while ostensibly promoting mainstream acceptance.