Queer Shows for the Straight Joes

Allison Luthy

Arts Journalism

3/2/08

Queer Shows for the Straight Joes

`“Whatever I don’t get, I just figure is gay,” Will’s Texan client, Harlan, comments when he sees Will and Grace make an inside joke on the hit sitcom, “Will and Grace.”

This is not a bad assumption to make on the sitcom featuring two gay men and their female counterparts. Premiering in 1998, “Will and Grace” marks a change in television history when NBC created a show about gay men that became a hit.

Shows like “Will and Grace” and 2003’s “Queer eye for the Straight Guy” brought a new awareness to the American public of the gay community. Television as never before represented people from different backgrounds.

This new diversity in television gave the gay community a voice, but came at the expense of perpetuating gay stereotypes. The majority of the characters on these shows are portrayed as shrill, high-maintenance men who spend their time hitting on every other man they meet and rearranging throw pillows.

In one episode of “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy,” Carson, the host, sniffs his sleeve, and squeals to the man whose wardrobe he is about to remake, “I’m starting to smell like butch. You’re clothes are rubbing off on me.”

Tom Seiler, board president of the Kalamazoo Gay Lesbian Resource Center said of the television characters, “I did not find them to be very probing representations of ‘real’ people; rather, I found them superficial, flighty, offensive in a mild sort of way. The show was very popular, though, and perhaps did much to persuade people to be rather more comfortable with the idea of gay people than they might otherwise have been.”

This technique of presenting homosexuality with a quip at their expense effectively brought the issue into American popular culture, but staying with the image of the silly gay man failed to do more than provide the basis for more serious work to follow.

In Ang Lee’s 2005 film, “Brokeback Mountain,” the homosexuality is carried out of New York and San Francisco and placed in rural Wyoming. The film contrasts traditional gay stereotypes, making the main characters gay cowboys, who are anything but feminine, riding bucking broncos at rodeos and speaking in grunts and terse single-word responses to one another.

Real issues of the gay community—ostracization and violence—are conveyed through the main characters’, Ennis Del Mar and Jack Twist’s, struggles to define their relationship in a homophobic society.

When Jack and Ennis return to Brokeback Mountain years after they met there, Jack gets frustrated with Ennis’ fear of being open about their relationship and yells, “Tell you what, we coulda had a good life together! Fuckin' real good life! Had us a place of our own. But you didn't want it, Ennis! So what we got now is Brokeback Mountain!”

The emotionally-charged film went on to win an Oscar for best picture that year, Ledger winning best actor.

Incredibly realistic in its portrayal of the cowboys, “Brokeback Mountain” excited so much controversy that even three years later, after Ledger’s death, religious extremists protested the heterosexual actor’s gay role outside the Screen Actor’s Guild Awards, carrying signs reading “Heath’s in Hell.” Ledger’s family opted for a private service after receiving threats of similar disruption to occur at his funeral.

The Church’s spokesperson, Shirley Phelps released a statement about Ledger, saying, “You cannot live in defiance of God. He got on that big screen with a big, fat message: God is a liar and it's OK to be gay.”

Television and movies may not be denouncing God as the WBC claims, but the message that it is OK to be gay has indeed permeated the mass media.

The Kalamazoo Gay Lesbian Resource Center’s president, Tom Seiler, commented on the public’s reaction to the television shows and movies produced so far about homosexuality, “Statistics seem to indicate that there seems to be a clear age gap between older folks who are less accepting of LGBT matters and younger folks who seem to take LGBT matters in stride as nothing special to remark on. Maybe the media, oriented as it is to a younger audience, reflects this gap. If so, then one would need to argue, I suppose, that some attention paid is better than none, and that the more attention paid the better.”

While the American public seems to be more accepting today of serious gay men in the media, Seiler does make a valid point. Without the groundwork laid by the earlier television shows featuring gay men, it would not have been possible to create a work as monumental as “Brokeback Mountain” and expect the audience to be receptive to its message.

Carson Kressley of “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy” may sport hot pink argyle sweaters on the show, so flamboyant even preppy high school girls wouldn’t dream of wearing them, but even with the generalizations of gay behavior, the show does expose the public to a successful gay man.

Television has been getting more serious recently about realistically portraying homosexuality in its programs. Perhaps someday soon there will be a sitcom featuring gay men who can be funny without being made a caricature of their sexual orientation.