From the late 1990s to the mid-2000s, primetime American television audiences grew to embrace two male characters who would come to define two distinct types of gay male characters. The sensitive Will Truman and the flamboyant Jack McFarland, portrayed by actors Eric McCormack and Sean Hayes, became the backbone of the hugely popular sitcom Will & Grace. It was the first time two such characters regularly took the stage in primetime television.
In the years since, the advent of reality television (Queer Eye for the Straight Guy) and the diversity of cable programming (Queer as Folk) provided more diverse representations of LGBT lifestyles. But now gay characters and personalities have moved from niche to mainstream in shows like Modern Family or HBO’s Looking. Gayness is now less of a reason for having a character, and has instead become just another plot twist or character nuance.
But it doesn’t mean all the work is over. We’ve invited three critics to discuss the evolution of LGBT characters in pop culture – and to identify cultural blind spots where producers, writers and actors still need to put in work. Answers have been edited for length.
About the panel
Nancy Goldstein has written for venues including the Guardian, the Atlantic, the American Prospect and the Washington Post, where she was an editor’s pick and the winner of the blogging round during their Next Great Pundit Contest. Follow her on Twitter at @nancygoldstein.
Richard Lawson is an entertainment columnist who currently writes for Vanity Fair. Follow him on Twitter at @rilaws.
Nick Mattos is a freelance journalist and essayist. Remember to Breathe, a collection of his previously published creative non-fiction essays, will be released in 2014. A graduate of the Evergreen State College, he currently resides in Portland, Oregon. Follow him@nickmattos2
The concept of the ‘gay sidekick’ is a classic mainstream exploration of the LGBT community in American pop culture. Have gay characters moved more to the center of the plot in recent years, and where does work still need to be done?
Nick: One great effect I’ve observed in recent representation of queer people in pop culture is the presence of queer characters whose sexuality is not the crux of their identity. A great example of this was the character of Mitch Downe in the excellent 2012 film Paranorman, who was arguably the first openly gay character in a mainstream children’s animated film. He wasn’t stereotyped at all – the revelation of his sexuality was actually a humorous but sensitively handled plot twist. [He] was instead a whole, integral character, whose personality grew organically through the course of the film. In terms of work that still needs to be done, there are still very few representations of queer people that don’t fit the mold of being affluent, white, and relatively heteronormative in expression.
Nancy: The “gay sidekick” role that has accounted for much of what we’ve seen of LGBT representation on TV over the past 20 years hasn’t been much of an exploration at all. But My So-Called Life broke ground, not least by representing the friendship between Angela Chase and Enrique “Rickie” Vasquez and addressing bullying and homophobia.
Sex and the City moved the cultural ball upfield by representing gay men as a routine part of any nice straight sophisticated New York City woman’s life. Even the formulaic Will & Grace did its part by beaming a sexless gay man and his comic gay neighbor into middle America’s living rooms. But all of these shows focused on the classic straight woman/gay man dynamic, and all of them represented gay identity in narrow and stereotypical ways: as foils, clowns, losers, outsiders, bitchy queens or sympathetic ears.
It’s no surprise that it was a gay man – Alan Ball, the creator of Six Feet Under – who first thought to move a gay male character from the margins of a show’s plot to its center. David Fisher spent plenty of time dealing with being gay and coming out, but he also did far more than live to entertain his straight female friends or die of HIV-related complications. I think it’s telling that we’ve seen no one and nothing like him since the show ended in 2005, even with the advent of LGBT-themed shows like Queer as Folk, The L Word, and now Looking.
Has television reached a post-gay state? Have the ‘normal lives’ of gay men and women replaced the ‘otherness’ of LGBT characters?
Nancy: Nope. I mean, it’s refreshing that there are some more fully realized LGBT characters now than there were a decade or two ago. At the same time, we’ve yet to see another David Fisher, and Modern Family literally features a gay clown.
Still I want to applaud four shows in particular for featuring LGBT characters who do more than [wax] angst over coming out, discover they’re HIV positive, shtup everyone in sight, moon over a straight character, sing and dance, or get bullied or bashed.
Thumbs up to Scandal for its depiction of Cyrus Beene and James Novack, whose lives, while distinctively gay, white, male and privileged, aren’t particularly “other” compared to the other mostly white privileged people in their circle. Bravo to The Good Wife for its depiction of Alicia Florick’s gay brother, Owen Cavanaugh. As my pal Rob Thurman observed, this very smart show is the first to turn an overused convention on its head by having the bad blood between Owen and Peter Florick be – not about homophobia, as the media speculates – but simply about them disliking one another.
Finally, cheers to the excellent Orange is the New Black. The show isn’t above throwing the viewer some lesbian catnip. (How else to describe Laura Prepon?) But it’s also the first to successfully depict two women who both like getting it on with each other and have some chemistry outside of bed. Along those same lines, the show keeps viewers genuinely engaged in the lives of women who have sex with women when they’re not having sex. (Bless The L Word for trying, but watching its characters trying to find something to say to one another while fully clothed was like watching the proverbial paint peel.) And finally, there’s the triumph of the show’s writers and actress and transgender activist Laverne Cox for creating, in Sophia Burset, a pretty darned fully realized trans woman character.
Richard: I’m still not really sure what “post-gay” means, exactly, but I think we’ve arrived at a point where neither boring homogeneity nor isolating otherness are the only two modes of gay representation on television. Difference is increasingly being presented as simply a part of life. So gay characters don’t have to be either asexual saints or scandalous sexaholics in order to get screentime.
Gay characters can be boring, freakish, sexy, conservative, whatever. While I sometimes chafe at the way some shows, like Saturday Night Live for example, wind up making cheap gay jokes in the name of equal opportunity offensiveness, I think it’s a good sign that TV writers seem to be growing more comfortable depicting gay characters with as much sympathy and scorn and everything in between as they do straight ones.
Nick: I agree with Richard – I’m honestly not quite sure what “post-gay” means either. Something really interesting I’m noticing in queer representation on television these days, though, is the transformed return of some very old tropes about queer men.
In the 50s and 60s, gay men were often depicted as these thoughtful, sad, somewhat tragic characters, with lives full of longing and struggle; Christopher Isherwood and James Baldwin come to mind as great authors of this trope. When I saw the first episode of Looking, I was struck by the degree to which longing had finally re-entered the queer narrative. Looking tackles the romantic lives of a certain subset of gay men with stunning lucidity, and particularly captures the frustrating nonsense and painful longing that often come into play in modern queer life.
Reality television is notorious for producers editing real people into two-dimensional characters. Do some shows provide better representation for the LGBT community than others?
Richard: Well, I think reality television is such a broad category at this point that it’s impossible to assess it as a whole and say if it’s doing anything right or wrong in its entirety. Some reality shows, like Top Chef and Project Runway, are great about casually dealing with gayness, while series like American Idol still frustratingly and pointlessly go to great lengths to avoid the topic entirely. Sure, the Real Housewives franchise is littered with ridiculous gay people, but pretty much everyone on those shows is absurd.
In general, I think reality TV has done a lot toward providing a visible platform for lots of gay people from different walks of life. RuPaul’s Drag Race may be a niche hit, but it’s still a hit, which is great. And it’s admirably unafraid of tackling various issues of race and gender within the queer community that largely go otherwise uninvestigated. Right now, it feels like reality TV is just as good for gay people as it is straight people, and just as bad, too.
Nancy: I have to congratulate Tim Gunn for refusing to be limited by the trope of the gay-man-in-fashion, and RuPaul for doing the same regarding the trope of the drag queen. Both could have allowed themselves to be played for laughs. Instead, they’ve each used a genre with a penchant for making people seem ridiculous to establish themselves as hardworking, savvy professionals with tough standards (and yes, they also dole out the occasional homey word of wisdom or tear-inducing pep talk).
Do you think social media discussion around LGBT culture and issues has changed how the community is viewed?
Nick: Absolutely – in ways both good and bad. I posit that, in its essence, social media is deceptive; it’s structured to make users feel as though their opinions and thoughts are important enough to share while simultaneously steering the conversation towards topics and viewpoints curated by advertisers.
One recent example of this was when the Human Rights Campaign spent over 10,000 dollars promoting the story of Michael Sam’s coming out on Twitter with the stated intent of “rally[ing] & amplify[ing] supporters and mak[ing] it difficult for opponents to catch steam”. It makes me wonder: how much of this show of support was really organic, and how much was fuelled initially by HRC dropping big money to promote the action?
That said, though, I’m supportive of anything that moves in the direction of democratizing the dissemination and discussion of new information – and how better to do this than to give everyone the tools to host bulletin board discussions on their own branded forum? Social media could function as the sort of tool that the early LGBTQ rights movement couldn’t have dreamed of: a means to quickly gauge public opinion, hash out politics, reach new supporters and mobilize movements.
Richard: Anecdotally, I’ve seen Twitter and Tumblr and the like provide wonderful platforms for discussions of queer issues, be they trivial or serious. Sure a lot of junk happens on all those sites, but in offering anyone who wants to participate a fairly equal seat at the table, I think social media has been a general good for “the movement”, while also perhaps helping dispel the notion that there is just one big monolithic queer movement.
And I think it’s important that teenagers are the ones who seem to engage the most fluently with all this stuff. Look at the success of gay YouTubers like Troye Sivan and Tyler Oakley. Their fans are largely teenagers who are as obsessed with them as they are with any straight teen idol. Sure it’d be nice to see more diversity among the crowd of internet-famous gay folks, but I still think they represent a major generational shift in acceptance that I’d have to imagine will have more and broader positive cultural effects as those kids get older. The way social media makes difference accessible and visible and vocal has to be a good thing, right?
