Abstract
Before the “queer vogue” of recent years, there was a decided lack of visibility for gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered, and queer individuals in the media landscape; the visibility that did exist largely comprised long-standing stereotypes and negative portrayals.2 Of course, this did not mean that there was a lack of concern about gay identity and the queering of American culture. For example, during the late 1980s, the mainstream news media periodically reported, in both positive and negative ways, on the continuing AIDS crisis and on issues such as gay adoption, domestic partnerships, and military service for gays and les-bians.3 At the same time that gay and lesbian lives were becoming a larger part of the national conversation, queer identity was becoming a more integral part of mass media at the fringes of the mainstream. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, independent films studios were producing an array of films that candidly explored the queer experience, inadvertently launching what B. Ruby Rich would infamously label the “New Queer Cinema.” The commercial success of these films led Hollywood to follow suit, and within a few short years, the studios were also producing films with queer subject matter.4 Additionally, queer phenomena such as drag performance and “vogueing” crossed over into the mainstream via the work of artists such as k. d. lang and Madonna, whose hit single “Vogue” (1990) and accompanying video (directed by David Fincher) did much to popularize the formerly subcultural practice. On network television, by the mid-1990s, gay-themed episodes and references to homosexuality were also plentiful, as Ron Becker points out in Gay TV and Straight America (2006), his analysis of America’s “obsession” with gayness in the 1990s.
In the absence of adequate information in their immediate environment, most people—gay or straight—have little choice but to accept the media stereotypes they imagine must be typical of all lesbians and gay men.
—Larry Gross1
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Notes
Larry Gross, Up from Invisibility: Lesbians, Gay Men, and the Media in America (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 16.
For more on news media, see Edward Alwood, Straight News: Gays, Lesbians and the News Media (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996)
Laura Castafieda and Shannon Campbell, News and Sexuality: Media Portraits of Diversity (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2006).
B. Ruby Rich, “New Queer Cinema,” Sight & Sound, September 1992, 30–34.
Important films of the period include Bill Sherwood’s Parting Glances (1986)
Isaac Julien’s Looking for Langston (1988)
Marlon Riggs’s Tongues Untied (1990)
Gus Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho (1991)
Derek Jarman’s Edward II (1991)
Jennie Livingston’s Paris Is Burning (1991)
Greg Araki’s The Living End (1992)
Todd Kalin’s Swoon (1992).
Hollywood films of the period include Jonathan Demme’s Philadelphia (1993)
Beeban Kidron’s To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar (1995)
Mike Nichols’s The Birdcage (1996).
For more detail, see Harry M. Benshoff and Sean Griffin, eds., Queer Images: A History of Gay and Lesbian Film in America (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006).
Ron Becker, Gay TV and Straight America (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2006), 3. Oddly, Becker only makes passing mention of The Simpsons, not even discussing a single episode at length, which is an unfortunate oversight in an otherwise comprehensive and admirable work. The Simpsons, as I argue in this chapter, also contributed significantly to the representation of gay identity on television during the 1990s and beyond.
For more on the culture wars, see James D. Hunter, Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America (New York: Basic, 1991)
Jeffrey Escoffier, American Homo: Community and Perversity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998)
Jonathan Zimmerman, Whose America? Culture Wars in the Public Schools (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005).
On niche marketing, see Alexandra Chasin, Selling Out: The Gay and Lesbian Movement Goes to Market (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000).
Teresa de Lauretis is credited with coining the term queer theory in a special issue of the feminist journal differences that she edited; see “Queer Theory: Lesbian and Gay Sexualities,” differences 3, no. 2 (1991): iii–xviii. The provenance of the term is not as important, however, as the dramatic shifts created within the academy by queer theory, which offered a more intensified focus on issues of sex, gender, and sexuality than had been evident in both feminist and gay and lesbian studies up to that point. For a brief (and unsympathetic) history of the institutionalization of queer theory, see David Halperin, “The Normalization of Queer Theory,” Journal of Homosexuality 45, nos. 2–4 (2003): 339–43.
A more comprehensive history is found in William B. Turner, A Genealogy of Queer Theory (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2000).
Karen Kopelson, “Dis/Integrating the Gay/Queer Binary: ‘Reconstructed Identity Politics’ for a Performative Pedagogy,” College English 65, no. 1 (September 2002): 17.
Pioneering texts include Vito Russo, The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies, rev. ed. (1981; repr., New York: Harper & Row, 1987)
Alexander Doty, Making Things Perfectly Queer: Interpreting Mass Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993); Dyer, Matter of Images
Michelangelo Signorile, Queer in America: Sex, the Media, and the Closets of Power (New York: Random House, 1993)
Michael Warner, ed., Fear of a Queer Planet: Queer Politics and Social Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993).
Three texts that have been particularly useful for their focuses on television and mass media and have thus informed much of what follows in this chapter are Suzanna Danuta Walters, All the Rage: The Story of Gay Visibility in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001); Gross, Up from Invisibility; and Becker, Gay TV. Other useful collections include Alexander Doty and Corey Creekmur, eds., Out in Culture: Gay, Lesbian, and Queer Essays on Popular Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995)
Martha Gever, John Greyson, and Pratibha Parmar, eds., Queer Looks: Perspectives on Lesbian and Gay Film and Video (New York: Routledge, 1993)
Ellis Hanson, ed., Out Takes: Essays on Queer Theory and Film (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999)
Michele Aaron, ed., New Queer Cinema: A Critical Reader (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004).
Alan Brookey and Robert Westerfelhaus, “Pistols and Petticoats, Piety and Purity: To Wo ng Foo, the Queering of American Monomyth and the Marginalizing Discourse of Deification,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 18, no. 2 (2001): 142.
Andy Medhurst, “Batman, Deviance, and Camp,” in Signs of Life in the USA, ed. Sonia Maasik and Jack Solomon (Boston: Bedford, 1994), 328.
For a more detailed discussion of these shows, see Steven Capsuto, Alternate Channels: The Uncensored Story of Gay and Lesbian Images on Radio and Television, 1930s to the Present (New York: Ballantine, 2000), 106–18.
John R. Leo, “The Familialism of ‘Man’ in American Television Drama,” South Atlantic Quarterly 88, no. 1 (1989): 31.
E. Salholz and T. Clifton, “The Future of Gay America,” Newsweek, March 12, 1990, 21, 25.
Andrew Kopkind, “The Gay Moment,” Nation, May 3, 1993, 577.
Jess Cagle, “America Sees Shades of Gay,” Entertainment Weekly, September 8, 1995, 20.
Fred Fejes, “Invisibility, Homophobia, and Heterosexism,” Critical Studies in Mass Communications 10, no. 4 (1993): 400.
Ibid., 28–29. Bonnie J. Dow provides a useful overview of the rise and demise of the show in “Ellen, Television, and the Politics of Gay and Lesbian Visibility,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 18, no. 2 (2001): 123–40. Also see Susan J. Hubert, “What’s Wrong with This Picture? The Politics of Ellen’s Coming Out Party,” Journal of Popular Culture 33, no. 2 (1999): 31–36
Didi Herman, “‘I’m Gay’: Declarations, Desire, and Coming Out on Prime-Time Television,” Sexualities 8, no. 1 (2005): 7–29
Jennifer Reed, “Ellen DeGeneres: Public Lesbian Number One,” Feminist Media Studies 5, no. 1 (2005): 23–36.
A. J. Jacobs, “Out?” Entertainment Weekly, October 4, 1996, 23.
A. J. Jacobs, “When Gay Men Happen to Straight Women,” Entertainment Weekly, October 23, 1998, 23.
Dana Heller, “Taking the Nation ‘From Drab to Fab’: Queer Eye for the Straight Guy,” Feminist Media Studies 4, no. 3 (2004): 350.
Doug Sadownick, “Groening Against the Grain,” interview, Advocate, February 26, 1991, 32.
Larry Gross, “Out of the Mainstream: Sexual Minorities and the Mass Media,” Journal of Homosexuality 21, nos. 1–2 (1991): 27.
Anna Marie Smith, “The Politicization of Marriage in Contemporary American Public Policy: The Defense of Marriage Act and the Personal Responsibility Act,” Citizenship Studies 5, no. 3 (2001): 310.
Daniel Wickberg, “Homophobia: On the Cultural History of an Idea,” Critical Inquiry 27 (Autumn 2000): 57.
The debate over whether one’s sexuality is a “choice” and, therefore, changeable is long-standing, but it intensified after the American Psychiatric Association declassified homosexuality as a mental disorder in 1973. Since that time, a cottage industry has grown around the notion of “reparative therapy” or “conversion therapy,” both within the mental health community and among Christian fundamentalists groups, which gave birth to the “ex-gay” movement in the 1990s. The debate became even more heated after a 2001 presentation by Dr. Robert Spitzer, a respected member of the APA, which claimed that sexual orientation could be changed. The Spitzer Study, as it is known, was published in Archives of Sexual Behavior in 2003 and has been a source of intense debate ever since. For more, see the Archives of Sexual Behavior 32, no. 5 (October 2003), the special issue of the journal that includes Spitzer’s paper as well as responses from many other medical professionals. Also see Wayne R. Besen, Anything but Straight: Unmasking the Scandals and Lies Behind the Ex-Gay Myth (New York: Routledge, 2003)
Tanya Erzen, Straight to Jesus: Sexual and Christian Conversions in the Ex-Gay Movement (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006).
Clifford Krauss, “Gay Marriage Is Extended Nationwide in Canada,” New York Times, June 29, 2005, A4.
This partisan divide has been commented upon by many. For more, see George Lakoff, Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002)
Thomas Frank, What’s the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America (New York: Metropolitan, 2004)
Stephen T. Mockabee, “A Question of Authority: Religion and Cultural Conflict in the 2004 Election,” Political Behavior 29 (2007): 221–48.
Bruce Steele, “The Gay Rights Makeover,” Advocate, September 2, 2003, 42.
Andrew Sullivan, “Beware the Straight Backlash,” Time, August 11, 2003, 35.
A rebuttal to such criticisms is certainly possible. Though this is not a primary concern for me here, I’ll note that there is a large body of literature documenting that cross-dressing is common among heterosexual males. For overviews, see Richard Elkins, Male Femaling: A Grounded Approach to Cross-Dressing and Sex-Changing (New York: Routledge, 1997)
Marjorie Garber, Vested Interests: Crossdressing and Cultural Anxiety (New York: Routledge, 1997). Robin’s ruse is fueled by his (heterosexual) desire for Patty; since she initially saw him as a fellow lesbian, the ruse is maintained. Lastly, it must be noted that Homer actually performs a great many gay weddings for other people in the course of the episode.
As might be expected, protests were launched by the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation and the Human Rights Campaign. These were successful in getting the Mars Corporation to pull the ad and shut down the website. See Matthew Creamer, “Marketing’s Era of Outrage,” Advertising Age, February 12, 2007, 1–2
Guy Trebay, “A Kiss Too Far?” New York Times, February 18, 2007, late ed., sec. 9, 1; and “We Are Not Amused” (editorial), Advocate, March 13, 2007, 4.
Although it was almost universally panned by critics (labeled as, among other things, “sexist,” “racist,” and “offensive”), the reviews did not stop the film from doing well financially: in its three-month theatrical run Chuck and Larry earned a worldwide gross of just over $186 million—$120,059,556 domestically and $65,994,597 in foreign markets. “I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry,” Box Office Mojo, March 10, 2008, http://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=chuckandlarry.htm. For detailed critiques, see Manohla Dargis, “Dude (Nyuck-Nyuck), I Love You (as If!),” New York Times, July 20, 2007, 17
David Noh, review of I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry, Film Journal International, September 2007, 59.
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© 2012 Matthew A. Henry
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Henry, M.A. (2012). “The Whole World’s Gone Gay!”: Gay Identity, Queer Culture, and The Simpsons . In: The Simpsons, Satire, and American Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137027795_5
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