Screening the Closet:
The Discourse of Visibility, Sexuality, and Queer Representation
in American Film and Television, 1969-Present
By Melanie E. S. Kohnen
M.A., Heinrich-Heine-Universitaet, Duesseldorf, Germany, 2001
A.M., Brown University, 2002
A Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy
in the Department of American Civilization at Brown University
Providence, Rhode Island
May 2010
© Melanie E.S. Kohnen 2010
This dissertation by Melanie E. S. Kohnen is accepted in its present form
by the Department of American Civilization as satisfying the
dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.
Date __________
___________________________________
Lynne Joyrich, Advisor
Recommended to the Graduate Council
Date __________
___________________________________
Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Reader
Date __________
___________________________________
Robert Lee, Reader
Approved by the Graduate Council
Date __________
___________________________________
Sheila Bonde, Dean
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Curriculum Vitae
Melanie E. S. Kohnen was born on July 23, 1975 in Duisburg, Germany. She
completed her Magister Artium degree in English Languages and Literatures with a
minor in Media Studies at Heinrich-Heine-Universität in Düsseldorf, Germany. During
her studies there, she received a one-year DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service)
scholarship to attend Wesleyan University in Middletown, CT. At Wesleyan, Melanie
focused on American government, history, material culture and cultural studies. Upon her
return, she began research for her thesis, eventually titled Crossing Borders, Re-Locating
Our Selves: Chinese American Women’s Identities After 1965.
While working on her thesis, Melanie received two additional scholarships. The
first scholarship was a DAAD research grant that allowed Melanie to attend ifu, the
International Women's University, a pilot project sponsored by the European Union. Over
the course of three months, she participated in lectures and workshops on the topics of
migration, transnational communities, and globalization. As final project, she worked on
a multimedia performance that combined photography, digital images, oral history, music
and spoken word to trace transforming moments in the lives of twelve ifu participants.
The second scholarship was a John F. Kennedy Institute Library Research Grant at Freie
Universität in Berlin, Germany. The grant provided access to the John F. Kennedy
Institute's resources.
After completing her Magister Artium degree, Melanie joined the Ph. D program
in American Civilization at Brown University. During her first two semesters at Brown,
iv
she completed the requirements for an A.M. in American Civilization. She received a
Brown University Fellowship during her first year as a Ph.D. student and the Miss
Abbott's School Alumnae Dissertation Fellowship during one of her final years at Brown.
In the summer of 2008, she received the Historical Society of Southern California Haynes
Research Grant to support her dissertation research.
While working towards the completion of her Ph. D, Melanie taught a first-year
and sophomore seminar entitled “'The Gay '90s?': Sexuality, Identity, and the Media in
the 1990s.” She also developed a class called “From I Love Lucy to Lost: Television and
American Culture” for Summer @ Brown. Due to the popularity of the class, she has
taught the course every summer since 2007. Melanie also worked as a Teaching Assistant
for the Department of American Civilization and the Department of Modern Culture and
Media. She led discussion sections, gave lectures and graded papers in courses on film,
television, new media, advertising, and America's urban development.
In addition to teaching, Melanie worked as a Teaching Consultant for Brown's
Sheridan Center for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education for five years. She
observed and evaluated teaching in the humanities, sciences, and arts at both Brown
University and the Rhode Island School of Design. During her last three years at Brown,
Melanie also held the position of Managing Editor of Digital Humanities Quarterly, a
peer-reviewed digital journal run through Brown's Women's Writers Project.
As a graduate student, Melanie published two articles. The first article, "Signal to
Noise: The Paradoxes of History and Technology in Battlestar Galactica," appeared in
v
FlowTV: A Critical Forum on Television and Media Culture, in December 2007. In 2008,
she contributed an essay entitled "The Adventures of a Repressed Farmboy and the
Billionaire Who Loves Him: Queer Spectatorship in Smallville Fandom" to Teen
Television: Essays on Programming and Fandom, an anthology edited by Sharon Ross
and Louisa Stein. The collection was published by McFarland in 2008.
Melanie has accepted a position as Marion L. Brittain Postdoctoral Fellow in the
School of Literature, Communication and Culture at the Georgia Institute of Technology.
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Preface and Acknowledgments
There are many people who have contributed to the rewarding, challenging, and
exciting grad school experience I had at Brown. First and foremost, I want to thank the
members of my dissertation committee, Lynne Joyrich, Wendy Chun, and Bob Lee.
Lynne is the very best advisor one can ask for, going above and beyond in
supporting me while I finished my dissertation. Her incredibly detailed and always
thought-provoking commentaries on chapter drafts pushed me to consider yet another
perspective even when I thought I had exhausted a particular avenue of thought. Lynne is
also an amazing teacher. Her seminar on queer cinema and video was the most rewarding
and exciting class I took at Brown. She also introduced me to Television Studies—an
introduction that allowed me to turn my lifelong passion for TV into the core of my
academic research. I can say without a doubt that I would not be the scholar I am today
without Lynne's guidance.
Wendy also deserves many thanks for her incisive commentary on my dissertation
as work-in-progress. But I mostly want to thank Wendy for encouraging me to stick with
New Media Studies when I thought I wouldn't be able to wrap my head around it. Wendy
reassured me that with time, and much, much more reading in the field, it would all make
sense eventually. It did. Wendy also taught me the wonderful phrase, “if it doesn't hurt,
you aren't learning,” which I have gone on to share with my students on a regular basis
(usually to their dismay). Wendy's insight showed me that frustration with one's research
is not a sign of trying to do the impossible, but of being on the brink of an important
vii
insight or discovery.
Bob has been a calming presence during the often stressful time of writing my
dissertation. Most importantly, Bob's comments on my dissertation proposal encouraged
me to consider race and ethnicity as central categories of analysis in my project. This
encouragement had a profound impact on my research; indeed, the intricate connections
between whiteness and queer representations constitute the central analytical axis around
which my dissertation revolves.
Beyond my dissertation committee, many other people at Brown provided me
with guidance and assistance. The Department of American Civilization and the
Department of Modern Culture and Media were my home bases during my grad student
years. At AmCiv, Susan Smulyan always had an open door for me and taught me much
about American advertising when I was a Teaching Assistant for her. Likewise, working
as a grader for Ralph Rodriguez provided both much-needed financial assistance during
my final years at Brown and a deep insight into the field of Ethnic Studies. At MCM, I
have always felt very much at home even though I was not officially a grad student there.
I was fortunate to work as a Teaching Assistant for a number of MCM courses in critical
theory, film, and new media. Teaching alongside Mary-Ann Doane, Wendy Chun, and
Lynne Joyrich has shaped my desire to connect research and pedagogy (and to teach
poststructuralism to unsuspecting undergrads).
In addition to my home departments, I also need to mention Digital Humanities
Quarterly and the Sheridan Center for Teaching and Learning as two Brown institutions
viii
that were of crucial importance to my life as a grad student. Digital Humanities
Quarterly offered me the possibility of gathering professional experience beyond
academic research and teaching by hiring me as Managing Editor, a position I happily
held for three years. During this time, I worked closely with Julia Flanders, the editor-inchief of DHQ, who introduced me to the field of Digital Humanities and who was most
patient in teaching me XML. I am most grateful to Julia and to DHQ for sponsoring me
during my final year at Brown—without DHQ's assistance I would not have been able to
finish my dissertation.
The people and programs at the Sheridan Center have been central to the
development of my pedagogical outlook and skills. I want to thank Laura Hess and Kathy
Takayama for their wonderful professionalization seminar and for their assistance in
developing my teaching portfolio. I also cherished my work as a teaching consultant for
the Sheridan Center. As a teaching consultant, I observed many hours of graduate student
teaching at Brown and the Rhode Island School of Design. Sitting in on astronomy
lessons on top of Barus-Holley or watching a pottery demonstration at RISD allowed me
to look beyond my disciplinary focus and encouraged me to think about pedagogy in
multiple settings and for diverse groups of students.
I also want to thank everyone who provided me with a life apart from writing,
researching, and teaching. At Brown, those people included the loyal Battlestar
Galactica viewing group, which, at its core, consisted of Julie Levin-Russo, David
Bering-Porter, Lynne Joyrich, and myself. We spent many a Friday night huddled around
ix
a TV set trying to figure out if the Cylons indeed had a plan all along (the question
remains unresolved no matter what Ronald D. Moore says). One of the most exciting
events in which I participated at Brown was a result of these geeky TV pleasures, namely
the (Re)Producing Battlestar Galactica panel in 2007. Many thanks also go to Sarah
Wald and Jessica Johnson for hours spent together in a projection booth during our shared
Teaching Assistantship and for much support beyond that semester. I also need to thank
Gill Frank and Angela Mazaris for many spirited discussions on the intersections of
history and theory.
Of course there were also people beyond Brown who were invaluable during grad
school and dissertation writing. It was certainly fate that Louisa Stein and I met at the
Media in Transition conference at MIT in 2003. Louisa is an amazing friend and
academic partner-in-crime. Her dedication to her work and her passion for life is always
inspiring. She has spent countless hours providing constructive criticism on drafts of my
articles and conference papers over the years. We have attended many conferences
together, including the incredible trip to SCMS in London in 2005. I'm looking forward
to many more conference trips with her. Another good friend I made at the 2007 Media in
Transition conference is Anne Kustritz. I particularly want to thank Anne for introducing
me to vidding and for sharing my enthusiasm of a good dessert.
This list of thank-yous wouldn't be complete without mentioning Grete BrewerBakken, who taught me so much about writing, and without a huge shout-out to Tara
Pratt and Stephanie Kenney, who write the best TV show that is not currently on TV.
x
Grete, Tara, and Stephanie constantly remind me that academia is not the end-all and beall of existence, which is a very important reminder indeed.
Finally, I want to say thank you for my family's steadfast support. My mother has
always had complete faith in me and has always supported me in whatever I wished to
do, even if that meant that I would move thousands of miles away from home to pursue
my Ph.D. on a different continent. Words cannot adequately describe how grateful I am to
have my family's support, no matter what.
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Table of Contents
Introduction
13
Chapter 1: All That Visibility Allows, or Mapping the Discourse of Queer
20
Visibility
Chapter 2: Towards the 'Gay 90s:' Redefining Queer Visibility Through the
63
Lens of AIDS
Chapter 3: Outside Space and Time: Screening Queerness in Brokeback
107
Mountain and Boys Don't Cry
Chapter 4: Kevin and Scotty Get Married (And Hardly Anyone is Watching): 142
Queer Visibility, Privacy, and the Boundaries of Everyday Life on Television
Concluding Remarks
185
Bibliography
192
xii
INTRODUCTION
Queerness irreverantly challenges a linear mode of conduction and
transmission: there is no exact recipe for a queer endeavor, no a priori
system that taxonomizes the linkages, discruptions, and contradictions into
a tidy vessel. (Puar, xv)
This dissertation examines the discourse of queer visibility as it has unfolded through a
proliferation of gay, lesbian, and queer representations in American film and television
from 1969 to the present. Using the so-called explosion of gay visibility during the 1990s
as a focal point, I analyze how and why a specific definition of queer visibility, namely
one that adheres closely to a normative gay and lesbian identity, has become central to
imagining queer subjectivities and practices in American culture. My analysis reveals
how equating queer visibility with gay and lesbian identities is a limited and limiting
conceptualization of a spectrum that includes a broader group of people, places, and ways
of life.
I strongly believe that analyses of queer representations, practices, and
subjectivities cannot, and should not, be contained in a series of linearly unfolding
13
14
examples. While my chapters follow a loose chronological order, each chapter traverses a
range of time periods, media forms, and theoretical frameworks to provide an overview
of the complex and often contradictory discourses that come together to shape queer
media visibility. I examine queer practices and representations that cross sexual, gender,
and racial identifications; I pursue connections across film, television, and print media;
and I juxtapose academic and popular sources in order to articulate a broader way of
understanding queer visibility.
My chapters examine crucial turning points in the recent history of queer
visibility, such as the initial response to the AIDS crisis during the 1980s, Ellen
DeGeneres' coming out in the 1990s, the reliance on spatiality and temporality to screen
race and queerness in recent films such as Brokeback Mountain and Boys Don't Cry, and
the defense of white domesticity via an incorporation of gay male identity into television
programs of the early 2000s, including Brothers & Sisters. Some of these turning points
—the AIDS crisis, Ellen's coming out, Brokeback Mountain—have received considerable
scholarly attention. My reexamination of these events and media texts aims to make
connections among aspects that have previously been considered to exist independently
of one another. As such, I show, for example, how Brokeback Mountain and Boys Don't
Cry share a reliance on specific spatialities and temporalities to bring queer romance to
the screen, and I demonstrate how struggles over the meaning of everyday life, family,
sexuality, and race connects TV programs such as Ellen and Brothers & Sisters.
Moreover, existing accounts of these important moments in the discourse of
queer media visibility obscure more than they reveal. An aspect that is often deliberately
15
forgotten in academic and popular writing is the critical role that whiteness plays in
facilitating queer representations. Queer visibility depends on whiteness as a screen, and
whiteness-as-screen serves a dual purpose. First, it functions as a projection surface for
complex representations of sexuality, and second, it obscures the central importance of
race in enabling these representations. Via the analyses I carry out throughout the
following four chapters, my research advocates a broader perspective on the various
screening processes that shape queer media visibility.
In Chapter 1, “All That Visibility Allows, or Mapping the Discourse of Queer
Visibility,” I introduce the broad historical and theoretical frameworks that shape queer
visibility in American culture. The chapter begins with an interrogation of the central
concepts of this dissertation: visibility, queerness, race, and the closet. I outline how the
closet functions as a screen upon which queerness is rendered visible. Emphasizing the
crucial importance of whiteness to these screening processes, I make an initial
intervention in the existing scholarly discourses of queer media visibility, especially
regarding the scope and implications of the so-called explosion of gay visibility during
the 1990s. Rather than representing a progressive or liberatory development, I argue that
the proliferation of specifically denotative gay and lesbian representations during the
1990s has tried to cement one form of queer visibility as the only form of queer visibility,
thus obscuring other possibilities of rendering queerness visible (for example via
connotative and other formal representational strategies). The second half of the chapter
challenges the usual history of queer media visibility. Instead of dividing this history into
a “before and after” story that proclaims an absence of queer media representations
16
before the abolition of the Hollywood Production Code (which banned any denotativere
presentation of same-sex intimacy in film) in the late 1960s and a proliferation of queer
visibility in film and TV afterwards, I advocate an approach that considers denotative and
connotative elements as textually inseparable and as always co-existing in media texts.
This approach centers around an analysis that asks which forms of queer visibility have
existed when, where, for whom, and under what circumstances. While other scholars
have put forth similar approaches, my theorization of the closet-as-screen and its
racialized underpinnings adds a new dimension to existing ways of analyzing the history
and current state of the discourse of queer visibility.
Chapter 2, “Towards the 'Gay 90s:' Redefining Queer Visibility Through the Lens
of AIDS” re-examines the significance of AIDS to the proliferation of gay, lesbian, and
queer media representations. The AIDS crisis had a momentous impact on America's
GLBT community: it led to a radical reimagination of queer lives and practices. This
chapter examines queer visibility during the 1980s from three distinct but overlapping
angles with the aim of providing a thorough, but non-linear, insight into queer visibility
during the AIDS crisis. The discourse of queer visibility and AIDS is fraught and
complex, and I approach this complexity by bringing together significant aspects without
trying to streamline them into a narrative of progressive development. The first part of the
chapter analyzes how HIV and AIDS was rendered visible in the mainstream media
during the 1980s. Newspaper and TV news reports channeled confusing information
about HIV/AIDS into recognizable types and metaphors that drew on pre-existing ideas
about connections among deviancy, queer sexuality, and disease; these types and
17
metaphors still shape how we think about AIDS and People with AIDS (PWA). The
second part of the chapter focuses on the activist group ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to
Unleash Power), specifically the ways in which their posters, videos, and direct action
dismantled and reorganized the discourse of queer visibility within the framework of
AIDS. The final part outlines the normalization of AIDS—that is, the ways in which its
impact on the American nation stopped being perceived as emergency and became part of
the background noise of ongoing social crises.
This normalization is of crucial significance to the so-called explosion of gay
visibility during the 1990s. I argue that this explosion only became possible after the
disarticulation of queer sexuality and queer identity that accompanied the normalization
of AIDS: via the discourse of safe sex and via select media representations, including the
film Philadelphia, a discourse of queer identity emerged that privileges monogamy,
whiteness, and middle-class status over queer practices that defy easy categorization.
Whereas AIDS inflected nearly all queer media representations during the 1980s, the
disarticulation of sexuality and identity allowed for an emergence of gay and lesbian
characters and storylines that eventually blend seamlessly in to the media landscape.
The following two chapters examine select media texts and discursive shifts of the
1990s in more detail. Chapter 3, “Outside Space and Time: Screening Queerness in
Brokeback Mountain and Boys Don't Cry,” examines two films that have been hailed as
breakthroughs for queer visibility. While media critics praised both Brokeback Mountain
and Boys Don't Cry for their critical representation of gay and transgender lives and
identities, I concentrate on the ways in which both films rely on distant spaces and times
18
to mobilize queer representations that are ultimately nonthreatening to both the norms of
Hollywood cinema and everyday life. Brokeback Mountain and Boys Don't Cry offer a
contradictory engagement with the ideologically charged spaces of the West and the
Midwest: on the one hand, they seem to challenge common perceptions of these regions
by situating narratives of queer lives and romances in them; on the other hand, the films
encapsulate and contain queerness in remote spaces and times that seem distant from
“us,” the viewers. Moreover, both films draw on racialized histories to mobilize their
storylines, but an engagement with the significance of race is almost completely screened
out of the diegeses. Genre, mise-en-scene, and other formal aspects intersect to facilitate
this screening of race and queerness and its containment in remote spaces and times.
Instead of considering Brokeback Mountain and Boys Don't Cry as films that broke with
traditions of Hollywood film-making, I demonstrate how both films rely on mainstream
cinematic traditions to create visions of queerness that appear revolutionary, but are
ultimately very normative in their message about queer subjectivities and romances.
The final chapter, “Kevin and Scotty Get Married (And Hardly Anyone is
Watching): Queer Visibility, Privacy, and the Boundaries of Everyday Life on Television”
continues my exploration of the media's uneven engagement with queerness and race.
Specifically, this chapter discusses how queerness became a normal and normalized
aspect of serial network television between the late 1990s and the early 2000s. While the
coming out of Ellen Degeneres and of her character on the sitcom Ellen in 1997 provoked
a media frenzy that captivated Americans' attention for months, the wedding of two male
characters on the drama Brothers & Sisters in 2008 went nearly unnoticed. Using the
19
comparison of these two television events as a springboard, I examine how queerness
moves from something that is at odds with the rhythms of white, middle-class, American
everyday life to being an important component of maintaining white ideals of privacy and
domesticity. My analysis shows how the type of queer media visibility that has emerged
since the normalization of AIDS in the early 1990s links into cultural discourses about the
American nation that emerged after the events of 9/11. America's redefined self-image
has allowed for (and perhaps necessitated) a temporary and symbolic inclusion of those
queer Americans who can adhere to specific class, race, and lifestyle norms. While one
might understand the lack of a reaction to Kevin and Scotty's wedding as indication of
greater inclusion of minority subjects on network TV, my analysis situates this media
event in a larger cultural context of privacy and white domesticity and invites a cautious
attitude towards overly optimistic assessments of televisual notions of “progress.”
All four chapters form cohesive units that pursue and examine one aspect of the
discourse of queer visibility as it has emerged over the past forty years. Going beyond the
practice of single case studies, each chapter includes a juxtaposition of multiple media
texts to underline the numerous screening mechanisms that filter the discourse of queer
visibility. Across all chapters, overarching clusters of meaning emerge that demonstrate
how queer visibility shapes and reflects not only media representations, but the real and
imagined geographies, histories, and peoples of the American nation.
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CHAPTER 1
All That Visibility Allows, or, Mapping the Discourse of Queer Visibility
In April 1997, Ellen DeGeneres appeared on the cover of Time Magazine under
the headline “Yep, I'm Gay.” This well-orchestrated coming out took no one by surprise;
after all, DeGeneres and her character Ellen Morgan, the main character of the sitcom
Ellen, had had one foot out of the closet for months. This contradictory play of hide-andseek characterizes much of the so-called “explosion of gay visibility” during the 1990s in
the United States. Often referred to as the “gay 90s,” this decade saw a proliferation of
queer representations and heated debates in both the popular and academic press over the
implications of this allegedly new visibility. But was this apparently new-found visibility
really all that new? Who was being included (and excluded) from this particular form of
queer visibility? More precisely, in what ways does the kind of queer visibility that
emerged out of the closet alongside Ellen obscure other possibilities and traditions of
imagining queerness? These questions are central to investigating the discourse of queer
visibility during the 1990s and beyond. Yet these questions are also too narrow to allow a
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comprehensive mapping of this discourse, as the phenomena and conversations that
comprise it cannot be neatly divided into “before” and “after” the 1990s, or into “visible”
and “invisible” sexualities. Rather, this mapping requires a careful analysis of the many
facets of queer visibility, particularly one that considers its focal point, namely the closet.
The cultural logic that underpins the image and metaphor of the closet plays out in
screening processes of various types: the closet acts like a screen upon which images of
queerness are projected even as it simultaneously screens out other facets of queerness.1
Intersecting discourses of race, sexuality, and gender shape and facilitate this screening of
queerness. Whiteness plays a particularly crucial role in screening the closet: frequently,
it acts as the screen upon which the most prominent images of queerness, such as Ellen
Morgan's and Ellen Degeneres' coming out, are projected. Yet while the closet-as-screen
may appear solid at times, it is always porous and can never completely screen the more
unruly facets of queerness from view.
This chapter offers an overview of the various facets and of the multiple and
contradictory screening processes that comprise the discourse of queer visibility. I begin
with laying out the multiple meanings and intersections of visibility and queerness. Thus,
in the first section of this chapter, “To See is More Than to Know,” I interrogate what
visibility signifies, particularly in relationship to knowledge, power, and sexuality, and
then I move on to “The Many Shades of Queer” through an investigation of queer theory
and its sometimes uneasy relationship to gay and lesbian identity politics. “The Closet as
a Screen” questions “the closet” and “coming out” as central metaphors of queer
1
The idea of the closet as a screen was first articulated by Shane Phelan in Sexual Strangers: Gays,
Lesbians, and the Dilemmas of Citizenship. I will elaborate on Phelan's concept and on my expansion of
it in a later section of this chapter, namely “The Closet as a Screen.”
22
visibility by shedding light on the racialized underpinnings of these concepts. Moreover, I
offer a few ways of reconsidering how queer visibility has been discussed in terms of
media representations. “Hollywood is Fabulous, and Always Has Been: Queerness and
Representation” challenges the progressive narrative usually told about queer media
representations (namely, as a linear advance from a time in which queerness was
supposedly “invisible” in the media to the present era in which we are witnessing the
“explosion of gay visibility”). Together, these facets allow a preliminary overview of the
discourse of queer visibility and my challenges to previous conceptualizations of it, both
of which are then mapped out in more detail in subsequent chapters.
Visibility: To See is More Than to Know
The Oxford English Dictionary defines “visibility” in the following way:
a. The condition, state, or fact of being visible; visible character or quality;
capacity of being seen (in general, or under special conditions).
b. The possibility of (a vessel, etc.) being seen under the conditions of
distance, light, atmosphere, etc., existing at a particular time; hence
conversely, the possibility of seeing, or the range of vision, under such
conditions.
23
Visibility, then, signifies both the possibility of being seen and the possibility of seeing
under certain general and special conditions. Accordingly, visibility always encompasses
two processes: being identifiable and recognizable, on the one hand, and
identifying/recognizing, on the other. In other words, visibility exists in tension between
presence and perception, neither of which are stable categories. Presence, in particular, is
a matter of coming-into-being where visibility is concerned. Furthermore, as the OED
highlights, visibility is subject to certain general or special conditions that shape the
moment of coming-into-being and the converse moment of being recognized. In fact, it is
these general and special conditions that determine how and to what extent something (or
someone) can be perceived and how we see it (or him/her).
Among the general conditions of visibility, we can identify the relationship
between vision and knowledge. This relationship far exceeds the familiar phrase “to see
is to know” and its suggested causality (i.e. that knowledge is the product and outcome of
seeing something/someone). Rather, as Michel Foucault and others have observed, vision
and knowledge are invested by relations of power, and they are often part of a larger
undertaking that aims to control, to regulate, and to discipline (Discipline and Punish,
216-217). Foucault uses the example of the Panopticon, a seventeenth century prison
model in which prisoners are continuously exposed to the unverifiable gaze of a guard, to
formulate a theory of a disciplinary society. In disciplinary societies, observation of one's
self and of others (in the form of constant assessment, regulation, and classification in
institutions like schools, hospitals, factories, and prisons) is key to the accumulation of
knowledge and the exercise of power. In such a system, it is presumed that the more you
24
observe, the more you know, and the more power you can exercise, while at the same
time structuring your observations according to specific guidelines, capturing knowledge
in forms and tables, and allowing the rules of the institution to guide disciplinary actions.
In the disciplinary apparatus of constant surveillance, both observee and observant are
therefore part of, as Foucault puts it, “the panoptic machine, invested by its effects of
power” (ibid, 217). Hence, at the very least, knowledge and vision interact and determine
each other—one might only see something because one already knows of or about it, or
seeing something might reaffirm previously existing conceptions of what one sees.
Moreover, the desire to see, to know, and to identify—in short, this “will to know”
(and to see/be seen)—is always already bound up in sexuality to the point where, in
contemporary Western societies, “knowledge” is sexual knowledge (Foucault, The
History of Sexuality, 69). Foucault uses the practice of Christian confession as a starting
point to develop his theory of knowledge, sexuality, and subjectivity. From a specific
practice, the confession has spread to any model of engagement aiming to uncover
“hidden” information. In the give-and-take between the one who asks and the one who
answers, the “truth” about a subject's inner self is brought to light, i.e. rendered visible;
yet, this truth, according to Foucault, has no prior existence before its constitution in
discourse. From the late nineteenth century onward, the truth about oneself was figured
as sexual, to the point where sexuality became a problem of truth and of knowledge
(Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 65-68).
Visibility, then, is not simply a process of coming-into-being accompanied by
recognition and identification, but rather is informed by knowledge, power, and sexuality
25
—dynamics that are central to subjectivity and society. In other words, the process of
who and what becomes visible, in which ways, and to whom involves a multi-faceted
negotiation with and within established regimes of power-knowledge. The same
dynamics also regulate that which supposedly stays invisible. As I will elaborate later,
invisibility is often a refusal to see rather than an impossibility of seeing—enacted, for
instance, through the racialized screening processes of the closet. The interaction between
power, knowledge, sexuality, and race, as well as the dichotomy of visibility/invisibility,
are the central constitutive forces of the discourse of queer visibility. An analysis of this
discourse shows why, and in what ways, visibility has gained such crucial importance to
the articulation of queer desires, acts, and identifications. Before I elaborate on that,
however, I want to sketch out what “queerness” means in this context.
The Many Shades of Queer
On a most basic and general level, “queer” designates acts and practices that defy
the heteronormative. Beyond what the combination of the two words, “hetero” and
“normative,” implies (i.e. the imposition of heterosexuality as a norm), heteronormativity
constitutes a specific form of social organization. Lauren Berlant defines heteronormative
culture as follows, “a public culture, juridical, social, and aesthetic, organized for the
promotion of a world-saturating heterosexuality” (16). “Queer,” then, while referring to
specific sexual practices, also implies a stance that opposes how heterosexuality is used
to organize central social institutions, including the law, the family, public and private
space, and the media. This oppositional understanding of “queer” is most prevalent in
26
queer theory (and scholarly work drawing on its framework) as well as in certain forms
of political activism. The insights of queer theory have allowed a disarticulation of sexual
acts and sexual identities, thus facilitating the (perhaps by now painfully obvious) idea
that a wide range of people, not limited to gays and lesbians, engage in “queer” sexual
practices. Queer theory also insists on queerness as central to social processes. What
queer theory thus allows, ideally, is both a focused, local analysis of queer lives and queer
representations, and a connection of those localized analyses to broader discourses and
social dynamics that goes beyond positioning an oppressed minority in opposition to or in
conflict with a majority group. The term “queer” has also been adopted by scholars and
activists as an umbrella term for “gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and other nonheteronormative acts, some of which may be heterosexual in nature.” I use “queer” in
both senses, i.e. as an oppositional stance that challenges heteronormativity and as a
short-hand (especially when I speak of the discourse of queer visibility, mostly because
visibility is considered central to all the categories of identification that I listed).
However, I'm also aware that “queer” is the product of a specific historical
moment—that it is a previously derogatory term that was reclaimed in a specific political
context and that the term was defined not only in opposition to the heteronormative but
also against other ways of defining non-heterosexual identifications. As James R. Keller
and Leslie Startnyer observe:
Born in the desperate and contentious environment of the AIDS crisis,
'queer' adopted a more confrontational and radical political stance than
was typical of the gay liberation movement at that time—a movement that
27
has been characterized as essentially capitulationist, seeking to portray
gays and lesbians as safe and bourgeois, not so much a challenge to as an
emulation of heterosexual conventions and values. (3)
Whether or not queer politics was “really” more radical than those politics carried
out under the label of “gay” and “lesbian” is an investigation I undertake in Chapter 2.
For now, it is important to note that “queer,” especially in academic writing, is often used
in implicit opposition to identity politics and in support of a conceptualization of
sexuality that emphasizes acts and practices over identification with a minority group
often referred to as “the gay and lesbian community” (as if this is a stable category).
The conflicts surrounding the definitions of visibility and of queerness already
indicate that queer visibility is a volatile and complicated matter. Queer visibility is often
associated with the emergence and definition of the GLBT community as minority group
in the U.S. and with the related political movements that strive for the inclusion of GLBT
Americans in terms of equal rights. Since the Stonewall riots in June of 1969—the event
that has become commemorated as the originary moment for the gay and lesbian rights
movement—being visible has often been understood as the cornerstone of GLBT identity.
The twin figures of coming out and of the closet shape this particular understanding of
queer visibility. While coming out of the closet is often imagined as enabling revelations
of communities and identities previously “hidden,” these processes also obscure as much
as they reveal. For a more comprehensive understanding of this simultaneous process of
revelation and obfuscation, it is necessary take a closer look at how Stonewall functions
as a moment in gay and lesbian history often remembered as a turning point that
28
represents a collective coming out.
“Come Out, Come Out Wherever You Are”: Stonewall
As I previously mentioned, the riots that followed the police raid of the Stonewall
Inn, a gay bar in Greenwich Village, on June 27th, 1969, have become the focal point of
American gay and lesbian history. Accounts of who was there and what exactly happened
differ, but the basic story goes like this: during a routine raid of the Stonewall Inn,
patrons did not acquiesce to attempts of arrest but instead fought back. Clashes between
queer patrons and the police continued for two more nights. Soon afterwards, the gay
liberation movement formed and spread all over the country, with gay and lesbian people
making their presence known to the media and to “average,” presumably heterosexual,
Americans. This story of Stonewall Riots is a seductive, inspiring, and profoundly
American story of triumph over adversity, a narrative that characterizes the popular
stories of many other minority movements in the 20th century. Paradoxically, it also
imbues the Stonewall Riots with qualities of the spontaneous and unique: portraying it as
an event that was unprecedented and unstoppable. As this simultaneous figuring of
Stonewall as part of a standard story of minority struggle and as a unique event already
suggests, historians and activists invested in GLQ history have demonstrated that the
events that took place at the Stonewall Inn were neither unprecedented or unique: there
had been a number of other clashes between police and gay patrons at bars in New York
and other cities, and there most certainly had been other activist efforts on behalf of gays
and lesbians before June 1969.
29
Despite the many historical accounts that document a vivid gay and lesbian
subculture in various cities and the beginning of gay and lesbian activism in organizations
such as The Mattachine Society and The Daughters of Bilitis from the 1950s onwards,
Stonewall still stands for an explosive moment, the historical significance of which was
allegedly immediately apparent to everyone involved (see also McGary and Wasserman,
19). In other words, some of the activism, and certainly the riots, prior to Stonewall have
been screened out from historical memory in order to facilitate the perception of
Stonewall as extraordinary event (rather similar to how, as I will later elaborate, much of
the queer visibility during the years 1970-1990 was screened out to make room for the
declaration of “the explosion of gay visibility” during the 1990s). The raid and the
protests at the Stonewall Inn have thus become “recognized” as both the origin of queer
visibility in the popular imagination and perhaps the most visible event of gay and lesbian
history. In order to understand the various screening processes that contributed to the
creation of Stonewall as the origin myth of queer visibility, it is necessary to look at how
this event has been marked as both ordinary and extraordinary.
The raid at the Stonewall Inn falls squarely within the realm of the ordinary in the
sense that raids of gay and lesbian bars were a common occurrence in the 1950s and
1960s. Sociologists Elizabeth A. Armstrong and Suzanna M. Crage argue that these raids
were so frequent that a “script” detailing the behavior of police and patrons had emerged
by the mid-1960s: “police entered the premises, stopped activities, and arrested patrons”
(728). While one might see a deviation from this script—as, for example, in the form of a
riot—as extraordinary for gay bar raids, riots in general were common enough as part of
30
other protest movements in the late 1960s. Skirmishes confined to one bar might not even
be regarded as outstanding considering the much larger riots happening at the time. In
fact, John D'Emilio recounts that people saw the Stonewall riot and walked past,
shrugging it off as “just another riot” (“After Stonewall,” 240). Additionally, the
Stonewall riots do not mark the first time patrons fought back against police. Remarkably
similar events took place in New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco throughout the
1960s, but none of them attracted the attention or have been remembered to the degree
that the Stonewall riots did and have. For example, when gay patrons of a San Francisco
coffee shop called Compton's Cafeteria fought back against police in August of 1966,
neither the media nor those involved in gay activism deemed the event outstanding or
inspirational. Indeed, the San Francisco homophile movement, consisting largely of white
middle-class men, looked down upon rioting as a form of “fighting back” (Armstrong and
Crage, 733).2
In contrast to the radio silence surrounding the Compton's Cafeteria riot, the 1967
raid of the Black Cat in Los Angeles attracted significant attention from activists and the
media. Follow-up demonstrations against police brutality drew protesters from diverse
backgrounds. Lillian Faderman and Stuart Timmons observe that “after a couple of years
of witnessing other minority groups demand their rights, and even take to the streets for
them, many Los Angeles homosexuals were now unwilling to absorb such outrage
without response. PRIDE (Personal Rights in Defense and Education, a radical gay
activist group founded in 1966) spoke for them, organizing multiple protests outside the
2
The San Francisco homophile movement didn't participate in the one-year anniversary commemoration
of Stonewall, either. Only when the first Pride parades in New York and other cities were a success did
they begin to recognize the Stonewall Riots as important event (Armstrong and Crage,733; 742).
31
Black Cat” (157). Faderman and Simmons point out that even though “hundreds of
onlookers” assembled in addition to the protesters, and 3,000 informational flyers were
handed out, “the demonstrations never caught the attention of the media, and the Black
Cat did not take the role in gay history attributed to the Stonewall Rebellion two and a
half years later” (157). No long-term changes happened in terms of the relationship
between police and the gay community; thus protests against the raid weren't seen as
successful (Armstrong and Crage, 734). As one of the main reasons for why the protests
remained relatively contained to the gay community, Faderman and Simmons cite the
sprawl that characterizes the L.A. cityscape, which L.A. Residents navigate by car and
not on foot. Consequently, “chance passersby [such as many of the Stonewall protesters
had been] were scarce” (157). However, the raid did motivate activist Dick Michaels to
turn his newsletter into a newspaper, which eventually became the major gay publication
in the United States, the Advocate (Armstrong and Crage, 735).3
Split attitudes towards different forms of activism and city geography are thus
among the factors that contributed to what happened in the immediate aftermath of the
riots in San Francisco and Los Angeles. But they don't explain why Stonewall became
understood as different from or outstanding in contrast to these events. Perhaps the
activist climate in New York City was more favorable in 1969 (with the beginnings of a
more radical activism sparked in the spring); more people walked around Greenwich
Village than they did in L.A.; and the funeral of Judy Garland led an edge of desperation
to the mood in the gay community on June, 29th 1969 (D'Emilio, “After Stonewall,” 240).
3
In the creation of the Advocate, the story of gay liberation intersects with the history of television, as the
people who created it put together the first copies of the magazine by using the ressouces at their place
of employment, namely the print shop that printed the scripts for ABC daily soaps (Faderman and
Simmons, 159).
32
Yet, as Armstrong and Crage contend, it is not the actual events that make Stonewall
memorable, but the fact that it was remembered, and indeed, deemed memorable (744).
As after the raid on the Black Cat in Los Angeles, activists in New York
immediately organized a reaction to the Stonewall raids, realizing that this event could be
used strategically for political purposes. They called New York's print media and alerted
them to the ongoing riots. Moreover, only three days after the Stonewall Riots, activists
distributed flyers that already declared that the event “will go down in history as the first
time that thousands of Homosexual men and women went out into the streets to protest”
(Teal, 8, qtd in Armstrong and Crage, 738). Three months later, at the Eastern Regional
Conference of Homophile Organizations in November 1969, New York activists
proposed a resolution to turn the Annual Reminder, a yearly picket at Philadelphia's
Independence Hall that started in 1965, into an annual demonstration to commemorate
Stonewall under the name “Christopher Street Liberation Day” (Armstrong and Crage,
738). This push to make Stonewall a national commemorative event depended crucially
on previously compiled mailing lists and gay independent media (ibid, 740). In June
1970, Gay Pride parades took place in New York City and Los Angeles, among other
cities.
Thus, it is not Stonewall per se that is outstanding; rather, the immediate
construction of Stonewall as an historic event at the hand of New York's gay activists
made it outstanding. What is most significant about Armstrong and Crage's argument is
the shift away from finding explanations for why Stonewall was or was not outstanding
or different, and towards an understanding of Stonewall as carefully constructed tool that
33
activists used to advocate their goals, the most important of which were to claim a
presence in the media (thus in the imagination of “straight America”) and to affirm the
burgeoning discourses surrounding gay and lesbian identities. Thus, Stonewall is not an
originary event that finally pushed gay activism out of the closet; rather, activists
inscribed a particular narrative on the events that took place at the Stonewall Inn while at
the same time building an agenda of visibility on this constructed narrative. The
deliberate forgetfulness that surrounds the Stonewall Riots underlines the fragmentary
and shifting constitution of queer visibility. What emerges forcefully in histories of
Stonewall is the constant reframing of events and identities, and the repeated questions of
how to understand and represent oneself, “the movement,” and “the community” both to
insiders and outsiders (and how to draw lines around all these categories in the first
place). In the retelling of GLQ history, these contested visibilities are screened in order to
render a particular version of queerness visible, usually one attached to the narrative
structure of “coming out,” i.e. the story that something previously hidden is revealed at
one point and stays visible from that point onwards. Stonewall as origin story of gay
liberation is one example of the various screening processes that comprise the discourse
of queer visibility.
Screening the Closet
As the various screening processes surrounding the Stonewall Riots show, it is
misleading to think of “coming out of the closet” as a singular moment of crossing-over
from a state or place that is “hidden” to one that is visible. Even though the concept of
34
coming out relies on a spatial metaphor that describes an apparently finite transition from
one space into another, it is best imagined as a continuous process. Thus, instead of one
all-encompassing announcement of one's gay or lesbian identity, “coming out” is a
laborious, repetitive process without end—one that has been thought of as fundamental to
queer identities, particularly after Stonewall. As Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick explains in
“Epistemology of the Closet,” every meeting between strangers “erects new closets
whose fraught and characteristic laws of optics and physics exact from at least gay
people new surveys, new calculations, new draughts and requisitions of secrecy or
disclosure” (46, emphasis mine). It is interesting that Sedgwick chooses the word
“optics” here to discuss the closet when the term “visibility” is curiously absent from her
overall discussion. Nevertheless, this word choice underlines the importance of visibility
to understanding the epistemology of the closet: the spatial metaphor of the closet
suggests an either/or state of being, which is at the foundation of queer visibility (one is
either “in” or “out” of the closet, i.e. either invisible or visible), when queer visibility is in
fact a continuous process during which multiple moments of being “in” and “out”
intersect. Also interesting is Sedgwick's emphasis on “at least gay people,” suggesting
that the dynamics of the closet are more “visible” to queer people than to straight people,
who find their identities and ways of life resonating with the heteronormative demands
surrounding them and who consequently might not “see” the pressure they can exert. In
other words, the propagated difficulty in identifying queerness has more to do with the
allegedly blinding forces of heteronormativity than with the visibility or invisibility of
queerness. From this point of view, heteronormativity is so visible that it has cast other
35
sexual identifications into shadow.
Following this line of thought, Shane Phelan suggests that the closet actually acts
like a screen: it “screens” queerness, or at least certain aspects of queerness, from view
while simultaneously serving as the surface for heteronormative projections (98). This
screening process leads, among other things, to the assumption that everyone is
heterosexual until proven otherwise. However, the closet can never fully screen queerness
from view; a specter of queer acts and identities always remains, even in those spaces that
appear to be fully saturated with heteronormativity.4 Thus, it isn't so much that queerness,
or at least certain aspects of queerness, are “invisible” by default, but that there has been
a concerted effort in society to declare them invisible (in part by promoting
heterosexuality as “normal” and “natural”). Deeming queerness “invisible” only obscures
it via the screening process of the closet: queer acts and desires exist before and
independently of coming-into-being in the moment of articulation, of “coming out.”
Moreover, efforts nominally aimed at removing queerness from public view—public here
meaning a whole host of institutions and venues of representation (employment by the
state, civil rights, such as the right to marry and receive certain benefits, narratives of
queer romance in film and television, etc.)—didn't actually make queerness disappear,
but marked it as “deviant” and discussed it as such. This “deviant” queerness manifested
itself in the very spaces from which it was supposed to disappear, including sites ranging
4
The connection between deviant sexualities and secrecy/invisibility isn't an entirely new insight, of
course. Both Michel Foucault and Eve Sedgwick have shown how this connection has become manifest
over time. Sedgwick characterizes the increasingly intensifying association of sexuality and secrecy in the
following way: “The gradually reifying effect of this refusal [of same-sex desire] meant that by the end of
the 19th century, when it had become fully current—as obvious to Queen Victoria as to Freud—that
knowledge meant sexual knowledge, and secrets sexual secrets, there had in fact developed one particular
sexuality that was distinctly constituted as secrecy” (Sedgwick, 49).
36
from public parks to Hollywood cinema. Considering all of this, it is more productive to
ask which forms of queer expression have existed where, when, and for whom, rather
than holding on to a strict distinction between “visible” and “invisible.” That is,
understanding the closet as a screen, as Phelan proposes, allows for a more precise
mapping of this discourse of queer visibility. My analysis of the screening processes that
are in effect in histories of the Stonewall Riots are an example of such an approach. But I
want to take Phelan's conceptualization of the closet-as-screen one step further and argue
that, while this screen serves as a projection surface for heteronormative ideals, it also
allows for the coming-into-being of specific types of queer visibilities, namely those that
can nominally adhere to certain class, race, and gender norms.
This broader understanding of the closet-as-screen becomes particularly important
when one considers that even those scholars who are concerned with critically analyzing
the alleged necessity of rendering queerness visible often also rely on a screening process
to facilitate this coming-into-being as queer. As I previously argued regarding GLQ
history, it is not only the demands of heteronormativity that screen queerness, but also
those who, one might assume, are concerned with rendering the entire spectrum of queer
identities, practices, and communities visible. The most frequently appearing screening
process comes into effect in comparisons between sexuality, race, and sex. As a first
observation in such analyses, scholars typically mention, often in a casual way, that
sexuality needs to be rendered visible because it is not “written on the body” in the way
that race and sex apparently are. For example, in 1983, Richard Dyer observed, “A major
factor about being gay is that it doesn't show. There is nothing about gay people's
37
physiognomy that declares them gay, no equivalents to the biological markers of sex and
race” (“Seen to be believed,” 20). More recently, in 2001, Suzanna Walters wrote,
“Unlike people of color, and women, gays are not necessarily or inevitably 'visible.' Most
of the time, difference is not marked on our bodies” (28).
Such comparisons between sexuality, race, sex, and gender, however, yield
incredibly problematic arguments for a number of reasons. One, in both Dyer's and
Walters' assessments, the imagined gays and lesbians lead lives that are removed from the
perceived burden of constant visibility. They are by implication white: as whiteness is
still the only racial category that can imagine itself as unmarked, queer subjects that exist
outside of the regime of the visible are white by default.5 Two, the comparison stabilizes
sex and race as categories in ways that are untenable; specifically, assertions like those
made by Walters and Dyer render sex and race as easily “legible” in order to facilitate an
analysis of the complex processes that allow queerness to become visible in media
representations. What is obscured in this comparison are the ways in which racialization
has an uneasy relationship to visibility as well: race isn't “visible” because of bodily
markers, but because certain cultural discourses construct a specific way of “seeing” race
that is always already an interpretation, not simply a reading of embodied “facts.”6 Three,
this comparison neglects the fact that sexuality, rather than being merely a parallel
category, is always bound up with race and sex: queer people are always also sexed,
gendered, and raced in multiple, mutually constitutive yet often conflicting, ways (just as
5
6
For an account of how homosexuality became associated with whiteness by modeling gay politics on
the Civil Rights Movement, see Guzman, 94. Also, this whiteness is inscribed by certain class norms.
As I discuss in Chapter 3, those people who are positioned as “white trash” cannot inhabit the category
of “unmarked” whiteness as their class position qualifies and intersects with their racial identity.
See Michael Omi and Howard Winant's Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the
1990s, especially 53-77.
38
“people of color” and “women” are constituted by discourses of sexuality as well as those
of race and gender). In other words, comparisons between queer visibility, race, sex, and
gender, and the implicit oversights of such comparisons, are problematic because they
obscure crucial processes of racialization and their intersection with discourses of
sexuality and gender. In fact, these oversights amount to what I want to call a screening
of race—they “screen out” the importance of race and racialization in the construction of
queer visibility.
This differentiation of race and sexuality into two categories that can be
compared, but are considered to be separate, has a long-standing history. This tendency to
consider processes of racialization and of categorizing sexual identifications as parallel
but unrelated goes back to the late 19th century. Yet, as Shioban Somerville argues,
concerns over how to define “black” and/versus “white,” and “homosexual” and/versus
“heterosexual” weren't parallel or analogous events, but rather linked and constitutive of
one another (3). As such, the work of early sexologists, for example, borrowed from and
relied on methodologies of categorizing bodies that emerged from studies trying to
determine racial difference (ibid, 10). Another example of the intertwining of discourses
of race and sexuality emerges in the way that the late nineteenth-century figures of the
black rapist and the murderous lesbian were mobilized as threats to white womanhood
and to white domesticity (Duggan, Sapphic Slashers, 3).
Even these brief examples show that ideas of homo- and heterosexuality have
been bound up with specific concepts of race from the time that those ideas first
circulated in both scientific and popular discourses. It is thus imperative to consider the
39
representation of both race and sexuality in conjunction with one another, not as separate
categories. In fact, the discourse of queer visibility is replete with junctures that rely on
the screening of race. For example, in addition to allowing the Stonewall riots to emerge
as moment of origin of gay liberation, the screening processes at work in retelling the
events at the Stonewall Inn also often screen out race. What goes often unmentioned in
popular narratives about the Stonewall Riots is that those who participated in the riots
were largely on the fringe of the gay and lesbian community in terms of racial and gender
identifications (D'Emilio, “After Stonewall,” 240-41). More recently, during the
Congressional hearings on the question of whether or not to allow gays and lesbians in
the military, those in favor of repealing the ban relied on making analogies between
discrimination based on race and on sexual orientation, yet did not invite a single queer
person of color to testify, thus upholding the impression that race and sexuality are
separate matters and, specifically, that gays and lesbians are white (Berube, 243). The
subsequent chapters offer more in-depth analyses of crucial turning points that reshaped
the discourse of queer visibility and its concurrent screening of race, including the AIDS
crisis of the 1980s, Ellen DeGeneres' coming out, the “breakthrough” films Brokeback
Mountain and Boys Don't Cry, as well as the recent television program Brothers &
Sisters.
If one unscreens the importance of race in shaping the discourse of queer
visibility, its most fundamental concepts, such as the closet and coming out, appear in a
different light. Manolo Guzman's study of gay Latino men, for example, refutes the idea
that not coming out—that is, not to declare oneself as gay—to one's family or community
40
is both a failure and a reaction to an oppressive, homophobic environment. He argues that
the absence of such a declaration in this particular cultural context “is not an imposition
of the code of silence on homosexual expression. Rather, this absence of speech, no
longer talking about things like marriage, represents a suspension of the assumption of
heterosexuality. There is enormous amount of room for the expression of homosexuality
under this absence of speech about homosexuality” (88). This assessment is crucial for
three reasons: one, it demonstrates that “coming out” is a specific cultural product,
namely one that is largely “Anglo” (i.e. American and white); two, a decision against
coming out is not always a reaction to a hostile climate that suppresses all aspects of gay
life; and three, that not-being-visible (in the sense of constantly coming-into-being as
“gay”) might create spaces in which queerness can flourish.
Understanding the cultural specificity of concepts such as “coming out” helps to
interrogate the insistence on visibility as fundamental to the formation of queer
subjectivities. This interrogation can then foster alternative ideas of how queerness can
manifest itself in spaces where queer desires and acts undeniably exist but don't require
explicit articulation in the (white American) tradition of “being out.” Interestingly, one of
those spaces exists in the midst of the American cultural imagination: Hollywood cinema,
and more recently, commercial television. Both have offered room for specters of
queerness that are not definitely described or represented. At the same time, the insight
that “being out” is a mostly (Anglo-)American concept also underlines that it is often
closely aligned with whiteness, especially when it comes to what are often the most
visible facets of queerness, namely those found in media representations. In the following
41
section, I sketch out various queer traditions in Hollywood cinema and in television to
underline that the developments of the 1990s have a long history and especially to call
attention to aspects of this history that are frequently as deliberately forgotten as the
importance of race when it comes to mapping the discourse of queer visibility.
Hollywood is Fabulous, and Always Has Been: Queerness and Media Representation
As my previous thoughts on the central role of race in the formation of queer
visibility indicate, media representations play a central role in screening the closet. In
fact, in a mass-mediated society such as contemporary American society, the question of
queer visibility is always tied to how this visibility is expressed in the media—in print,
TV, film, and, most recently, in digital media. Often, visibility and representation are
conflated: queer visibility is only possible, only comes into existence, through
representation.7 The equation of visibility and representation is another reminder that
visibility is a discourse, not a pre-existing state of being that only finds expression in the
media. Closely connected to the manifestation of queerness in the media is the perception
of it (that is, the reception by members of the audience), as presence and perception are
presumed as the two halves that constitute visibility. In fact, the way various spectators
“see,” that is, recognize and assess, manifestations of queerness in the media is a crucial
aspect of the discourse of queer visibility. This close relationship between manifestations
of queerness and the possibility of recognizing them also appears as a central motif in
7
“Representation” can also signify political representation, in the sense of queer Americans being
recognized as political/civic constituents and thus as full citizens. The struggle over that form of
representation is closely linked to struggles over queer visibility in the media, as queer images have
often been a rallying point for or against gay and lesbian civil rights. I elaborate this more fully in
Chapters 2 and 4.
42
many academic studies devoted to the exploration of queer visibility in the media. Ellis
Hanson's exclamation “I can see again!” in the introduction to Out Takes: Queer Theory
and Film, Richard Dyer's choice of Now you See It as the title for his essay collection on
gay and lesbian film, and the use of Spectacular Passions as the title of Brett Farmer's
study of gay male spectatorships, among many other examples, all point to the fact that in
academic as well as popular discourses, visibility is intimately linked to vision, i.e. the
ability to see or discern queerness. Yet this discernment is a complex matter, involving
both production and reception, as well as both what is screened and screened out. Queer
visibility in the media, then, is a multi-faceted and fluid process, one that Alexander Doty
so aptly defines as “those aspects of spectatorship, cultural readership, production, and
textual coding that seem to establish spaces not described by, or contained within,
straight, gay, lesbian, bisexual, transsexual, or transgendered understandings and
categorizations of gender and sexuality” (Flaming Classics, 7).
One of the most important aspects to consider when analyzing queer visibility in
the media is the fact that any overt representation of same-sex intimacy was, in effect,
banned in Hollywood film and suspended in commercial U.S. TV for decades during the
20th century. In other words, during the heyday of Hollywood cinema, and through the
early years of television, the closet-as-screen primarily functioned to keep queerness from
manifesting itself on movie and TV screens. Importantly, these constraints were largely
adopted voluntarily and not as a result of court orders or in response to other legal
interventions. Rather, the ban grew out of a sense on the part of those who worked in the
media industry of what Americans might be ready to see in film or TV. For the cinema,
43
the Hollywood Production Code was in effect from 1934-1968. For most of that time, the
representation of any form of sexuality was extremely limited: heterosexual desire could
only be shown within certain parameters (resulting in many closed-mouth kisses and in
the apparent preference of married couples to sleep in separate beds), and “transgressive”
sexualities, including interracial romance and any nominal representation of same-sex
desire, were not shown at all—at least not in any “explicit” ways (even if, as I will adress
shortly, “implicit” coding or connotation was widespread). The ban of both interracial
and same-sex romance once again underlines the close alignment of race and queer
sexualities, as both were deemed too “queer” for the imagined tastes of mainstream (read:
white and heterosexual) America.
In 1961, the Code was revised to allow limited depictions of homosexual subject
matter, and, in 1968, it was abolished entirely and replaced by a ratings system. This
system supposedly shifted the responsibility for content from the producers to the
audience: theoretically, everything could now be shown in films, but who was allowed to
see this content was limited by age (Benshoff and Griffin, 93; 136). Since the most
profitable rating is PG-13, however, production companies strive for content that will be
approved for that rating. The desire to fulfill the requirements for earning this rating from
the MPAA (Motion Pictures Association of America) constitutes another form of selfregulation as a large number of subjects (often related to sexuality rather than, for
example, violence) are deemed inappropriate for the age group allowed to see films under
the PG-13 rating. Consequently, screening processes are still at work in Hollywood today.
As for TV, networks mostly look to advertisers and their expectations when
44
deciding what subjects make for acceptable programming. While the FCC (Federal
Communications Commission) has regulatory power over U.S. TV, it hasn't enforced a
singular set of standards similar to the cinema's Production Code; rather, it is networks
and their Standards and Practices offices that, typically, voluntarily regulate TV content
(with some exceptions in which the FCC has issued fines for inappropriate content). The
variety and type of queer content (and even what counts as “queer” content) varies among
television networks. While ABC, NBC, Fox, and the CW subscribe to a very limited idea
of queer visibility (at least in terms of explicit narratives of GLBT people), cable
channels, especially those financed through subscriptions, such as Showtime and HBO,
allow for a wider and more sexually explicit range of queer visibilities as part of their
original programming.
Yet, despite these representational constraints, the existence of the Production
Code and of network self-regulation didn't (and doesn't) entail an absence queer
representations from these media (the contrary, rather). They did, however, shape what
kinds of queer visibilities manifested themselves, and in what ways. Furthermore, the
prohibitions and their partial repeals (queer acts and desires can still only be shown in
specific ways, after all) have also led to some critical blockages and oversights, inviting
commentators to accept an overly simple division of queer visibility in a “before” and
“after.” For example, one might be inclined to say that before the Production Code was
lifted, queer visibility manifested itself mostly through “connotation”—gestures,
iconography, character typing, plot devices, genre structures—whereas, after a
redefinition of this prohibition, “denotation”—openly gay and lesbian characters and
45
storylines—became more prevalent. This is an inaccurate division, however, since both
denotative and connotative queer visibilities existed and continue to exist—and, in fact,
are textually inseparable.
Even the terms “connotative” and “denotative” are somewhat problematic if one
adheres to the idea that anything in the realm of the connotative is merely secondary to
the supposedly real and unquestionable statement of the denotative (Barthes, 7). D.A.
Miller, in his analysis of Alfred Hitchcock's Rope (1948), shows how connotative queer
elements in film manage to spread their meaning to all other signifiers precisely because
the queerness they represent is unstable and not clearly defined (129). The ambiguity that
connotative elements contain—leading spectators to wonder whether or not there is
something queer about this character or that course of action—informs even supposedly
safely heterosexual characters, rendering their sexuality as something to be doubted and
by no means confirmed. In contrast, a denotative queerness that is clearly defined would
not spread its signification in the same way; rather, it would be contained in the one
character or course of action that is textually labeled as “queer” (or “gay” or “lesbian,”
etc.). Thus, instead of considering queer connotative significations in film as secondary to
denotative ones, I argue for them as different ways of indicating queer presences, both of
which have specific consequences on the construction of meaning in the film as a whole.
Additionally, I join Alexander Doty in a refusal to consider queerness-via-connotation as
mere “subtext” to the supposedly straight text; rather, queer and straight meanings coexist on equal planes in the same text (Flaming Classics, 2). They are two sides of the
closet-as-screen: what is projected denotatively onto it cannot exist independently of
46
what is seemingly screened out connotatively. In short, I consider denotation and
connotation different registers of signification that appear alongside one another in
cinematic and televisual texts. Instead of understanding connotative meanings as those
that are “hidden” or “invisible,” and denotative meanings as those that are “apparent” and
“clear-cut,” it is more productive and more important to ask which forms of queer
expression have existed where, when, and for whom.
With this in mind, I want to map a history of queer visibility in the media that
recognizes both sides of the closet-as-screen via a few, very select examples. I will
elaborate on parts of this history in more detail in subsequent chapters, but for now I
provide a general overview that fosters an understanding both of the various ways in
which queer visibility has been part of film and television and of how scholars have
discussed this visibility. To start this trajectory, consider an assessment that Suzanna
Walters, writing in 2001, makes at the beginning of her “history of gays in TV,” as she
calls it: “The new gay visibility on TV is surely a dramatic departure from the history of
the medium. While film has long dealt with gay subjects, albeit in a stereotyped and
'tragic' way, television's 'family-focused' format seemed to insist that gays and lesbians
were simply not part of the families that made up TV audiences” (59). The new “gay
visibility” to which Walters refers is the proliferation of gay and lesbian images in the
media during the 1990s, a development that is the main focus of her book All the Rage:
The Story of Gay Visibility in America. Walters positions this “new” visibility in contrast
both to the presumed previous absence or invisibility of gays and lesbians on TV and to a
long history of “gay subjects” in film (it's a little unclear whether she means “subjects” in
47
the sense of gay and lesbian characters or of gay and lesbian plots/themes, or perhaps
both). She locates this difference in medium specificity—according to Walters,
television's heteronormative, familial form (both in textual structure and contextual
location) made it more difficult for television programming than film to represent gays
and lesbians, at least until recently.
While I agree with Walters' overall assessment—namely that gay and lesbian
images became more frequent during the 1990s—much needs to be added to the story
and her analysis of it. For example, the “long” history of queer visibility in film is
mirrored, to a certain extent, in television if one looks beyond the narrow conception of
such visibility as indicating only programs “about gays and lesbians,” or, in other words,
if one only considers the denotative projections onto the closet-as-screen. Indeed, the idea
that there is a pre-constituted community that either finds representation on TV or does
not is problematic (which, in all fairness, Walters discusses as well). Even gay and
lesbian characters (named as such by themselves or other characters in the texts) found
their way onto TV screens long before the 1990s (as, for example, in popular sitcoms
such as All the Family and The Mary Tyler Moore Show in the early 1970s; in various
Made-for-TV movies like An Early Frost from the early 1980s onwards; or in drama
series including Dynasty or Soap in the 1980s).8 Similar denotative and connotative
mechanisms to those used to represent queerness in Hollywood films were used on TV as
well (i.e. coded characters, situations, and plots), but whether or not those were always
“tragic” and “stereotyped” is a questionable notion. Particularly the issue of stereotypes
and the various meanings they can hold deserves more consideration. Finally, Walters
8
See Larry Gross' chapter “Television Takes Over” in Up From Invisibility, 81-93.
48
introduces the imagined, straight audience which presumably has had much difficulty
adjusting to queer visibility. This imaginary group of people commands the attention of
media producers and scholars alike, with often peculiar results. These aspects—the
constitution of queer visibility in film and TV, and the similarities and differences
between those media, the question of stereotypes, and the imagined audience—provide a
focus for my brief general overview.
As mentioned, film shares a number of connotations and denotations used to
signify queerness with television, perhaps because queer cinematic coding was already
well-established by the time that commercial TV became an institutionalized medium
with its own narrative conventions. Yet there are significant differences between how, in
general, film and TV frame narratives and images, of course, and “film” and “TV” aren't
uniform media either. There have been different possibilities for queer representations in
studio films and in independent films, for example, as there have been in network, cable,
or public TV. Nevertheless, queer cinematic codes that came into being in the Hollywood
studio system had an impact on both independent film and TV.
Considering the prevalence of progressive narratives that circulate when it comes
to telling the history of queer visibility in the media—typically presented as a move from
a homophobic past that disallowed queer representations to a more open climate that
allows the portrayal of gays and lesbians—it is perhaps surprising to find that queer
images have been part and parcel of Hollywood filmmaking from its beginning. For
example, the relationship between Greta Garbo's character Christina and Elizabeth
Young's character Ebba in the 1933 MGM Grand film Queen Christina has all the
49
significations of a romance, including a shared kiss. It is films like Queen Christina that
make one wonder if the institution of the Production Code was in part a response to the
proliferation of queerness in studio productions. Yet even once the Production Code was
enforced, an arsenal of connotative devices allowed the continued presence of queer
images in Hollywood films. These include queer characters, which range from men who
appear a little “too feminine” to women who are a little “too masculine” (corresponding
to the idea that gender inversion was part of homosexuality, a theory that was popular in
the early 20th century) to character types such as the “sissy,” “the sad young man,” or the
“spinster,” all of whom had a queer air about them.9 Furthermore, beyond specific
characters and character types, entire genres became outlets for queer presences,
including supernatural, horror, and musical films.10
All three genres broke through the conventions of the everyday, be it via the
intrusion of alien and ghostly beings or the sudden eruption into song and dance, thus
challenging and disrupting ideas of what qualifies as “normal.” Even the melodrama,
which largely stayed within a realist framework, made “the normal” questionable by
revealing the instability of marriage and family, often rendering them as institutions that
confine and oppress, and by marking this instability through moments of stylistic,
iconographic, narrative excess and rupture.11 Queer producers and audiences also
9
10
11
For detailed analyses of queer character types in Hollywood cinema, see, for example, Richard Dyer's
The Matter of Images, Andrea Weiss' Vampire and Violets: Lesbians in Film, and Patricia White's
UnInvited: Classical Hollywood Cinema and Lesbian Representability.
For a queer take on supernatural and horror films, see, for example, Harry M. Benshoff's Monsters in
the Closet: Homosexuality and Horror Film and Rhona Bernstein's Attack of the Leading Ladies:
Gender, Sexuality, and Spectatorship in Classic Horror Cinema; examples of queer analyses of the
musical are D.A. Miller's A Place for Us: Essays on the Broadway Musical and Alexander Doty's “'My
Beautiful Wickedness': The Wizard of Oz as Lesbian Fantasy” in Flaming Classics.
For more on Hollywood melodrama and its engagement with normalcy, see Christine Gledhill's Home
is Where the Heart is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woman's Film.
50
contributed to the continued circulation of queer images. Some of the most famous
“classics” are outcomes of behind-the-scenes struggles over queer representations. My
favorite anecdote from Vito Russo's history The Celluloid Closet details how, during the
filming of Ben-Hur (released in 1959), screenplay writer Gore Vidal, director William
Wyler, and actor Stephen Boyd agreed to portray the relationship between main
characters Messala, played by Boyd, and Ben-Hur, played by Charlton Heston, as one of
former lovers to give it more depth (Russo, 76). Heston was never informed of this
decision, but his performance certainly matches the emotional intensity of Boyd's acting,
thus providing much fodder for possible queer readings of this relationship. And
audiences did pick up on queer moments in, and queer facets of, Hollywood films,
developing ways of “seeing queerly” that spread beyond the subcultural level to become
available for a mainstream audience.12 While some historical examples (such as lesbians
flocking to see The Uninvited or the more recent example of gay men finding queer
pleasures in Top Gun) are probably not widely known, The Wizard of Oz and The Rocky
Horror Picture Show are recognized and enjoyed as queer cult classics by large numbers
of people of varying sexual identifications (Benshoff and Griffin, 10, 66, 147; Doty,
Flaming Classics, 54).
After the Production Code was abolished in 1968 and homosexuality could be
named as such in Hollywood film again, films began to appear that denotatively
narrativized gay characters and gay urban life. This does not mean that the earlier queer
registers disappeared or were replaced by “more visible” representations. Rather, the
12
For a more elaborate analysis of the ways in which straight audiences see queerly, see my article "The
Adventures of a Repressed Farmboy and the Billionaire Who Loves Him: Queer Spectatorship in
Smallville Fandom." In: Teen Television: Essays on Programming and Fandom.
51
before-and-after story often told about queer representations is testament to a shift in
attention of those invested in queer images (a shift that is similar to the investment in
coming out that characterizes narratives of gay lives and identities “before” and “after”
Stonewall). Both activists of the newly existing gay rights movement and some media
scholars chronicling the history of queer media images give preference to discussions of
the meaning of these new images because of the ways in which the strategies employed
by the media themselves shifted in modes that dovetailed with new social discourses of
visibility (see, for example, the work done by Larry Gross, Suzanna Walters, or Stephen
Tropiano). This shift in attention constitutes another example in which scholars who are
invested in queer visibility use screening processes to facilitate their discussions: in order
to highlight newly possible denotative queer representations, the continuing use of
connotative queer elements needs to be screened out. Moreover, the discussion of postCode queer visibility often takes place within the framework of evaluating “positive”
versus “negative” images and of decrying the prevalence of stereotypes in films and TV
programs from the late 1960s onward.13
The so-called New Queer Cinema of the 1990s allowed for a point of convergence
between connotative and denotative manifestations of queerness as well as an
13
Stereotypes relate to the idea of “positive” and “negative” images in the following way: a stereotype is
considered a “negative” image because it reduces gays and lesbians to a limited number of character
traits which may or may not relate to how gays and lesbians “really” are. Yet, in a circular logic, these
characters traits are considered demeaning, in part, I would argue, because they have become
stereotypes. However, the fundamental problem with the idea of dividing representations into “positive”
and “negative” images is the fact that a representation will never be able “accurately” to represent
reality. This is not only because the production of filmic and televisual representations is subject to a
number of formal constraints that shape what and who is being represented in which ways, but also
because “reality” itself is an entirely unstable concept that is always in part shaped by media
representations. The complexity of stereotypes has been explored by Richard Dyer in A Matter of
Image, Sasha Torres in Black, White, and In Color: Television and Black Civil Rights, and by Jose
Esteban Munoz in Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics.
52
engagement with stereotypes that goes beyond the “positive”/“negative” framework. The
collection of independent films grouped under the label of New Queer Cinema challenges
previous gay and lesbian films on the level of both formal and narrative structures and of
subject matter. As B. Ruby Rich, who coined the term “New Queer Cinema,” put it in
1992, “Definitely breaking with older humanist approaches and the films and tapes that
accompanied identity politics, these works are irreverent, energetic, alternately
minimalist and excessive. Above all, they're full of pleasure” (16). Many filmmakers who
contributed to New Queer Cinema were themselves queer and often from activist
backgrounds. But films such as Peter Jackson's Heavenly Creatures (1994) or Nancy
Meckler's Sister My Sister (1994) demonstrate that straight filmmakers can also make
films that construct queer subject matter in unexpected and challenging ways (Aaron, 9).
While this might seem like an obvious observation, the territorialism that is sometimes
exhibited by queer filmmakers and queer media scholars over their cultural provenance of
queer cinema makes such a statement necessary and important.
While New Queer Cinema broke with or reinvisioned the politics of positive
images, it used and reworked both the queer cinematic coding of Hollywood film and the
traditions of independent queer filmmaking. Instead of rejecting certain character types,
like the gay villain, as stereotypical and/or tragic, films such as Swoon (1992)—an
adaptation of Hitchcock's Rope (1948)—embrace “negative” images and show the
productive and pleasurable forces that can be found in them. In fact, an engagement with
and queer rewriting of classical Hollywood film is a recurring theme in New Queer
Cinema. For example, Todd Haynes' film Poison (1991) reworks horror, prison, and
53
documentary genres through an excessive use of their distinctive conventions—a move
that calls attention to the naturalization of cinematic styles. Haynes further developed this
approach in Far From Heaven (2002): embodying the generic markers of 1950s
melodrama, the film also draws on the possibility of portraying both queer desires and
interracial romance as such. I want to refrain from saying that the film makes a
previously only implied queerness and interracial romance “visible” because the nonnormative aspects of 1950s melodrama were visible, both to many audiences and to many
people in the film industry. Rather, Far From Heaven brings together connotative and
denotative manifestations of illicit sexuality—one example of many where both modes
exist side-by-side in the same film. Thus, instead of approaching the film as one that
undoes the suppression of queer and interacial images in Hollywood's past, it is more
accurate to consider it as an insistence on the non-normative that has always been a part
of our media culture.
Despite Far From Heaven's attempt to address both sexuality and race within
cinematic codes and history, the one area in which New Queer Cinema did not break with
Hollywood's tradition is its engagement with race. Even though a few films, such as Lie
Down with Dogs (1995), Love! Valor! Compassion! (1997), or Jeffrey (1995), feature a
diverse cast, an interrogation of the ways in which race and desire intersect often fall flat
or are absent entirely. Jose Esteban Munoz calls these moments of diversity “detours into
difference” that do not challenge the overall whiteness of these films (“Dead White,”
130). Another Todd Haynes' film, namely Safe (1995), represents an exception to this
practice, Munoz explains, as it defamiliarizes both whiteness and heteronormativity.
54
Exploring the increasing illness-induced estrangement of a white married woman from
the world of suburbia, Haynes relies on connotation to tell a parable about AIDS that
engages with the correlation of sexuality and race without reducing it to a detour into
difference (Esteban, “Dead White,” 136).
Turning now to TV, I want to come back to Walter's assessment of the nearly
complete absence of queer representations on television before the 1990s. At the end of
her “brief history of gays in TV,” she summarizes, “So, historically speaking, we have a
move from an almost totally invisibility (and when visible, almost total stereotyping) to
an increased presence, albeit a flawed, sporadic, and episodic one, to a backlash against
that increased presence that then paves the way for the more substantive 'open door' that
we are now witnessing” (65). Yet the before-and-after story embedded in her historical
overview focuses almost entirely on denotative representations of queerness and accepts
the binary categories of “visible” vs. “invisible” as the basis of this discourse. Walters
makes one passing reference to potential “subtext” in the “best friends” sitcom Katie and
Allie (1984-1989) and one reference to the camp sensibilities of the prime-time soap
Dynasty (1981-1989), but otherwise, connotative queerness doesn't exist for Walters. Yet
even if one were to focus only on those representations that are considered denotative, a
rich history unfolds. The events that took place at the Stonewall Inn and the subsequent
formation of the gay liberation movement received a great deal of mainstream media
coverage; even before then, TV news reports dealt with the issue of homosexuality
(Benshoff and Griffin, 130). The AIDS crisis during the 1980s also led to numerous
newspaper and television reports investigating gay life and communities. If major news
55
outlets as well as the aforementioned TV dramas and comedies engage with queer
subjects, how can Walters insist that queerness was “almost totally” invisible before
1990? Further, in addition to these denotative representations, many of the connotative
devices used in queer cinematic coding, as well as codes more specific to TV, are also at
work in television. The worlds of homosocial sitcoms such as Katie and Allie, Three's
Company (1977-1984), and Laverne and Shirley (1976-1983) are ripe with queer
meanings—to the point, for instance, where singular episodes featuring mistaken-identity
plots (when the main characters are perceived as gay, which gives them a chance to
articulate their heterosexuality) have the task of (unsuccessfully) containing all the queer
possibilities offered through the shows' diegeses (Doty, Making Things Perfectly Queer,
43).
But even more direct links can be established between queer cinematic coding and
current television. Smallville (2001-present), for example, a show detailing the youth of
Superman, features recurring appearances of genetically mutated “freaks” that lead the
entire ensemble of main characters to wonder whether or not they might be “freaks” as
well (and at this point, all of them have discovered that they, in fact, are). The articulation
of difference via the “freak” metaphor is easy to discern here, and the long-standing
equation of the supernatural with non-normative sexualities, as well as the dialogue that
frames being a “freak” in terms that compare it to closeted homosexuality, firmly embed
queerness at the center of Smallville's diegesis.
Considering all this evidence, it is simply incorrect to say that queerness was
“largely” absent from television until recently. In fact, I would suggest that the “explosion
56
of gay visibility” during the 1990s is a cementation of one form of queer visibility as the
(only) form of queer visibility. From this narrow point of view, queer visibility becomes
compressed into gay and lesbian characters and/or plots that explicitly deal with gay and
lesbian lives: categories that have specific boundaries and can be opposed to heterosexual
characters and storylines. In contrast, as I mentioned earlier, connotative queer presences
aren't as easily contained or defined: like the supernatural and “freakish” presences with
which they were often associated in Hollywood films, they can appear anywhere at any
moment, including commercial television. Thus, while the proliferation of gay and
lesbian characters on TV during the 1990s made queerness tangible and undeniable, it
can also be read as an attempt to limit how queerness can manifest itself on television,
and it gives the illusion that anyone and anything outside of those marked characters or
storylines is safely heterosexual. From this point of view, the developments of the 1990s
aren't quite as hopeful as, for example, the cover story of Entertainment Weekly suggested
when it announced that entertainment had come out of the closet—though the image of
the closet is perhaps the perfect choice for these developments as it draws attention to
some of the screening processes that regulate queer visibility and divide it into “visible”
and “invisible” halves.
But it is not only connotative queer significations that are screened out of the
stories told about the “gay 90s.” The importance of whiteness in the screening of the
closet that enables these “new” queer representations doesn't play a role in either
Entertainment Weekly's nor Susanna Walter's account of the “explosion of gay visibility”
despite the fact that most of their examples feature white gay and lesbian characters or
57
storylines. This is curious because the whiteness of those films and TV shows that are
most frequently analyzed in accounts of the “gay 90s” is nearly blinding—for example,
programs such as Ellen, Will&Grace, or Queer as Folk center on the lives of white
people, yet this is rarely included as factor in discussing what kind of queer visibility is
being represented there.14 To once more return to the metaphor of the screen, one realizes
that it is the whiteness of the characters that their various sexualities are projected upon,
rendering it as seemingly nothing more than the surface on which negotiations
surrounding queer and straight sexualities take place. But, as I elaborated before (and will
elaborate even further in Chapter 3 and 4), screening queerness always also includes
moments of obfuscation, and in this case, it is the significance of race that is obscured.
By reinscribing whiteness as that racial category which doesn't have to explain itself,
these programs continue the project of representing race and sexuality as unrelated social
formations. Consequently, the persistence of whiteness in these programs is not simply or
merely indicative of a failure to be more inclusive on the part of producers and networks,
or a perpetuation of television's racial politics. Rather, whiteness becomes a necessary
component of this particular expression of queer visibility.
Towards Homonationalism
A reconsideration of celebrating the “gay '90s,” and its racialized underpinnings,
becomes a particularly pressing matter considering what, in describing our current
political and cultural landscape, Lisa Duggan refers to as the “new homonormativity.”
14
Of course there are some notable exceptions here, both in terms of scholarly analysis—Rebecca Claire
Beirne's essay on Queer As Folk comes to mind here—and in terms of programming—for example, The L
Word, The Wire, Oz, and a range of reality TV programs such as The Real World feature queers of color.
58
Homonormativity comprises “a politics that does not contest dominant heteronormative
assumptions and institutions but upholds and sustains them while promising the
possibility of a demobilized gay constituency and a privatized, depoliticized gay culture
anchored in domesticity and consumption” (179). In other words, the homonormative
describes non-heterosexual identifications and ways of life that intersect with
heterosexual ones in ways that don't challenge the overarching demands of
heteronormativity. As examples of homonormative politics, Duggan lists groups and
individuals that rose to prominence during the 1990s, such as the Log Cabin Republicans
and the writings by gay conservatives such Bruce Bawer and Andrew Sullivan. Although
there is, of course, some debate about this, certain gay rights organizations, such as the
Human Rights Campaign, might also fall under this banner. As Shane Phelan observes,
“[t]heir membership, agenda, and strategies are resolutely white, middle-class, and
assimilationist” (100), suggesting that, even though we might imagine gay and lesbian
political activism to pose a challenge to the general social order (perhaps due to the leftleaning history of these politics, or because they are consistently portrayed as such by
their opponents), it will not always include that. In fact, advocacy carried out under the
banner of gay and lesbian identity politics might only represent a fraction of those who
identify as gay or lesbian.
It is this rendering visible of a particular kind of queer identity that frames the
alleged explosion of gay visibility in the media during the same decade. In fact,
homonormativity and the celebration of denotative queer media images as the most
“progressive” kind of queer visibility go hand in hand.15 For example, the emphasis on
15
In this context, it is interesting to consider Jasbir Puar's observation that “queer visibility also functions
59
domesticity and consumption that Duggan singles out as characteristic of
homonormativity lends itself to an integration of gay and lesbian representations into the
familial and commercial world of network TV. Indeed, the insistence on a clear division
between denotative and connotative queer representations feeds into the project of
recognizing only homonormative queer representations as significant, or even as the only
forms of queer visibility.
Homonormative politics and representations become particularly suspicious after
the events of 9/11. Given those events and their aftermath, in recent years,
homonormative efforts have been yoked to a patriotic agenda. This “homonationalism,”
as Jasbir Puar puts it, allows gays and lesbians of a certain class, race, and lifestyle to be
symbolically included in the nation—symbolically, of course, because this inclusion
doesn't erase inequalities in terms of access to certain rights (“Mapping,” 68). The
underpinning of this inclusion is the opposition of the acceptable (straight or gay) subject
to the abject subject, often embodied in the figure of the terrorist. Queerness and
whiteness merge to produce proud American subjects that subscribe to discourses of
American exceptionalism and diversity and are positioned in opposition to racialized,
queer others (Terrorist Assemblages, 2). This move towards homonationalism is
prominently echoed and advocated in TV programming that relies on whiteness as a
screen for the production of queer visibility (ABC's program Brothers&Sisters, which I
analyze in-depth in Chapter 4, comes to mind as the clearest example). Consequently, the
longstanding connection between heterosexuality and the nation that had disallowed
as marking of a moment of 'real' and definitive sexual subjectivity” (“Transnational Configurations of
Desire,” 178). In other words, only denotative representations of queerness are deemed “real” whereas
those which are “merely” connotative are dismissed.
60
identifiable queers as part of its imagined community is no longer as tenacious as
previously assumed (Berlant, 19). This doesn't mean that heteronormativity is suddenly
suspended, but rather that other concerns—particularly surrounding race and religion—
have become so pressing that the demand to be heterosexual can be momentarily
suspended in some cases. If particular gays and lesbians can still fit the remaining
requirements that are tied to the heteronormative, such as a specific racial and class
hierarchy or a specific model of the family and of long-term partnerships, they can be
symbolically included in the nation.
Situating the screening of race and queerness in a broader context conveys the
urgency of rethinking how to analyze and understand the homonormative versions of
queer media representations. This urgency becomes particularly obvious when
considering the flip side of the screening of race and queerness: not only does whiteness
underwrite queer representations, but queerness is drawn into the project of maintaining
white hegemony. In other words, homonormative queerness must be white in order to be
integrated into the heteronormative framework of the nation. The “whiteness” in question
here transcends a discourse of racial markers; rather, as Puar observes, it “functions to
mark concluding impulses of a linear modernist telos of progress and development
characterized by the 'arrival' of the subject often through class, educational, and income
status” (“Transnational Configurations of Desire,” 178). This type of what one could call
symbolic whiteness thus functions in tandem with homonormativity: the discourse of
homonationalism constructs queerness and racial others in such a way that it allows even
those who nominally do not fit the demands of heteronormativity and whiteness to be
61
included in the nation, while at the same time allowing the United States to appear as a
nation that embraces a diverse, multicultural population. In light of these developments,
the importance of recognizing the connection between whiteness and queerness, race and
sexuality, when it comes to analyzing queer media representations becomes a crucial task.
Moreover, I argue that this normative discourse of queer visibility has been in the making
for longer than either Duggan or Puar presume. While Puar locates the shift towards
homonationalism after 9/11, and Duggan mostly discusses the 1990s when it comes to
homonormativity, my analysis emphasizes the important recognition that the discourse of
queer visibility, as it has developed since at least 1969, has contributed the stepping
stones for the various screening processes that characterize the current state of queerness.
Indeed, by tracing out the ways in which whiteness has been a crucial factor in the
facilitation of the so-called explosion of gay visibility in the 1990s, I tease out the
moments that lay the groundwork of homonationalism which comes into full force during
the post-2001 “war on terror.”
These insights about the various screening processes that influence the ways in
which queerness manifests itself in society are crucial to a comprehensive mapping of the
discourse of queer visibility. They once again underline that visibility is an unstable,
contested category that is historically and culturally specific. Furthermore, as this brief
discussion of the central role that whiteness plays in facilitating certain types of queer
media representations during the 1990s shows, one of the most contested social sites in
which queerness manifests itself is the media; indeed, it is film and television that have
long had a decisive impact on how Americans understand queer identities. Consequently,
62
a diversification in analyzing the various ways in which queer visibility can manifest
itself in film and on TV is an urgent project and much needed intervention in the
screening of the closet. An analysis that demonstrates how denotative representations
stand alongside connotative representations, even in the same film or TV show, that looks
across genres, that takes both form and content into consideration—indeed, that undoes
these very divisions—and that recognizes the crucial role that race plays in queer
visibility produces a more thorough mapping of the discourse of queer visibility. This
mode of analysis also makes it possible to link current and past modes of queer
representations so as to underline that queerness has always existed in the midst of media
representations. The following chapters undertake such an analysis and thus offer a new
way of understanding and conceptualizing the relationship between visibility, sexuality,
race, subjectivity, politics, and representation.
CHAPTER 2
Towards the “Gay 90s:” Redefining Queer Visibility Through the Lens of AIDS
The dramatic increase in queer visibility did not begin with the gays-in-the
military issue, of course, but with AIDS. For all our attempts to become
visible in the years after Stonewall, nothing we were able to do for
ourselves ensured our visibility so much as the horrible crisis that beset
our communities in the early 1980s. It goes without saying that that
visibility came at a terrible cost, the cost of hundreds of thousands ill,
dying, and dead. But the cost is not only in lives but in the sort of visibility
we achieved. (Crimp, Melancholia and Moralism, 278)
Douglas Crimp makes two important observations regarding queer visibility: one, that it
surfaced most strongly in the American cultural imagination during the AIDS crisis, and,
as is commonly thought, not after Stonewall or during the so-called “gay 90s;” and two,
that the usual story about AIDS and the GLBT community, namely that it was a tragedy
which ultimately managed to get (heterosexual) Americans to reconsider their attitudes
towards GLBT concerns, needs to be interrogated. In many ways, the impact of
HIV/AIDS on queer identities, sexualities, and discourses forms the focal point of the
thirty years I investigate in this dissertation. Reactions to AIDS within the gay
community led to a radical reimagination of the type of “liberation” that the Stonewall
riots initiated, on the one hand, and laid the foundation for the alleged “explosion of gay
visibility” during the 1990s, on the other.
This chapter has three parts that deliberately overlap. The first part focuses on the
language and images that emerges in press and TV reports about AIDS, rendering HIV
63
64
and AIDS visible in types and metaphors in the cultural imagination; the second part
addresses activist responses to mainstream AIDS discourses; and the final part lays out
how the disarticulation of gay identity and gay sexuality in light of the AIDS crisis was
crucial for making the so-called “explosion of gay visibility” in the 1990s possible. The
three sections cover similar ground from different angles in order to underline the
complex intersections of queer visibility and AIDS and to show how profoundly ideas of
queer identities and sexuality changed throughout the 1980s. Cindy Patton explains this
type of exploration best when she says, “Here, in the landscape of the HIV epidemic, we
will discover vast tracks of barren land, territories whose existence remains unspoken,
perhaps even—for the time being—unspeakable” (Inventing AIDS, 3). Patton's vivid
invocation of the co-existence of speech and silence and of chartered and unchartered
territories underlines the significance of discourse (in its most literal definition as speech
and in its more abstract meaning of media images, cultural protocols, regulatory
mechanisms) and of geography (especially in regard to AIDS in the 1980s, the urban
landscape of Manhattan) in understanding queer visibility within the framework of AIDS.
The weighing of speech against silence, of visibility against invisibility, of “being out”
against “staying in the closet” are deliberations that are always central to queer identities
but that come into sharp relief in ACT UP's (Aids Coalition to Unleash Power) protests.
Likewise, the struggle over geography, over the often indeterminate line of public and
private, is central to the re-zoning of queer visibility during the AIDS crisis, and plays out
most visibly in the debate over the closing of gay bathhouses and bars in Manhattan.
Choosing three overlapping angles from which to examine the AIDS crisis is also
65
a deliberate move against constructing one chronological narrative about AIDS. There is
not one story about queer visibility and AIDS, but many; these stories start and stop,
intersect and contradict one another. My intention is to provide an overview of how queer
visibility was redefined during the 1980s, ultimately leading to the particular construction
of queer visibility during the “gay '90s” but this overview necessarily remains partial
(both in terms of scope and focus).
Rendering AIDS Visible
The intersections of HIV/AIDS, non-normative sexualities, and visibility involve
complex phenomena fraught with explanations projected in hindsight upon clusters of
events and people. The competing narratives surrounding the first diagnosis of AIDS in
the United States are a good example of this pattern. For example, even the seemingly
objective assessment that doctors first diagnosed what would be called AIDS in a group
of urban gay men in 1981 already represents a decision to privilege, or render visible,
certain circumstances over others. Among the circumstances that fell to wayside as that
historical narrative solidified are the fact that these men were diagnosed with medical
conditions that only later on were brought into association with the label “AIDS”; that
similar conditions were observed in IV drug users in the 1970s, but not recognized as
indications of a potentially new virus; and that the identification of “gay men” as those
affected by these medical conditions was based on a growing recognition of something
called a “gay community,” a recognition that is an outcome of the gay liberation and gay
rights movements of the 1970s. Thus, the by now familiar assessment that urban gay men
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were the first to be diagnosed with AIDS is already based on a number of abstractions
and on a narrative imposed on divergent circumstances. This narrative emerged in press
accounts in the early 1980s and still circulates today as a short-hand “origin story” of
AIDS in America.16 The accompanying counter-narrative, mounted by AIDS activists,
that explained how the initial diagnosis of AIDS only in gay men led to homophobia
apparent in, for example, the preliminary designation of this new virus as “GRID” (GayRelated Immunodeficiency) and in the speculation that the “gay lifestyle” had brought
this virus into existence is also based on a retroactively constructed narrative. While the
activist narrative highlights how longstanding cultural associations among non-normative
sexualities, deviance, and disease shaped the initial assessment of what would be called
HIV/AIDS, it also relies on the understanding that gay men were the first to be affected
by the virus.
Instead of considering these two narratives—the one emerging in the mainstream
press and the one popularized by activists—as competing for degrees of accuracy, and
instead of considering the initial perception of AIDS as “gay disease” as a homophobic
misinterpretation of “facts” (namely, that gay men were the first to be diagnosed), it is
more productive to see this “early” history of AIDS, as well as its subsequent
development, as intersection of various discourses. In this case, the perception that gay
men constituted a specific group that doctors generally considered to be “healthy” made
it possible to recognize that a repetition of unusual infectious diseases in these men was
forming a pattern, rather than being merely a strange circumstance based on already
16
See, for example, “Hysterical Blindness.” Advocate, Issue 983 (October 4th, 2007), 64; “The State of
AIDS, 25 Years After the First, Quiet Mentions.” The New York Times (June 5, 2006).
67
compromised health, as with the cases on “junkie pneumonia” in IV-drug users (Patton,
Inventing AIDS, 27). What emerges most strongly from this example is the overlaps
between “cultural ideas” about gay men and about drug users, on the one hand, and
“medical facts” about diseases and public health on the other. These overlaps are then put
into sharper focus via established regimes of “seeing” in the sciences and the media, both
of which are institutions occupied by the pursuit of discovering—or at least narrating—
the “truth.” In other words, “AIDS” is not simply a medical or public health crisis that is
also a cultural or epistemological crisis, but it is always a medical and an epistemological
crisis to the point that the two are too entwined to separate. Recognizing that it is
impossible to separate the “medical” or “scientific” from the “cultural” dimensions of
AIDS, Douglas Crimp observes:
[This recognition] shatters the myth so central to liberal views of the
epidemic: that there are, on the one hand, the scientific facts about AIDS,
and, on the other hand, ignorance or misrepresentation of those facts
standing in the way of rational response . . . AIDS does not exist apart
from the practices that conceptualize it, represent it, and respond to it. We
know AIDS only in and through those practices. (“Cultural Analysis,
Cultural Activism,” 28)
Consequently, an assessment of the ways in which AIDS relates to non-normative
sexualities and identifications and to visibility must thus not merely involve a cataloging
of how homophobic media representations and political debates acerbated the AIDS crisis
and skewed ideas circulating about gay men in particular (even if such associations can
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and should be noted); it also necessitates charting the ways in which already existing
notions of queer visibility and non-normative sexualities were reexamined and redefined
through the lens of AIDS.
One way in which older notions of queer visibility served as basis for narrating
the emerging story about AIDS and gay men was the media’s employment of a set of
terms that seem objective, even based on “scientific” insights, but that perpetuated ideas
that linked sexual deviancy and disease. A 1981 New York Times article addressing the
unusually high occurrence of Kaposi's Sarcoma in gay men (an occurrence that becomes
part of the “origin story” of AIDS in the U.S.) goes to great lengths to suggest that
“deviant” sexual practices consisting of “multiple and frequent sexual encounters with
different partners” led to a weakened immune system which then allowed for the
manifestation of Kaposi's Sarcoma (Altman, “Rare Cancer,” A20). As this example
shows, the terminology frequently repeated in media reports addressing the “facts” about
HIV and AIDS contains more than the ability to describe a new virus and a new disease.
Rather, it sets up a connection between non-normative sexual practices and the spread of
HIV that becomes a staple in the discussion and representation of AIDS (and eventually
becomes a crucial component in paving the way for the “explosion” of “gay visibility” in
the 1990s).
This correlation also leads to the imaginary divide between a “general population”
of white heterosexual Americans who remain mostly unaffected by AIDS and a number
of “risk groups” that includes those who are most at risk of simultaneously being affected
by AIDS and of “spreading” HIV to the “general population.” Thus, while the term
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“general population” seems to imply “every American,” it is actually employed in media
and political discourse as designation for an imaginary group of heterosexual Americans
whose normative sexual practices have kept HIV infections at bay—unless, that is, they
are unknowingly infected by members of “risk groups,” i.e. those associated with nonnormative “life styles” or sexual practices.17 The standard repertoire of cited risk groups
are gay men, bisexuals, drug users, and, in the early 1980s, Haitians.18 The opposition of
a “general population” to “risk groups” furthermore suggests—falsely, of course—that
one group engages in fundamentally different sexual practices than others and that HIV
infection can be contained (or spread) on the basis of assumed membership in either a
“risk group” or the “general population.” This notion of containment becomes so
entrenched that, even as late as 1989, an editorialist in the New York Times can suggest
that “[t]he AIDS virus can be heterosexually transmitted to the regular partners of
bisexual men and addicts, but is generally not spreading beyond these groups” (“Why
Make AIDS Worse Than It Is,” A22).
The idea of “risk groups” in the context of AIDS has served to marginalize
further, yet also to bring under greater scrutiny, groups of people already perceived to be
outside of the imaginary “general population,” and not, as the discourse of epidemiology
17
For more on how the dichotomy of “general population” vs “risk groups” shapes AIDS discourse, see
Patton, Inventing AIDS, 103f; Watney, “The Spectacle of AIDS,” 73. For an excellent discussion of
the moralist underpinning of seemingly neutral key phrases in mainstream media coverage of HIV/AIDS,
see Jan Zita Grover, “AIDS: Keywords.”
18
Consider the following examples: “It first seemed that the new and often deadly disease called AIDS was
limited to a few groups—homosexual men, intravenous drug users, Haitians, and hemophiliacs and others
who receive blood transfusions” (Biddle and Slade, “A Wider Risk of AIDS Feared,” 1983); “Most cases
have involved male homosexuals, intravenous drug users and people from Haiti” (Altman, “Research
Traces AIDS in 6 of 7 Female Partners,” 1983); “At present, the established risk groups are homosexuals,
intravenous drug users, hemophiliacs, and Haitians” (Altman, “Heterosexuals and AIDS,” C1, 1985);
“Those at risk include homosexual and bisexual males; intravenous drug users; those from foreign
countries where AIDS is believed to be endemic” (Collins, “AIDS Cases and Risk Groups” B4, 1985).
70
suggests, to contact and inform these groups about transmission and infection (a course of
action that would involve safe sex education, which at least the federal government was
not ready to endorse for a long time, Grover 28). Several articles in independent gay
magazines such as Christopher Street discuss precisely this marginalization as early as
1981, urging gay men to resist the imbrication of morality and science. For example,
Lawrence Mass urges, “it's probably that some STD's that may be related to the current
epidemic are being spread at the baths, but not because of the baths per se”
(“Understanding the Epidemic,” 25, emphasis not mine). Of course it is precisely the
bathhouses that come under attack as points of origin for the spread of AIDS (for more
articles that discuss the alignment of disease and deviancy, see Mass, “Cancer Signs” and
Lancaster, “What AIDS is Doing to Us”).
Within this context, a statement such as Undersecretary of Education Gary Bauer's
explanation for why President Reagan had not yet publicly addressed the AIDS crisis in
1985—namely, “It [the “AIDS virus”] hadn't spread into the general population yet”—
takes on an even more sinister meaning (qtd. in Grover, 23). More than a homophobic
dismissal of the significance of AIDS this comment reinforces the idea that the “general
population” of presumably heterosexual Americans is unaffected by, and perhaps even
safe from, AIDS, and that the government's primary responsibility is to said “general
population,” rather than to an insignificant “risk group” whose lifestyle exposed them to
infection. As Leo Bersani so succinctly observes, “The 'general public' is at once an
ideological construction and a moral prescription” (“Is the Rectum a Grave?”, 203).
Moreover, according those who engage in a “deviant lifestyle” the status of a risk group
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justifies scrutiny of said lifestyle—rendering visible what had previously not been widely
accessible (such as the bathhouse culture and associated sexual practices) or deeming
presumably “private” matters to be of “public” interest and concern. Perhaps the most
incisive example that comes to mind is the 1985 Bowers vs Hardwick decision, in which
the Supreme Court upheld states' right to regulate consensual sex between adults via
contested sodomy laws, but the debate about mandatory HIV testing also falls into this
category (I will discuss Bowers vs Hardwick and state regulation of sexuality and privacy
in more depth in Chapter 4). This is one of many instances that serves as reminder of how
a greater degree of visibility does not automatically translate into libratory potential but
rather may allow for more intensive regulation (which then can be dismantled and
resisted, as the activism of ACT UP shows).
In laying out the underpinnings of some of the terms that shape the way in which
AIDS has been rendered visible, I have relied in part on scientific “facts” about HIV and
AIDS, but, as previously mentioned, it is important to keep in mind that medical science
is not a bedrock of truth upon which one might construct a “neutral” or “correct”
discourse of AIDS. Perhaps more so than for other viral diseases, the specific discourse of
AIDS is full of uncertainties and struggles regarding the scientific meaning of HIV and
AIDS. As Lee Edelman summarizes:
'AIDS', in the first place, and on the most literal level, lacks a coherent
medical referent, remaining a signifier in search of the determinate
condition or conditions it would signify. A diagnostic term describing the
state in which the immune system—compromised, it is currently thought,
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through the HIV infection—can no longer ward off officially designated
opportunistic diseases. (“The Mirror and the Tank,” 94)
In other words, the definition of AIDS is so precarious that, for example, in 1991, the
Boston Globe reported on the possibility of the CDC (Center for Disease Control)
adopting a new, 14-page definition of AIDS. Yet, despite the complexity to which this
struggle for a coherent definition points, much simpler definitions of AIDS remain
dominant in the popular cultural imagination. In other words, the relationship between the
signifier “AIDS” and the signified medical condition it supposedly describes is rendered
intelligible only through a suppression of the possible multiple medical manifestations of
“AIDS” and the replacement of multiple meanings by one definition. Thus, “AIDS” is an
abstracted designation for an array of meanings that are all largely unstable. Even on the
level of science and medicine, AIDS is consequently part of a discourse of contested
visibilities in which certain significations are privileged over others.
This privileging of a particular “scientific” meaning of AIDS was cemented
through the establishment of narrative patterns in media reports about AIDS. These
reports created “reliable” visual representations for the varying cluster of symptoms
grouped under the label “AIDS.” Paula Treichler observes that, even as early as 1984,
when the documentary AIDS: Chapter One appeared on television, representational
shorthands were already in place to convey easily accessible meanings to viewers; among
those shorthands, Treichler names “viral images enhanced and magnified, background
music that telegraphs significance, the AIDS crisis presented as a 'puzzle' being solved by
an interdisciplinary detective team, laboratory footage shot and edited to simulate key
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moments in the chronology of AIDS (Robert Gallo phones the CD), interviews with
participants, schematic drawings of the immune system” (“Seduced and Terrorized,”
130). Familiar through frequent repetition, viewers might not question which images are
paired with which statements, Treichler argues (ibid). The linear narrative of discovery,
identification, and explanation of HIV/AIDS also obscures the decisions and
disagreements within the medical and scientific community that shaped the emergence of
the terms “HIV,” “AIDS,” and the definitions thereof.19
In addition to stabilizing the scientific meaning of AIDS via a set of visual
shorthands, television contributed significantly to shaping what Douglas Crimp has called
the genre of “portraits of PWA” (People With AIDS). Conceived as response to a call for
a more “human” portrayal of AIDS, i.e. one that shows “the people” behind the medical
“facts” of HIV and AIDS, these images pictured AIDS patients clearly marked physically
by the disease. Rather than producing a sense of shared “humanity,” the repetition of a
specific set of images used to portray PWA as alone and visibly sick ultimately served to
set them apart from the (heterosexual, HIV-negative) “general population,” which was
expected to react with sympathy at best, loathing at worst (Crimp, “Portraits of People
with AIDS,” 88; 90). Exceptions to this portrayal were the “innocent victims” of AIDS,
i.e. those who were infected by a partner or by a blood transfusion. Children, not
surprisingly, rank high among the list of innocent “victims.” As Crimp observes, “They
are so innocent that they can even be shown being comforted, hugged, and played with”
(“Portraits of People with AIDS,” 90).
19
See Treichler, p. 160f. For a more in-depth analysis of the scientific construction of AIDS, see also
Epstein, Steven. Impure Science: AIDS, Activism, and the Politics of Knowledge. University of California
Press, 1996.
74
One common feature in all portrayals—no matter if they deal with the “guilty” or
“innocent” PWA—is the representation of HIV and AIDS as a private matter, thus
obscuring the public health dimension of HIV and AIDS, specifically the government's
inaction in terms of funding and education (“Portraits of People with AIDS, 91).
Television's inability or refusal to address the public health dimensions of the AIDS crisis
is not a surprise, of course. TV's familial address to an imagined heterosexual audience
meshes most comfortably with human interest stories, and not with an indictment of
government inaction (especially because such an indictment would also force a
confrontation with how television narratives contribute to the construction and
interpretation of categories such as “risk groups,” “general population,” etc). The
declaration of AIDS as a private matter while simultaneously showing reports and
documentaries about PWAs is contradictory, and once again shows the complex ways in
which AIDS has been rendered visible.
The scientific representation of AIDS and the portrayal of PWA come together in
what Simon Watney characterizes as the “spectacle” of AIDS. This spectacle consists of a
“diptych” of images, namely, on the one side, a microscopic or digital image of the HIV
virus, and, on the other side, images of “AIDS victims” who are physically marked by
AIDS. The spectacle is put on display for an outside observer, i.e. someone who is
presumed to be part of the “general population” and thus not directly affected by AIDS,
but nevertheless “already 'knows all he needs to know' about homosexuality and AIDS,”
as Watney puts it (78, emphasis not mine). Joining the two sides in one visual discourse
stages a morality play whose principles characters are “the image of the miraculous
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authority of clinical medicine and the faces and bodies of individuals who clearly
disclose the stigmata of their guilt” (ibid). A remarkable example of this discourse of
AIDS as morality play is “The AIDS Conflict,” a 1985 Newsweek article that frames the
appeal to develop a “rational” approach to AIDS that “will do justice to both the extremes
of innocence and depravity” by contrasting the case of a seven-year old girl and a gay
man who engages in sex with frequently changing partners (17).
It is this morality play that inspires and enrages AIDS activist groups to make
media coverage one of their main targets. But these groups, most notably ACT UP, did
not simply produce “counter-narratives.” Rather, in the form of direct action, pamphlets,
graphics, and videos, they dismantled and reorganized the discourse of queer visibility
within the framework of the AIDS crisis.
ACT UP
In accounts that chart the significance and impact of AIDS on the GLBT
community, ACT UP often plays a central role. ACT UP's very visible style of activism,
always with the intention to disrupt established patterns of thought and action, represents
one instance in which the AIDS crisis forced the gay and lesbian community to come
together and push back against the homophobia embedded in media, scientific, and
government discourses of HIV/AIDS, or at least that is how the conventional story about
AIDS and ACT UP goes. While this is certainly one way to think about ACT UP's role in
the AIDS crisis, I'm more interested in, on the one hand, how ACT UP tried to redefine
what queer visibility can mean (and indeed, ACT UP is often credited in part with the
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reclaiming of the term “queer” for political and academic purposes), and, on the other
hand, how this particular type of activism fits into the discourse that leads up to the “gay
90s.” For example, for all its creativity and inventiveness, not all of ACT UP's actions
were new and radical interventions that reshaped the discourse of queer visibility; rather,
the group sometimes also relied on traditional models of identity politics. I discuss these
contradictions in my analyses of ACT UP's most famous graphic, the “SILENCE =
DEATH” poster, and their action on the twentieth anniversary of the Stonewall riots. But
before I move on to these two specific forms of protest, I want to provide a little more
background about the formation of ACT UP and the kinds of activism in which the group
engaged in the late 1980s.
On March 10, 1987, Larry Kramer, author of several plays and well-known AIDS
activist, gave a speech on AIDS as part of a monthly series at the Gay and Lesbian
Community Center in New York. He criticized both the usual suspects—the Food and
Drug administration, the National Institutes of Health, New York's health care system (or
rather, lack thereof)—and, perhaps unexpectedly, a gay organization dedicated to
education and action around HIV/AIDS, the Gay Men's Health Crisis (GMHC). In his
speech, Kramer took issue with GMHC for its too “corporate structure and service
orientation,” which supposedly made it difficult to do aggressive political activism.
Kramer asked if the assembled wanted to start a new organization “devoted solely to
political action” (Crimp and Rolston, 26). That, according to Douglas Crimp and Adam
Rolston, was the beginning moment of ACT UP, the “AIDS Coalition To Unleash
Power,” which defined itself as “a diverse, nonpartisan group united in anger and
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committed to direct action to end the global AIDS epidemic” (this definition was
frequently repeated at ACT UP meetings and reprinted on ACT UP posters). This is a
powerful account, yet as with all origin stories, it is imprecise; for example, ACT UP's
most famous logo, SILENCE = DEATH, had already been used publicly by the Silence =
Death collective for several months prior to the formation of ACT UP, indicating that
ACT UP did not initiate some of the designs with which the group is associated. But it is
certainly a compelling narrative, especially because the image of the GLBT community
rallying its forces to fight back against the backlash caused by AIDS fits so well into the
patterns of gay historiography that, perhaps not incidentally, emerged around the same
time.
The first six months of ACT UP activism were dedicated to getting treatment to
people with HIV and AIDS: “the central issue was getting AIDS treatments out of the
NIH [National Institutes of Health] and FDA [Food and Drug Administration] and into
the bodies of those who are HIV-infected” (Crimp and Rolston, 36). But ACT UP's
engagement with AIDS was not limited to battling with public health institutions over
drug trials and treatment options. Rather, the members of the group understood and
engaged AIDS as both a crisis of health and of signification. As such, ACT UP tried to
shift the terms of the debate, for example from mainstream press and politics' usage of
the phrase “AIDS victims” to “People with AIDS,” or from “dying from AIDS” to “living
with AIDS.” ACT UP used print, graphics, and video to create different images of the
AIDS crisis: images that reveal the construction of and the bias contained in mainstream
representations instead of merely opposing them. Thus, through its protests, graphics,
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texts, and videos, ACT UP insisted that it is not enough to be visible, but that this
visibility should challenge the dominant discourses of AIDS. This approach differs
significantly from, for example, the AIDS quilt that formed part of the 1992 March on
Washington. While this quilt is certainly hugely visible and significant in terms of
demonstrating the loss of life and doing important memory work, it is not a strategy that
fully challenges the signification of AIDS; rather, it reinforces the implications that PWA
are ultimately all victims—the genre of PWA is thus once again upheld and reinforced.
ACT UP quickly became (in)famous for its direct action campaigns featuring inyour-face graphics and chants that attracted media attention. In March 1987, the group's
first protest shut down Wall Street. Newsweek, among other major papers and magazines,
took note, but dismissed ACT UP (which is not mentioned by name) as just “angry
protesters” with outrageous demands (Clark and Gosnell, 24). In January 1988, ACT UP
directly challenged the mainstream media portrayal of AIDS. In their “Don't Go to Bed
with Cosmo” action, the group brought attention to the false information in an article
published in Cosmopolitan magazine. Based on “expert opinions,” most notably the one
of Robert E. Gould, a psychiatrist, the article purports that straight women are not at risk
for AIDS, not even during sex without condoms. In response, the ACT UP women's
committee organized an action at the New York offices of Cosmopolitan, handing out
condoms and informational flyers that attack the skewed information in the article. When
the national media got wind of the protest, ACT UP activists were denied access to telling
their side of the story—sometimes literally, as they were not allowed to be part of the
studio audience at the Phil Donahue Show on the day that Robert E. Gould was there as a
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guest (Crimp and Rolston, 40). In reaction to being barred from the Phil Donahue Show,
ACT UP activists produced the documentary Doctors, Liars, and Women: AIDS Activists
Say No to Cosmo. It aired on GMHC's weekly public cable access show and also
circulated at film festivals, campuses, and community centers (ibid). Crimp and Rolston
argue that “the video not only presents a counterargument to Gould's lies . . . but also
provides information on how to organize a demonstration and on the role of women in
AIDS activism, including the role of self-representation” (ibid). In its attempt to provide
information about AIDS while at the same time functioning as an activist tool, Doctors,
Liars, and Women is typical of the videos produced by various ACT UP affinity groups.20
In other words, ACT UP videos often engaged with question of representation on multiple
levels: they take apart mainstream media representations of AIDS and of ACT UP itself;
they offer a different point of view of HIV/AIDS; and they function as documentaries and
testimonials about the group's organizing efforts.
SILENCE = DEATH
A black poster featuring an inverted pink triangle and stark white letters
proclaiming SILENCE = DEATH has become ACT UP's most persistent and
recognizable legacy. The slogan SILENCE = DEATH exemplifies the ways in which
ACT UP rendered AIDS and its impact on the GLBT community visible: on the one
hand, it is unflinchingly direct, but on other hand, it has more complexity and
20
ACT UP defined “affinity group” in the following way: “A tradition of Left organizing, affinity groups
are small associations of people within activist movements whose mutual trust and shared interest allow
them to function autonomously and secretly, arrive at quick decisions by consensus, protect one another at
demonstrations, and participate as units in coordinated acts of civil disobedience” (Crimp and Rolston, 21).
80
contradictions than one might expect from a two-word phrase (or other brightly colored
and concise messages that ACT UP used over the years).
In recalling their first encounter with this graphic, people frequently insist its
meaning was “immediately apparent.” For example, Bill Olander, who later becomes the
curator of Let the Record Show, an ACT UP installation in the window at the New
Museum for Contemporary Art in New York City, observes that “[f]or anyone conversant
with this iconography, there was no question that this was a poster designed to provoke a
heightened awareness of the AIDS crisis” (Crimp, “Cultural Analysis, Cultural
Activism,” 33). Cindy Patton emphasizes that “[i]t was war zone graffiti, produced as
slick, powerful poster warning anyone in a position to understand that this was our war,”
while also remembering that “When I first saw this poster I believed it said 'Science =
Death.' I had no doubt that this was what I read” (Inventing AIDS, 127). While perhaps
instantly recognizable, the meaning of the graphic remains unstable, slippery, and even,
in Patton's case, a candidate for misreading. Crimp and Rolston offer yet another
perspective:
SILENCE = DEATH declares that silence about the oppression and
annihilation of gay people, then and now, must be broken as a matter of
our survival . . . . But it is not merely what SILENCE = DEATH says, but
also how it looks, that gives it particular force. The power of this equation
under the triangle is the compression of its connotation into a logo, a logo
so striking that you ultimately have to ask, if you don't already know,
'What does it mean?'” (14, emphasis not mine)
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What strikes me as most significant about Crimp and Rolston's interpretation of
the graphic is not its apparent alignment with previous calls for a politics of visibility (i.e.
that becoming visible is a means to liberation from oppression), but their emphasis on the
question of signification itself. In other words, the force behind SILENCE = DEATH
does not lie exclusively or completely in what it appears to say, but in its ability to elicit
questions about possible meanings and, by extension, about how we arrive at what we
think this graphic means. Lee Edelman, Stuart Marshall, and Cindy Patton have offered
incisive critiques of these processes. I want to explore Edelman's take on the slogan and
Marshall's thoughts on the imagery to further explore the complex array of meanings
called forth by SILENCE = DEATH, and I use Patton's analysis of the slippage between
“silence” and “science” to discuss the discursive constraints within which the graphic
operates.
In “The Mirror and the Tank,” Edelman argues that AIDS is always already bound
up with homosexuality, and specifically, that the act of anal sex figures in the cultural
imagination as the “origin” of AIDS (98). Going beyond a repudiation of the
homophobia implicit in this imaginary causal chain, Edelman argues that what is at stake
here is the anxiety of maintaining a specific subject position, namely that of the active
white male heterosexual subject: “Subtended by the always excitable fantasy of threat to
this subject's agency, the originary myth linking 'AIDS' to the 'addictive' passivity of the
anus in intercourse is immobilized largely in order to affirm, and thereby to shore against
his ruins, the white male heterosexual as uniquely autonomous in his moral agency”
(101). The projection of an active/passive, top/bottom binary onto gay sex allows a
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defense of said subject position. Edelman goes on to argue that AIDS activism that insists
on a specific form of politics—Edelman briefly refers to ACT UP's direct action tactics—
and that sets itself up against a so-called “non-political” position, associated with the
presumably “narcissistic” gay male lifestyle of the late 1970s, ends up duplicating the
same active/passive split that brought about the homophobic origin story of AIDS against
which AIDS activism fights (110). In other words, sentiments within the gay community
that condemn certain sexual practices as “unsafe” and “irresponsible” in the age of AIDS
ultimately reaffirm the logic that fuels the homophobic moral panic surrounding AIDS
(Crimp makes a similar point in “Portrait of People with AIDS”). Edelman's analysis of
the larger ideological implications of AIDS rhetoric that marks itself as anti-homophobic
while at the same time advocating a normalized gay sexuality is an extremely useful
addition to similar analyses by Douglas Crimp and Patrick Moore. As I will elaborate
later on, this insight is crucial to understanding how the AIDS crisis shapes the discourse
of queer visibility in the 1990s.
However, while Edelman's basic analysis is helpful in its assessment of how
“oppositional” positions may still adhere to and are at risk of replicating larger
ideological frameworks, his take on AIDS activism overgeneralizes the different positions
and groups that make up the designation of “AIDS activism.” For example, ACT UP did
not merely oppose general discourses of AIDS but tried to show their construction.
Additionally, and more importantly, ACT UP did not participate in the moralizing
denouncement of a “narcissistic” lifestyle, as Edelman suggests.21 In fact, ACT UP
21
While Edelman never directly makes the connection between his criticism of “activism” and ACT UP in
“The Mirror and the Tank,” the fact the he mentions ACT UP as the one example of direct-action politics
makes one wonder if he isn't thinking of ACT UP all along.
83
meetings were known as cruising spots. Patrick Moore recalls, “[t]hey [the meetings]
provided a forum for socializing and cruising. But the Monday night meetings also
developed the culture of ACT UP itself, a culture that was inclusive but not intensely
competitive, highly sexual, intelligent, and chaotic” (128). Moreover, those who have
both participated in and written about ACT UP, such as Crimp and Moore, subscribe to a
sex-positive position.
While Edelman is concerned with the implications of the slogan SILENCE =
DEATH, Stuart Marshall engages with the visual component of poster. In “The
Contemporary Political Use of Gay History: The Third Reich,” Stuart Marshall analyzes
the history of the pink triangle, specifically in relation to the persecution of homosexuals
during the Nazi regime when the pink triangle was used as the concentration camp badge
to designate homosexual men. Marshall wonders why ACT UP and other gay rights
groups adopted a symbol so clearly associated with, as he puts it, “the inconceivable and
unspeakable possibility of annihilation” (68). He also briefly makes the important point
that being visible and identifiable will not always be a productive or appropriate choice.
Referring back to an interview with a gay man who survived the Nazi regime precisely
because he did not reveal his sexual identity, Marshall argues that silence was a survival
strategy: “SILENCE = SURVIVAL” (70). Marshall doesn't explore this point further, but
I want to underline the importance of historical contextualization for the persistent call to
come out in both radical and “assimilated” queer and gay politics—a call that does not
always heed the specific circumstances of a queer person's life and times. The
relationship between speech and silence, visibility and invisibility is much more complex
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than the demands of the slogans “come out wherever you are” and “SILENCE =
DEATH” make them out to be.
Additionally, yet conversely to a moment in time when visibility is not an option,
there are moments and groups of people for whom “invisibility” is not an option. In other
words, the option of keeping one's sexuality private is not always available to everyone in
this country, as Jasbir K. Puar demonstrates in her analysis of the situation of non-U.S.
citizens in American detention facilities after the events of 9/11. Detainees and their
families do not have access to the same kind of privacy that is afforded U.S. citizens—for
them, keeping their intimate and familial lives “private” is not an available option (see
Terrorist Assemblages, 141-151, and my analysis in Chapter 4). The frequent calls to
register or physically mark HIV-positive people in the late 1980s are another example of
how voluntary “coming out” can turn into a privileged choice not available for everyone.
New York Times Columnist William F. Buckley demanded in 1986, “[e]veryone detected
with AIDS should be tattooed in the upper forearm, to protect common needles users, and
on the buttocks to prevent victimization of other homosexuals” (A27). If calls such as
Buckley's had turned into laws, the decision of whether or not to be visibly queer would
have remained the privilege of those are HIV-negative. Buckley’s editorial furthermore
underlines the centrality of language to constructing a causal connection between
queerness and AIDS: in Buckley's imagination, AIDS spreads in and through “risk
groups” such as drug users and gay men; infection with AIDS is a form of
“victimization;” and sex between men is reduced to anal sex, a sexual activity so
dangerous that it requires a warning label.
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Regarding the pink triangle, Marshall argues that AIDS activists used it “to
produce a specific ideological effect,” namely recalling genocide at the hand of the state.
Yet the implied analogy makes Marshall uncomfortable because it is historically
imprecise. He also objects to its usage because it obscures the various processes through
which AIDS becomes a moralizing discourse that regulates queer desire by constructing
differences between “guilty” and “innocent” PWAs. “We cannot understand this [process]
if we focus on genocide metaphors,” Marshall observes (87). Moreover, he is concerned
that the use of this symbol obscures differences among PWAs because it projects
“political cohesion” around a specific identity (i.e. that of gay men). These points are
worthy of consideration, yet, like Edelman, Marshall fails to recognize that SILENCE =
DEATH does not signify one coherent or stable meaning. Specifically in this case, it is
not the symbol of identity-driven politics, as Marshall presumes. From the beginning,
ACT UP was concerned with issues related to AIDS that went beyond advocating on
behalf of one specific minority group (ACT UP's fight for clean needle exchange in New
York City is perhaps the best example). Indeed I would argue that ACT UP began to
implement exactly the kind of representation that Marshall calls for, namely one that
“must be polysemic, multiple, and perhaps, when it speaks about difference,
contradictory” (89).
It is these contradictory and polysemic meanings in SILENCE = DEATH that
Cindy Patton tries to unravel when she analyzes her own initial misreading of the slogan
as “Science = Death.” She insists that this misreading is no mistake because both science
and silence have been part of the construction and destruction of gay and lesbian
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identities since “homosexuality” emerged as category of identification in the late 19th
century: “once the closet, now media blackouts; once psychiatry, now internal medicine,”
Patton summarizes (Inventing AIDS, 127). Both “oblivion” (i.e. the initial willful
ignorance of AIDS on the part of mainstream media and politics that amounts to an
imposition of silence), and “diagnosis” (i.e. the interjection of medical science in the life
of a HIV-positive person that renders silence impossible), are threats not only to PWA,
but also to those perceived to be “at risk” of HIV infection (ibid). As such, both silence
and speech are equally dangerous. While Patton grants that silence can be a privilege—
the “safety of camouflage,” in her words—it can also mean complicity in the construction
of homophobic discourses, particularly when it comes to assessments of AIDS (Inventing
AIDS, 129). Speaking out against these constructions is not always an act of rebellion,
however. Rendering one's self into speech via the “new coercive technology of
confession” embedded in the HIV antibody test ultimately also serves to uphold the
disciplinary mechanisms of the state (via registration of HIV status, for example) and of
the scientific pursuit of the “truth” about AIDS (Patton mentions that scientists elicited
and relied upon PWA talking about their sexual practices to establish the cause(s) of
AIDS, Inventing AIDS, 130). Yet Patton seems to favor speech—speech that doesn't allow
itself to be contained in either scientific protocols or in television's human interest stories,
but rather draws attention to the ways in which PWA are variably rendered as nonexistent, as sources of scientific information, as “risk groups,” or as sympathetic
“victims” while at the same time refusing to comply with these categorizations (131).
While SILENCE = DEATH evokes and invites a range of interpretations
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regarding the meanings of silence and speech, and of visibility and invisibility, as well as
their connection and possibilities for political organizing, other ACT UP actions and
graphics did not leave as much room for multivalent interpretations. The slogans and
graphics that ACT UP used for “Stonewall 20,” an action to commemorate the twentieth
anniversary of the Stonewall riots, engage in what one might call a very “traditional”
politics of visibility that emphasizes coming out as the central building block of gay
identities. Aside from providing yet another affirmation of the Stonewall Riots as the
originary moment of gay activism—“This year [1989] we celebrated the 20th anniversary
of the Stonewall Riots, the opening volley in the formation of the gay liberation
movement,” Crimp and Rolston observe in passing—a number of contradictions emerge
around ACT UP's self-defined relationship to gay and lesbian history and to “coming out”
as politically significant action (98). For example, Crimp and Rolston underline that as
members of ACT UP, “we see ourselves both as direct heirs to the early radical tradition
of gay liberation and as rejuvenators of the gay movement, which has in the intervening
decades become an assimilationist civil rights lobby” (ibid). The assessments Crimp and
Rolston make here are imprecise. First of all, the tradition of direct action that ACT UP
follows traces back, in part, to the media “zaps” staged by the GAA (Gay Activist
Alliance). The GAA is actually a group that split off from the GLF (Gay Liberation Front,
i.e. the group founded after the Stonewall Riots) because they thought the GLF was too
ineffective due to its lack of organizational structure. In engaging with the mainstream
media on the basis of pointing out “inaccurate” representations of gays and lesbians, the
GAA pursued a less radical agenda than the GLF. Also, Crimp and Rolston's
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condemnation of the “assimilationist civil rights lobby” is rather unproductive. The kind
of activism undertaken by groups such as the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force is
certainly not entirely useless, even if their lobbying targets and advocates mostly on
behalf of the white middle class, and, interestingly enough, critics of ACT UP use the
same strategy to undermine ACT UP's validity and radicalism: they observe that members
of ACT UP are mostly white middle-class men.
What makes Crimp and Rolston's imprecise observations so interesting, however,
is that they constitute an intervention in the narration of historical events in order to
bolster their own position as heirs and current advocates of the gay liberation movement
—much like the GLF shaped the perception of the events at the Stonewall Inn to lend
substance to the emerging gay liberation movement. In addition to aligning itself with the
“radical tradition” of gay liberation, ACT UP also produced a booklet about the history of
political gay and lesbian activism, namely A His&Her Story of Queer Activism, thus
further strengthening ACT UP’s position in the historical development of GLBT
organizing since Stonewall (note the use of the term queer in the title of their history).
Stonewall 20
On the anniversary of the Stonewall Riots, June 29, 1989, ACT UP staged an
alternative pride march to the official parade. Instead of following the traditional route
from Central Park to Greenwich Village, ACT UP chose to make its way along the
inverse path, i.e. from Greenwich Village to Central Park. The defiance of the parade
route laid out by those who ACT UP perhaps perceived as the assimilationist faction of
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the gay and lesbian community was grounded in yet another emphasis on not only
reclaiming, but rendering visible, radical gay history: “One piece of history uncovered by
that effort [i.e. the compilation of His&Her Story of Queer Activism] was the symbolism
inherent in the route of gay pride marches. In the early 1970s, we had marched out of the
gay ghetto, up Sixth Avenue, and into Central Park for a militant rally. We had no police
permits; we simply took to the streets and proclaimed our right to be everywhere” (Crimp
and Rolston, 100). Again, this interpretation of the early gay pride parades is contradicted
by other interpretations. The Christopher Street Liberation Day Parade didn't take place
without permits—the parade was officially permitted (see reproduction of the permit in
Becoming Visible: An Illustrated History of Lesbian and Gay life in Twentieth-Century
America, 16). Also, the declaration that “we simply took to the streets” suggests that the
parade was a spontaneous event when it was the outcome of months of careful planning
on both an organizational and symbolic level (as I discussed in Chapter 1). What is once
again most interesting about this assertion is the way in which Crimp and Rolston's
proclamation of “the right to be everywhere” speaks less to a historic precedent than to an
important and consistent feature of ACT UP actions and to their politics of visibility,
namely ACT UP's frequent take-overs of significant public spaces such as Grand Central
Station or Wall Street.
During the parade, ACT UP members wore T-shirts with the slogan “I am out
therefore I am” on them. Perhaps the declaration “I am out” is a marker of the passage of
time: it is no longer necessary to encourage oneself and others to “come out,” as the gay
liberation movement's most famous slogan, “come out, come out, wherever you are,” did.
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Rather, one simply is “out,” and this position defines who one “is.” The declaration of “I
am out therefore I am” aligns with the idea of coming out as libratory act and with the
interpretation of the failure to come out as betrayal, notions that solidified over the next
few years. The perception of coming out as some sort of queer duty becomes most
obvious during the waves of celebrity outings during the early 1990s, a practice that was
initiated by ACT UP member Michael Signorelli in his column for OutWeek. In its
insistence on coming out as key to the constitution of subjectivity, “I am out therefore I
am” differs significantly from SILENCE = DEATH in its incitement to visibility. While
the Stonewall 20 slogan figures coming out as an individual act, structured around
personal experience, SILENCE = DEATH is a predominantly anonymous, collective
action of raising attention to structures of power and discrimination. SILENCE = DEATH
also emphasizes process—the process of speaking, of discourse—not a one time occasion
of “coming out.” In both cases, however, a similar kind of hope of change is pinned onto
a public declaration.
As part of their description and analysis of Stonewall 20, Douglas Crimp and
Adam Rolston (both former ACT UP members) explain the design process for the “I am
out therefore I am” T-shirt. The T-shirt is another example of ACT UP's use of
“appropriation art,” i.e. the construction of a piece of art out of pre-existing images or
artworks with the goal of abdicating claims to originality and artistic “genius” in an effort
to underline that “the 'unique individual' is a fiction, that our very selves are socially and
historically determined through preexisting images, discourses, and events” (Crimp and
Rolston, 18). The emphasis on a criticism of the “unique individual” is important in the
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context of the “I am out therefore I am” T-shirt. As I elaborated above, the slogan centers
on the act of self-creation through the act of coming out—not exactly a denial of unique
individualism. Crimp and Rolston go on to observe:
For the 20th anniversary of Stonewall the statement [i.e. publicly
announcing one's sexual identity] was given a new graphic emblem, ACT
UP's T-shirt with an image appropriated from artist Barbara Kruger.
Rewriting Descartes’ cogito, Kruger took a swipe at consumer-determined
identity: I SHOP, THEREFORE I AM. Our graphic played a Foucauldian
twist on hers, turning the confession of sexual identity into a declaration of
sexual politics: I AM OUT, THEREFORE I AM. (102)
The idea of the “I am out therefore I am” T-shirt as an appropriation of an anticonsumerist artwork playing on Descartes already offers enough of a referential
entanglement without the reference to Foucault, which appears without further
elaboration. The specific way in which Crimp and Rolston draw on Foucault's theory of
the confession is curious indeed as their interpretation does not correspond to the ways in
which this passge in The History of Sexuality, Vol.1 is most frequently interpreted. After
all, in Foucault's theory, the confession is not an admittance of sexual preferences (in the
classic understanding of “coming out”), but rather the production of subjectivity via the
construction of sexuality. In other words, according to Foucault, one does not reveal a
previously existing understanding of oneself as gay or lesbian, but rather the quest for the
“truth” about oneself that is pursued during the confession leads to a formation of
subjectivity in the moment of confessing, with the constitution of sexuality as a subject's
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perceived innermost “truth.”
Considering that ACT UP's politics are often brought into connection with the
emergence of queer theory—a body of theory that heavily draws on Foucault—this
(perhaps willful?) misreading of Foucault once again draws attention to the construction
of narratives about events and ideas. Stonewall 20 tried to recapture the perceived radical
spirit of the gay liberation movement with the goal of inspiring AIDS activists and
perhaps also to remind one another of the vitality of the gay community, a reminder that
seems crucial at a moment when both people and institutions are at risk of annihilation
due to the AIDS crisis. Looking back at his interpretation of the “I am out therefore I am”
T-shirt and other ACT UP graphics, Douglas Crimp states, “The AIDS activist graphics I
wrote about in AIDS Demographics, for example, were produced for specific
demonstrations, were about local issues of the moment, and thus have no meaning today
except as mementos, documents, or examples of the type of work that might be made for
other times and places” (“De-Moralizing Representations of AIDS,” 264). I respectfully
disagree with Crimp on the perceived lack of the usefulness of ACT UP graphics. In
addition to inspiring current forms of activism, they also provide insights into how queer
visibility was understood during the AIDS crisis and into which kinds of narratives
emerged around this visibility.22 These insights are crucial to understanding how the
discourse of queer visibility evolved and changed over the years.
The graphics and interpretations surrounding SILENCE = DEATH and Stonewall
20 show that while ACT UP attacked the predominant representations of gays and
22
For examples of current activism inspired by ACT UP, see From ACT UP to the WTO: Urban Protest
and Community Building in the Era of Globalization., an anthology edited by Benjamin Shepard and
Ronald Hayduk.
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lesbians that were circulating in the media at the time, they nevertheless also enacted a
politics structured around visibility, thus emphasizing and reaffirming the centrality of
visibility to queer identities. The uneven meanings that emerge around SILENCE =
DEATH and Stonewall 20 lay a claim to visibility, but one in which visibility is not fixed,
but rather adaptable to different circumstances. While the insistence to speak out remains,
what will be said and to whom changes, especially over time. ACT UP was certainly
successful in making its voice heard in many ways—in capturing the media's attention, in
gaining a few political victories, and in securing a place in gay and lesbian history. But as
Crimp and Rolston ask, “Such success can ensure visibility, but visibility to whom?” (19).
It is such questions of visibility, for which audiences and under which protocols, that
become crucial to understanding the transition between the “dark” times of AIDS in the
1980s and the “explosion of gay visibility” during the 1990s.
The “end” of AIDS via the normalization of AIDS
By the early 1990s, a decade after the first diagnoses of what would be called
AIDS, the AIDS crisis was no longer perceived as an emergency, but had transitioned
into a “permanent disaster,” discussed as such in the same breath as drug abuse,
homelessness, and poverty. This transition from emergency to chronic social problem
represents the first way in which AIDS was “normalized;” it becomes part of a list of
social issues that are too overwhelming to be resolved and can thus be ignored (Crimp,
“Right On, Girlfriend!,” 174).
At the same time, the film Philadelphia (Jonathan Demme, 1993), a major
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Hollywood production with an A-list cast consisting of Tom Hanks and Denzel
Washington, emerged and turned the spotlight on the impact of the AIDS crisis. What
may seem paradoxical at first sight—the AIDS crisis fading into the white noise of
constant social problem while at the same time being rendered highly visible through a
mainstream Hollywood film—are actually two phenomena that go hand-in-hand. The
press lauded Philadelphia as daring and critical, as if this film was the first time that
“America” was confronted with the AIDS crisis. Such a portrayal denies an entire decade
of media representations and AIDS activism that significantly contributed to the image of
AIDS presented in Philadelphia. In fact, this most “visible” encounter with AIDS, in
which Hollywood, and by extension, “America” is now finally able to deal with AIDS,
also ushers in the end of AIDS via a normalization of AIDS: now that a major movie
studio has brought us a story about AIDS that elicits sympathy for its “victims,” and this
story has been lauded by critics and “average” Americans alike, AIDS can be
conveniently forgotten about (just as a similar moment, in which, arguably, the height of
queer visibility ushers in forgetfulness occured with Brokeback Mountain in 2005).
Philadelphia is thus not a turning point in the representation of PWA, but the
culminating moment of this genre, or at least of its more sympathetic dimensions.
Philadelphia rehearses all its characteristics: the sympathetic victim, the properly
monogamous relationship, the supportive family, the justice of the law, the containable
discrimination in the form of prejudiced employers, the address to the “general
population” and so forth. By rendering AIDS a personal matter, one that plays out
between straight, HIV-negative individuals who react either with sympathy or fear to the
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person with AIDS, Philadelphia once again favors a personalized view of AIDS, similar
to ways in which TV news and special reports have framed the AIDS crisis. Among the
issues that are conveniently left out of the picture yet again are the structural and
institutional forms of discrimination against PWA as well as the ways in which media
representations are implicated in the production of exactly those anxieties brought
towards PWA that Philadelphia criticizes. Moreover, queer sexualities and communities
are merely backdrops in the film, thus marked as “unimportant” when compared to the
“real” issues of the film, namely the injustice of discrimination and the appeal to
sympathy towards AIDS “victims.” As Douglas Crimp puts it, “And what [director
Jonathan] Demme seems thus to be saying is that you have to dispense with what makes a
queer a queer in order to get anybody else to feel sorry he's going to die” (“DeMoralizing Representations of AIDS,” 256). I would go one step further and argue that
the denial of queer sexuality and culture is not only necessary to elicit sympathy, but to
allow for this form of mainstream visibility in the first place. The disavowal of desire
between the gay couple featured in Philadelphia is crucial to constructing a narrative that
demands the recognition, sympathy, and tolerance of their partnership.
Philadelphia is exemplary of the way in which AIDS “disappears” via the
mechanism of normalization. It also shows how the “end of AIDS” via the normalization
of AIDS sets up the conditions for, and in fact enables, the explosion of gay visibility
during the 1990s: the process of normalization allows an uncoupling of the immediate
association of AIDS and gay sexuality via the assurances that “good,” white middle-class
gays have “grown up” and become responsible citizens. As such, they no longer present a
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danger to the status quo (or the “general population”).23
There are several interlocking ways in which this disarticulation has come about,
and I want to look at each of them in some detail. As I mentioned, Philadelphia was the
pinnacle of a genre—the genre of portraits of PWA—that had been constituting itself
throughout the 1980s. During that time, network television and mainstream movie
representations of gay men with AIDS revealed a lingering hesitancy to represent
intimacy between queer characters and relegated queer sexualities to an “off-screen”
realm. An Early Frost, a 1985 made-for-TV movie that outlines a family's reaction to
discovering that their son is HIV-positive, is perhaps the most widely known stepping
stone towards Philadelphia. Secondly, the discourse of safe sex also plays a major role in
this disarticulation: it equates “safe” sex with sex that occurs within a monogamous
relationship, that happens in private, and that doesn't include any “risky” practices.
Finally, and directly related to the push for a specific definition of “safe” sex, the
mainstream media ran stories about changes in “gay lifestyle” throughout the 1980s that
condemned the careless and “promiscuous” days of post-Stonewall cruising and dancing
in the 1970s. These three discursive processes allow for the emergence of a normalized
gay visibility that is celebrated in the 1990s and that, by projecting itself as “first” and
only type of visibility there is, screens out other ways of representing queerness, at least
in the mainstream press and on TV.
Disco, Drugs, and Dick
23
Conservative gay journalist Andrew Sullivan most famously articulated this point of view in his 1996
New York Times Magazine article “When Plagues End: Notes on the Twilight of an Epidemic.”
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The alignment of safe sex and monogamy as popularized in many safe sex
discourses can be traced back to the 1980s through articles in both the gay and
mainstream press. For example, as early as 1983, the New York Times put forth a
narrative that begins to separate “good” gays from “bad” gays and that lauds a change of
attitudes towards casual and/or public sex. The article “Homosexuals Confront a
Changing Way of Life” includes numerous quotes by gay men, most of whom are
professionals or business-owners, who cite AIDS as an impetus for shifting their romantic
priorities away from casual sex to long-term partnerships. Some opposing voices find an
outlet in the article as well, but these opinions are deemed to be “behind the times,” held
by people incapable of changing their habits. The article features a quote by Alan R.
Kristal, a doctoral student in Public Health, who argues that “They [men who frequent
bars and bathhouses] are trapped in adolescent masculinity . . . and lack the social skills
of forming relationships” (Norman, A1). Statement by “experts,” such as the one by
Kristal and others working in the field of medicine and science, frame the opinions given
by gay men, thus allowing the experts a “final word,” namely one that endorses
relationships and dismisses casual sex. The article clearly declares sex that takes place in
private and within an exclusive relationship as “safe” and sex that is anonymous and
public as “risky” and as contributing to the “spread” of AIDS. This dichotomy is then
projected onto a narrative of gay liberation that deems the post-Stonewall days of disco
and cruising as adolescent mistakes that AIDS brought into sharp relief, allowing for the
realization that “growing up” means letting go of these mistakes in order to achieve
“real” liberation: “Everyone wants the same things—a home, a job you don't hate too
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much, and someone to share it with . . . We've begun our liberation, now let's liberate
ourselves,” Harvey Fierstein says (ibid). The idea that such moralizing condemns a
significant part of gay culture does not cross the “experts'” minds. As one doctor
observes, “A lot of gay people think you can't extract the life style from being gay. I think
you can have a gay identity without the risk factors”—the “risk factors” here being sexual
behavior that escapes the norm, of course (ibid).
It is not only mainstream press outlets such as the New York Times that
underwrites this new gay morality. Gay magazines, such as Christopher Street, also
feature similar opinions. In a 1984 feature article on “Surviving AIDS,” Lanzaratta Philip
explains, “My most rewarding moments are the one-on-one conversations when I can
relate to specifically someone's words. The intensity becomes similar to the 'old days,'
when dishing was disco, drugs, and dick, not life and death” (32-33). Philip's statement
sets up an analogy between gay life in the time of AIDS, when intimacy that does not rely
on sexual relationships becomes the most rewarding kind, and before AIDS, when life
revolved around the shallower pursuits of gossip, going out, and getting laid. Even
though Philip deems this new kind of intimacy as rewarding, a hint of wistful
remembrance is also palpable in the statement. Despite any potential nostalgia, however,
the article makes it clear that the days of “disco, drugs, and dick” are over. A similar
sentiment characterizes a 1985 editorial by Douglas Sardownick in the Advocate.
Speaking on behalf of young gay men, Sardownick explains that an increasing number
choose monogamy as the first line of defense against “the new dangers of illness” (8).
While he admits that his three-year relationship began out of necessity, he also underlines
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that, as someone who came of age in the early 1980s, he “had no history of untamed
promiscuity to fall nostalgically back on” and that, for this generation of gay men,
cruising is not an ideal lifestyle (ibid). In other words, it is not only mainstream press
outlets that foster an alignment of safe sex with monogamy (an alignment that depends on
the condemnation of the supposedly misguided and hedonistic late 1970s), but it is also
the gay press that participates in this reframing of what many previously considered the
embodiment of gay liberation.
It is important to keep in mind that neither the condemnation nor the celebration
of the days of “drugs and disco” offer the “true” story of gay life in the late 1970s; rather,
both are frameworks for organizing and understanding queer sexualities. It is the differing
implications of these narratives that are most important to understand: one allows for the
construction of gay sexuality that actively resists heteronormative patterns (but is not
without its alienating and destructive elements); the other favors carving out a niche
within the constraints of heteronormativity (one that possibly allows for participation and
eventual acceptance into the nation).
The fight over the closure of gay bathhouses in New York City in 1985 is the
incident that most clearly illuminates how intersecting discourses of “general
populations” versus “risk groups” and a condemnation of “promiscuity” produce a
framework for the renegotiation of queer visibility under the banner of safe sex.
Specifically, the deployment of a rhetoric centered around “saving lives” and “protecting
public health” lead to a restructuring of how queer visibility became manifest in and
through physical spaces such as bathhouses, bars, movie theaters, and other commercial
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venues that had allowed for public sex. While New York State Governor Cuomo, New
York City Mayor Koch, and State Health Commissioner Dr. David Axelrod initially
concurred with AIDS activists that bathhouses provided a space where “risk groups”
could be educated about AIDS, they radically changed their position in the fall of 1985.
Not so incidentally, the news coverage surrounding the death of Rock Hudson on October
2, 1985 drove home the point that if a previously beloved film star could turn out to be
gay and dying from AIDS, “anyone” could be at risk.24 Defending the state's authorization
to close bathhouses if they posed a risk to “public health,” Axelrod explained Governor
Cuomo's decision to the New York Times in the following way: “I think he was
increasingly concerned about public-health considerations, particularly about the spouses
of bisexual males who did not know of their husband's proclivities and what impact that
would have on the ultimate birth of children” (qtd. in Purnick, “AIDS and the State,” B4).
The implications of Axelrod's statement are staggering: aside from the suggestions that
the goal of heterosexual marriage is reproduction (making future children the group that
most deserves to be protected from AIDS) and that women are the victims of their
philandering husbands, the construction and defense of “public health” in the state's
imagination clearly only involves those who fully comply with the demands of
heteronormativity. The ultimate risk here is not a virus, but deviancy.
24
Moreover, Rock Hudson's death reinforced the impression that AIDS is a “gay disease.” For example,
headlines such as Life Magazine's “No One is Safe” do not indicate the realization that HIV, as a virus,
could affect anyone, but rather that it is impossible to tell who might be part of a “risk group” and thus
expose the “general population” to HIV (Patton, Inventing AIDS, 101). Richard Meyer argues that the
revelation of Rock Hudson as a gay man with AIDS caused a feeling of betrayal among many Americans—
a betrayal of an image of safe, straight masculinity, as so frequently put forth by Hudson's publicity shots
from the 1950s (278). The images publicized along with the revelation of Hudson's struggle with AIDS can
no longer contain the queer air that surrounded his earlier photographs: through a collapse of a specific
representation of PWA (as physically marked by disease) and homosexuality into a synonymous
relationship, these pictures shore up panic instead of dispelling it.
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Thus, the way Axelrod and other officials constructed safe sex discourse redrew
moral boundaries around specific sexual behaviors. The “deviant” act that was implied
but not discussed in the struggle over New York City's bathhouses is anal sex, which was
once again imagined as exclusively queer practice. As I elaborated earlier in my
discussion of SILENCE = DEATH, mainstream discourses reduce gay sexuality to the
practice of anal sex; moreover, anal sex becomes the imaginary site where AIDS
originates and from which it spreads. Once the awareness of so-called “heterosexual
AIDS” cases began to rise after 1983, it became important to uphold a neat separation of
heterosexual and queer sex practices. An admission that heterosexuals might also engage
in anal sex became problematic as it rendered the neat separation of straight and queer
sexualities slippery and vague, which in turn would have shaken the foundation of
mainstream AIDS discourses that crucially depended on ideas of “risk groups” (such as
gay men) as distinct from the safe “general population” (i.e. heterosexuals). As Cindy
Patton observes, “anal sex in heterosexuals must be explained away as a form of birth
control, as an uncivilized 'mistake' about where to put 'it,' or as a kinky pleasure engaged
in only with 'prostitutes'” (Inventing AIDS, 118). With anal sex safely ensconced in the
realm of queer sex, “true” heterosexuals (i.e. those who are imagined to refrain from
non-normative sexual practices, from drugs, and from contact with “risk groups”), no
longer had to concern themselves with its dangers. Jonathan Alter's assessment of how
the press handles covering AIDS in 1985 illustrates both the reduction of gay sexuality to
anal sex and the separation of heterosexual sex from that practice: “[w]hile much remains
unknown about how the AIDS virus spreads, no description is really complete without
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reference to breakage of the rectal lining through anal sex. That is probably how the vast
majority of the cases have been transmitted so far—a fact that underlines the remoteness
of the AIDS risk from most people's experience” (“Sins of Omission,” 25).
The full extent of what the mainstream media imagined under the “deviancy”
contained in the lifestyle of certain gay men emerged in a New York Times article about
the closure of The Mineshaft, a gay bar that was the first to be shut down after the
announcement of new measures in the fight against AIDS in the fall of 1985. Relying on
reports by city health officials, author Joyce Purnick described The Mineshaft as “dark
place” featuring “the accoutrements of sadomasochism.” The article ends on a quote by
Mayor Koch who deems the health officials' report “tough stuff to read” but imagines that
the activities at The Mineshaft “must be horrific, horrendous in its actuality to witness”
(“City Closes Bar,” B3). It is these “dark” bars, bathhouses, and movie theaters that have
no place in the new, “enlightened” gay lifestyle that is in the process of emerging in the
second half of the 1980s. But the regulation and redefinition of queer visibility via
interventions in the actual geography of New York City's gay neighborhoods doesn't end
with the fight over bathhouses. During the 1990s in particular, a series of interventions on
behalf of the city reduced public and commercial spaces that had long been sites for
cruising and alternative sexual cultures. From the enforcement of the city health code in
1995 (disallowing any type of sexual encounter in commercial spaces, whether “safe” or
not), through gentrification of spaces such as the Hudson river piers, to the establishment
of new zoning laws in the same year (severely restricting where adult businesses could
operate), the “new” gay visibility is not only modeled by “out and proud” characters on
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TV, but is also carved into the urban landscape of U.S. Cities such as New York (Warner's
“Zones of Privacy,” 79-82).
Towards the “Gay 90s”
Once “gay sex” had been isolated from “heterosexual sex” and had been rendered
a private act taking place within a monogamous relationship, the media was able to
disavow the existence of gay sex altogether: gays in the mainstream media don't have sex
at all. Thus, where once the connection between queer identities, sexualities, and AIDS
seemed inseparable, and one could not confront or represent one without the others,
discussions surrounding a more “responsible” way of life coupled with a moralizing safe
sex discourse allowed a disarticulation of the automatic association of gay sexuality and
AIDS. The proliferation of “positive” images of gays on TV and in film could only
happen after the at least superficial disentanglement of the perceived causal
intertwinement of AIDS and queer sexuality. The continued absence of gay (and lesbian)
sexuality on network television in particular can thus be explained by this normalization
as well: being confronted with gay sex serves as a reminder of the still-present threat that
non-normative identifications and practices pose to the heteronormative structures of
American society. The specter of AIDS is only one component of this threat, but perhaps
the one that has been most effectively suppressed.
Among other effects, the normalization of AIDS in conjunction with the
“explosion of gay visibility” in the 1990s brought about prominence for a handful of
conservative gay journalists who shape and align themselves with a homonormative
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discourse. This perspective on AIDS is even more insidious than the blatantly
homophobic attitude that was put forth by the media and certain politicians in the 1980s
because it is wrapped in “sensible” arguments (such as the one that aligns monogamy
with the prevention of AIDS) and supported by a conversion narrative (gay men used to
lead lives of promiscuity and drugs, but the AIDS crisis made them “grow up” and
become responsible). This type of “reasonable” argument, underwritten by the evidence
of experience (or at least the claims of some people's experiences) becomes difficult to
undo. Moreover, it bolsters the idea of “good” gays versus “bad” gays. It is astonishing to
see the same myth that first surrounded AIDS—namely that only people who subscribed
to a certain “lifestyle” (read, gay and promiscuous) would be susceptible to AIDS, and
that, consequently, heterosexuals were not at risk, reappear here—albeit in slightly altered
ways. It's a shift from “innocent” PWA (heterosexuals and children) and “guilty” PWA
(drug users and gay men, who are by default considered promiscuous) to “good gays”
(those who are monogamous, white, and middle class and seemingly never have sex) and
“bad gays” (those who refuse to “grow up” and let go of their promiscuous ways). If, in
the 1980s, the specter of AIDS haunted all non-heterosexual acts and identities, the
normalization of AIDS successfully banished this specter for those who would conform
to the new images put forth in the explosion of gay visibility. Considering the notion of a
growing acceptance of gays and lesbians (evidenced by the “new” media visibility) and
the general, post-Philadelphia understanding that AIDS “victims” deserve sympathy,
charges of homophobia outside of the acceptable parameters of hate crimes or legally
recognized patterns of discrimination seem nonsensical and irrational.
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In light of this, historical narratives such as the following brief overview of the
years 1970-1990 that Molly McGary and Fred Wasserman put forth in Becoming Visible:
An Illustrated History of Lesbian and Gay life in Twentieth-Century America paint a
picture of the relationship between non-normative sexualities, AIDS, and visibility that is
not only simplistic but, I would argue, reactionary:
In large measure the gay liberation movement of the 1970s had been predicated
on coming out and on a politics of visibility. In the 1980s, AIDS created a whole
new level of visibility for gay people in American society as discussions of
homosexuality necessarily spread in the media, the classroom, and the home.
Middle America finally had to acknowledge AIDS and homosexuality as its gay
sons came home to die. While the epidemic and this new visibility engendered a
backlash in some quarters, the gay and lesbian community's extraordinary
response to the health emergency and the courage of people with AIDS prompted
a greater acceptance of and respect for gay people. (240; emphasis mine)
McGrary and Wasserman's story of yet another minority group's triumph over adversity
obscures that, rather than coming out once and then fighting for increasing degrees of
visibility, the gay community comes out over and over again: first in the 1950s as
“victims” of psychological disorders, then in the 1960s-70s with Stonewall and gay
liberation, then in the 1980s with AIDS, and finally, in the 1990s with appearances in TV
and Hollywood movies and with more political battles surrounding issues like gays in the
military, hate crimes, and gay marriage. Moreover, a recognition of the normalization of
AIDS—the ways in which certain aspects of the AIDS crisis needed to be “forgotten” in
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order to allow for the proliferation of “out” gay and lesbian characters on TV and in
movies—that paves the way for the “explosion” of gay visibility has no place in this
progressive narrative.
It is narratives such as the one offered in Becoming Visible that underline the
importance of resisting the morality tales told about the AIDS crisis and, perhaps more
importantly, about what Patrick Moore calls the “backstage years” of 1969-1981. As he
observes in the introduction to Beyond Shame: Reclaiming the Abandoned History of
Radical Gay Sexuality, “It is very difficult to see those backstage years. They lie in
shadow, hidden behind the scrim, illuminated only dimly by the light of AIDS. All scrims
become opaque when they are lit from only one side and we, the audience, sit in the
present, viewing those years through the lens of tragedy” (Moore, 3). Moore's use of a
media-based metaphor (the scrim as screen) to describe historiography is very telling,
pointing towards the complicated ways in which queer identites, sexualities, and media
visibilities intersect. Against the opaque screen that only allows the projection of a
progressive, moralizing narrative that sees the late 1970s as period of drugs, disco, and
sex that “responsible” gay men have fortunately left behind, thus enabling them to
emerge into media and political representation, one needs to mount a story of
simultaneity: a struggle between different ideas about queer identities and visibilities,
about “assimilation” and “liberation,” about “normative” and “radical” sex—stories that
cannot be reduced to one or the other.
CHAPTER 3
Outside of Space and Time: Screening Queerness in Brokeback Mountain and Boys Don't
Cry
During the last ten years, movie critics, audience members, and academics have
hailed Brokeback Mountain (Ang Lee, 2005) and Boys Don't Cry (Kimberly Pierce,
1999) as “breakthrough” films regarding their representation of GLBT issues. Continuing
the narrative of the so-called explosion of gay visibility that began in the early 1990s,
both films are deemed another step forward for including a greater degree of queer
visibility in Hollywood cinema. It shouldn't come as a surprise, then, that both Brokeback
Mountain and Boys Don't Cry rely on the same screening processes that accompany other
“breakthrough” media texts of the 1990s and early 2000s: namely the reliance on
whiteness as screening surface for projecting queerness and the simultaneous screening
out of the significance of race and of those aspects of queer identities and sexualities that
defy easy categorization. Specifically, genre and mise-en-scene facilitate a screening of
queerness in Brokeback Mountain and Boys Don't Cry, as these produce screening
processes that encapsulate and contain the films' diegeses in distant places and times.
Instead of bringing queerness closer to the spectator, these screening processes render the
representations of queer desires and identities non-threatening to both the norms of
Hollywood cinema and of American society.
Brokeback Mountain translates Annie Proulx's short story of the same name into a
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108
film about a love affair between two ranch hands, Jack Twist and Ennis del Mar. Their
affair begins in 1963, when Jack and Ennis spend one summer herding sheep on
Brokeback Mountain, and continues for the next twenty years in brief return trips to the
mountain that reunites their otherwise separate lives. Boys Don't Cry is also the result of
adapting previously written material for the screen. But in this case, the film is not based
on a fictional narrative, but rather on newspaper accounts, oral histories, and police
transcripts of transgendered Brandon Teena's life and murder in rural Nebraska in 1993.
Director Kimberly Pierce translates these sources into a tragic cinematic love story that
explores the last few weeks of Brandon's life and his short relationship with Lana Tisdel.
Both films locate their diegeses in spaces and times that seem remote from “us”--”out
there” rather than nearby. In Brokeback Mountain, the romance between Ennis and Jack
spans decades, all of which are firmly anchored in the past. This “pastness” goes beyond
specific markers of historical time to incorporate broader discourses of cinematic
historicity, including generic markers of genres past their heyday, such as the classic
Western and the mid-20th century melodrama. In an allusion to another popular genre,
namely science fiction, the Nebraska landscape depicted in Boys Don't Cry takes on an
almost alien quality: blurring lights speed along dark highways that lead nowhere.
Despite its origins in “true” events that can be tied to a specific time and place, the film
portrays characters and places as untethered and without a sense of who they are and
where their lives are headed. This is not the “heartland” that is frequently portrayed as
America's moral center. Projected onto this backdrop, both Brandon Teena's struggle with
transgender identity and his eventual murder also appear far-away, a product of a remote
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almost other-wordly homophobic culture.
Locating the diegeses of both films outside of a particular space and time softens
the potential disruption evoked by the cinematic examination of queer identities. At the
same time, the spaces invoked in both films, namely the American West and the Midwest,
are spaces that are central to the American cultural imagination. The paradoxical ways in
which the West and the Midwest become both familiar and distant spaces are thus key to
how Brokeback Mountain and Boys Don't Cry tell stories about queer media visibility.
In other words, the screening of queerness in Brokeback Mountain and in Boys
Don't Cry oscillates between two poles: one the one hand, the films offer seemingly
provoking representations of queer lives in the ideologically charged spaces of the West
and the Midwest, and, on the other hand, they contain this provocation in remote times
and places. In fact, I want to underline that the praise for the breakthrough qualities of
these films precisely depends on their encapsulation of queerness in a time and place that
is alien and remote, and, as such, ultimately unable to impact neither Hollywood filmmaking nor everyday life in significant ways.
Not Quite Breaking Through: Situating Brokeback Mountain and Boys Don't Cry in the
Discourse of Queer Visibility
In terms of reception, themes, and their place in the discourse of queer visibility,
Brokeback Mountain and Boys Don't Cry overlap in many ways: both films tell stories
about queer lives and identities in remote rural areas, ending in the violent deaths of their
protagonists, and both have been hailed as breakthrough GLBT films. I want to sketch
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out these similarities in more detail before moving on to examine the significance of
space and time in the films' diegeses, mises-en-scene and narratives in more detail.
At first sight, both films seem to defy the traditional norms of Hollywood cinema
and the cultural discourses circulating about the regions in which these films take place.
The idea of telling a love story between two men in a big studio movie with stars in the
leading roles, or of addressing the rejection of gender norms on the part of a young transman in a widely distributed independent film, may seem like a challenge to both
Hollywood cinema and the idea of the pastoral West and of the Midwest as core elements
to imagining the nation. One might want to applaud the producers and directors of these
films for these “firsts.” Many reviews certainly did. For example, Adam B. Vary observes
in his review of Brokeback Mountain for the Advocate:
Never before has a gay-themed film been as written about, reviewed,
lauded, awarded, discussed, dissected, parodied, and hyped as Brokeback
Mountain, so it's easy to forget amid this din that the film is deeply
moving millions nationwide one theater and one screen at a time,
communities sitting together in the dark and emotionally connecting with
this story. (np)
Equally effusive praise for the way Brokeback Mountain unites Americans in
appreciating the story of Jack and Ennis' romance appears in magazines of varying
political affiliations. The New Republic's Stanley Kauffman remarks, “[t]they [Jack and
Ennis] are as truly in love as two people can be,” Richard Corliss of Time Magazine
proclaims that “America is now experiencing the Brokeback breakthrough,” and Leah
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Rozen of People observes that “[a] haunting love story about two Wyoming cowboys
who carry on a furtive romance for decades, its delicate storytelling and perceptive
performances make it one of the year's best films” (20; np). Even the National Catholic
Reporter's movie critic Joseph Cunnen deems that Brokeback Mountain demonstrates
“good taste” and concludes his review with the questions, “If one sees this love as less
than profound, the question remains, how many movie examples of deep love are there to
place against it? Were the lovers in those other films as innocent as they are here?” (17).
Across the board, reviewers for magazines and newspapers lauded Brokeback Mountain
both for the way it handled the portrayal of two men in love and for how it managed to
transcend that context to tell a universally appealing story. While the reviews of Boys
Don't Cry don't reach for the same sort of superlatives regularly used in response to
Brokeback Mountain, movie critics still consider the film outstanding. Dennis King of
Tulsa World remarks that the film “says something enduring about the achingly complex
business of being human, fitting in and finding love and acceptance” (np). Similarly,
Carol Cling of the Las Vegas Review-Journal deems that the film “transcends its
suspenseful, inside-the-crime elements to explore more complex attitudes and emotions,
from the mysteries of sexual identity to the all-American conflict between individualism
and conformity” (np). Overall, reviews for both films stress presumably universal or
“human” themes, such as the quest for love, acceptance, and finding one's place in
society. At the same time, mainstream media critics underline that these are remarkable
achievements for films that engage with characters and topics that they perceive to be
distant from the imagined reader of these reviews. The reviews thus anchor the
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“breakthrough” qualities of Brokeback Mountain and Boys Don't Cry in the successful
combination of breaking new cinematic ground by telling a gay and transgendered love
story, respectively, and of communicating familiar cinematic themes at the same time.
The critics' praise for the films' allegedly effortless blending of new and
established themes and storylines already suggests that the “breakthrough” qualities of
Brokeback Mountain and Boys Don't Cry might not be quite as disruptive as the term
“breakthrough” suggests. More importantly, by declaring these films “breakthroughs”
that portrayed certain lives and identities for the first time in mainstream cinema, a whole
history of previous queer lives and identities is erased, both in on- and off-screen terms:
Jack and Ennis weren't the first “gay cowboys” in mainstream film history, and Brandon
Teena not the first trans person to appear on screen. As such, Brokeback Mountain and
Boys Don't Cry fulfill a similar role for gay male love and for transgender identities that
Philadelphia served for cinematic renditions of the AIDS crisis: becoming hailed as
breakthroughs while drawing on long-established patterns of queer representation, most
of them not exactly progressive or productive.In addition, declaring both “firsts” not only
denies these histories, but also allows the depiction of male-male intimacy and of
transgender identity in Brokeback Mountain and in Boys Don't Cry, respectively, to
become blueprints for subsequent portrayals of those relationships and identifications
within the confines of the redefined discourse of queer visibility that emerged during the
1990s. For example, Milk (Gus van Sant, 2008) and Transamerica (Duncan Trucker,
2005) are two widely distributed Hollywood films in the past few years that address
GLBT issues in the wake of Brokeback Mountain and Boys Don't Cry. Both films engage
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time, space, race, and sexuality in similar ways to their predecessors. In its exploration of
Harvey Milk's work and life, Milk is another example of a film that contains and
constrains gay male love in the past, namely the 1970s, limits it geographically (to San
Francisco, which is already known that as a “gay” city), and ends in the murder of the
gay protagonist. Transamerica tells the story of MTF Bree's cross-country journey with
her son, whose existence she wasn't aware of until the beginning of the film. The film
stabilizes racial identities almost to the point of caricature in order to facilitate a (rather
poor) exploration of gender identity; for example, the Native American Bree encounters
on the road perfectly fits the stereotype of the “noble savage” who is one with the land
and who imparts words of wisdom. The employment of space and time to screen race and
queerness in Milk and Transamerica thus echoes similar patterns in Brokeback Mountain
and Boys Don't Cry.
The contradictions that emerge around the assessment that Brokeback Mountain
and Boys Don't Cry are the first films to address “gay cowboys” or trans identities are
compounded by the praise for the alleged breakthrough qualities ascribed to Brokeback
Mountain and Boys Don't Cry. Both films have been lauded for their ability to tell stories
about “universal love” and the temporal defiance of a homophobic culture, but neither of
those themes don't actually break with heteronormative ideas about space and time.
Neither Brokeback Mountain nor Boys Don't Cry offer what Judith Halberstam calls a
queer time and space:
'Queer time' is a term for those specific models of temporality that emerge
within postmodernism once one leaves the temporal frame of bourgeois
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reproduction and and family, longevity, risk/safety, and inheritance. 'Queer
space' refers to the place-making practices within postmodernism in which
queer people engage and it also describes the new understandings of space
enabled by the production of queer counterpublics. (In a Queer Time and
Place, 6)
While Brokeback Mountain and Boys Don't Cry offer momentary possibilities of creating
lives outside of normative ways of life, the “breakthrough” aspects of Brokeback
Mountain and Boys Don't Cry fold back into a framework of homonormativity and do not
create spaces and times outside of it. For example, the portrayal of Ennis' choices
throughout Brokeback Mountain's narrative might be read as the desire to escape the
expected milestones of a heteronormative life (settling down, marriage, children), but
most reviews, as well as Annie Proulx and the screenplay writers of Brokeback Mountain,
read these choices as being motivated by internalized rural homophobia and the
impossibility of Ennis choosing a domestic life with Jack on a ranch of their own (I will
elaborate on Ennis' choices and other queer possibilities in Brokeback Mountain later on
in this chapter).25 Thus extratextual discourses have worked to contain glimpses of queer
times and spaces in the film by labeling Ennis' choices as passive response to an
oppressive environment, rather than an active stance against the demands put upon him.
The uneven potrayal of queer lives and identities in Brokeback Mountain and
Boys Don't Cry also encompass a focus on violence and murder. Both films end on the
violent death of one of the protagonists: in the case of Brokeback Mountain, Jack dies
25
Author Annie Proulx and screenplay writers Larry McMurty and Diana Ossata outline their
interpretations of the primary characters in Brokeback Mountain in Brokeback Mountain: Story to
Screenplay.
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alone on the side of the road. The film strongly implies that his death is the result of a
beating by homophobic community members. In Boys Don't Cry, Brandon is first raped
and then shot for the transgression of gender lines. Paradoxically, Jack's and Brandon's
murders are points of both initiation and inertia in relationship to Brokeback Mountain
and Boys Don't Cry. On the one hand, it is very unlikely that either of these films would
have been made if they didn't involve horrific crimes that are supposed to elicit sympathy
(with the victims) and condemnation (of the circumstances that led to these crimes) in the
audience. On the other hand, the murders also effectively shut down the possibilities of
the queer lives and loves that the movies suggest; thus, the violence also works as another
strategy of containment. The exertion of violence against queer characters has a long
tradition in Hollywood cinema, and it is quite surprising to find this theme in films that
are deemed “progressive” by mainstream media reviews and by many audience members.
As suggested by my previous two observations regarding the breakthrough
qualities and the significance of violence in relationship to Brokeback Mountain and Boys
Don't Cry, the full significance of how the discourse of queer visibility works in these
films only emerges when one reads textual against and alongside extratextual discourses
(such as movie reviews, interviews with the directors, screenplay writers, and stars,
audience reactions, and academic analyses). In most cases, extratextual discourses offer
various ways of reading the films' plots and characters as well as insights about their
significance to our current cultural moment. I have already mentioned how the frequent
interpretation of Ennis' actions in Brokeback Mountain as inability to act on his feelings
for Jack in conventionally romantic terms, rather than a deliberate refusal to act according
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to heteronormative expectations, serves to obscure possible queerly disruptive moments
in the film. Another example of how extratextual discourses serve to constrain the
potential queerness expressed in these movies happens via the attempt to separate the
actors from their characters and to inscribe the actors' sexual and gender identifications as
“real;” as such, Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger need to be unquestionably straight,
and Hilary Swank needs to be unquestionably female.26
While all of the above overlaps are significant, the most important connection
between Brokeback Mountain and Boys Don't Cry remains their temporal and spatial
disclocation and the ensuing possibility of screening out of race and queerness. It is this
connection between space, time, race, and queerness that I want to explore in the
remainder of the chapter.
Screening the West in Brokeback Mountain
Brokeback Mountain's ability to evoke sympathetic identifications depends on the
location of its protagonists and narrative in a remote space and time, specifically in
Wyoming during the 1960s and 1970s. This space—Wyoming in particular, and the West
in general—is central to the American imagination. The West is always both a real and an
imaginary space that has key significance for how America imagines itself as a nation: it
is the space of Manifest Destiny and of the frontier. The construction of this idealized
West depends on screenings of race and queerness. For example, the image of the
cowboy as symbol of a rugged, straight, and white masculinity obscures a history that
26
For an excellent analysis of how star images and characters of Brokeback Mountain relate to one
another, see Jessica L.W. Carey's “Performing 'Lonesome Cowboy' and 'Jack Nasty': The Stars'
Negotiation of Norms and Desires.”
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encompasses queer relationships between men, many of which were not white. Recent
scholarship has shown that idealized accounts of the settlement of the West suppress both
the range of intimacies that characterized the lives of cowboys in the 19th century
(encompassing social, erotic, and sexual relationships), and the racial diversity among
cowboys (Patterson, 109). Even the term “cowboy” has its origin in the Spanish word
vaquero (lit. “cowman); the idea of cowboys traveled from Mexico to the United States
and became progressively whiter the more it circulated in American culture (Perez, 78).
Hiram Perez summarizes the screening processes at work in the emergence of the
American cowboys in the following way:
The Anglo cowboy's homosexuality is critical to Westward expansion. His
sexuality is quietly sanctioned by the nation as is the racial violence he
executes against American Indians, as well as Mexican ranchers who
remained in Texas, and even Basque shepherders . . . . If the cowboy is
recuperated as a hero after his demise due to land privatization, it is
perhaps due to a need to recast his role (and consequently that of the
nation) in the violent settlement of the American West. (82)
The emergence of the cowboys as white hero—in other words, the very position he
occupies in many Westerns—thus depends on a willful forgetting of the historical
circumstances of Westward expansion. What remains is not only a whitewashed image of
the cowboy, but what Mary Patt Brady has called “imperialist nostalgia:” a longing for an
idealized past that is devoid of a history of racial conflict (24). Consequently, while the
designation of Brokeback Mountain as a “gay cowboy” movie was frequently used
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flippantly, a careful consideration of this moniker reveals much about the ways in which
Brokeback Mountain participates in and uses dominant cultural narratives about the
Western and the American West.
At first, the description of Jack and Ennis as “gay cowboys” seems to be at odds
with the image of the cowboy created in the classic Western. The Western genre,
especially the frontier Western, has significantly contributed to how Americans imagine
the West and the cowboy (Anderson, 17). From the point of view of some critics, the
appearance of openly acknowledged desire between cowboys reveals the homoeroticism
of the Western genre as a whole. As Eric Patterson observes, “Brokeback Mountain
addresses the erotic element in the Western movie genre directly, forcing straight viewers
to be aware of the sexiness of the cowboy figure that forms an important dimension of his
appeal but that they would prefer to deny” (116). Specifically, Patterson draws attention
to the tight jeans and shirts Jack and Ennis wear, neither of which are nearly as stylized as
the cowboys costumes of the classic Western, but they do their part to tie Jack's and
Ennis's cowboy looks into a discourse of desire. Patterson thus argues that the film forces
audiences to engage with the previously suppressed homoeroticism of Westerns and
cowboys. Maybe, maybe not. While Jack and Ennis are certainly eroticized figures in the
film (not dissimilar from many leading men in contemporaneous Hollywood cinema), the
way in which Jack and Ennis are hailed as the first gay cowboys qualifies Patterson's
argument. Positing Brokeback Mountain as the first movie of its kind marks Jack and
Ennis as extraordinary and suggests a break with the past—with films in which gay
cowboys allegedly had no place—instead of a continuation. Brokeback Mountain's status
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as “breakthrough” obscures previous historical and cinematic moments, including
previous queer cowboy movies such as Midnight Cowboy (John Schlesinger, 1969) and
Lonesome Cowboys (Andy Warhol, 1968) or the position of the cowboy as erotic figure
in gay male culture. The designation of Brokeback Mountain as “the” gay cowboy movie
privileges the denotative representation of queerness over connotative ones. Previous
connotative moments of queerness between cowboys are obscured via the now denotative
queerness of Jack and Ennis. This pattern appears in many of the media texts that are
considered part of the “gay 90s.”
Upon closer inspection, it turns out that identifying Brokeback Mountain as the
“gay cowboy movie” is a misnomer on two levels. First of all, Jack and Ennis are neither
cowboys nor gay. Throughout the film, they take up a diverse range of occupations,
including shepherds, ranch hands, rodeo participants, and seasonal laborers, but they are
not cowboys in the traditional sense, i.e. men working with cattle. Secondly, they do not
self-identify as gay. In fact, Jack and Ennis do not identify or label their sexuality at all.
The only identification of their sexual preferences comes in form of a rejection: both of
them state that they are “not queer” without an elaboration of what they “are.” The
continuous identification of Jack and Ennis as “gay cowboys” in reviews of Brokeback
Mountain therefore projects a sexual identity onto the characters to which they never
subscribe in the film. Yet the “gay cowboy” label has stuck: extratextual discourses thus
settle the question of identification even though it remains open in the film itself as
neither Jack nor Ennis embrace a “gay” (or any other particular) identity. Ron Becker
explains this need to pin down definitively queer identifications in the following way:
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“For what might be called post-closet TV, gay men who are not out—who fail to identify
with the label waiting for them, who refuse to accept the straight world's tolerance, who
expose the gaping hole in the post-civil-rights logic—are a real problem. To maintain
confidence in the clarity between gay men and straight men, these closet cases must be
helped out” (127). In other words, in the supposedly gay-friendly 1990s and beyond,
engaging in same-sex desire without subscribing to a corresponding label confuses the
idea that being out is both a safe choice and expected. While Becker uses this argument
primarily to discuss TV characters whose sexual identification remains unclear and thus
problematic because it cannot be definitively opposed to that of straight characters, I
would extend this reading of the need to label and identify characters as an aspect of the
broader discourse of queer visibility as it emerged during the 1990s. The case of Jack and
Ennis certainly fits this pattern.
A further exploration of the “gay cowboy” moniker reveals that it relates to
historical narratives of the West in equally complex ways as it does to the Western. Even
though Brokeback Mountain seems to challenge the usual narrative of the West by
revealing that yes, “gay cowboys” did exist, thus apparently revising ideas about the
West, the film also participates in the same screening processes that have been crucial to
the construction of the West as idealized space in the first place. In other words,
Brokeback Mountain engages in its own screening of race and queerness to facilitate a
love story of two white ranch hands. As such, Brokeback Mountain's narrative of tragic
love, and the celebration thereof in the film's reception, participates in and reflects
another central dynamic that has characterized the discourse of queer visibility as it has
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emerged in the early 1990s: it reveals one aspect of queer visibility and defines it as all
that there has been and could be while obscuring other possibilities of rendering
queerness visible. But, as is always the case in these screening processes, race and other
forms of queerness cannot be completely screened from view: alternative visions of race
and queerness appear at the edges of the frame, in fleeting moments that are deemed
insignificant in both the narrative and in reviews, but that are actually crucial to the
construction of Ennis and Jack's romance.
With the exception of the denotative, that is, textually rendered sexual desire
between Jack and Ennis, Brokeback Mountain fits into and reflects the prominent cultural
narrative of the West, especially in the early part of the film. The mise-en-scene evokes
familiar views of pristine mountains and valleys: it places Jack and Ennis into an
idealized, timeless Western landscape. As Martin Manalansan observes, “[l]iterally and
figuratively, Ennis and Jack are away from it all, from the turmoil of everyday life
(including women, family, and colored people) and from the messiness of history” (98).
The Western landscape of Brokeback thus isn't merely a backdrop to the developing
romance between Jack and Ennis, but is rather an integral part to how we understand their
romance. Moreover, instead of disrupting prevailing ideas about or reimagining the West,
the idea of “gay cowboys” unscreens only one element that didn't appear in standard
narratives of the West. This denotative rendering of Jack and Ennis' desire for one another
still relies on the screening of race as whiteness simultaneously functions as projection
surface for a gay romance and as filtering device for racial otherness. Situating Jack and
Ennis in a Western landscape that always already includes screenings of race and
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queerness is thus a crucial component and facilitator of constructing this “neoliberal story
of gay love” (Manalansan, 100). Brokeback Mountain might tell a story about “gay
cowboys,” but the screening of race remains firmly in place.
Brokeback Mountain participates in the same kind of whitewashing that
characterizes both narratives of the West and of the Western, in which the lives of white
people figure prominently while non-whites take up the roles of the enemy or of
insignificant side-kicks.27 In Brokeback Mountain, this pattern continues as racial
difference appears insignificant to Jack and Ennis' life and romance. First of all, it does
not appear important that Jack and Ennis are white; as so often in Hollywood film, their
whiteness is a given and does not require further elaboration. The only time we are aware
of racial difference is during Jack's trips to Mexico, where he cruises Mexican men for
anonymous sexual encounters. “Mexico” as a cultural space is summed up in visual
shorthands: in a brief establishment shot, people in bright clothes dance in a street of clay
houses, music blaring from off-screen; the only legible store sign reads “Licoreria.” Jack
quickly ducks into a dark alley, where men lounge against house walls. Red light
streaming from a window confirms what the men's poses suggest. Jack nods at the man
with the lightest skin tone and they disappear into the dark together. This scene takes up
all of two minutes in the film. Despite the brevity of the scene, it is clear that Mexico is
coded as a deviant space: Jack travels to Mexico to fulfill sexual needs, not to discover
romantic love. As Roy Gundman observes, “banishing unromantic promiscuity beyond
national borders is pandering to viewers' middle-class mainstream mentality” (np). The
27
For an elaboration on how race shapes the Western, see Mark Cronlund Anderson's Cowboy Imperialism
and Hollywood Film.
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unscreening of race in this brief scene thus only functions to reaffirm the love between
Jack and Ennis as “real,” whereas Jack's sexual encounters in Mexico occur out of
shameful desperation. Locating cruising and anonymous sex in Mexico also allows the
West to remain a “pure” space that fosters the kind of intimacy Jack and Ennis
experienced during the first summer on Brokeback. The grandiose vistas of the mountain
stand in sharp contrast to the night-time setting of the Mexican market (Manalansan, 99).
The “queerer” elements of gay relationships and sexual practices are thus tied to a
racially deviant space and effectively banished from the larger story about Jack and
Ennis' lives. Ultimately, Jack's trips are only important as signifiers of the emotional
struggles that Jack and Ennis face in their relationship with each other.
In a climactic scene towards the end of the film, these emotional struggles erupt in
a confrontation between Jack and Ennis that is key to understanding how screenings of
race and queerness converge with narratives of the West in order to elicit sympathetic
identifications. It is 1978, fifteen years after that summer Jack and Ennis first spent
together on Brokeback. They have returned there for yet another of their infrequent trips;
Ennis is now divorced and Jack's marriage exists in name only. Just before they leave to
return to their lives, Jack once again expresses frustration over how long it will take until
they can see each other again. The following conversation takes place between them as
they stand in the shadow of Brokeback Mountain:
Ennis: “You got a better idea?”
Jack: “I did once.”
Ennis: “You did once. Well, have you been to Mexico, Jack Twist? Hmm?
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'Cause I hear what they got in Mexico for boys like you.”
Jack: “Hell yes, I've been to Mexico. Is that a fucking problem?”
Ennis: “I'm telling you this one time, Jack fucking Twist, and I ain't
foolin'. What I don't know, all them things that I don't know, I'd get you
killed if I come to know them. I ain't jokin'.”
Jack: “Yo, try this one, and I'll say it just once.”
Ennis: “Go ahead.”
Jack: “Tell you what: we coulda had a good life together, real fucking
good life. Had us a place of our own. But you didn't want it, Ennis! So
what we got now is Brokeback mountain. Everything's build on that.
That's all we got, boy, fuckin' all. So I hope you know that if you don't
ever know that rest.”
Ennis mumbles something incomprehensible.
Jack: “You count the damn few times we been together in nearly twenty
years and you measure the short fucking leash you keep me on. Then you
ask me about Mexico, and you tell me you kill me for needing something I
don't hardly ever get. You have no idea how bad it gets. And I'm not you, I
can't make it on a coupla high altitude fucks once or twice a year! You are
too much for me, Ennis. I wish I knew how to quit you.”
Ennis, crying: “Why don't you? Why don't you just let me be, huh? It's
'cause of you, Jack, that I'm like this. I'm nothin', I'm nowhere.”
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Jack and Ennis had several similar conversations over the course of the film, but none of
them ends in such a harsh confrontation. It is apparent that Jack's revelation that he has
been going to Mexico in search of sexual encounters fuels Ennis' anger. His statement
about being aware of what Mexico offers to “boys like you” reaffirms Mexico as deviant
space within the diegesis of Brokeback Mountain. His threat of violence against Jack
underlines just how threatening this deviant space is: it intrudes into the relationship
Ennis has with Jack, the one built around Brokeback. It needs to be rejected, perhaps
even excised from pristine space of the West.
Drawing on this and other arguments between Ennis and Jack, many reviews
designate Jack as the character who embraces his love of and desire for Ennis more fully.
This frequently repeated interpretation of Jack as the one who is more accepting of his
desire and love for Ennis is bolstered by a homonormative framework: Jack's suggestion
of settling down on a farm together fits well into the trajectory of particular civil rights
discourses (especially around gay marriage) that dominated the mainstream discussion of
GLBT identities at the time Brokeback Mountain was released. Ennis' rejection of Jack's
suggestion is seen as sign of internalized homophobia on Ennis' part, backed up by
information we receive about a traumatic event during Ennis' childhood, during which
Ennis is forced to look at the mutilated body of man who was rumored to share a ranch
with another man. But what if we read Ennis' rejection of Jack's plan as refusal of both
homo- and heteronormative domesticity, as, for example, Hiram Perez suggests? Perez
argues that “Ennis' 'cowboy lifestyle' in this modern context—which incorporates but
cannot be reduced to queer sexuality—is arguably the greater threat to heteronormativity
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and the American way of life: migrant, exclusively homosocial, communal, antiindustrial” (79-80). From this perspective, Ennis emerges as a queer figure who resists
normative temporalities, both in his marriage and in rejecting Jack's proposal to settle
down together.28 He defends his choice to have a life marked by transient moments and
jobs and the occasional trip to Brokeback with Jack.
It is in this transience that we can find a queer time and space in Halberstam's
understanding. Interestingly, this queer time and space once again opens up via the
possibilities of silence (similar to my arguments about silence in Chapters 1 and 2). In the
lines of dialogue I quoted above, and indeed throughout most of the film, Ennis listens to
Jack far more frequently than he talks to him. Instead of considering Ennis' silence as
inability to articulate his thoughts and feelings, we can also see it as a refusal to define
himself. As Ennis implores Jack, “[w]hy don't you just let me be?”. But Jack, and the
logic of the discourse of queer visibility, demand self-identification from him. The
designation of the film as “gay cowboy movie” and critiques of Ennis as repressed figure
(because he can't embrace a “gay” identity in the way Jack does) deny other queer
readings of his life and choices.
“Pastness:” Where Western and Melodrama Meet
The significance of space and place, and their accompanying screenings of race
and queerness, to Brokeback Mountain's narrative and reception intersect with a range of
temporalities, all of which signify differing levels of what I call “pastness.” Pastness
28
For a similar take on Ennis' rejection, see also Gundman and Colin Johnson, “Rural Space: Queer
America's Final Frontier.”
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indicates a certain state of being that encapsulates an undefined (i.e. timeless) belonging
in the past. This pastness works in Brokeback Mountain in conjunction with a remote
location in the West, and, of course, with the various screening processes of race and
queerness, to facilitate a mostly sympathetic and celebratory engagement with the film.
Brokeback Mountain's narrative takes place roughly between 1960-1980.
Providing a fixed time frame within which the film's narrative happens is the most
obvious marker of temporal distance: Jack and Ennis' lives take place in a time that is
historically removed from the contemporary spectator of the early 2000s. But despite this
precise marking of time, Jack and Ennis' lives also seem to be taking place outside of
time—historical milestones of the decades during which Brokeback Mountain takes
place, for example the Vietnam war or the Civil Rights Movement, don't touch Jack and
Ennis' lives. This sense of their lives taking place outside of time underlines and works in
conjunction with the spatial distance between “us” (the audience) and “them” (Jack and
Ennis): their lives unfold in such a remote place that even events of allegedly nationwide
importance don't reach them or touch their lives. This particular conjunction of being
outside of historically grounded time and space then facilitates the recognition of Jack
and Ennis' story as one of “universal” love, an identification that also heavily depends on
whiteness (as the discourse of whiteness represents whiteness as unremarkable racial
categorization which then allows it to function as projection surface for the struggle
surrounding sexual identities).
However, I want to argue that the most significant tool for creating distance,
namely the one that facilitates the sympathetic identification with Jack and Ennis, doesn't
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take place through the anchoring of the plot in a distant time and place, but via
“pastness.” This pastness envelops Brokeback Mountain in two ways: First, the film
involves a transgeneric mix of Western and melodrama, two genres that, despite the
occasional revival, are perceived as unpopular and are strongly associated with classical
Hollywood cinema. In the words of Time's movie reviewers, Brokeback Mountain is “a
gay western art film—a triple whammy of unfashionable genres” (Corliss et al).
Secondly, Brokeback Mountain's narrative itself emphasizes Jack and Ennis as being
stuck in the past.
In terms of genre, labeling Brokeback Mountain as the “gay cowboy movie” is a
misnomer: Brokeback Mountain is not a Western in the classic sense; rather, it is a
transgeneric film that meshes together conventions from the Western with that of the
melodrama.29 Consequently, labeling Brokeback Mountain a “gay cowboy movie” does
more than obscure that Jack and Ennis are neither (or necessarily) “gay” nor “cowboys”
and that racial difference is neglected as playing a role in their lives. In addition to
constraining a fluidity of sexual identifications through sexual labels (i.e. by labeling Jack
and Ennis as “gay”), the use of textual labels (i.e. the “Western” label) also tries constrain
the generic fluidity of the film itself. This is particularly important since it is the
transgeneric quality of the film that is crucial to the screening of race and queerness
apparent in the reception of Brokeback Mountain. While Jack and Ennis dress and talk
like cowboys, and they move through a landscape that is identified with the figure of the
29
For a more elaborate explanation of Brokeback Mountain's transgeneric elements, see Chris Berry's “The
Chinese Side of the Mountain,” in which he discusses the inclusion of Chinese melodrama and yaoi
elements in the film, and Joshua Clover and Christopher Nealon's “Don't Ask, Don't Tell Me” for the
containment the generic mix of Western and melodrama entails.
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cowboy in the American cultural imagination, they also find themselves in situations
more closely associated with the melodrama. In particular, Jack's and Ennis' conflicted
domestic situations carry signifiers of the melodrama. Ultimately, it is Brokeback
Mountain's transgeneric mix that facilitates the screening of various possibilities of
queerness in the film by rendering previously connotative queer moments in Westerns
singularly visible via the romantic (and melodramatic) love story between Jack and
Ennis. These queer moments undergo a codification of sorts in which the homonormative
model of domesticity as desired outcome of gay romance overshadows other queer
possibilities (e.g. the possibilities that surface in Ennis' silence and apparent inaction in
response to Jack's seemingly more active proclamations of commitment).
The pastness facilitated via transgeneric elements also allows an amalgam of
several Wests to emerge. The beginning of the film shows us the pastoral wilderness that
was created by writers and painters in the 19th century and that inspired the ideas of the
frontier and the doctrine of Manifest Destiny; we also see images of the West as shaped
specifically by the Western, putting forth a specific type of rugged white masculinity
(never entirely devoid of connotative queerness, however). As the film progresses, the
mise-en-scene transforms into a West in which cowboys don't have a place anymore; a
space of big farms, economic decline, and settled lives. Thus, through a combination of
generic and narrative markers, the text itself encapsulates Jack and Ennis' romance in the
pastness of one summer, in a space—Brokeback mountain—that once was but can never
exist again and only lives on in nostalgic memory. The relationship Jack and Ennis have
during the summer on the mountain thus serves simultaneously as an anchor of their lives
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and as something that has irrevocably been lost, just like the pastoral West that provided
the backdrop of that summer.
Inside of Space and Time: Jack, Ennis, and the “Down Low”
While genre, diegesis, and narrative work hard to imprint a sense of pastness onto
Brokeback Mountain, broadening the focus beyond the film's text and its immediate
reception context offers a way of understanding how Brokeback Mountain speaks directly
to current debates about race, sexuality, and queerness. As I explained in the previous
sections, the screening of race in Brokeback Mountain's mise-en-scene and in its diegesis
underlines the importance of whiteness to constructing particular forms of queer visibility
and challenges the “progressive” message most reviews found in Brokeback Mountain as
the tragic love story of two “gay cowboys.” The implications of and answers to the
question, “what if Jack and Ennis were black?” brings the importance of whiteness to the
sympathetic reception of Brokeback Mountain (and to the film's importance to the
discourse of queer visibility) into even starker relief. In “Why I hate that I loved
Brokeback Mountain,” Dwight McBride asks precisely that question and argues that
“[t]wo African American men could not possibly have been viewed as representing
universal gay male experience in the way that the whiteness of the characters in
Brokeback Mountain can and does” (96). In other words, the whiteness of Jack and Ennis
is key to the presumed universalism of Brokeback Mountain's “message” (which most
critics identified as being about love and as communicating Jack and Ennis' struggles in
ways to which “we” can easily relate). Furthermore, McBride underlines that Jack and
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Ennis fulfill a “sense-making norm” of gay identity that goes beyond whiteness and
includes a masculine and non-queer appearance and demeanor, all of which come
together to make them figures ready for sympathetic identification (97). Consequently,
Jack and Ennis fit into the parameters laid out for queer media visibility throughout the
1990s and beyond. Other similarly sympathetic figures include the media renditions of
Matthew Shepard and the portrayal of fictional characters such as Will&Grace's Will
Truman. But Jack and Ennis also fit into the trajectory of recent queer media visibilities
in other, perhaps more unexpected, ways.
Specifically, the fact that they continuously cheat on their wives is often either
overlooked or excused as by-product of a homophobic environment that doesn't allow
Jack and Ennis to be with the people they really want to be with, i.e. each other, and that
imposes love-less marriages on them. Whiteness is again the crucial component in
evoking sympathy and identification here. A contextualization of interpretations of Jack
and Ennis' marital digressions in the media discourses surrounding black men on the socalled “down low” demonstrates most clearly just how significant whiteness is to the type
of queer visibility embodied by Jack and Ennis.
In 2005, the year in which Brokeback Mountain was released, the debate about
black men who have sex with other men without either identifying as “gay” or without
openly acknowledging their queer desires had been going on for a few years. Key to this
discussion is the argument that sexual practices on the “down low” significantly
contribute to a rise in HIV infections within black communities. Martin Manalansan
succinctly summarizes the contradictory arguments about the “down low” in the
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following way: “Often they [black men on the “down low”] are seen to be vestiges of
tradition, lagging behind in the march toward sexual and gender cosmopolitanism. At
best, they are victims of cultural norms in need of education and rescue. At worst, they
are both internally homophobic, self-hating imposters getting the best of both worlds”
(99). Manalansan's observation points towards the ongoing debate about the difficulties
of reconciling queer and black identities and the various explanations for these
difficulties, the most prominent of which tend to emphasize the existence of homophobia
in black and other non-white communities. One of the problematic implications of
explanations structured around homophobia is that one supposedly cannot be both black
and gay and that black men who have same-sex partners need to privilege racial
identifications over others or fear exclusion from the black community. As I explained in
Chapter 1, the idea that one needs to choose between one's racial and sexual
identifications is an overly general assessment that assumes race and sexuality are
separable and separate, rather than always-already intertwined, discourses. Overall,
debates about the “down low” posit black men's sexual practices as important problem
that needs to be addressed and solved because it puts female partners at risk of HIV. The
ways in which the “down low” is embedded in larger discourses about the intersection of
race and sexuality is often left out of these debates. It is easy to see how the cultural
discourse surrounding the “down low” is very different from the celebratory reception of
Jack and Ennis' allegedly tragic romance.
In this context, Richard Pitt comments on the interpretation of Brokeback
Mountain as tragic romance, remarking specifically on the film's reception, in which Jack
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and Ennis' unfaithfulness to their wives is, for the most part, regarded with sympathy, and
not with judgment. He argues that it is the characters' whiteness and their temporal and
spacial remoteness that saves them from receiving the same condemnation that black men
on the “down low” have received in recent years. One might interject and remark that
these are two historically different situations that require different responses, especially
because Jack and Ennis' affair takes place before the identification of HIV/AIDS.
However, Pitt's comparison of two Oprah shows devoted to the subject, one featuring
white married men who identify as gay and one featuring black men who have sex with
men on “down low” demonstrates that it is not so much a historically different situation,
but rather racial difference, that makes the incisive difference in interpretation here (255256). While the show focusing on white couples is framed within a discourse of
sympathy and of criticizing especially rural homophobia, the show addressing the down
low condemns infidelity and shifts the focus of sympathy away from black men. Pitt does
not address the continuous disarticulation of race and sexuality in American culture, a
disarticulation that has contributed to the association of whiteness with gay male
sexuality and of blackness with heterosexuality.
Going even beyond that, I argue that we can see this dichotomy (of Jack and
Ennis becoming sympathetic via their whiteness and black men on the down low being
criticized due to their racial identification) as another outcome of the screening processes
accompanying the discourse of queer visibility in the 1990s. During the 1980s, white
bisexual men were one of the risk groups routinely identified with the spread of AIDS.
As I explained in Chapter 2, they were often blamed for spreading HIV/AIDS to the
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“general” population of heterosexual Americans because they had sex with both (gay)
men and (straight) women. The causal linkages between the sexual practices of bisexual
men and the spread of HIV are obviously reductive and biased; yet, they served as a
blueprint for many stories about AIDS and the “general” population during the 1980s.
After the disarticulation of queer sexuality and queer identity in the early 1990s, AIDS
fades into the background of cultural conversations about sexuality, at least regarding
white gay and lesbian Americans. AIDS is increasingly connected to blackness (AIDS in
Africa, the down low) or to promiscuity (which, as Pitt shows, has been racialized, 257).
This shift—separating AIDS from its almost immediate connection to white bisexual men
to black men on the “down low” or populations outside the United States—allows for the
emergence of the sympathetic white bisexual married man who suffers from continuing
homophobia and cannot be “out.” The portrayal of Jack and Ennis fits into these
discursive shifts and illustrates how important whiteness is to the sympathetic depiction
and reception of their relationship.
“That's Not Even On the Map:” Boys Don't Cry
As I mentioned in the introduction to this chapter, Boys Don't Cry narrates the last
few weeks of transgendered Brandon Teena's life, focusing on his brief relationship with
Lana Tisdell. In contrast to Brokeback Mountain, Boys Don't Cry is based on “true
events” surrounding the murder of Brandon Teena in Falls City, Nebraska, in 1993.
Similarly to Brokeback Mountain, screening processes involving race and sexuality in
Boys Don't Cry relate to space and time in fraught and complex ways.
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Most academic analyses and popular reviews focus solely on the representation of
transgender identity in Boys Don't Cry, ignoring how a screening of race facilitates Boys
Don't Cry's narrative focus on Brandon's transgender identity.30 On the rare occasion that
analyses address the significance of race, they usually only debate the absence of Philip
De Vine, who, in the historical events upon which the film is based, was a black, straight
man who was murdered alongside Brandon Teena and Lisa Lambert.31 But the screening
of race in Boys Don't Cry goes beyond this absence. In fact, I suggest that race isn't
absent from Boys Don't Cry at all. Rather, racial meanings haunt the film. Racialized
discourses, such as the alien-ness and alienation that characterizes both the Nebraska
landscape and the characters, are mobilized in order to facilitate the narrative and our
identification with Brandon.
While, unlike the vague “pastness” previously discussed, Boys Don't Cry is
narratively connected to a specific time and place, namely Falls City, Nebraska in 1993,
the film's mise-en-scene and its use of other formal strategies nonetheless foster a sense
of being outside of a historically specific time and space. As Christina Dando puts it, “It
[the landscape in the film] is virtually timeless. There is also a sense of both place and
placelessness. While the landscape is distinctively Plains, it could be described as
nowhere” (100). We often think of something that is “timeless” as something that
transcends its own historical context so that it will continue to have meaning because it
encapsulates some core cultural meaning. Yet in Boys Don't Cry, the “timeless” Nebraska
30
31
See, for example, David Ansen's review “Walk Like a Man, Talk Like a Man”in Newsweek, Michael H.
Kleinschrodt's “'Boys' Director Seeks Understanding for Tragic Victim” in the Times-Picayune, and
John Keenan's “Portrayals Illuminate 'Don't Cry'” in the Omaha World Herald,
Jennifer Brody's “Boyz Do Cry: Screening History's White Lies” is a good example of such an analysis.
136
landscape is evacuated of context and meaning; it becomes a “nowhere” that is left
untethered and disconnected. Its alien qualities are underlined in the film by sped-up
editing sequences with the aid of time-lapse photography that blur lights against the night
sky, by shots of nearly monstrous, lit-up factories, and by imagery of revolving overhead
power lines.32 This unfamiliar landscape is not the heartland of picket fences and family
values. Rather, the portrayal of the alien and alienating Nebraska landscape is positioned
as a critique of the heartland that underlines the fear of difference in rural spaces.
Ultimately, however, this critique draws on its own stereotypical representations of rural
America to cement the distance between Nebraska as space “out there” that does not
relate to “us.”
In addition to the use of time-lapse photography and other formal strategies, the
alienation of Falls City also occurs on a narrative level. Where Brokeback Mountain's
narrative anchored Jack and Ennis' lives in the American past, Boys Don't Cry's narrative
firmly anchors Falls City as a space that is remote and distant in an almost otherwordly
way. As Brandon's cousin Loni puts it, “That's not even on the map.” In the conversations
that Loni and Brandon have throughout the film, Loni again and again underlines that
Falls City is a place where Brandon doesn't belong, and that is a dangerous environment
for anyone who falls outside the norm. Loni thus marks Falls City as a homophobic,
32
The alien qualities of the Nebraska landscape also recall a different context altogether, namely the
intrusion of a foreigner, of an “illegal alien” into the American state. The discourse of illegal aliens is most
immediately connected to the relationship between Mexico and the U.S., and is characterized by a long
history of racial conflict. While it is certainly easy to imagine Brandon as the “illegal alien” that intrudes
into a territory where he doesn't belong—and is violently punished for it—the larger context of race is
evacuated from the alienness and alienation that pervades Boys Don't Cry's diegesis. The border-crossings
Brandon undertakes are firmly located and constrained within the discourse of gender and sexuality, which
eclipses the ways in which Boys Don't Cry borrows from discourses of race and racialization in order to tell
a story about Brandon's transgender identity.
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violent town that rightfully doesn't show up on any maps. When Brandon shows him a
picture of Lana, the girl Brandon is in love with, Loni remarks that she is attractive “if
you like white trash.” Loni articulates what the mise-en-scene has already hinted at,
namely that the people who live in Falls City are, in the words of Lisa Henderson,
“trapped by limited options in a limited place, by duplicity, by histories of violence and a
lack of autonomy” (301). By calling upon and naming the residents of Falls City “white
trash,” Loni once more underlines the distance between “them” and “us” for the viewer.
However, what disappears from view through this labeling is that “white trash” has been
racialized in contradictory ways. John Hartigan argues that “instances of the name 'white
trash' register racial pollutions: moments when decorum of the white racial order has
been breached or compromised or, perhaps more important, where the imaginary
boundary between whiteness and blackness is undermined” (115). The label “white trash”
functions as a means of distancing a group of poor whites from normative whiteness, on
the one hand, and as a way of policing the boundaries of normative whiteness, on the
other hand. Frequently, “white trash” is connected to particular social and geographic
locations—a discusive strategy that limits the potential for disrupting racial boundaries to
specific and often remote and rural spaces. While Boys Don't Cry relies on the distance
created by this label, the films also evades a confrontation with the underlying
racialization of “white trash”; the racial and class dimensions of “white trash” in Falls
City remain unexplored, blending into a backdrop that supposedly signals homophobia
and violence and not much else. As such, the explicit evocation of “white trash” works in
conjunction with the alien landscape of Falls City to underline the idea that it is only
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“those people” in Falls City who could be responsible for such a brutal crime as the rape
and murder of Brandon Teena.
Another abject aspect of white identity also did not make it into the film.
Evidence that one of Brandon's murderers was associated with a white supremacy group
is not part of Boys Don't Cry's diegesis. Consequently, the possibility that the murder of
Brandon, Philip, and Lisa goes beyond a hatred of Brandon's gender transgressions is lost
in Boys Don't Cry. The possibility that these murders are imbricated in a much more
complex refusal of difference articulated in the transgendered body of Brandon and the
racialized body of Philip does not have a place in the narrative or mise-en-scene. The
continuous disarticulation of this intersectionality is also evident in director Kimberly
Pierce's explanation for why she decided against the inclusion of De Vine's murder: it
seemed too “tangential” to her. The impression that race was tangential to Brandon's story
arises out of the notion that race and sexuality can be separated, and, particularly in this
case, that Brandon's murder was not connected to De Vine's. By marking De Vine's death
as tangential, it is relegated to a matter of being 'in the wrong place at the wrong time',
which could be said of many instances of racially motivated violence, but denies the way
in which spaces and times are saturated with racial meanings in the first place. Much like
Brokeback Mountain, Boys Don't Cry engages in the continuing refusal to acknowledge
the intersectionality of race, gender, class, and sexuality.
But what is perhaps most interesting about this narrative positioning of Falls City
is that Loni, the character who informs us of Falls City as a “nowhere” populated by
“white trash,” is a white, gay man himself. What do we make of the fact that Loni situates
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Falls City and its residents for us? Moreover, how do we read Loni's continuous
challenges to Brandon's transgender identity? For example, when Brandon asks Loni why
people threaten him after he flirts with a girl at roller rink, Loni replies, “Because you're
not a boy...why don't you admit that you're a dyke.” Loni thus occupies a curious
position: on the one hand, he lives in a trailer in rural Nebraska, which might align him
with the same class position as the residents of Falls City, but on the other hand, he
clearly rejects the alienation that comes with being labeled as “white trash” and with the
queerness of Brandon's transgender identification. At the same time that he is the one
who marks Falls City as stereotypical rural town, his own positioning breaks up the
supposed uniformity of space in Boys Don't Cry: his gender, sexual, and class
identifications slot into much more normative places than those of the remaining
characters. Indeed, he embodies the kind of queer visibility that has emerged as the norm:
gay and of an unremarkable that is, an unmarked class and whiteness. It is perhaps not
surprising that he is the one who claims the authority to categorize those around him and
who asks the kinds of questions that the spectator might about why Brandon would
choose to remain in an environment that is hostile and offers no perspective for the
future. In asking these questions, Loni not only locates himself outside of Falls City but
situates Falls City as a site of white trash and queerness in opposition to a much more
normative gay culture. In so doing, he disavows his own location in a rural, poor area and
characterizes himself as normatively white precisely via his gay identity. The audience's
identification with Brandon thus emerges out of the tension between rejecting Loni's
efforts of putting down Brandon's desire to create a new identity and life for himself
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(crucial components of the American dream and especially of westward expansion, after
all) and recognizing that the “white trash” environment of Falls City doomed Brandon's
efforts from the start.33
Conclusion
Locating the events depicted in Brokeback Mountain and Boys Don't Cry outside
of space and time not only facilitates the celebration of these movies as part of the “gay
90s” but allows a willful ignorance of the racialized and queer landscapes and times that
make the kinds of queer visibility portrayed in these films possible in the first place; as
such, celebratory accounts of the films' significance and breakthrough qualities are
further examples of how the screening of race and of unruly elements of queerness is
crucial to the discourse of queer visibility as it has emerged since the early 1990s. Both
33
At this point, at least a brief note on Matthew Shepard's murder and subsequent televisual renditions of
his life is necessary. In discussions of Brokeback Mountain and of Boys Don't Cry, the name Matthew
Shepard comes up frequently. On the one hand, it makes sense to mention him, as he lived and died in
Laramie, Wyoming, the same state in which Brokeback Mountain takes place. Moreover, his death is
attributed to anti-queer violence, much like the murders of Jack Twist and Brandon Teena. But this is where
the similarities to Brokeback Mountain and Boys Don't Cry, at least in terms of the fictional retellings of
Shepard's life and murder, end. In contrast to Brokeback Mountain and Boys Don't Cry, the various
renditions of Matthew Shepard's life and murder are clearly located in the here and now: while newspaper
reports of Shepard's murder initially depicted Laramie as a homophobic place “out there,” subsequent
fictional depictions, especially The Laramie Project (Moises Kaufman, 2002) resist that depiction and seek
to locate Laramie at the heart of America, simultaneously suggesting that homophobic murder can happen
anywhere and that “hate is not a Laramie value,” thus refusing the stereotype of the homophobic, rural
Western town. Additionally, Matthew Shepard has become a projection surface for activism in support of
including sexual orientation in hate crimes legislation, especially on a federal level. His story is thus
explicitly tied to political debates that were taking place at the time of his murder and of the release of The
Laramie Project, and sympathy with Matthew Shepard has been used to rally activists and politicians in
support of new hate crimes legislation. In all of this, Shepard has almost completely disappeared: The
Laramie Project is about Laramie's struggle with the aftermath of the murder, and The Matthew Shepard
Story (Roger Spottiswoode, 2002), a film made for television, deals with Shepard's parents' search for
meaning after their son's murder. While Brokeback Mountain and Boys Don't Cry focuses on Jack, Ennis,
and Brandon, the various fictional accounts about Matthew Shepard screen out Matthew nearly completely;
he only appears in accounts other people give about him. One has to wonder if it is this absence that allows
The Laramie Project and The Matthew Shepard Story to be so directly linked to a “real” space and time:
Matthew's queerness is safely located off-screen and can no longer touch the audience.
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Brokeback Mountain and Boys Don't Cry rely on the same screening processes that
accompany other “breakthrough” media texts of the 1990s and early 2000s, such as, in
terms of films, Philadelphia, Transamerica, and Milk, in terms of TV, Will&Grace,
Queer As Folk, and Brothers & Sisters. Specifically, these texts rely on whiteness as
projection surface for rendering queerness visible, while simultaneously screening out of
the significance of race and of those aspects of queer identities and sexualities that defy
categorization.
In the specific case of Brokeback Mountain and Boys Don't Cry, the screening of
race and queerness works in conjunction with genre and mise-en-scene to encapsulate the
films' diegeses in a distant place and time. In other words, these films primarily situate
queer lives and identities outside of time and space through temporal and spatial
dislocations; these dislocations are anchored in screenings of race and queerness rather
than located in historically specific times and places. Whereas popular reviews situate
both Brokeback Mountain and Boys Don't Cry as breakthrough movies that critically
engage queer lives and identities, I argue that the films' engagement (and lack of
engagement) with race, sexuality, space and time render the representations of queer
desires and identities non-threatening to both the norms of Hollywood cinema and of
American society. The following chapter continues my exploration of the mainstream
media's uneven engagement with screenings of race and queer sexualities. Via a
comparison of Ellen with Brothers & Sisters, I argue that queer visibility on television in
the early 2000s draws gay identities into a project of maintaining white domesticity and
privacy.
CHAPTER 4
Kevin and Scotty Get Married (And Hardly Anyone is Watching): Queer Visibility,
Privacy, and the Boundaries of Everyday Life on Television
When Ellen Degeneres and her character Ellen Morgan came out in April 1997,
the coming-out episode was the culmination of a media frenzy that had been going on for
months.34 As Steven Capsuto observes, “The Ellen controversy became the news story
that no one could escape. It was everywhere” (388). When Kevin Walker and Scotty
Wandell got married on Brothers & Sisters in May 2008, the episode received little more
than a yawn in response. No extensive press coverage or Time Magazine covers
accompanied this wedding, and no one really cared that Luke McFarlane (the actor who
plays Scotty) had come out a month earlier.35 In one of the few reviews discussing the
wedding, Matthew Gilbert muses that, in contrast to the “brouhaha” surrounding Ellen's
coming out, “on the day of Kevin and Scotty's nuptials, which arrives after much onscreen making out by the couple, there seems to be only TiVo-setting and shoulder
shrugging” (np). All in all, Kevin and Scotty's wedding in the season two finale of
34
35
For the sake of convenience, I will refer to the double coming out of Ellen Morgan and Ellen Degeneres
as “Ellen's coming out” for the remainder of the chapter. Blurring the lines between the star and the
character was very much a part of this double coming out, and acted as an attempt to lend an air of
authenticity to Ellen's televisual coming out. As Lynne Joyrich observes, “By having Ellen DeGeneres
come out of the closet just shortly before Ellen Morgan did, television assures us that we can recognize
homosexuality through and through when we see it, that it can't be faked—despite the competing
corollary admission that this conflated Ellen's' sexuality had been faked until this point” (25).
McFarlane came out in an interview with the Globe and Mail, a Canadian newspaper, in April of 2008.
See Chelin, Pamela. “A Commitment to Himself.”
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143
Brothers & Sisters was an utterly mundane event. What happened in the ten years
between Ellen and Brothers & Sisters that explains the difference in reception? The
answer sounds simple, but comprises complex discursive shifts: between 1997 and 2008,
queerness became a normal part of the mainstream media landscape. One might consider
this development as sign of the television industry's and the audience's increasing
embrace of queer visibility in the form of gay and lesbian characters. In other words, the
absence of frantic media coverage of Kevin and Scotty's wedding could indicate that we
have gotten used to seeing queer characters as part of our television programming and
have come to consider their presence as normal. However, it is precisely the apparently
mundane qualities of Kevin and Scotty's wedding that need further investigation as
something other than a mark of progressive developments. The ways in which their
wedding—and their relationship in general—blend apparently seamlessly into the
diegesis of Brothers & Sisters and into TV programming in general reveal much about
the further normalization of queer media visibility and its function in regulating who can
count him- or herself as part of the American nation in the early 2000s.
This chapter traces the various processes that allowed for this normalization—as
such, I investigate Kevin and Scotty's wedding as part of a larger shift in televisual
renditions of queer visibility. Specifically, the incorporation of openly gay characters into
TV's everydayness constitutes a move beyond the solidification of whiteness as
projection surface for queer visibility (which, as previously detailed, had occurred earlier
in the 1990s) and towards homonationalism (which becomes particularly pronounced
after the events of 9/11).
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The Story of Ellen, Bill, and Monica, or, the (TV) Closet Is Not For Queers Only
It would be an understatement to say that Ellen's coming out has been a focal
point of scholarly analyses devoted to exploring the so-called explosion of gay visibility
during the 1990s.36 Much like the mainstream press's endless commentary on Ellen's
coming out, scholars have also provided abundant analyses of what many have come to
regard as yet another turning point in the history of queer media visibility. Tempting as it
may be to divide this history into “before Ellen” and “after Ellen,” declaring Ellen's
coming out a “first” requires much clarification and moments of deliberate forgetfulness.
After all, Ellen was not the first lesbian character on television; rather, she was the first
lesbian character to come out on a prime-time network program. As Anna McCarthy
remarks, “In keeping with the characteristics of coming out as a speech act, the episode
had 'nothing to do with the acquisition of new information'; rather, it was a largely
ceremonial first, an occasion we were all supposed to remember as the moment when
queer lives finally became part of mainstream television” (594). Within the discourse of
36
Almost every scholarly analysis of GLBT media images of the 1990s at least mentions Ellen's coming
out in passing. The more substantial analyses include: Becker, Ron. “Gay Material and Prime-Time
Network Television in the 1990s.” In: Gay TV and Straight America; Capsuto, Steven. “The Ellen
Morgan Story (or How to Win a Toaster Oven): Television: 1994-1998,” In: Alternate Channels: The
Uncensored Story of Gay and Lesbian Images on Radio and Television; Cragin, Becca. “Lesbians and
Serial TV: Ellen Finds Her Inner Adult.” in In: Keller, James R. and Leslie Stratyner. The New Queer
Aesthetic on Television: Essays on Recent Programming; Didi, Herman. “'I'm Gay': Declarations,
Desire, and Coming Out On Prime-Time Television”; Dow, Bonnie J. “Ellen, Television, and the
Politics of Gay and Lesbian Visibility”; Gross, Larry. “Hollywood's Gay Nineties.” In: Up from
Invisibility; Hubert, Susan J. “What's Wrong With This Picture?”; Moore, Candace. “Resisting,
Reiterating, and Dancing Through: The Swinging Closet Doors of Ellen DeGeneres? Televised
Personalities.” In: Beirne, Rebbeca (ed). Televising Queer Women: A Reader; Streitmatter, Rodger.
“Ellen: Coming Out, On Screen and Off.” In: From "Perverts" to "Fab Five": The Media's Changing
Depiction of Gay Men and Lesbians; Tropiano, Stephen. “'Not That There's Anything Wrong With It':
Homosexuality and Television Comedy.” In: The Prime Time Closet: A History of Gays and Lesbians
on TV; Walters, Suzanna. “Dossier on Ellen.” In: All the Rage; Yescavage, Karen and Jonathan
Alexander. “What Do You Call a Lesbian Who's Only Slept with Men? Answer: Ellen Morgan.
Deconstructing the Lesbian Identities of Ellen Morgan and Ellen DeGeneres.”
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queer visibility, Ellen's coming out thus plays a similar function to the Stonewall Riots,
the early days of the AIDS crisis, and the successes of Brokeback Mountain and Boys
Don't Cry: it is a carefully constructed moment that has become significant because we
chose to bestow an originary quality upon it.
Many scholarly debates about Ellen's coming out turn a focused lens on the
construction of this originary moment, foregrounding its significance to media portrayals
of queer identities. Analyses that tie Ellen to other media events that challenged
Americans to confront their ideas about sexuality, most notably the affair between Bill
Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, are surprisingly rare (Lynne Joyrich's essay
“Epistemology of the Console” is one example that does make connections among Ellen,
Bill, and Monica). In other words, most scholarly examinations of Ellen's coming out
explore the months of media coverage leading up the coming out episode in 1997 and
analyze the cancellation of Ellen a season later. For example, Steven Capsuto, Susan J.
Hubert, and Larry Gross provide in-depth descriptions of the press coverage and the
production discourse that surrounded Ellen between 1996 and 1998. Suzanna Walters
picks apart “The Puppy Episode” (the episode in which Ellen Morgan comes out) and
reveals its heteronormative underpinnings. Adopting a more comparative approach,
Becca Cragin analyzes Ellen Morgan's character in the context of televisual lesbian
representation, and Didi Herman discusses Ellen in relation to the British TV program
Bad Girls. While all these essays provide important insights into the immediate cultural,
production, and reception context of Ellen's coming out, they do not situate it in a more
broadly conceived discourse of queer visibility, i.e. one that goes beyond a discussion of
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the potential progressive value of this media event and that situates it in a broader context
that takes, for example, the structures of television as a medium or the reliance on
racialized discourses in the facilitation of queer visibility into account. But it is exactly
such a broad conceptualization that is necessary to understand how Ellen's coming out
relates to the affair between President Bill Clinton and former White House intern
Monica Lewinsky and that underlines the importance of considering the connections
between both events.
The details of and fallout from the affair between Clinton and Lewinsky
dominated news headlines for much of 1998. Starting on January 21, 1998, rumors about
the affair unfold in the mainstream media, followed by Clinton's admission of the affair
on August 17, 1998, and the House of Representatives' vote in favor of impeaching the
president on December 19, 1998 for perjury during his grand jury testimony about his
relationship with Monica Lewinsky. In the relentless pursuit of details about the affair,
something became clear rather quickly: there was something rather queer about Bill and
Monica's relationship. As Debbie Nathan puts it:
Those folks [in the mainstream media] dominated the yada-yada about the
President’s adulterous immorality and his 'exploitation' of a poor intern,
but few were frank enough to admit what was really bothering them: that
the sex between Bill and Monica wasn’t just extramarital, it was also oralgenital and oral-anal. That, according to the moth-eaten 'crimes against
nature' laws, is barely one step from-horrors!-sodomy. (20)
The discovery that the American president, a figure who embodies the ideals of the
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nation, might stray off the heteronormative path caused anxiety in some (Kenneth Starr
comes to mind) and inspiration in others (a how-to instructional video tape called Bend
Over, Boyfriend, which was targeted at heterosexual couples, became a best seller that
year).37
The fundamental logic that drove both the media frenzy surrounding Ellen's
coming out and the Clinton/Lewinsky affair is the open secret. In both cases, questions
such as “is she...?” and “did they...?”, and the deferral of definitive answers to these
questions, drove the press frenzy in ever tighter circles around the near-certainty of
knowing that yes, Ellen is “really” a lesbian and yes, Bill and Monica “really” had sex.
This give-and-take of providing and withholding knowledge is central to what Michel
Foucault has called the spiral of power and pleasure: “The pleasure that comes of
exercising a power that questions, monitors, watches, spies, searches out, palpates, brings
to light; and on the other hand, the pleasure that kindles at having to evade that power”
(The History of Sexuality, 45). It is precisely the pleasurable limbo between almostknowing and refusing to confirm that saturated the intense media coverage in response to
hints about Ellen's coming out and rumors about a relationship between Bill Clinton and
Monica Lewinsky. But what is most significant for understanding how the story of Ellen,
Bill, and Monica relates to queer media visibilities is that this dance around what we can
know and how we know what we know about sexuality, especially queer sexuality, is
37
Kenneth Starr was the Independent Counsel for a range of investigations relating to President Clinton,
including the legal aspects of the Clinton-Lewinsky affair. The Starr Report: The Independent Counsel's
Complete Report to Congress on the Investigation of President Clinton became infamous due to its
lengthy and detailed descriptions of the sexual acts in which Clinton and Lewinsky engaged. For an
analysis of the Starr Report, see Ann Cvetkovich's “Sexuality's Archive: The Evidence of the Starr
Report.” For more on the popularity of Bend Over, Boyfriend, see Debbie Nathan's “Sodomy for the
Masses.”
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central to the structure of television as a medium. As Lynne Joyrich has argued, “Indeed,
television is a crucial site for the exploration of the logic of the closet not only because of
its central role in establishing (and suspending) knowledge in postmodern culture but also
because US television itself is located at the intersection of many of the same conceptual
divisions that Sedgwick described” (23). In other words, television both transmits ways
of knowing (queer) sexuality via its narratives and via its position at the intersection of
various cultural discourses.
The most significant of those discourses that TV negotiates is the border between
public and private, which television continuously narrates for us as it “constructs
knowledges identified both as secret (domestically received) and shared (defined as part
of a collective national culture)” (23). The construction of knowledges that are both
secret and shared is a theme that winds its way through the story of Ellen, Bill, and
Monica, and later, through Kevin and Scotty's wedding. For example, in “The Puppy
Episode,” Ellen announces her lesbian identity publicly at an airport by accidentally
speaking into a microphone hooked up to the terminal's announcement system. During
the Clinton/Lewinsky affair, one of the persistent questions in TV news coverage was
whether or not the private life of a president impacts his public duties and whether or not
a president even has a truly private life. In contrast to these articulations and questions of
publicity, Scotty and Kevin get married in the privacy of Kevin's mother's home. While
the latter is perhaps not that surprising considering TV's domestic focus, the private
marriage of Kevin and Scotty takes on another meaning when one asks who has access to
that kind of privacy, and who can choose to keep their personal affairs private and who
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cannot (a question I will investigate in more depth later on in this chapter). As this brief
overview shows, the public/private dynamic at the center of the story of Ellen, Bill, and
Monica and of Kevin and Scotty's wedding directly relates to what Lynne Joyrich has
called the “epistemology of the console” (named after Sedgwick's concept of the
“epistemology of the closet”). In turn, these televisual events also offer an opportunity to
investigate how televisual epistemology structures the interdependence of queer visibility
and hegemonic whiteness.
The overlapping events of Ellen's coming out and of the Clinton/Lewinsky affair
challenged television's epistemological structures even as it also reaffirmed them. For
example, the sexually explicit subject matter that frequently surfaced in the reporting of
the Clinton/Lewinsky affair and of Clinton's impeachment incited what Foucault tems a
“repressive hypothesis” scenario: while commentators constantly declared that certain
explicit details about Bill and Monica's affair couldn't be articulated on television, there
was nevertheless an endless incitement to discourse about those details (revealed, of
course, in a veiled and consequently seemingly tantalizing fashion) (Joyrich, 24; Torres,
104). Ellen engaged in a comparable dynamic of unveiling and evasion. The constant
stream of hints and allusions to Ellen's soon-to-be-official lesbianism on and off the show
between the fall of 1996 and the spring of 1997 were so self-aware that they exemplified
and narrated television's epistemology (Joyrich, 33). For example, the opening scene of
the 1996-7 season of Ellen takes place in Ellen's bathroom, where she sings the famous
West Side Story lyrics “I feel pretty / I feel witty / I feel pretty and witty and – hey!”,
confounding viewer expectations to hear the word “gay” at the last moment when no
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running water emerges from the tap. This tension between an unspoken yet shared
knowledge illuminates both the dynamic of the open secret and of televisual
epistemology.
Considering that the televisual closet isn't for queers only—as Joyrich
demonstrated most clearly—why is this connection among Ellen, Bill, and Monica raised
so rarely? As I have emphasized throughout the preceding chapters, it is important to
remember that, in regard to queer media visibilities, the closet functions as a screen, and
that this screen most frequently becomes embodied in the whiteness of the characters
whose sexuality is under negotiation. What role does whiteness, and discourses of race in
general, play in the story of Ellen, Bill, and Monica? The short answer is, a rather large
one for each case. However, the deployments of whiteness that are mobilized in the
discourse of queer visibility in Ellen's coming out and in the Clinton/Lewinksy affair are
markedly different—in Ellen's case, her normative whiteness allowed race to become the
allegedly invisible projection surface upon which her coming out was projected; it only
became visible (and thus problematic) when the show tried to explore her everyday life as
a lesbian beyond the moment of coming out (more on Ellen and her whiteness in the next
section).
In the case of Bill Clinton, his whiteness never quite fit the normative mold, and
an exploration of how his racial and sexual identity has consistently been rendered
“deviant” via a connection to his “white trash” origins reveals much about why his affair
with Monica Lewinsky turned into a perceived threat to the nation itself (McElya, 158).
Specifically, it is the idea of the president engaging in queer acts that makes the Clinton-
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Lewinsky affair so threatening: after all, if the president does it, why shouldn't the rest of
America, too? In order to ward off such conclusions, both the mainstream press and the
team around Kenneth Starr constructed Bill Clinton as a man who violates the norms of
white masculinity and who had indulged in excessive behavior throughout his life
(McElya, 159). As Jonathan Alter puts it in an opinion piece for Newsweek, “Everyone in
Clinton's immediate family suffered from some kind of compulsive disorder or addiction”
(31). By marking Bill Clinton as a thoroughly queer figure, he stands apart from the
nation, rather than standing in for the nation.
It is the perceived difference between how Ellen and how Bill Clinton relate to
queer sexualities, whiteness, and the nation that makes these two events seem to so
different despite their similar underlying logic of the closet. Furthermore, it is the
resolution of these differences via the move toward homonationalism that paves the way
for the allegedly mundane nature of Kevin and Scotty's relationship on Brothers &
Sisters. In order to understand how this shift took place, I now take a closer look at how
Ellen's lesbian identity challenged the boundaries of televisual everyday life.
A “Gay Rosa Parks”? Ellen's Struggle with Everyday Life38
“The Puppy Episode” was a huge ratings success (Becker, 166). Subsequent
episodes, some of which dealt with Ellen's exploration of her newly “out” status and
some of which didn't explicitly engage her lesbian identity at all, did not receive high
38
In her discussion of Ellen's continuous use of analogies of race and sexuality—specifically, the show's
strategy to portray being gay as being analogous to being a person of color—Anna McCarthy concludes
that “the producers affirmed a model of public visibility through which DeGeneres could characterize
herself as a gay Rosa Parks” (605).
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ratings (Becker, 170). At the end of season five, a year after Ellen came out, the program
was canceled. There are many different theories for why viewers lost interest in Ellen and
for the network's decision to cancel the show, many of which revolve around the idea that
Ellen was “too gay” or “not gay in the right ways.” Aligning herself with the first
explanation, Suzanna Walters, for example, argues that Ellen had ultimately become too
centered on “gay life.” Walters herself applauds the program for engaging with subjects
such as lesbian parenting (since the woman whom Ellen dates has a daughter) and the
adjustments that Ellen's parents go through to reconcile the “old” (presumably straight)
Ellen with the “new” (lesbian) Ellen (88, 92). It is those praiseworthy plots, Walter
explains, that triggered “double standards and heterosexual unease” among producers and
network executives and that ultimately led to Ellen's cancellation (94). In contrast, Steven
Capsuto investigates the production discourse surrounding Ellen's last season in his quest
for an explanation. He concludes that the reason for the cancellation does not stem from
the show's engagement with Ellen's lesbian identity, but rather from the increasing
difference in the network's and the producers' vision for the program. These differences
caused the program to lose a clear direction—during one week's episode, Ellen would be
fully immersed in what Walters called “gay life,” and in the next episode, Ellen would
stumble into a situation reminiscent of the pre-coming-out episodes. Weary of network
policing of what plots could and could not air on the show, not to mention the addition of
a “TV-14” rating to some episodes, the show increasingly tried to “prove a point rather
than to entertain” (Capsuto, 402). In the end, Capsuto argues, “the show was simply no
longer funny enough to survive” (403). Finally, Lynne Joyrich demonstrates how both
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positions, i.e. that Ellen had become “too gay” or was not gay in the “right way,” fold
into the overall logic of television: “The questions, then, over what's too gay or not gay
enough, what's 'funny that way' or what's simply queer . . . revealed once again that the
door of the closet can swing both ways, that sexual knowingness remains a fault line for
knowing TV” (38). Put differently, the struggle over Ellen's last season speaks not only to
the question of how to incorporate a lesbian character into a sitcom, but opens up a
broader view of how discourses of queer visibility intersect with the fundamental
structures of television as a medium. It is this intersection of queerness and televisuality
that Anna McCarthy pursues in her analysis of Ellen's last season.
Rather than attempting to explain whether or not the show suffered from a
heteronormative backlash or to estimate how much good the program did for queer media
visibility, McCarthy argues that the post-coming-out episodes of Ellen speak most
directly to the ways in which queerness and television form mesh or don't mesh (596).
The one thing that becomes most apparent in the attempts to negotiate Ellen's lesbian
identity within the confines of the traditional sitcom is that, while her coming out as onetime event did not disrupt televisual seriality, her ongoing queer presence, and its
function as central narrative element, very much went against then-established sitcom
seriality (597). McCarthy succinctly summarizes this contradiction: “Queer TV, in short,
could make history as event television but not as what we might call 'uneventful'
television” (ibid). From this point of view, the main problem with the last season of Ellen
was not whether or not Ellen was “too gay,” but that queerness and televisual
everydayness didn't cohere into an ongoing narrative. This is perhaps not a surprise
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considering that queer visibility on television was still something remarkable in 1997. Put
differently, the ways in which queerness was rendered visible on TV relied on plots and
characters that stood out in one way or another from the rest of the diegesis.
In Gay TV and Straight America, Ron Becker offers a detailed description and
analysis of gay and lesbian characters and storylines that appeared on television between
1989 and 2002. The most noticeable way in which gay characters stood out from their
straight counterparts was the lack of intimate relationships. Becker anchors television's
hesitant pursuit of this subject matter in the controversies over a 1989 episode of
thirtysomething that depicted two men sitting next to each other in bed. The episode
effectively disappeared from television as it was never shown again, not even in reruns
(Becker, 138). As I explained in Chapter 2, the disarticulation of sexuality and identity
was a crucial precondition to the so-called explosion of gay visibility during the 1990s.
As this explosion took shape, gay characters appeared on TV with increasing frequency,
but most often in the same types of storylines in which they had appeared since the 1970s
—as victims of homophobic violence, as participants in mistaken identity plots (in which
a straight character will be mistaken for gay due to or in the presence of a gay character),
or as initiators or recipients of straight characters' experimentation with same-sex
attraction (so that the number of lesbian kisses during “sweeps” periods grew throughout
the 1990s to the point where it has become a cliche). In addition, the inclusion of an
openly gay and lesbian supporting character could lend an edge to an otherwise not
particularly noteworthy program: “including a gay neighbor, a lesbian sister, or some
queer plot twist was not only possible but lucrative for those networks and producers
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anxious to differentiate their product in a saturated market of Friends and Seinfeld
imitators” (Becker, 158). Even the successful sitcom Will&Grace, which premiered only
a few months after Ellen went off the air, relies on Will's and Jack's gay identities as focal
points of plots and jokes—in fact, they need to stand out in order for the show to succeed.
If Will and Jack's gayness were unremarkable, there would be no difference between
Will&Grace and the many other sitcoms revolving around a male and female lead
character (and, consequently, the program would probably not have been the success that
it was).
The clash between queerness and serial television's emphasis on everyday life has
much to do with homonormative discourses emerging during the 1990s. While the
increasing prominence of homonormativity after the AIDS crisis of the 1980s allowed for
the proliferation of gay and lesbian characters and issues in the media, the accompanying
normalization of queer lives and identities on and off the screen had not “progressed” far
enough to resolve all contradictions, especially when it came to integrating queer subjects
—both in the form of queer American citizens or in narratives told about them—into the
nation. Considering that Ellen, with her white, middle-class, house-and-business-owning,
and romance-seeking existence fits the demands of homonormativity, one would expect
her to fit into the norms of television as well. Yet, her lesbian identity makes her
televisually stand out. This points to one of the cracks in the discourse of
homonormativity; namely, that, despite fulfilling the core demands of heteronormativity,
i.e. adherence to gender, class and lifestyle norms, there is still something queer here that
creates difference (and distance) between homo- and heteronormativity. Throughout the
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1990s, this difference became particularly apparent in discourses around civil rights,
especially regarding the presence of openly gay and lesbian Americans in the U.S.
military and the advocacy for the legalization of gay marriage. Despite the increasing
visibility of gay and lesbian subjects during the 1990s, brought about by the media and
political advocacy, the alignment of queerness and everyday life remained filled with
friction. While gay and lesbian rights activists and some media scholars consider this
friction as an impediment that needs to be resolved so that gay and lesbian Americans can
blend into everyday life both off and on screen, other activists and scholars have insisted
that it is precisely those queer elements that one should strive to preserve as crucial
differences not in terms of exclusion, but rather as building blocks for rethinking social
norms and social structures in general. Aligning herself with the latter position, McCarthy
points out that, in those moments when Ellen's lesbian identity clashes with TV seriality,
queer possibilities open up. Instead of regarding the uneven moments of the last season as
contributing to Ellen's “failure,” one can consider them as instances that allow the
emergence of questions about the televisual structures that allow or prohibit queer media
visibilities (596).
However, these questions only reach so far, and they do not reach far enough to
facilitate a critical engagement with the role that race plays in discourses of queer
visibility. Despite the fact that references to race appear with increasing frequency during
the last season of Ellen, the importance of whiteness-as-screen for the rendition of queer
media visibility remains unremarkable yet again. Instead of engaging with the intertwined
nature of race and sexuality, Ellen continues the project of portraying those categories as
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comparable, but separate, discourses. McCarthy discusses this representational strategy in
two ways. First, she demonstrates how proclamations of “advances” in television's
portrayal of queer characters, on the model of “advancement” of non-white subjects,
functions as self-reflexive commentary on the progression of the history of television. In
a self-congratulatory way, “like race” approaches to queer visibility suggest that over
time, television has become increasingly inclusive, so that after accepting non-white
characters into the fold of televisuality, we can now include gay and lesbian characters in
TV programming as well. Second, McCarthy considers this comparative strategy as
evidence for the limited ways in which Ellen discussed the challenges of queer lives.
While episodes addressed singular moments of homophobia, often in ways that likened
them to racial discrimination, these storylines did not confront more insidious forms of
what McCarthy calls “oppressive straight behavior” that happens in a repetitive or
systemic fashion (607).
I want to go one step further and underline that what stands out most clearly are
the ways in which the parallels between being gay and being a person of color attempt to
deflect attention away from the particular racialized queer visibility Ellen draws on;
namely, the one that relies on whiteness-as-screen. If the unevenness of Ellen's last
season opens up questions about the relationship between queerness and televisual
seriality—and the representation of queerness on TV in general—then these ruptures
might also allow the crucial importance of whiteness to emerge as something noticeable.
This becomes particularly possible in the contradiction between the way class and racial
elements of Ellen's identity allows her to appear as “the girl next door”—as a stand-in for
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the average American—and the way in which her sexual identity continuously marks her
as different. The frequent parallels that Ellen draws between race and sexuality thus
simultaneously allow the show to perpetuate the idea of televisual history as progressive
and to deflect attention away from the continued importance of racialized discourses to
televisual representations. Moreover, it draws attention away from the fact that while
whiteness has long been one of the key factors that determined who was and was not
allowed symbolic inclusion into the nation, it is not enough to grant access to the nation
even if one lives up to the demands of homonormativity. Even in the 1990s, complete
access to an “unremarkable” everyday existence is thus denied to queers on and offscreen alike.
Despite moments of rupture, the links among Ellen's lesbian identity, her
whiteness, and the ways she fits into the everyday life of television and of the nation
remain safely ensconced behind the closet-as-screen. While television in 1997 was able to
manage coming out as a one-time event, the continuous process of coming out, and its
continuous challenge to the heteronormative fabric of everyday life, proved too much.
The last episode of Ellen inserts Ellen into many televisual “firsts,” such as the first
discussion and portrayal of pregnancy on TV during I Love Lucy, but does not offer a
narration of her coming out. It seems, as McCarthy suggests, as if the episode implies that
a full integration of queerness into televisual history can only happen at some future point
(609). This future has already come and gone in 2008, when Kevin and Scotty get
married.
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Brothers & Sisters: Just Another White TV Family?
For the past three years, Brothers & Sisters, an ABC drama revolving around the
Walker family from Pasadena, CA, has blended seamlessly into the television landscape.
Despite ABC's enthusiastic description of the show as “compelling one-hour drama
series” that allows viewers to experience “the complicated maze of American lives today”
by following the lives of “five enmeshed and somewhat damaged adult siblings and their
strong, but devoted, mother Nora Walker,” there is nothing truly new or remarkable about
the show's characters or narratives
(<http://abc.go.com/primetime/brothersandsisters/index?pn=about>). Not even the
presence of openly gay lawyer Kevin Walker (played by Matthew Rhys) as second-oldest
of the siblings elicits critical interest. The Walkers are just another white, upper middle
class TV family who experience moments of crisis on a weekly basis.
The initial reviews of the program ranged from lukewarm endorsements to biting
dismissals, and they didn't address Kevin's presence as openly gay character at all.
Dorothy Rabinowitz of the Wall Street Journal characterized Brothers & Sisters as
“instantaneously seductive finished product” while the Washington Post's Tom Shales
concluded that “The show, premiering on ABC tomorrow night, aches with sensitivity,
throbs with sensitivity, and reeks of sensitivity.” Indeed, the program's initial conflict,
which pitches conservative Kitty Walker (played by Calista Flockhart) against the rest of
the family, all of whom are liberal, soon fizzles out into a “blood is thicker than water”
truce that only breaks up for conveniently placed storylines (such as Kitty's support of
Robert McCallister, one of California's Republican senators and Kitty's eventual
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husband). Other storylines engaging presumably sensitive political issues, such as
youngest sibling Justin Walker's drug abuse after a tour in Iraq, play out in similarly
predictable ways and don't shake up either televisual form or Walker family unity.
Despite the hesitant critical reception of Brothers & Sister's pilot episode, ABC
has certainly profited from the show over the past three seasons. It consistently delivers
good ratings, especially in the coveted demographic of 18-49-year-olds, leading to the
show's early renewal for a fourth season in the spring of 2009 (Stanley, np). Additionally,
the incorporation of three openly gay regular characters in Brothers & Sisters has
contributed to ABC's reputation of being a “gay-friendly” network among some media
outlets (in addition to Kevin, the other two gay characters are Scotty and Saul Walker,
Kevin's uncle, who comes out to the family in the episode in which Kevin and Scotty get
married). For example, in a cover story on Kevin Walker and on actor Matthew Rhys for
the Advocate, Dennis Hensley observed that “Last year, while we were getting used to a
world without Will&Grace, Queer as Folk, and Six Feet Under, and the number of
scripted gay characters was at a 10-year low, ABC gave us something we've said we
always wanted: a gay series regular on a network show whose romantic and sexual life is
given the same treatment as everyone else's” (np). Other critics were less enthused about
the “sameness” awarded to gay television characters on ABC's shows: “ABC became a
kind of haven for gay characters who were as addled - and ultimately dull - as their
straight counterparts. (Look no further than 'Brothers & Sisters.'),” Wesley Morris of the
Boston Globe pointed out (np). In a way, Morris and Hensley are both right in their
assessment. While Hensley's remark leans towards the overly optimistic, as Kevin's love
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life is portrayed in much less explicit ways than the intimate encounters in which his
heterosexual siblings engage, Kevin and Scotty are certainly treated as “the same” as the
straight couples within the diegesis of the show, at least by members of the Walker family
(whether or not they are all equally dull is a matter of personal opinion, of course).
Overall, the differing standards network television applies to the intimate aspects of
same-sex and of heterosexual romance are rather noticeable on Brothers & Sisters, “gayfriendly” network or not.
ABC has also come under fire for the ways in which the network has handled the
storylines of queer characters on programs such as Ugly Betty and Grey's Anatomy during
the 2008-09 season. While the exit of MTF transsexual character Alexis Meade on Ugly
Betty was most likely due to actress Rebecca Romijn's pregnancy (and two other queer
characters, Mark St. James and Justin Suarez, continue to thrive on the show), the abrupt
ending to the lesbian romance between characters Callie Torres (Sara Ramirez) and Erica
Hahn (Brooke Smith) on Grey's Anatomy led to much speculation among fans and media
critics that their relationship had become too “steamy” for ABC's liking. Indeed, after a
season-long arc that allowed Callie and Erica's friendship to turn into romance at a slow
pace, their relationship apparently ends after a five-minute disagreement about an issue
unrelated to their personal lives. Erica walks to her car and is never seen on the show
again. While Shonda Rhimes, one of Grey's Anatomy's executive producers, explained
that Callie and Erica's story had run its course, both fans and media critics speculated that
the network had put pressure onto the show's producers to return to safe, heterosexual
waters.39 The controversy around Grey's Anatomy indicates that while Kevin and Scotty
39
Regarding the controversy surrounding the end of Callie and Erica's relationship and the firing of
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might blend into Brothers & Sisters' diegesis, the management of queer visibility on other
ABC programs doesn't run quite as smoothly.
Aside from a passionate 2007 Emmy acceptance speech that lead actress Sally
Field delivered about the war in Iraq, Brothers & Sisters has not attracted any
controversy. Considering the show's traditional narrative focus, this is not surprising.
While Brothers & Sisters likes to take on current politics from time to time (as in Justin
Walker's deployment to Iraq or Robert McCallister's run for the Republican presidential
nomination), the real narrative motor of the show's narrative arcs are the secrets that
slowly surface in the wake of family patriarch William Walker's death in the first episode.
Over the course of the show's existing three seasons, viewers discover that he
mismanaged the family business, Ojai Foods, leaving it teetering on the edge of
bankruptcy; that he had a decades-long affair with Holly Harper, who fights her way into
Ojai via William's will; and that he had an illegitimate child, Ryan (who appears on the
show during season three after the viewer has already met Rebecca, Holly's daughter,
who everyone believes to be William's illegitimate daughter until a DNA test at the end of
season two reveals the truth, namely, that she is not a “real” Walker). While one might
expect the viewer to be enthralled by the continuous presence of open secrets on the
show, the utter predictability of these secrets deprives them of their epistemological pull:
“It's all so horribly, punishingly familiar,” declares Tom Shales in his review for the
Washington Post (np). But as I mentioned earlier, it is this familiarity of narratives and
Brooke Smith, see, for example, de Moraes, Lisa. “'Grey's' Lesbian Doc Fails the 'Chemistry' Test,”
Marikar, Sheila. “Why Did 'Grey's' Get Rid of Gay Romance?”, McNamara, Mary. “Critic's Notebook:
'Grey's Anatomy,' Blasted for Brooke Smith Firing, is Behind the Gay Character Learning Curve,”
Mitovitch, Matt. “Grey's Actress "Really, Really Shocked" by Ouster from Show,” and Wallenstein,
Andrew. “Why Did 'Grey's Anatomy' Cut Lesbian Dr. Hahn?”.
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characters that demands further investigation. The bland veneer of white, upper middleclass hetero- and homonormativity that covers Brothers & Sisters' diegesis shows definite
cracks and cannot completely screen out the racialized underpinnings that support it. In
fact, the Walkers' involvement in the California citrus industry links Brothers & Sisters to
longstanding historical narratives of racial conflict and their erasure in popular culture.
Brothers & Sisters constantly reminds its viewers that the Walkers are a close-knit
family. Indeed, the diegesis rarely expands beyond familial boundaries. Nearly
everything in the Walker siblings' lives revolves around other family members or the
family business, Ojai Foods, which grows, processes, and ships a range of fruit. In typical
TV fashion, there isn't much of a separation between family and work lives—most
members of the Walker family are working or have worked for Ojai Foods, and the
program makes it clear more than once that the business and the family are inseparable. A
crisis at Ojai effects everyone on a deeply personal level, not only because the family's
wealth is tied to the well-being of the company, but because the family's unity and their
history is also tangled up in it. This deep intertwinement is most clearly symbolized in the
family ranch, which is located in the Ojai orchards. While the family resides in Pasadena,
family members visit the ranch at various points throughout the series and frequently
express fondness for the land that surrounds the ranch.40 For example, in episode 1x07,
Kevin tells Scotty that he lost his virginity “both times” while staying in Ojai for the
summer: “First to this girl, Sarah Gimble. The second one a summer later to this guy, this
total stud; everyone in Ojai was in love with him.” Other family members also tie
important milestones in their lives to the family ranch—Ojai thus becomes a cornerstone
40
Ojai is the smallest town in Ventura County, CA (http://www.ci.ojai.ca.us/).
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in their personal and familial identities.
Despite the central importance of Ojai Foods to the construction of the Walkers'
family identity, the viewer learns next to nothing about the origins or the day-to-day
business of the company. While this is unsurprising (considering that the company mainly
serves as way of generating familial conflicts, and thus storylines), it nevertheless glosses
over the screening of race that is in effect here. Ojai Foods makes the Walkers who they
are in more ways than one—it supports their family unity, but it also ensures their class
and race status. The tidbits that emerge about the history of Ojai Foods firmly tie the
company to the history of Southern California's citrus industry. While the town of Ojai is
not directly located in what Matt Garcia and others have referred to as the “citrus belt,”
which comprises the San Gabriel and San Bernandino Valleys, the founding of Ojai
Foods in 1926 and its primary business focus on growing, packing, and distributing fruit
establish a connection between the Walkers' family history and the citrus belt's
agricultural history (Garcia, 19).41
The California citrus industry boomed between the late 18th century and the
1960s, attracting farmers from the Midwest and agricultural laborers from Mexico and
from among the growing number of Asian American immigrants. The accumulated
wealth in the citrus industry significantly contributed to the economic development of the
greater Los Angeles region during the first half of the twentieth century, a factor that is
often overlooked today (Garcia, 2). In the early part of the twentieth century, white citrus
farmers took pride in creating a new community based on agrarian ideals while
41
To be more precise, Garcia observes that the citrus belt “stretched sixty miles eastward from Pasadena,
through the San Gabriel and San Bernandino Valley, to the town of Riverside” (19).
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disavowing the labor of Mexican and Asian Americans that sustained the profits and
livelihood of farmers (Garcia, 46). Towns that developed around the citrus industry were
largely segregated, and the work available on citrus farms was racially segmented, with
the lowest-paying jobs going to non-white workers (Garcia, 77). Ultimately, in the 1970s,
the citrus industry entered into a decline that eventually led to the near-complete
disappearance of orchards in the citrus belt. Yet, even though the citrus industry isn't as
dominant in the greater Los Angeles area as it was in the first half of the twentieth
century, it has left its mark on patterns of residential settlement and on labor structures
(Garcia, 260).
Although Brothers & Sisters is set in present-day California, the program's
representation of Ojai Foods evokes the feel of a traditional pre-1970s citrus company in
that it still engages mainly in the business of growing, packing, and selling fruit (Tommy
Walker eventually leaves Ojai to found a winery called Walker Landing). Apparently, the
Walker family did not give in to the temptation of selling their land when the citrus
industry went into decline. Moreover, the whitewashed world of Ojai and of the Walkers'
social circle is both reminiscent of the segregated world of the early citrus industry and a
reflection of the continuing self-segregation of housing in the LA. area. Despite of Ojai's
historical lineage as part of the citrus industry, this history never enters into the
denotative representation of Ojai Foods. The only traces of this history appear in the form
of old advertisements that hang in Sarah Walker's office or in brief comments, such as
Sarah's “oh god, not a labor dispute” in response to issues arising when Ojai Food tries to
expand its business into China.
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The evasion of history here recalls the engagement with history I discussed in
Chapter 3. There are obvious parallels between the simultaneous reliance on and
disavowal of histories of racial conflict in Brothers & Sisters, on the one hand, and in
Brokeback Mountain, on the other hand. Both texts screen out race while at the same
time depending on it to construct narratives of white romance and family life. The
significance of California's racialized history is screened out of Brothers & Sisters to
make way for a normative story about a white upper class family; in Brokeback
Mountain, racialized discourses of the West are screened out to construct a romance about
two white cowboys. And yet, these racilialized histories persistently linger at the edge of
the frame. Similar to the symbolic meaning of the West to Brokeback Mountain's
diegesis, the mythology of the citrus industry is an important component of Brothers &
Sisters' depiction of white wealth. As Garcia explains, “While wheat, cotton, and grapes
have had their images tarnished by revelations of labor exploitation, grower vigilance,
and absentee landlords, citrus has usually escaped such criticism. Even today, the image
of oranges a vision of prosperity in abundance” (17). In many ways, then, this image of
citrus fruit as symbols of abundance in America diverts attention away from the racial
tension between Mexican laborers and Anglo landowners that shaped the citrus industry.
Considering this symbolism, perhaps it is no surprise at all that the Walkers own a fruit
company. Ojai Foods provides a shorthand for wealth without evoking an immediate
association of racial and class tension, and thus it becomes a supposedly blank slate that
functions as setting for family conflicts.
The aim of my brief digression into California's agricultural history is not to
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lament television's continuing misrepresentation of said history, but rather to draw
attention to the ways in which shows like Brothers & Sisters contribute to ways of
deliberate forgetting of racial conflict in favor of embracing whitewashed historical
symbols, such as the vintage fruit ads in Sarah's office. More importantly, the
representation of Ojai Foods as a business that appears devoid of a particular history and
that only has meaning as a core part of the Walkers' collective identity is part the
scaffolding that upholds whiteness as screen for the type of queer visibility inhabited by
Kevin and Scotty, which is also devoid of links to racialized discourses such as the ones
emerging around gay marriage.
As I will demonstrate, Kevin and Scotty's wedding, far from disrupting the family
unit (as opponents of gay marriage might argue), serves to unite the Walkers in a time of
crisis. Moreover, Kevin and Scotty's queer identities shore up the discourse of whiteness
on which Brothers & Sisters' diegesis crucially depends. Drawing queer identities
(specifically, in this case, gay male identities) into the maintenance of hegemonic
whiteness is a salient feature of the type of homonationalism that came into full force
during the war on terror in which the American government has engaged since the attacks
on 9/11. As I argued in Chapter 1, whiteness and queer visibility have become
interdependent in new and insidious ways in the past eight years. Simultaneous to the
emergence of whiteness as a projection surface for a specific type of queer visibility,
queer subjects, identities, and visibilities are called upon to uphold and reproduce the
centrality of whiteness to imagining the America nation. Specifically, as Jasbir Puar
explains, the heteronormative demands of the nation are temporarily suspended to
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welcome previously excluded queer subjects who fulfill certain class, lifestyle, and racial
norms (Terrorist Assemblages, 32). This inclusion in turn allows the U.S. to appear as a
democratic and multicultural nation and to portray itself in contrast to nations that are
seen as oppressive and violently homophobic (most significantly, those nations that the
U.S. faces in its so-called war on terror). Those simultaneous shifts represent what Puar
refers to as “homonationalism.” In this context, the multicultural facade put forth in
Brothers & Sisters, which declares the Walkers to be an “average” American family that
does not “see” racial or sexual difference, takes on greater meaning than that of just
another show that blends into the television schedule. Through a close analysis of “Prior
Commitments,” the episode in which Kevin and Scotty get married, I unpack the
implications of Brothers & Sisters' diegetic encouragement to turn a blind eye to the
program's complicit participation in a cultural logic that drives ever-finer lines of division
between those who can and cannot be part of the nation.
“Holy Mantrimony”42
In classic season finale fashion, the Walker family is in turmoil at the beginning of
“Prior Commitments”: Ojai, due to a failed export deal with a Chinese company, is on the
brink of bankruptcy; Kitty's continuing struggles to get pregnant seem to hit a brick wall
when another round of IVF proves unsuccessful; and Rebecca deals with the
consequences of discovering via DNA testing that she is not a “real” Walker after all.
Kevin and Scotty themselves have finally left some relationship troubles behind and
42
During “Prior Commitments,” the episode in which Kevin and Scotty's wedding takes place, Justin
Walker refers to his brother's impending marriage as “holy mantrimony.”
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overcome Scotty's parents' homophobic reaction to their impending wedding. By the end
of the episode, all those troubles are (at least momentarily) forgotten and the joy over the
wedding smooths over any familial rifts (such as Kitty's and Robert's Republican values
that make them nominally opposed to gay marriage as legal institution). Overall, the
episode underlines once more that Walker family unity will eventually triumph over any
adversity. Indeed, it is the questions of who does and who does not belong to the family,
and who has access to the private, domestic world of the Walkers (and, by implication,
that of the “average” white American family) that is under intense negotiation in this
episode.
Kevin and Scotty's decision to get married is a spontaneous one, originally
brought about by concerns over Scotty's lack of health insurance. After Scotty gets
injured at work, Kevin suggests that they register as domestic partners so that Scotty can
be part of Kevin's health care benefits. Scotty rebuffs Kevin's offer by explaining that he
wants his wedding to be “special” and that being “practical” is not enough of a reason to
become domestic partners since domestic partnership “is it, our only legal option,” as
Scotty emphasizes (2x14, “Double Negative”).43 Kevin explains that he isn't sure if he
will ever be ready “for that”—the “for that” presumably being a wedding based on
romantic love and commitment. But only an episode later, after an emotional
conversation with his uncle Saul, during which Saul comes out to Kevin, he is indeed
ready to propose to Scotty in the “proper” romantic way. Most importantly, Kevin
43
At the time the episode was written and aired, gay marriage had not yet been legalized in the state of
California. The California Supreme Court's decision of May 15, 2008 that led to the legalization of gay
marriage went into effect on June16, 2008
(<http://www.courtinfo.ca.gov/presscenter/newsreleases/NR31-08.PDF>). Proposition 8, a ballot
initiative that passed on November 5, 2008, added an amendment to California's constitution that once
again rendered gay marriage illegal.
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explains that he is grateful for being able to come home to a person like Scotty and that
he wants to form a family with him. Scotty happily accepts Kevin's proposal, and they
decide to get married the following Saturday (“why wait?” is the reason Kevin gives to
his surprised mother Nora after telling her the news). Nora immediately insists that the
wedding should be held at her house—a site of many important Walker family events,
including numerous family dinners. The extended Walker family is present for the
ceremony, which takes place in the lavishly decorated living room. Kitty officiates at the
wedding and gives a brief speech about how sometimes the impossible can indeed
become possible, which the viewer is encouraged to understand as a comment on both the
possibility of gay marriage and on Kitty and Robert's desire to have children. When it
turns out that Kevin and Scotty forgot to bring rings to the ceremony, Kevin's brothers
immediately donate their wedding rings so that the ceremony can continue and Kevin and
Scotty can exchange vows. The wedding concludes with a kiss, much cheering, and a
family meal.
“Prior Commitments” highlights a salient feature of Brothers & Sisters' diegesis: a
near-fetishistic preoccupation with domestic spaces, especially the home of Nora Walker.
A focus on interior, domestic spaces is, of course, a prominent feature of television in
general, both in terms of narrative and of production (it is cheaper to film on sets than
outdoors or on location). Yet, the intense and narrow focus on the Walker family on
Brothers & Sisters elevates the attention paid to private, familial spaces to new televisual
heights. The characters rarely venture beyond their boundaries—most scenes take place
at characters' homes or at Ojai, which in itself is a familial space due its central
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importance to the Walkers' collective identity. Kevin and Scotty's wedding in the living
room of Nora's home reinforces the importance of domestic space in two related ways:
first, their wedding serves as moment of unity during a time of crisis. The wedding
allows the Walkers to congregate at Nora's home to seek refuge from the ongoing crises
in their lives, and even partially to resolve them. The domestic functions in a classic
televisual way here: it is the answer to all problems. Secondly, a traditional notion of
privacy, with an emphasis on domesticity, is deployed more specifically to articulate a
particular form of gay inclusion in the domestic sphere. Gay inclusion via the concept of
“privacy” has played an important role in both the Lawrence v. Texas (2003) decision that
lifted the ban on sodomy and thus legalized consensual same-sex relationships in all
states, and in the subsequent advocacy in favor of legalizing gay marriage. In order to
understand how the intense attention paid to domestic spaces on Brothers & Sisters works
as part of a push for homonationalism, I want to take a step back and look at the
significance of the Lawrence v Texas decision and the media coverage around gay
marriage in more detail to tease out connections among whiteness, privacy, and
domesticity.
The Supreme Court's decision in Lawrence v. Texas rendered the remaining state
bans on sodomy unconstitutional and overturned the court's 1986 decision in Bowers v.
Hardwick, which had affirmed state bans on sodomy. Overall, this decision has been
hailed as a major victory for gay and lesbian civil rights and as a sign that queer
Americans are one step closer to being equals to straight Americans under law. As Daniel
Gordon explains, the major difference between the Bowers and the Lawrence decision is
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the Court's focus: in Bowers, the judges were preoccupied with the legal dimensions of
regulating sexual acts (including sodomy), whereas in Lawrence, the debate centered on
intimacy within the private sphere (5). Considering the cultural context within which
these decisions took place, the shift in focus is unsurprising. The AIDS crisis had
dominated public debate about gay men's sexuality in 1986, when the court deliberated
Bowers v. Hardwick. Moreover, as I discussed in Chapter 2, anal sex was often
constructed as the originary site of AIDS and as the sexual act that threatened the health
and stability of the nation (which was figured as embodied in the “straight majority” that
appeared to be in constant danger of becoming infected with HIV). Deciding whether or
not the state should have a right to regulate consensual sex between adults thus took on a
particularly urgent dimension in 1986, especially since the sexual act in question was
portrayed as the origin of the health crisis threatening the nation. By 2003, the AIDS
crisis had largely disappeared from public discourse. Furthermore, the proliferation of
homonormative images and values, along with the disarticulation of sexuality and
identity in queer media visibility, had brought concerns about domesticity and
consumption to the forefront of debates relating to the gay and lesbian community. A
focus on intimacy and privacy in the Lawrence decision responded to the homonormative
concerns and debates that had gathered momentum throughout the 1990s and early
2000s. The Supreme Court's decisions in both the Bowers and Lawrence cases thus link
into wider cultural discourses about the ways in which queerness relates to American
culture.
Indeed, the decision to legalize consensual same-sex acts within the private,
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domestic sphere underlines the necessary disappearance of queer sexuality from public
view, a mandate that was also a precondition for the so-called explosion of gay media
visibility during the 1990s. The concession that the state should not interfere with samesex acts that happen in private is therefore implicitly balanced by a condemnation of
similar acts in public. This particular understanding of privacy the Court put forth in
Lawrence is more traditional than the one developed in other recent decisions, which had
extended a notion of privacy beyond actual domestic spaces (Puar, Terrorist Assemblages,
118). The reinscription of privacy as a physical domestic space consequnently becomes
an underlying requirement for the legalization of same-sex sexuality.
In a way, then, the ruling in Lawrence, which is frequently perceived as liberatory,
actually continues to restrict queer practices due to assumptions about privacy and
domesticity. Moreover, it raises the question of who has access to the kind of privacy that
the Court outlined and privileged in Lawrence. As Jasbir Puar points out, “LawrenceGarner can offer protection only to those who inhabit the fantasy of, and can mark and
traverse across, bounded notions of public and private” (Terrorist Assemblages, 125). The
possibility to decide which areas of life to keep private, and the option to have access to a
private, domestic space, is a privilege that is not accorded to all residents of the United
States. This privilege depends crucially on race, class, and citizenship status.44
Particularly the perception of private domestic space as something that exists outside of
the state's reach and that functions separately from the public sphere has strong racial
44
Connections among property, privacy, race, sexuality, and citizenship have longstanding histories and
are in fact central to the ways in which legal and symbolic access to the nation has been policed; see, for
example, Ian F. Haney Lopez' White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race and Lisa Lowe's
Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics.
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underpinnings. Feminists of color have long criticized this perception as illusionary. They
have pointed out that, while the opposition of “public” and “private” might seem to hold
true for white men and women, it does not necessarily apply to minorities who often
experience closer state scrutiny of their “private” lives (Puar, Terrorist Assemblages,
124). Puar builds on this notion and discusses the status of non-citizens in American
detention facilities, thereby highlighting the importance of citizenship in addition to race
and class status in determining what kind of access U.S. residents have to privacy and to
inclusion into the nation. For example, she describes the arrests of Muslim men made in
the wake of the Patriot Act of 2001 as instances in which families are torn apart without
legal recourse to resist the arrest and subsequent detention of family members.
Knowledge of where or why their relatives have been taken away remains sparse or is not
available at all (Puar, Terrorist Assemblages, 146). These cases, Puar argues, show that
“the intimate is a protected space of citizenship” (ibid). Her analysis also demonstrates
that among non-U.S. citizens, heterosexuality is no longer sufficient to access the
privileges, including privacy, afforded by adherence to heteronormativity.
Access to and command of the type of privacy that remains free of state
intervention (or one that maintains the illusion of freedom from intervention) is thus an
important aspect of white privilege. It is important to keep in mind that “whiteness” in
this case extends beyond previous constructions of racial difference. As Puar explains, the
type of normative whiteness that includes access to privacy “is not strictly limited to
white subjects, though it is bound to multiculturalism as defined and deployed by
whiteness” (Terrorist Assemblages, 31). The Lawrence decision is instructive regarding
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this deployment of multiculturalism: after all, one of the defendants, Tyron Garner, is a
black man. Even though sodomy laws have historically been used to police interracial
couples in particular, racial difference does not prominently figure in either the Court's
opinion or the celebratory discourse in response to Lawrence.45 Tyron Garner's black
identity is screened out of the significance of Lawrence; his name does not even appear in
the shorthand Lawrence v. Texas under which this decision will be remembered. Even if
inadvertently, the Lawrence decision thus reaffirms whiteness as central to the ways in
which queerness becomes visible in American culture. Via the Lawrence decision, the
Supreme Court adopts a homonormative stance and inscribes it into legal precedence.
This inscription is another instance of homonationalism: by extending the right to engage
in certain queer sexual acts in private, queer subjects are both welcomed into the nation
and asked to support its normative race and class structures. Rather than being excluded
from the nation, queer Americans are drawn into the project of maintaining a certain idea
of the nation.
While the particular alignment of queerness, homonormativity, and inclusion into
the nation that forms homonationalism comes into sharper relief during the war on terror,
it is a process that has been in the making for a long time. For example, California's
domestic partnership laws, adopted in 1999, include a shared residency requirement.46
Same-sex couples who want to register as domestic partners need to prove that they live
together—a requirement that heterosexual couples do not have to fulfill when they
45
46
The use of sodomy laws to regulate interracial relationships and sexual encounters stretches all the way
back to the turn of the twentieth century. See Nayan Shah's “Between 'Oriental Depravity' and 'Natural
Degenerates': Spatial Borderlands and the Making of Ordinary Americans.”
According to California's Family Code section 297-297.5, the first requirement that applicants for
domestic partnership have to fulfill is the following: “Both persons have a common residence”
(http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/cgi-bin/displaycode?section=fam&group=00001-01000&file=297-297.5).
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register for marriage. The shared residency requirement thus underlines particular norms
of privacy and domesticity (purported signals of long-term partnership) for the legal
inclusion of same-sex couples into state benefits. As I argued in Chapter 2, an emphasis
on monogamy and domesticity as important aspects of gay male relationships already
emerged in the media discourses of the 1980s, when it became a way of differentiating
“good gays” (i.e. those who would not spread HIV to the so-called general population)
and “bad gays” (i.e. those whose sexual practices supposedly put the nation “at risk” of
HIV). The disarticulation of sexuality and identity in queer media visibility during the
1990s builds on that. Via the consolidation of whiteness as screen for queer visibilities,
this trajectory eventually merges into a homonationalist discourse. Broadening the
context of homonationalism beyond the war on terror allows a recognition of how queer
media visibility structured around ideals of domesticity and privacy has been drawn into
definitions of race, sexuality, and the nation for the past three decades.
In the wake of the Lawrence decision, those in the mainstream media seemed to
agree that gay marriage would be the top priority and next legal battle for gay and lesbian
civil rights. For example, the cover of Newsweek the week after the Lawrence decision
depicts a white gay couple under the headline “Is Gay Marriage Next?” (July 7, 2003). A
focus on domesticity and privacy is front and center of Newsweek's coverage of the
Supreme Court's decision. “It was a homey scene. Standing in their warm kitchen on a
winter's day in 2001, Julie and Hillary Goodridge, a couple for 16 years, played the old
Beatles song 'All You Need Is Love' for their young daughter, Annie:” this is how the
cover story claiming that Lawrence v. Texas inevitably leads to a fight for gay marriage
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begins (Gegax et al, np). The opening paragraph continues by detailing how Annie's
parents did not initially have a response to their daughter's insistence that, if they really
loved one another, they would get married. Spurred on by their daughter's observation,
Julie and Hillary tried to obtain a marriage license in Massachusetts in 2001, but were
denied (as gay marriage was only legalized in Massachusetts in 2007).47 The paragraph
concludes with the observation that “last week Hillary and Julie—and every gay person
who wants to be married or adopt a child or hold a job or receive a government benefit or
simply enjoy the right to be respected—received a tremendous boost from the highest
court in the land” (Gegax et al, np). The article goes on to describe the details of the
Lawrence decision and how it would shape the “war” over gay marriage.
In addition to mainstream media coverage, the Lawrence opinion itself anticipates
attempts to use the decision in the legal fight for gay marriage. Justice O'Connor
emphasizes in her concurring opinion that defending “traditional” definitions of marriage
would justify state intervention in and regulation of gay relationships (Hunter, 203). From
her point of view, should a gay marriage case come before the Court, the decision would
most likely uphold a differentiation of marriage between same-sex and heterosexual
partners as constitutional. Justice Scalia, in his dissenting opinion, disagrees, and asserts
that the Lawrence decision opens up the potential of legalizing gay marriage via a
Supreme Court case. The possibilities enabled by the Lawrence ruling, he argues, would
entail a severe “disruption of the current social order” (Gordon, 13). Scalia's dissenting
opinion, which, in large parts, reads like a treatise on the perceived threat of
47
Julie and Hillary Goodridge were the plaintiffs in the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court case that
led to the legalization of gay marriage in the state (Goodridge v. Department of Public Health, 798 N.e.
2D 941, 2003).
178
“homosexuality” to the American nation, outlines in detail how the legal precedent
established in Lawrence could lead to a further broadening of gay and lesbian civil rights,
including the right to marry.
All of these issues are relevant to Brothers & Sisters. In the context of the
Lawrence decision, California's domestic partnership laws, and mainstream media
coverage on the subject of gay marriage, the intense focus on privacy and domesticity in
the episode “Prior Commitments” almost appears as a prerequisite for Kevin and Scotty's
wedding. Indeed, it becomes difficult to imagine their wedding taking place anywhere
else than Nora's home, the symbolic center of the Walker family. After all, supporting
storylines that weave around the wedding deal with the definition of family and of
domestic arrangements. Kevin and Scotty's concerns blend in seamlessly with the
problems preoccupying the other Walker siblings as all of them face questions of how to
define familial bonds and allegiances. Moreover, it is Kevin and Scotty's wedding that
finally offers the possibility of resolving some of these conflicts—it thus becomes a
catalyst for decisions about the Walkers' family unity and, by implication, about access to
white, domestic spaces. A brief discussion of the supporting plots revolving around
Kevin, Kitty, and Rebecca helps to illuminate these connections.
Instead of having a bachelor party, Kevin decides to drive to Arizona to visit
Scotty's parents in the hope of unravelling their resistance to the wedding. Scotty's
parents aren't nearly as supportive of Scotty as the Walkers are of Kevin, and, while they
claim to have accepted Scotty's gay identity, they do not agree with his decision to get
married. Even after Kevin tries to reason with the Wandells by telling them that
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California law supports domestic partnerships, they refuse to attend the wedding. Yet, for
viewers, the trip to Arizona reaffirms the legality of Kevin and Scotty's commitment. The
storyline underlines that Kevin and Scotty have a right to be domestic partners under
California law, and that they inhabit the kind of privacy that is the prerequisite for
accessing that legal right both literally, as they live together in Kevin's loft, and in a more
symbolic sense as they fulfill the homonormative requirements that allows them to be
part of the nation.
For Kevin's sister Kitty and for family friend Rebecca, the wedding becomes a
decisive moment for the realization that families come in all shapes and sizes.
Throughout the season, viewers have seen Kitty's struggle to become pregnant and have
witnessed her insistence on having a biological child despite a miscarriage and various
rounds of failed IVF. During the preparation for the wedding, however, Kitty changes her
mind about adoption: rather than considering it as a last resort, she realizes it is simply a
different way of constituting a family. Rebecca has a similar realization about what
makes a family: she realizes that she doesn't have to be William Walker's biological child
to be a Walker. Nora tells her that “there is more to family than DNA” and that Rebecca
has become a part of the Walker family already. Sarah reaffirms that statement by
observing that “we're like the Mafia, us Walkers; once you're in, you can never get out.”
Moreover, since Rebecca isn't an actual relative of Justin's, their foreshadowed romance
can finally begin in earnest (since, during the season leading up the “Prior
Commitments,” Rebecca and Justin's friendship has taken on an increasingly romantic
dimension). The relationship between Rebecca and Justin eventually leads to a marriage
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proposal at the end of season three.
Overall, “Prior Commitments” suggests that biological ties aren't the only family
ties that matter, and that families can and do form in ways that are not based on biological
kinship. Taken at face value, this is a welcome message as the reimagination of familial
bonds is of central importance to queer politics and its aim to reimagine social structures
of everyday life. However, as it was articulated in Brothers & Sisters and other media
texts, this apparent message of diversification is deeply embedded in homonational and
other racialized discourses and thus merely uses a veneer of multiculturalism ultimately
to uphold an ideal of white domesticity. While “Prior Commitments” offers multiple
ways of reimagining what a family could be, the episode still reaffirms familial
domesticity as a norm of social organization, and as a norm that will persist under outside
pressure. After all, Kevin and Scotty's wedding offers the Walkers a moment of respite
from their ongoing crises and it serves as an opportunity for finding a resolution for some
of them, such as Kitty's desire for a family and Rebecca's anxiety of being excluded from
the Walkers.
The episode, and Brothers & Sisters in general, represents this new “diverse”
domesticity as exclusively white space. Whenever the Walker family expands, the new
family member turns out to be white (whether via marriage or via the addition of
previously unknown siblings). Both the introduction of suspected and actual illegitimate
children of William Walker, Rebecca and Ryan, and the eventual adoption of a baby girl
by Kitty and Robert preserve the Walkers' white domesticity. At the same time, both
storylines draw on historical and cinematic discourses of interracial relationships and
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families. Stories about the discovery of interracial children after a prominent white man's
death have circulated in the news in the past decade—Thomas Jefferson and Strom
Thurmon are perhaps the most well-known examples.48 Even in our current allegedly
multicultural climate, these kinds of discoveries still provoke anxiety about the crossing
of racial lines (and the revelation that these lines are always-already unstable). In the
context of visual media, they also tie into the longstanding cinematic fascination with
mapping ways of “seeing” race. Susan Courtney argues that the miscegenation clause that
was part of the Hollywoood Production Code between 1930 and 1956 had two major
consequences: one, it established cinematic coding that taught spectators how to “see”
race in Hollywood movies, and two, it supported the idea that racial categories are selfevident (104, 124). Moreover, Courtney outlines how these ways of “seeing” and
visualizing race depended on the reinforcement of traditional gender norms, particularly
after it became possible to show interracial relationships on the screen (248).
In Brothers & Sisters, these discourses about the crossing of racial lines and their
visualization in the media only appear fleetingly. Regarding the appearance of
illegitimate children, there is never any doubt about their whiteness: the Walker siblings'
suspicion that they may not be their father's only children begins with the discovery of a
photograph of a white baby at the Ojai family ranch and the siblings' futile efforts to trace
said picture to any of the known Walkers. Their quest to discover their long-lost sibling
leads to the introduction of Rebecca, who everyone assumes to be William's daughter
48
Regarding Jefferson, see, for example, Lucian K. Truscott IV's New York Times editorial “The Reunion
Upon a Hill,” Annette Gordon-Reed's book Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American
Controversy, and Peter Nicolaisen's article “Thomas Jefferson, Sally Hemings, and the Question of
Race: An Ongoing Debate.” Regarding Thurmond, see, for example, Kevin R. Johnson's article “The
Legacy of Jim Crow: The Enduring Taboo of Black-White Romance” and Essie Mae-Washington's
book Dear Senator: A Memoir of the Daughter of Strom Thurmond.
182
until she takes a DNA test. Half a season later, Ryan is introduced on the show, and he
turns out to be William Walker's actual illegitimate child. Throughout all of these rather
convoluted storylines, there is never any doubt about Rebecca or Ryan's white racial
identity.
There is a brief moment, however, when Brothers & Sisters very deliberately
engages in racial anxieties, namely during a preview for episode 3x07, “Do You Believe
in Magic?”. Kitty and Robert are in the middle of an adoption, and the preview provides a
sneak peek at their meeting with the birth mother of their future child. The preview pairs
a shot of a woman who is visually signified as African American announcing, “I'm
Trisha, your birth mom!” with shocked expressions on Kitty and Robert's faces. While
lingering on Kitty and Robert, we hear Trisha say “Surprise!” off-screen. The preview
clearly tries to suggest that Kitty's and Robert's shock and surprise is triggered by Trisha's
non-white racial identity and by the implication that their child will not be white, either.
This association is fueled by both the normative whiteness that suffuses Brothers &
Sisters' diegesis and by the racialized history of Hollywood cinema. The former leaves
the viewer unprepared for the possibility that Kitty and Robert might adopt a non-white
child, and the latter provides a pattern for understanding their surprise as anxious reaction
over the prospect of an interracial adoption. Yet during the actual episode, the preview's
racialized suggestions turn out to be at least denotatively false: Kitty and Robert's
shocked expression is in response to learning that Trisha is a neuro-surgeon, and not a
med student, as they had assumed. The dialogue even reassures us that Kitty and Robert
do not have any race-based biases: “You said ethnicity doesn't matter,” Trisha asks
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rhetorically, and then cheerfully goes on to explain that she is of Korean and African
American descent, and that her baby's father is white. She concludes the overview of her
family history by telling Kitty and Robert that they are “in for a surprise,” presumably
regarding the ways in which this multiracial ancestry will manifest in a visual way. Even
though this scene is supposed to affirm that, as good multiculturalists, race doesn't matter
to Kitty and Robert, there is an intense focus on racial lineage and the possibilities of
“seeing” race that does rather the opposite—it shows that racial difference, especially its
visual signification, still matters.
Both the veneer of multiculturalism and the defense of white domesticity in the
unfolding narratives of Rebecca and Ryan as illegitimate children and of Kitty and
Robert's adoption depend on Kevin and Scotty's relationship—and specifically their
wedding—as an important anchor. From this point of view, Kevin and Scotty's wedding
does more than defend the Walkers' family unity in a time of crisis. Rather, Kevin and
Scotty's commitment to homonormativity allows a defense of the Walkers' white, upperclass identity, and, more importantly, their uncontested right to privacy within the family
home. In addition, the wedding functions simultaneously as an outward sign of televisual
and social progress (by asserting that gays and lesbians have the right to marry on TV and
in real life under certain conditions) and yet still as an impediment to that progress, as it
reaffirms longstanding criteria, such as whiteness and heteronormativity, that regulate and
restrict who has access to civil rights, to privacy, and to symbolic inclusion in the nation.
From this point of view, the decade that passed between Ellen's coming out and Kevin
and Scotty's wedding might be seen as both momentous and anti-climactic. In contrast to
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Ellen's struggles with integrating lesbian identity into televisual everydayness, Kevin and
Scotty's wedding not only blends seamlessly into the diegetic world of Brothers &
Sisters, but it becomes a site of primary importance for the reinforcement of televisual
and social norms.
CONCLUDING REMARKS
When I began my investigation of the discourse of queer visibility in recent
American culture, my main focus rested on the questions of how and why visibility has
become such an important concept to expressing queerness in film and television. My
research has taken me into directions I did not anticipate, but that turn out to be vital to
understanding in what ways a preoccupation with visibility came to the forefront of queer
media representations.
First and foremost, there are the intricate connections between queer visibility and
whiteness, which most clearly emerge by considering the closet as a screen. Normative
ideas of whiteness serve as projection surface that, similar to the epistemology of the
closet, screen different facets of queer visibility. Consequently, whiteness is intrinsically
connected to prominent ideas of what queer media visibility ought to look like. At the
same time, the significance of whiteness is downplayed—it appears as merely a backdrop
to portrayals of queer lives and practices. More precisely, in many of the films and TV
programs that have been hailed as “breakthrough” moments, i.e. those that have become
most visible to the popular American imagination as queer media texts, whiteness acts as
185
186
a screen upon which particular notions of queerness are projected. From the 1980s
onward, queer media visibility solidifies as denotative, gay and lesbian representations
that correspond to white homonormativity. Examples of this pattern include Philadelphia,
Ellen, Will&Grace, Queer as Folk, Brokeback Mountain, and Brothers&Sisters, all of
which had and have significant popular appeal.
While the apparently seamless integration of whiteness and homonormative in gay
and lesbian representations seem to overshadow other possibilities, queer media texts also
contain moments that allow the recognition of the closet-as-screen at work. As such,
unscreening these moments forms the most important aspect of my research: throughout
this dissertation, I foreground that multiple queer modes—both denotative and
connotative, for example—emerge and persist simultaneously. Likewise, processes of
raciliazation can never be completely screened out of queer media texts. My chapters
investigate this connection between whiteness and queer visibility across a wide field of
events, time periods, and places to foreground the closet-as-screen's impact on debates
surrounding race, sexuality, gender, citizenship, activism and everyday life in the United
States.
Tracing and unscreening queer visibility across different temporalities and spaces
rendered aspects of queerness visible to me that I had not originally considered or
anticipated. Among those aspects are the cycles of forgetting that enable “breakthrough”
moments in queer history and media visibility, the deep connections between queer
visibility and (imagined) urban and rural landscapes, and the significance of silence in
moments of coming out. Historiography, geography, and modes of speech are interwoven
187
with discourses of whiteness and queer visibility in ways that exceed a strictly mediabased analysis. In these concluding remarks, I want to bring these seemingly disparate
threads together to once again underline the far reach of the discourse of queer visibility
and its deep impact on American culture in the past 40 years. Additionally, they also open
up the most exciting and urgent avenues for future investigations of the discourse of
queer visibility.
Across all four preceding chapters, my analyses highlight how the significant
“firsts” in queer history and in queer media representations depend on simultaneous
moments of deliberate forgetting. Among these “firsts” is the celebration of the events at
the Stonewall Inn in 1969 as the first gay riot, a notion that was carefully constructed
during the Eastern Regional Conference of Homophile Organizations in late 1969 and
upheld by events such as ACT UP's Stonewall 20 action in 1989. Marking Stonewall as
the “first” riot not only obscures earlier skirmishes between gay activists and the police,
but also allows the emergence of a before-and-after story of gay liberation—a pattern that
characterizes the discourse of queer visibility. Similar stories wind around the Production
Code, the AIDS crisis, and Ellen's coming out. All of these stories emphasize an opening
up of new possibilities and radical change. As such, they underline that the end of the
Production Code enabled the denotative portrayal of gay and lesbian characters and
subject matters in Hollywood film, that the AIDS crisis forced mainstream America to
acknowledge the gay and lesbian community, and that Ellen's coming out paved the way
for the so-called explosion of gay visibility on television. While these are important
developments, they only represent half of the story, so-to-speak. For example, even after
188
the Production Code was lifted, the connotative registers that had been used to signify
queerness in Hollywood cinema continued to thrive right alongside the new denotative
possibilities. Likewise, while the AIDS crisis certainly prompted the circulation of reports
on gay and lesbian ways of life, it also brought about a disarticulation of queer identities
and queer sexualities—in other words, the mainstream media's acknowledgment of gays
and lesbians critically depended on normalizing queerness. The ensuing explosion of gay
visibility, most vividly embodied in Ellen's coming out, further defined this
normalization, pushing queer media visibility closer to homonormativity, and, after the
events of 9/11, to homonationalism. Indeed, the quotidian existence of Kevin and Scotty
on Brothers & Sisters, which is so unremarkable that even their wedding comes and goes
without making a blip on the media radar, points towards the emergence of a
homonationalist definition of queer visibility as its most authentic and desirable form.
Along with before-and-after stories, the specificities of space and time also
emerge as crucial components of my investigation of the discourse of queer visibility.
Indeed, processes of normalization, queerness, and race all are deeply connected to
temporality and spatiality. As such, the history of AIDS in New York cannot be separated
from the urban landscape of Manhattan. The normalization of queer identities in the late
1980s and early 1990s brought with it the normalization of Manhattan's geography:
spaces once visibly queer, e.g. numerous bathhouses and gay clubs, were shut down in
the name of public health and reinvented in a more “family-friendly” manner (the
overhaul of Times Square is certainly the most prominent example, but the Hudson piers
also come to mind).
189
In addition to the real space of Manhattan, the imagined spaces of the West and
the Midwest become crucial to the manifestations of queerness in the films Brokeback
Mountain and Boys Don't Cry. In Brokeback Mountain, longstanding cultural ideas of the
American West frame the romance between Jack and Ennis—ideas that screen out,
among other things, the significance of race to imagined pastoral Western landscapes,
including the idyllic Brokeback mountain. While the idea of “queer cowboys” appears to
disrupt established ideas of the West, homonormative ideals shape the gay romance at the
center of the film and critically depend on the screening of race afforded by the mythic
Western landscape. Similarly, Boys Don't Cry seems to expose homophobia in the rural
Midwest. But this exposure relies on widespread preconceptions of rural America,
particularly of so-called white trash culture. While the film retells the events surrounding
the murder of transgendered Brandon Teena in a sympathetic way—the aspect of Boys
Don't Cry that the mainstream press celebrated—both narrative and diegesis evade an
engagement with its reliance on undifferentiated ideas of race and class.
The last aspect that winds through my investigation of the discourse of queer
visibility is the relationship between speaking out or remaining silent, which is mapped
onto the opposition of being visible or out and being invisible or in the closet. The
insistent push towards more visibility in the decades that I investigate marks the decision
not to be visibly queer as insufficient and even oppressive. Beginning with the gay
liberation front's slogan “Come out, come out, wherever you are,” the mandate to be out
and to speak out has rendered silence undesirable. Yet again, the foregrounding of one
particular form of queer lives and practices, in this case to be out, is embedded in
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questions of raciliazation and normalization. For example, non-white cultural traditions
offer insights into how not being visibly queer may open up spaces in which queer
practices can thrive. In these cases, silence cannot be equated with an oppression.
Moreover, cross-cultural comparisons allow the recognition that coming out is a
predominantly white American cultural concept that might not translate into other
national contexts.
The significance of silence also emerges in the context of AIDS. While ACT UP
stands behind the idea of SILENCE = DEATH, other aspects of the AIDS crisis of the
1980s, for example the suggestion to mandate HIV testing for specific parts of the
population, point towards silence as a privilege. In this context, both the need to speak
out about the devastating consequences of HIV/AIDS and the possibility to withhold
identification as queer or as HIV-positive become powerful and contested cultural modes.
After Ellen's coming out, the possibility of the co-existence of speech and silence
dwindles, at least within the context of queer media visibility. The increasing embrace of
gay and lesbian subject matter in film and television make the refusal to come out not
only undesirable, but tragic. Within this framework, mainstream reviews read one of the
major narrative arcs of Brokeback Mountain, namely Ennis' refusal to embrace a settled
life with Jack, as a sign of internalized homophobia when it would also be possible to
read it as a refusal of homonormativity. Within the contemporary context of failures and
successes in gay marriage legislation, Ennis emerges as tragic figure who will not even
lay claim to the limited possibilities afforded by his homophobic environment. Other
possibilities do not emerge as readily because they are obscured by cultural discourses
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that favor homonormativity.
The oscillation between a homonormative outlook emphasizing modes of queer
life and practices that align with whiteness, productivity, and stability and a point of view
that favors multiplicity and uncertainty characterizes the current moment of queer
visibility. My research negotiates between these sides of the closet-as-screen: I trace out
how predominant modes of queer visibility have come into being over the past forty years
while also demonstrating that alternative points of view can never be completely screened
out. Taking the so-called explosion of gay visibility during the 1990s as anchor, I have
developed the concept of the closet-as-screen to tease out the crucial moments in the
discourse of queer visibility. My mode of investigation allows for a critical understanding
of the conflicts surrounding homonormative and homonationalist paradigms of queer
visibility. In examining a wide variety of media, time periods, and cultural contexts, my
research has focused on clusters of meaning that might not seem to have connections to
queer visibility at first glance, but that, upon closer investigation, are suffused with
mechanisms, screens, and lenses that enable and regulate how queerness manifests itself
in American culture.
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