CNN Does it Again: Gary and Tony Have a Baby (UGH!)

CNN continues to prove just how useless and inane its coverage is/can be with the announcement that they will air a CNN Special Report called Gary and Tony Have a Baby in June.  I find it useless because I continually question the wisdom of a very middle class, assimilationist thread that runs through and dominates gay rights in America.  The major way that many gay rights organizations attack those who oppose gay rights is by trying to show how much gay couples are "just like the 'rest' of us" (i.e. normal, whatever the hell that is!).  Not to mention that a special like this does nothing to unseat the idea that gayness = whiteness.  As someone who does research on gay black men on television, I know that the universe of gay men of color on television is small, particularly when you discount unscripted and cable television shows, but white gay men appear on many network shows like Modern Family and Brothers and Sisters.



We are at a critical point right now in the gay rights movement.  We've run so far from what we, ourselves, deem stereotypical behavior that we're nothing more than a bunch of Wills (from Will & Grace) robbed of anything that makes us gay.  We don't want people (read: nongays) to think about us having sex or being intimate with one another, all in the name of achieving equal rights while touting "Gays: We're Just Like You." We think  achieving marriage rights (a middle class value) will do something for us in terms of acceptance, but the fact is, there will still be those who discriminate against us and our relationships/families.

Perhaps by achieving marriage equality we will have access to our partner's social security benefits and perhaps a small tax break for being able to file as a married couple, but these are all middle class values -- I'd bet that if a poll was taken of lower class gay men and lesbians and not the well-heeled, middle class (largely white) gay men and women to ask what is the most important thing the gay rights movement should be fighting for, I'm sure marriage equality would not be No. 1. 

This is one of the major reasons I cringe when people talk about the "gay community" or the _____ community because it assumes that there is something that people inherently have in common because they allegedly belong to that "community.  All gays are alike, all blacks are alike.  It's preposterous and its preposterous nature is revealed only when you say something like "the white community" and then watch people look at you like you have three heads. 

The bottom line here is that the media help us to continue to develop ideas about groups of people.  By failing to consistently show gay men and women of color, or gay men and women who have not been totally domesticated and neutered, they continue to frame gay people (and gay men in particular given their disproportionate representation on television) as white and middle class.