Men On... 2.0?: Black Gay Men on TV

I read this article on TheRoot by Michael Arceneaux (which is one of my favorite website) and was disturbed.  As many people know, much of my scholarly work centers on the limited representations and constructions of black gay men on television.  But this article bugged me, not because the author is wrong, but because he selectively chose which information to include and which to delete.

His gripe is that there is a revolution happening on television in terms of gay characters appearance and acceptance on TV but that black gay men have not been/are not a part of that revolution. And he rightly points out that these representations are disproportionately white. No arguments so far.  Where he goes off the rails (for me) is in his selection of Antoine Dodson (of "Hide Yo Kids" fame) and Lawrence Washington (from The Real Housewives of Atlanta). While perhaps his selection of these two celetoids (to borrow a phrase from the brilliant Chris Rojek who defines it roughly as a person who acquires short, intense bursts of media attention) speaks to their omnipresence in media he is remiss in recognizing that the Entertainment Weekly article DID mention Calvin from Greek who is an out black gay man, former president of his fraternity, has an interest in sports and has been written such that he has relationships (albeit with white men) that include kissing and sometimes the implication that there was same sex sexual intercourse. 

Also conveniently missing from this analysis is the gang from Noah's Arc.  Are they not gay representations (or at least not the "right" gay representations)?  Are the only "approved" (by whom?) ways that black gay men on television can be represented is as ultra masculine like Keith Charles on Six Feet Under?  What about Carter Heywood from Spin City?  Why is he missing from this analysis?  He is certainly the father of the movement whereby gay black men on TV began subscribing to what Evelyn Higginbotham calls a politics of respectability. 

We have to get beyond this notion of positive and negative when it comes to representations of black gay men in media.  These terms are entirely subjective.  Whose positive? Who's negative?  I often say to a friend of mine that nuance is dead and this article speaks to that notion loud and clear.  If we subscribe to Charles Cooley's notion that TV is a place we turn to in order to see ourselves reflected, then for someone, these representation are grounded in their truth.  Do some of these representations rely on stereotypes?  Of course they do, but stereotypes are grounded in a truth, perhaps not yours or mine, but someone's truth.  It's extraordinarily facile to dismiss black gay characters because they fail to conform to the ways in which we construct what black gayness (or gayness, generally for that matter) is or is not. 

I can't argue that we still need to search for the black gay men on TV, but the notion that all we have to pick from are the caricatures of gayness that harken back to the days of Men On... from In Living Color is a bit disingenuous.  We still have a long way to go, (the same is true for many televisual groups including lesbians, who are as invisible on TV as black gay men), but we have more choices than Arceneaux asserts.

Glee and Construction of Gay Men

My first piece for PopMatters was published while I was on vacation, so I'm a little remiss in publishing it here.  It takes a look at Kurt Hummel and the construction of gay men on television.  Enjoy!

Hetereonormalizing Gay Relationships

 I have (as is usual) been consuming a lot of media recently.  What is interesting is the amount of that media that works to heteronormalize gay relationships.  I've been catching up on Modern Family (a show I have really grown to enjoy and am teetering on the brink of calling myself a fan) and well, the gay relationship between and Cam and Mitchell is not so modern.  And it has nothing to do with the idea that they have not kissed, although there is a Facebook group of more than 13,000 people who want that to happen.  No, it has more to do with the way in which the producers of Modern Family have constructed this couple along "traditional" tropes of the family.  

Companies Don't Necesarrily Want GLBT people, Just Their Money

Once again, a company tries to court the gay dollar to help their fledgling business.  To Amtrak, I say, kiss my ass!  Where has Amtrak been on other important issues for GLBT people?  As far as I am concerned, epic fail.  Not to mention that for most gay people, the only way they travel by train is the subway system. 

What's with all the Lady GOGA?

It's always been my contention that female sexuality is far more fluid that male sexuality.  We've graduated from the days where lesbians were portrayed as psycho killers and have moved on to an era where the idea of lesbianism is primarily presented for the titillation of heterosexual men.  So, is it any wonder that we are bombarded with images of faux lesbianism in media?  From Chaka Khan and Patti LaBelle on the BET Awards to Miley Cyrus, female celebrities seem to be embracing their inner Lady G.O.G.A. (that's "girl on girl action" for the uninitiated.)

What Are the Rules for Celebrity Forgiveness?

A conversation I saw on Facebook caused me to think: what are the rules for celebrity transgression (and subsequent forgiveness)?  Last night's BET Awards featured performances by both Kanye West and Chris Brown.  For those who have been living under a pop culture rock, Kanye West famously interrupted Taylor Swift's acceptance speech at the MTV Music Awards and ended up looking like an asshole to just about everyone.

Elena Kagan is NOT gay says friends

So, Elena Kagan is not gay according to her friends.  While this may, or may not be true, it brings up an important question: "Why does it matter one way or the other as it relates to her ability to be an effective Supreme Court Justice?"     

Why I Hate CNN: Gay in America

I will tell anyone who listens that I detest CNN (and all the other 24 hour news networks including CNBC, MSNBC and FOX News) because I believe they do a disservice to Americans seeking unbiased news coverage.  But my recent giant glass of ice cold Haterade is lifted to CNN not necessarily for being biased, but for simply being dumb.  Now, I am never one to deny someone a check, so hats off to Soledad O'Brien for getting hers, but really CNN?  You have the nerve to call a series Gay in America and then treat us (and I use the word VERY loosely) to a documentary on one gay couple's (anticlimactic) journey to having a baby. 

Everything's Coming Up Gay

This is a great article from The New Yorker about the increasing number of gay (or at least gay-ish) young men in media and an attempt to figure out what it means culturally.  I think it just means that tween girls tend to like fey-ish young men rather than that there is necessarily a greater acceptance of gay folk on television.  But what is still troubling is that the identification of gay and gay-ish young men (or the "mark of gayness") still traffics heavily in stereotypes of what it means (or doesn't mean) to be gay.  Gay young men on television are still overwhelmingly showtune-loving, high-kicking and twirling representations (full disclosure: I was one of these young men) but isn't it time for a broader range of representations?  Certainly shows like Greek and Will & Grace (as problematic as the show is) have broadened the range of gay men seen on television, but these are adult men. 

I am a believer that television is a socialization tool and while we're televisually celebrating letting our freak flags fly, we're also limiting the construct of what young male gayness is and can be. 

Quote of the Day

"Oh, the gays are getting miffed! Don't tell us we're too gay or not or whatever. Oh lord, what is gay, anyway? Find me the line -- find me the defining line between gay and straight. Find me the defining line between male and female. There is no line. You cannot draw this line in the sand. Yes, there are plenty of people way over there who will never partake in anything straight and there are people way over there who will never partake in anything gay, but there's a whole lot of gray in the middle. Where's the line? Behind all of it is sexual insecurity. It's sexphobia."

-- Melissa Etheridge on the Newsweek "controversy" over Sean Hayes being "too gay" to play straight.

Where's the Rainbow?

I watched a documentary on LOGO called The Butch Factor on logo which purported to examine ideas (and ideals) about masculinity among gay men.  What struck me when watching was that the documentary presented a monolithic idea of masculinity, or to speak in the film's terms, butchness.  The masculine men played sports, participated in rodeos and were police officers while the less butch (read: feminine) representations were of men who had more artsy professions.

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.

Is Homosexuality an Abomination?

Fantastic editorial about Leviticus as related to homosexuality.  What is particularly interesting is the author's central thesis, which is why do we care about homosexuality more than we do other things forbidden by the bible? I think it says a lot about our culture of heteronormativity that we fixate this one aspect of sexuality, and people like Joel Olsteen says things like homosexuality does not represent people being "God's best" (as if he or anyone for that matter truly knows what "God's best" is rather than our interpretation of what we think it is.

Today in "People Are Stupid" News

Humans never cease to amaze me with their idiotic actions.  This story out of Australia may actually take the cake (at least for the day) in stupid people doing/saying stupid things.  A visually impaired man was refused service at a Thai restaurant because staff thought his dog was a gay dog versus a guide dog.  Really?  A gay dog?  How does that work in the real world? The store's owners claim that the waiter thought the dog had been desexed to become a gay dog (which proves again that people are stupid as if that had happened the dog would be asexual, not gay).  And that, my friends, is what's new in "People are Stupid" news today.

Framing Homosexuality via Archie

The comic strip Archie announcing that it would introduce a gay character to Riverdale was met by me with a yawn. But then I saw this video and this video



and then I realized the damage that media can do and that homosexuality is (and will always be) othered in our allegedly unbiased media culture.

Framing Homosexuality and Pedophilia

This week has been terribly interesting to watch the story about sexual abuse and the Catholic church unfold (again).  What's interesting is how approved "talking heads" (and the media by sanctioning/allowing their viewpoints) have worked to frame the Catholic church's problem as not one of pedophilia, but as one of homosexuality.  In other words, the media is complicit in recycling misinformation by continuing to allow certain guests on their programs and, in large part, failing to correct the misinformation.  As the brilliant Pierre Bourdieu states in his work On Television, 

"There is a backstage process of shaping the group that ends up in the studio for the show, beginning with the preliminary decision about who gets invited and who doesn't... The set is there in front of viewers, and what they see hides what they don't see-- and what they don't  see in this constructed image, are the social conditions of its construction." (Bourdieu, 34)

Whose Side Are You On? Celebrity and the Culture of Binaries

We live in a world that is often black and white with no shades of gray. You're either for health care reform or against it. You either support war or you're unpatriotic. We are constantly asked to choose sides in our culture. But never is choosing sides more absurd than when it comes to celebrities. I was reminded of this penchant for the news media to choose sides and then in their reporting make us chose a side as well when I (begrudgingly) watched CNN last week. The "impartial, just delivering the news" anchor Kyra Phillips decided to call Jesse James, Sandra Bullock's husband, a jerk in the course of delivering the news that Sandra Bullock had moved out of the family home in Los Angeles. Kyra Phillips was definitely on Team Sandy.

It's not just limited to coverage of marital/relationship discord (although there are many examples like Team Jen or Team Angie) but also reared its head when we were to chose between Team Coco (Conan O'Brien) or Team Jay (Leno). What's puzzling is that we make these decisions in a knowledge vacuum. As Chris Rojek says in his brilliant book Celebrity "one peculiar tension in celebrity culture is that the arousal of strong emotion [for celebrities] is attained despite the absence of direct personal reciprocity." In other words, we refer to celebrities by first name or by nicknames yet we have so little knowledge about them that would offer us the license to refer to them on friendly terms. For example, Mariah Carey is Mimi, Jennifer Aniston is Jen and Sandra Bullock is Sandy (maybe it's a female thing?). In addition, we have unimonikered people in our culture who go by their first name only: Beyonce, Madonna and for some (or most) gay men when you hear Liza, Bette, Diana, Tina, or Barbara, there can be no doubt about the person being discussed.

There have been some pretty nasty things written about Tiger Woods in light of his extramarital affairs (as well as Jesse James and many other celebrities who have admitted to having sexual relationships with people with whom they are not attached). But the fact remains that we know nothing about them. Perhaps Tiger Woods and his wife had an agreement that sexual monogamy is not an important aspect of their marriage (like Mo'Nique and her husband) and the media's focus on the relationship is really about Elin being embarrassed that the sexual dalliances of her husband have come to light. Maybe Sandra Bullock isn't really America's Sweetheart and is a bear to live with who refused to have sex with her husband. I doubt this is the case with either Tiger Woods or Sandra Bullock, but it illuminates that we just don't have enough information to be able to make the call about who wins when Team Sandy is going head to head with Team Jesse, or Team Tiger vs. Team Elin.

This binary also speaks to the way in which our culture has socially constructed marriage and monogamy. Culturally, we give Mo'Nique the collective "side eye" when she says that one of the partner's "infidelity" is not necessarily a reason to dissolve the relationship -- particularly if we believe that about 50 percent of marriages in the US end in divorce. Who said marriage (or serious relationships for that matter) had to be based on monogamy? We have culturally tied something carnal (sex) to something emotional (love) when the two are not really related. Maybe it is for the best that we live in monogamous relationships, but it's our modern creation and it hasn't been around "forever." And even in the Mo'Nique monogamy situation, we're asked to be on Team Monogamy or Team Open Marriage. Stories on the Internet urge us to make a choice with titles like Are Open Relationships Better?, Is Mo'Nique's Open Relationship Sexist? and Do Open Relationships Equal Insecurity? As Matt Bianco asks us, whose side are you on?

The One Where Meredith Vieira Does Not Like Man-on-Man Hugging

The places that one sees, if not homophobia, at least someone questioning male-to-male affection, is astounding. This from the Today Show wherein Meredith Vieira implies that two men hugging is cause for concern and essentially not normal. Her coded language is really saying, "That hug was really 'gay'. Are you gay?"

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

I do like how Anthony Mackie shuts her down and essentially, to borrow a phrase from South Park, calls shenanigans on her ludicrous line of questioning. And kudos to Al Roker (words I never thought I'd type) for incredulously asking, "Why would you ask that?!?!?!?"



Why does our society still support such antiquated notions of masculinity? Why does this (or Adam Lambert's AMA performance) raise eyebrows in a way that two women hugging/celebrating doesn't?

A Kiss is Still a Kiss: White Heteronormativity and the movie Valentine's Day

Garry Marshall you owe me $6!

Every bad experience is supposed to be a learning experience, right? So, I learned something from the cinematic crap fest called Valentine's Day. But I'm sure it's nothing that the writers, actors or producers expected me to get out of it. As someone who studies representation of both black people and gay people in media, I never expected Valentine's Day to shed any light on my studies, but it did -- and I guess that makes it worth the $6 I wasted seeing it. For the first half (or so) of this seemingly three hour movie I noticed that neither Jamie Foxx or Queen Latifah were getting any romantic play. Jamie Foxx's character was too cynical to be romantically involved and Queen Latifah's character was focused on her career. But then toward the end of the movie, Jamie Foxx became interested in Jessical Biel, culminating in an interracial kiss. The problem? "The kiss" was shot in such a way that you couldn't really see their lips becoming one, but just had the "idea" that they were kissing. I tried finding an image of said kiss, but when I put in the search terms Jamie Foxx Jessica Biel kiss, the first result was this and after scrolling through five pages still didn't see a screencap.


According to Erica Chito Childs, author of Fade to Black and White, "interracial stories may be appealing to show without mentioning race, and in particular, by showing interracial possibilities that promote the idea that society is color-blind while affirming the problems with crossing the color-blind color line." But by the way in which the sole interracial kiss was filmed in Valentine's Day, it shows that there is still taboo as well as perhaps some revulsion related to interracial couplings. And while the relationship was new, it's also interesting to note that they are one of the only couples not shown in bed together.

Viewers were also supposed to be shocked by Eric Dane's character's admission that he is gay and is subsequently in some kind of relationship with Bradley Cooper. The what, where or how of the relationship is never explained or defined but they're two gay characters in a movie so they must be together, right? But what is also cowardly about the portrayal of this relationship is that it is played solely for shock value. We were supposed to be shocked when we find out that Eric Dane is gay and then shocked again that Eric Dane and Bradley Cooper are a couple. And how do we know they are a couple? Because Bradley Cooper walks in and brushes a flower on Eric Dane's cheek while he's sleeping. When Eric Dane awakes they don't kiss, they just look at each other lovingly and then we fade to the next scene. While every other couple (including high school students) is shown kissing at some point.

I don't expect gayness in every movie I see (in fact, I'd probably hate it) but when you are going to have gay characters, at least have them kiss and don't just use it as a tactic to (allegedly) shock your audience. It very well may have been a shot at inclusiveness (after all, Valentine's Day is a film with a multicultural cast), but don't include a gay couple and then cop out. Sure, it may have outraged a few heterosexual viewers whose delicate palate is offended by seeing two dirty homos kissing (unless it's Jessica Biel and Jessica Alba or two equally hot women), but either go all the way or leave it out. Frankly, Valentine's Day was so craptastic, that it could have been left out entirely and the movie would have remained its level of crappiness.

The Importance of the Written and Spoken Word

In school we were told that the construction of survey questions is very important. We're told to focus the questions, make them as brief and clear as possible. And while there isn't a ton of emphasis put on the actual words you're using (other than to say that you must use words that most people would be able to define) the results of this survey by New York Times/CBS shows researchers that they might want to pay a little more attention to word selection. You see, the approval for allowing gay or homosexual people to serve in the military depends on what you call them. The poll found that 70 percent of those polled favor (either strongly favor or somewhat favor) allowing gay men and lesbians to serve in the military while only 59 percent of respondents favor (either strongly favor or somewhat favor) allowing homosexuals to serve in the military.




I heard Michelangelo Signorile posit that the numbers could be lower because the word "homosexual" mentions the word sex and makes respondents think about sex between two men (because that presumably is where the mind goes for images of repulsion, rather than lesbian sex). I'm not so sure that I completely agree with his argument, but what I think the real takeaway for researchers as well as people in general is that words matter. We have to be a lot more careful about the words we use in order to clearly convey what we really want to say. Some people brush things off as being purely about semantics, but as this poll shows, it's not just semantics, some words truly rub people the wrong way and cause them to react more negatively.