Last week (or maybe the week before) this video was being tweeted with quite a flutter.
Gay men will marry your girlfriends
It’s probably worth having a watch of the video if you want to read on. After I finally got around to watching it, all I could think was what’s all the fuss and excitement about? It’s either a little offensive, or if not, just bad. In having debates with friends on Twitter, I’ve started to take a stronger stance – I think things like this are actively destructive.
When I was young and was starting to realise I was gay, there were two major public faces for homosexuality; Will and Grace and Queer Eye for the Straight Guy (I used to watch Queer as Folk as well, but that was much more niche). Will and Grace and Queer Eye were in many ways big steps for the representation of the gay community (noting that I’m using the word gay here as there were no lead LBTI characters in either show). Moving from a place where gay men had very little to no representation at all, these shows really brought gay men into mainstream media culture.
Despite this progress however, they also presented a very limited representation of gay men; that of the stereotypical ‘fabulous’ camp gay man. Stereotypes about gay men being effeminate have been around for a lot longer than before Will and Grace and Queer Eye. But these shows, and much of the other representation of gay men around the time, brought these stereotypes well into a mainstream culture, and importantly actively built them up. They used the stereotypes not in a derogative manner, but in a positive way.
To add some extra context into this, this representation coincided with a bit of a ‘mainstreaming’ of the GLBTIQ movement. Whilst queer activists had been campaigning for centuries, you can really see a ‘break out’ of the movement around this time into the mainstream cultural conscience.
Will and Grace and Queer Eye therefore represented the way the straight community decided to represent gay people (noting that even though these shows had gay actors, they were created and set in a straight dominated industry) at the time that the queer movement was breaking into the ‘mainstream’.
In doing so, what was being presented was the ‘fabulous gay man’, who in general didn’t actually have sex (hence meaning we don’t have to think about that disgusting but sex) and is able to please women emotionally, therefore providing a service that straight men clearly couldn’t provide. These men aren’t really serious either – they’re funny, fabulous, a little one-dimensional and therefore is ‘un-threatening’.
Now, whilst this limited representation would normally just annoy me, it probably wouldn’t lead me to writing something like this if it wasn’t for the impact it had on the queer community, and movement. With the mainstreaming of this view of gay men, many in the mainstream of the queer community ended up hopping on board, with pretty bad consequences.
This is a really subtle change, but one that if you think about it has become all consuming. The key to this is the idea is that of these stereotypical men being ‘non-threatening’. At the time, instead of thinking ‘it’s great that we’re getting more representation, but let’s see if we can broaden it’, many went (not literally) ‘look at what the straight community love about us – let’s play into it to build our movement’ (for more discussion on this, check out this FUSE article I wrote a couple of years ago). We’ve bought into the stereotypes the straight community place onto us – allowing our oppressors to define who we are, and the reasons why we should have ‘equal rights’.
Now, I’m not saying that there is something wrong with people who fit this stereotype, or the stereotype itself. But, this particular representation of gay men is now so widespread it leaves out the whole diversity of our community; men, women, intersex and trans*. And there is something wrong if those who don’t fit this stereotype aren’t visible. Young queer people should grow up with a diversity of role models. Heterosexuals who are exposed to our campaigns should see the fullness of our lives. Gay men deserve freedom from discrimination and homophobia, no matter how well we fit the ‘fabulous’ ideal.
And because this broad representation isn’t occurring, many are now feeling pressure to fit within the mold that the straight community has defined for us. I can tell you from personal experience that many in the community now feel an expectation to live up to these sorts of stereotypes, with things like gym culture taking control of much of the gay community. Those who aren’t ‘fabulous’ get left out of being represented. For example, I have been told many times that you wouldn’t expect me to be gay because I ‘don’t act like it’. And this isn’t an expectation that is created by some conservative group, but one we create ourselves.
Even more importantly, the way we have built up the fabulous gay man has actively excluded many other in the queer community, in particular women. A large part of this is because the traditional stereotype of a lesbian woman is one who is butch – apparently not the ‘friendly face’ we want to show to the rest of the community. In doing so we have let homophobic society dictate how we represent our community, hiding some people while pushing others into the spotlight in a distorting way.
So, in the end, my annoyance about this video isn’t necessarily due to being offended with its content. Rather, it is real concern about where our movement is heading, and importantly, how the straight community (note that ‘College Humor’ is not queer-press) continues to represent the queer community.
In the late nineties and early naughties, when I was coming out, this sort of representation was in many ways the best we could ask for. 10 – 15 years later however, I was hoping we would have progressed. Whilst this video may be funny, it’s a symbol of how far we have to go.