Alysia Abbot has a fascinating critique of the rise of gay fathers on television in The Atlantic today, pointing out that the most interesting gay father in media this fall isn’t a sitcom character, but an activist in a documentary:

The most vibrant gay man you’ll see on a screen this fall won’t be found on TV but in David France’s filmed history of the ACT UP movement, How to Survive a Plague. Bob Rafsky quit his job as a PR executive at Howard Rubenstein (he’d represented Donald Trump before going on disability for AIDS) in order to become an activist. In a New York Times op-ed he wrote, “There’s not much to do except to keep fighting the epidemic, and those whose actions or inactions prolong it, until I get too sick to fight.”…Rafsky was also a dad. Among the most affecting scenes in an already affecting movie are those between him and his young daughter, Sara. We see them celebrating birthdays and dancing together in his sunny New York apartment. Rafsky’s face beaming, he tells us in voiceover: “It’s the only really successful love affair of my life.” This love is made more poignant as we see him deteriorate over the course of the film.

Rafsky’s best known for a moment in the spring of 1992, when he heckled candidate Bill Clinton at a campaign rally in New York City,”What are you going to do about AIDS?” Clinton responded, “I feel your pain.” The televised exchange led to AIDS becoming an issue in the ’92 election. During the Clinton administration, protease inhibitors were developed, transforming AIDS from a death sentence into a manageable disease. These advances couldn’t save Rafsky, who died of AIDS in 1993, but his story illustrates the legacy of political activism, a legacy to be proud of. At the time of his death at age 47, he was writing an autobiography about his work as an AIDS activist tentatively titled A Letter to Sara.

The gay fathers on TV today can make us laugh, but can they inspire? If they can’t inspire can they at least not embody embarrassing stereotypes? Thinking about the latest crop of gay dads on television I can’t help but recall a popular chant from the Act Up demonstrations whenever someone was arrested or harassed: “The whole world is watching! The whole world is watching!” The irony is that, too often, the world wasn’t watching then. But now, thanks to these primetime characters, people are definitely watching. They just aren’t seeing much of the truth.

Or maybe to put it another way, we aren’t seeing much of gay parents other than their gayness. It makes sense that stories about gay couples who are starting families would involve characters who are confronting their expectations for what their sexual orientation meant for what they could and couldn’t do in their lives. That’s an important conversation, but it is a limitation on storytelling, and on building out other facets of these characters. It’s one of the reasons I like Julie White’s character on Go On so much. In addition to the fact that she’s one of the only lesbian moms on network television, her character already had children with her wife, so that conversation is over and done with. Instead, we get to see her anxieties about dating and sex as a widow, her crankiness, or even be surprised by the fact that she turns out to be a lovely, accomplished dancer. We need stories about gay people reckoning with their own gayness. But equality means that not all stories about gay people should have to be about their gayness, just as straight people get to blow things up, and have wacky roommates, and go to terrible bachelor parties, and wear latex without implications for their sexual orientations.

I wrote last month about the need to see a much wider range of love stories between same-sex couples in our culture, moving away from relationships that are marked by tragedy because of the sexual orientation of the participants, and towards stories that can be purely happy, or tragic because of other factors, or the basis for heroics unrelated to the relationships. We’re in the early stages of some television shows that do that, like The L.A. Complex and Lost Girl. And now we have a music video that advances that narrative, Macklemore and Ryan Lewis’s gorgeous cradle-to-the-grave short film for “Same Love”:

Part of what’s fascinating and politically effective about the video is that the images are much more subtle than the lyrics themselves, which are a blunt call for equality. The couple in the film confront implied homophobia from their teenaged peers, from a couple on the street, but they also get to experience normal milestones, from teenaged fights with their parents, to public kisses, to introducing each other to their families, to an anxious proposal, to a joyous wedding. Homophobia, both internalized and external, is a factor in their relationship, but it’s far from the sum of it, and it doesn’t consume them and end in a cliche spasm of violence, as was the case for Murs’ “Animal Style” video. They just get to live, and love, and we can focus on the beauty and tremulousness and steadfastness of their relationship, above all else.

Last week, I went long on the future of popular culture about gay people and a pet peeve of mine: the treatment of homosexuality as primarly a source of problems instead of joy, whether it’s in the historical pop portrayal of gay people as deviant, miserable, and damned, or of homophobia as the primary dramatic story engine for gay characters. As is always the case on this subject, my writing was informed by conversations with friends and writers like Tyler Lewis, who writes better on the specific experiences of black gay men than anyone I know, and Slate critic June Thomas. Fortunately, I had the opportunity to sit down with June and tape our conversations for a new Bloggingheads episode:

It was a conversation that helped mentally crystallize for me the extent to which non-straight characters are written for the enjoyment of and in deference to the perspectives of straight people. Shows and movies that aren’t made specifically for gay people, like both iterations of Queer as Folk, are allowed to have one gay person or gay couple. We don’t get to see gay people in gay communities, to see gay men who are friends with lesbians (though that seems like it could change on The New Normal, where creator Ryan Murphy has announced plans to introduce a gay couple) because shows with gay characters are so often about gay characters’ relationships to a straight-dominated world, or more often, about straight people’s relationships to gay people, no matter whether or not straight people are the gay characters. Cultural signaling, like a man’s interest in fashion or a woman’s interest in sports, or is less about fleshing out the personalities and interests of the characters who possess them than in signaling to straight audiences about story developments: Kurt’s clothes on Glee mean there will be bullying, parental difficulty, a change of wardrobe, a revitalization of his confidence, and an eventual journey to the big city. Homophobia is something for gay characters to overcome, but also for straight characters to learn from, for straight viewers to use as a self-congratulatory benchmark, assuring themselves that they’d never behave so badly.

I’m being harsh here. I know that. The process of straight people learning and appreciating, rather than demonizing, gay people’s lives and challenges and gay cultures, such as they exist, is not an irrelevant process. But I’m tired of the constant need for accommodation. I’m tired of the idea that straight people are going to be most interested in stories about themselves than in stories about gay people even if the execution of say, an excellent love story about two men like Keep the Lights On is richer and deeper than so much romantic comedy claptrap. I’m tired, similarly, of the idea that stories about men are the default, that both men and women will turn into them, and that stories about women are somehow niche, that men won’t tune into them. In both of these areas, people who limit themselves to stories about themselves are both denying themselves great pleasure and beauty. And they’re defaulting to the privileged position of being able to expect that Hollywood will continue providing them stories about people whose lives are a heightened version of their own. At the end of the day, if people want to cut themselves off from stories that could move them, that’s their loss. It’s just frustrating to me when someone else’s lack of curiosity reaffirms Hollywood’s own, and limits what options are available to the rest of us.

Madeline Miller’s The Song of Achilles, which won this year’s Orange Prize for fiction, is a retelling of a very old story, the rise of the Greek warrior Achilles to immortality through his feats at Troy. Its innovation, however, is that the person who tells the story is Achilles’ companion Patroclus, a shadow by the hearth of myth, and to make the love story between the two young men explicit rather than inferred. Miller does a magnificent job of balancing antiquity and a sense of the modern. And in doing so, her novel highlights some of the profound limitations contemporary storytelling about LGBT people and relationships between people of the same gender has placed on itself.

In response to decades of popular culture that framed same-sex desire as a condition that could only lead to isolation, misery, and death, movies, television, books, even music videos responded with narratives that framed homophobia, whether externalized or internalized, as a powerful and deadly force, and a significant driver of stories. While the stories have been powerful tools in changing attitudes—Vice President Biden cited Will and Grace as a factor in changing his mind about equal marriage rights—they have something in common with the stories they pushed back against: both sets of stories treat homosexuality as a source of problems. As we imagine a future destination for gay-friendly popular culture, in other words, maybe what we should be dreaming of is stories that look like those from the distant past Miller summons back into existence, rather than anything from the recent past.

In The Song of Achilles, Achilles and Patroclus’s relationship is doomed not because they are men and love each other, but because their relationship is tied up in the warp and weft of history and the forging of legend. Throughout the novel, their relationship is presented as erotically emotionally fulfilling, and both men fight for their relationship and live it in public as a point of pride. Achilles claims Patroclus as his husband. Warned that in Troy, their relationship could cause comment because they are beyond the age when Greek boys stop having sex with each other and begin having sex with women, they choose to live publicly together anyway. They don’t even necessarily break because Patroclus is mortal and Achilles is half-human and half-god. Patroclus summons his courage to insist to Thetis, Achilles’ divine mother, that he is a worthy lover of her son, and ultimately, she comes to believe him. Ultimately, their love founders because Achilles ultimately chooses his fame over their relationship.

It’s a vision Patroclus sees early in his arguments with Thetis, who urges Achilles to come with her, away from his human father and his education. “She would feed him with the food of the gods and burn his human blood from his veins,” Patroclus worries. “She would shape him into a figure meant to be painted on vases, to be sung of in songs, to fight against Troy. I imagined him in black armor, a dark helmet that left him nothing but eyes, bronze greaves that covered his feet. He stands with a spear in each hand and does not know me.” In Troy, Achilles slowly becomes the sum of his fame. Walking through the camp and realizing that Patroclus knows many more of the men than he does, Achilles tells Patroclus “There are too many of them…It’s simpler if they just remember me.” And when he and Agamemnon clash, it becomes clear that Achilles is in love with the promise of his legend as much as Patroclus. “‘My life is my reputation,’ he says. His breath sounds ragged. ‘It is all I have. I will not live much longer. Memory is all I can hope for.’ He swallows, thickly. ‘You know this. And would you let Agamemnon destroy it? Would you help him take it from me?’” Their tragedy is Achilles’ romance with his own death, a self-destructive, immortalizing urge that has nothing to do with self-hatred over his love for Patroclus.

It’s exactly the kind of story that we need more of: depictions of relationships between men and women as sources of passion, emotional support, and pride that serve as the basis for characters who have other entanglements with the world, other triumphs, other tragedies. This is not to say that we should eliminate stories about the power of homophobia, given that it remains a powerful force in American society and the world at large. Coming out, self-hatred, family rejection or surprising family acceptance, and displays of societal homophobia, from verbal intolerance to violence, are both reliable dramatic fulcrums, and powerful mobilizing tools against hateful attitudes. And making those experiences central to gay characters’ identities and story arcs is also a way of acknowledging that straight audiences, when encountering gay characters, may foreground those characters’ sexual orientations, and may have as their central experience of those characters either grappling with their lingering assumptions about LGBT people or congratulating themselves for embracing characters wholeheartedly, even if the fictional people in those characters’ lives do not.

But if the only thing gay characters are allowed to do is be a vehicle for straight people’s revelations, or for conversations about the state of society, we’re replacing stereotypes with sainthood and the burden of social utility. And after a while, if the only or biggest problems characters have stem from the fact that they aren’t heterosexual, the lingering collective message is that homosexuality or bisexuality are a problem, even if one of society’s making and to society’s shame. It may be an inversion of old Hollywood narratives that portrayed gayness as a reason to be depressed, miserable, or suicidal. But it’s still a striking limitation to place on characters if the goal of such shows is to defy cramped visions of gay life and to present gay characters as fully human. Joy matters. As Daniel Mendelsohn writes in a piece for the most recent issue of Out about growing up without gay television, “Who hasn’t learned how to kiss from the movies? What I was desperate to see in the mid-’70s, when I was 14 and 15 and 16, was precisely what the pop culture wasn’t ready to show me — the images that all my straight friends had been casually absorbing all along: what desire and sex, kissing and lovemaking, happy coupling actually looked like.” What we need is not to render homophobia invisible, and swap one dominant narrative for another, but more stories overall, and more diversity in their narratives.
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As my colleague Igor Volsky noted yesterday, one of NBC’s Utah affiliate has decided not to air Glee creator Ryan Murphy’s new sitcom, The New Normal, about a gay couple who decide to have a child by surrogate because, ““For our brand, this program simply feels inappropriate on several dimensions, especially during family viewing time.” This doesn’t actually strike me as particularly surprising. But I think the channel might have made the decision for different ones than we might expect.

I’ve only seen the pilot of The New Normal, but other than the fact that the show depicts a gay couple in a partnership who want to have a child, it’s not a particularly challenging depiction. The couple conform to butch-femme stereotypes. They don’t have much in the way of sexual chemistry. People who dislike gay couples will not enjoy a show that insists in the most obvious possible terms that they’re here, they’re conforming as quickly as possible, get used to it. But I think it’s less challenging, at least thus far, than something like Glee, which equated a gay teenaged couple losing their virginity with a straight one, or even The Wire, which gave a lesbian couple on the baby track an actual erotic life.

But what I think is narrowly effective about The New Normal, and that might make the affiliate’s audience most uncomfortable, is that it shows bigotry as directly hurtful to the people in range of it. For most of the pilot, Jane (Ellen Barkin), an older divorced woman, is an outrageous caricature of a biased person, who speaks aloud what for most people is subtext or subconscious fear, rather than having her anti-gay views and her racism subtly inflect her thinking, bubbling up in surprising ways that leave everyone around her on edge. But the people around her do a nice job of acting out the pain her outrageous statements cause them. She acts as a roadblock in her daughter Goldie’s (Georgia King) efforts to better herself the one way she believes she can—Goldie is a young single mother—by carrying another couple’s child for a large, one-time fee that would allow her to attend law school. Jane is mean to the gay couple (Justin Bartha and Andrew Rannells) who choose Goldie to be their surrogate. Even when she doesn’t mean to, Jane inadvertently ends up coming across as racist to one of the men’s assistant (Nene Leakes). Jane’s views are more disruptive and hurtful than the act of two men building a family together.

And that, I think, is the real reason conservative viewers might be uncomfortable with The New Normal. It’s one thing to find gay couples distasteful or upsetting, but if you believe that gay people and the people who accept them are aberrant and easily confined to places that are far away from you, they don’t represent much threat. But if your views make you the dangerous, damaging, abnormal person, then it’s much more reasonable to feel threatened and upset.

Following our discussion yesterday about how liberal Hollywood-produced programming actually is, I wanted to call folks’ attention to this fascinating chart from Nielsen that, though based on data from two seasons ago, breaks out by age group how much of the television we consume is inclusive of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender characters:

It’s encouraging that, between the ages of 12 and 35, about a third of the scripted and reality television Americans are watching take place in worlds where gay people are thoroughly integrated as significant characters, though that number decreases as people get older. It’s one of the core ideas of the gay rights movement that it becomes much more difficult to discriminate against gay people once you know them, and good television, even if it’s not a replacement for actual humans, creates the sense that you know the characters and care for their well-being.

But in the release where Nielsen put out that graph, there are some disconcerting facts that point to regional and class gaps between where that programming is penetrating:

Within the 25-49 age demographic, LGBT-inclusive programs (and its advertisers) were most likely to reach:

College-educated white females
Small white collar households
Budding families (those with 3 or fewer members)
Non-white, professional Millennials without children also tended to watch LGBT-inclusive shows more frequently than primetime in general.

LGBT-Inclusive characters were incorporated into shows that skewed towards Eastern and Pacific viewers and were less watched by Midwesterners. This differential was most pronounced among 18-24 year olds in the Midwest, especially when compared to 18-24 year olds in other regions of the U.S.

It makes sense that people who were already liberal in their views on gay rights issues and dedicated to making socially conscious media consumption decisions would be attracted to programming that reinforced their views. But it would also be interesting to see if that programming accelerated or intensified the commitment of those viewers’ to gay rights or their sense that gay families were normal, and if the slower penetration of LGBT-inclusive programming in other kinds of households and other regions had any impact on how quickly perception of gay people changed in those areas.

The television season gets an early start this summer, thanks to the Olympics, which NBC is using to launch the two most promising new comedies it developed this year, Go On late tonight after Olympics coverage ends, and Animal Practice, which it will air at the same time on Sunday (both will be available online the next day).

Go On which features Matthew Perry as Ryan King, a sports radio host whose wife recently died, and who is required by his boss Steven, played by John Cho, to attend a support group before he can return to work, reminds me a bit of the early days of Community before the show became a wildly creative exploration of pop culture tropes with dismal ratings. Ryan is snarky and resistant about the gongs and self-affirmation exercises employed by Lauren (Laura Benanti, freed from servitude in The Playboy Club), the group leader. But as in Community, he can’t help but be drawn to the other members of the group including Owen (Tyler James Williams of Everybody Hates Chris), a withdrawn young man whose brother is in a coma after an accident, George (Bill Cobbs), an older man who has gone blind, and Anne (a wonderful Julie White), a widowed lesbian whose partner died after being cavalier about taking her heart medication.

The show’s goofy, at least through the pilot, operates on a less intense level than Community‘s did, where exploring the trope was the way you accessed emotion (in a sense, the show was an enormous, continuously operating video game). Ryan sets up a March Sadness competition to get the members of his group talking about the tragedies that have befallen them, and there’s a weirdly joyful bit involving equipment stolen from a LARPing group, but the characters don’t need them to express what they’re feeling, just as aides to start accessing joy and humor again. And while Jeff’s former lawyer colleagues have played a decidedly minor role in Community, the biggest problem with the Go On pilot is the time it spends on Ryan’s job, which is introduced as a relatively generic radio station with no character beats as good as those in the support group, unless Steven’s tendency to pat people on the ass counts as a personality trait.

But the characters in-group are very strong, and hopefully Go On will have the sense to devote the bulk of the show’s time to them. Anne, in particular, who Ryan describes as “a cool, very angry lady,” is one of the most quietly original characters of the new season. Unlike Ryan Murphy’s The New Normal about a gay couple seeking to have a baby via surrogate, which will debut in September, Anne conforms to no particular trope of gayness, and the death of her partner, mercifully, has nothing to do with their sexual orientation. Instead, it’s the mundanity of heart disease that felled her and has flattened Anne, who is furious at telemarketers who keep calling for her dead wife, and at Patricia, for leaving their children without one of their mothers. When I asked Julie White about Anne at the Television Critics Association, she surprised me by explaining that the character was initially written as straight, but that creators Scott Silveri and Todd Holland changed the role after White was cast.
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My fellow critic Sean T. Collins has been championing the hell out of Carly Rae Jepsen’s “Call Me Maybe” on Twitter, so I finally pulled it up yesterday and had a listen. It’s a really fun pop song with the same kind of emotional ambiguity as Miley Cyrus’s flawless “See You Again.” And the video contains a nice little surprise:

I think we can now safely say it’s a mini-trope to have a girl interested in a boy only to find out he’s gay, and to handle with it surprise and general good humor. That’s the basis for the introduction of Kevin Keller in Archie Comics, and it feels like a small sitcom staple. It’s a nice little illustration of the complexities of modern dating. And while it would be easy in these situations to portray gay men as competition for women, I think the best depictions tend not to do this. Here, the guy who turns out to be gay isn’t taking another fellow Carly Rae has a crush on away from her—he’s just into one of her bandmates, who is surprised, but not visibly grossed-out or hostile even though he’s pretty clearly not interested. And in the Archie world, Kevin’s coming out opens up a new possibility: instead of becoming another object of romantic competition between Betty and Veronica, he gets to become their friend.