Ann B. Davis, Queer Attractions, and Trans Media
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Quinlan Miller and Erica Rand Hot for TV, Hot for Ann B.: Ann B. Davis, Queer Attractions, and Trans Media Abstract This piece presents an interpersonal archive in tribute to the actor Ann B. Davis (1926-2014), an archive located on YouTube, in memory, and in the more traditional document repositories of institutionalized archives. While Davis was gender-conforming enough, by racialized, white supremacist standards, to find employment, notably as a cast member of television sitcoms The Bob Cummings Show (NBC/CBS 1955-59) and The Brady Bunch (ABC 1969-1974), Davis generally appeared as gender- nonconforming against the particular ideals of desirability represented by other characters and media personalities. The authors use a dialogue format to think about how histories of watching, listening, repurposing, and fandom work to identify, create, and shape trans media and a trans media archive. Considering their distinct but overlapping attractions to Davis as circuits of queer desire, the authors suggest that the trans dynamics of these circuits include not simply the fictional narratives of transgender characters but also the performances of characters, like those played by Davis, whose gender nonconformity in context draws out the structures and dimensions of gender normativities and cisnormativities. The archive is often conceived as a physical site in memory, and in the more traditional document where people find materials already acquired, repositories of institutionalized archives, this is an categorized, and managed by others. We share a archive as queerly formed as we are: a trans fag on the different kind of archive: an interpersonal archive Gen X-Millennial cusp and a non-trans femme in in tribute to Ann B. Davis (1926-2014), an actor her fifties who fell for each other at a TV conference we had separately found integral to our critical eight years ago.3 Erica first encountered Davis on lives and enticing to our erotic lives. Davis is best The Brady Bunch, which she began watching in known today for playing Alice Nelson, the live- middle school during its first run and watched in housekeeper to the blended family of the ABC repeatedly in reruns. In the show, a blonde white sitcom The Brady Bunch (1969-1974). But she had widow and brunette white widower “somehow form achieved success in series television long before, a family,” as the theme song recounts, each bringing receiving a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in to the union three children matched to them by 1960. That concrete honorific followed two Emmys gender and hair color.4 From this repetitive audio from four nominations for her role as Schultzy, a and visual reinforcement of binary gender, the show core character in The Bob Cummings Show (NBC/ rehearses the white hetero norms of agency and CBS 1955-59), a series known in syndication and re-released commercially as Love that Bob.1 Clearly, Davis was gender-conforming enough, in terms of racialized normativities, to find employment.2 Yet on both Bob Cummings and The Brady Bunch, as well as in other contexts, Davis appeared as gender-nonconforming against the particular ideals Screenshots from the end of The Brady Bunch ’s opening theme song (Season 1), of desirability represented by other characters and showing Davis inserted into the editors’ choreography of Brady gazes, in which, looking straight out instead of at any of the others, she does not participate. media personalities. For recent viewers familiar with tidbits publicized from cast memoirs, some of Gender nonconformity and our attraction to it these gazes, especially across the top row, might seem to prefigure sexual inter- is the basis of our archive, which grew out of love, est among the actors. Barry Williams (Greg) famously had a crush on TV mom lust, fandom, and research. Located on YouTube, Florence Henderson and hooked up with TV sister Maureen McCormick (Marcia). 30 Transgender Media Roxanne Samer, editor, Spectator 37:2 (Fall 2017): 30-39. MILLER AND RAND attraction at work in the US television industry and Scholars including Harry Benshoff, Judith Roof, and its texts.5 Quinn, who had also seen Brady Bunch Patricia White have written of actors’ contributions reruns and especially liked the Beastie Boys lyric to circuits of queer desire.9 We are interested in the about “Sam the butcher bringing Alice the meat” on trans dynamics of these circuits, thinking that trans the album Paul’s Boutique,6 became a Davis devotee dynamics include not simply the fictional narratives with Bob Cummings, which he introduced Erica of transgender characters but also the performances to almost sixty years after its debut, first through of characters, like those played by Davis, whose novelty DVDs and then YouTube, as the series gender nonconformity in context draws out the migrated, but mostly in intimate conversation. structures and dimensions of gender normativities In that program Davis’s character has a field day and cisnormativities.10 with gender and sexual conventions. Still, she is We bring to this project an understanding that often similarly stranded, marked as an outsider all who use and make archives bring embodied amid the myth of femininity and masculinity as meaning to their projects. As Jamie A. Lee writes, complementary opposites. “bodies are connected to archival bodies in distinct Our histories of being hot for TV and hot and meaningful ways that might, for example, for Ann B. are distinct, and we made our Ann B. transform understandings of evidential quality archives from different histories with archival from ‘enduring’ to also ‘endearing.’”11 We share the work as well.7 Erica, whose early scholarly identity excitement of people who have encountered all included “not an archivist,” had done some work manner of evidence of queer and trans lives and in brick-and-mortar archives documenting the ways of being, including through some unexpected presence and subsequent classification of trans finds: the vibrator that Julie R. Enszer found in people at migration sites. Quinn, taught in graduate the Minnie Bruce Pratt Papers at Duke, calling school that archival work could legitimate television forth “lesbian-feminism as a vital and vibrant scholarship, loves spending time in them, and theory and practice” embodied in Pratt as a poet, revels in conventional archival work repurposed for lover, and femme; the “lock of human hair…silver genderqueer TV history. He is also acutely aware, engraved baby cup…and other assorted artifacts” however, of the barriers to doing that historical work, Zackary Drucker enumerates in “Bring Your Own which may often include, for example, checking Body: The Story of Lynn Harris”; and the single “male” or “female” on the access form and appealing hair that Marika Cifor found attached to lipstick to gatekeepers who lack basic facility, openness, or in a box of items belonging to Victoria Schneider, interest to work with queer and trans people and “a transgender woman, sex worker, lover of velvet topics.8 Our linked but distinct collection practices jumpsuits, and sex workers’ rights advocate.”12 For related to Davis are responses to this situation. Cifor, “archival touches should be unavoidably Common practices of categorization—including intimate, provoking difficult and celebratory those that solidify trans archives—often function experiences and feelings reflective of the intimate to obscure, erase, minimize, or misrepresent the and sometimes painful history and memory that queer gender in and in engagement with popular made us who we are.”13 We agree. media. For example, documents of queer gender We are also mindful, however, that who we may be nestled in collections devoted to people or are makes for desires and collection practices that productions tacitly presumed to be and presented present Davis differently than she presented herself as (or not presumed to be but presented as) professionally. Numerous articles drawing on the cisnormative or heteronormative. These aspects AP story announcing her death do cite a 1955 of trans culture are difficult but also a pleasure to LA Times piece indicating Davis’s description and document and maintain in intimate interaction and embrace of her distance from heteronormative attraction. feminine ideals. “I know at least a couple hundred This piece uses the dialogue that follows to glamour gals who are starving in this town. I’d think about how histories of watching, listening, rather be myself and eating,” Davis said, adding that repurposing, and fandom work to identify, create, NBC “gave [her] eyebrows” despite her request that and shape trans media and a trans media archive. photographs of her not be retouched.14 We have TRANSGENDER MEDIA 31 HOT FOR TV, HOT FOR ANN B. also found occasional snippets that remind us not remain so, in retrospective narration of the period? to presume what the absence of named sexual or Trans people led public lives and trans characters romantic partners indicates.15 While presenting appeared on TV. In fact, Robert Reed, who played our own engagement with Davis’s vibrant erotic Brady dad Mike, received an Emmy nomination in charms and the interpretive connections that we 1976, the year after The Brady Bunch ended, for a make of her gender nonconformity in context, we 1975 appearance in the role of Pat Caddison, a trans 17 work to avoid imposing nonconsensual sexuality woman doctor on Medical Center (CBS, 1969-76). and gender. We enlist her in the preservation of her In the two-part episode Reed’s character transitions legacy of queer gender from our own amalgamated on the job, and attempts to forge a relationship with perspectives, without knowing much about how her teenage child. she understood her own sexuality or gender. In the absence of self-declared identity categorization, our ERICA: You’re right, and even on The Brady Bunch, queer gender recurs.