Are They Family?: Queer Parents and Queer Pasts In

ARE THEY FAMILY?: QUEER PARENTS AND QUEER PASTS IN CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN CULTURE BY MICHAEL SHETINA DISSERTATION Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English in the Graduate College of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2019 Urbana, Illinois Doctoral Committee: Associate Professor Siobhan Somerville, Chair Professor Chantal Nadeau Associate Professor Julie Turnock Associate Professor Richard T. Rodríguez, University of California, Riverside ABSTRACT The early twenty-first century saw a marked increase in depictions of LGBTQ people and communities in American popular culture occurring alongside political activism that culminated in the repeal of the Pentagon's Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy (2010) and the Supreme Court's overturning of same-sex marriage bans in Obergefell v. Hodges (2015). Even as these events fueled a triumphant progressive narrative in which social and political representation moved LGBTQ people into a better future, a significant strain of LGBTQ-focused popular culture drew its attention to the past. My dissertation, Are They Family?: Queer Parents and Queer Pasts in Popular Culture, examines how American film, television, and literature between 2005 and 2016 construct relationships among LGBTQ people across recent history in generational and familial terms. These works queer the concept of the family by deploying parents and parental figures to examine the role of families in the transmission of queer knowledges, practices, and identities, countering notions of families as mere precursors to queer identity—“families of origin”—or as the agential creations of out LGBTQ people—“families of choice.” These works demonstrate how such dichotomous conceptions of family limit the people, experiences, and forms of affect that are legible within the category of LGBTQ history. In my first chapter, I analyze how the reality series RuPaul's Drag Race (2009-present) produces kinship through shared queer knowledge and how contestants cite this knowledge in their performances. My second chapter examines how the melodramatic aesthetics and narrative of the film Carol (2015) re-inscribe pleasure and sensation into historical narratives of the lesbian 1950s. Together, these two chapters analyze how contemporary media demonstrate how seemingly retrograde queer modes of constructing kinship through shared relationships to dominant culture persevere even amidst a relative surfeit of LGBTQ representation. Chapters three and four turn to the nuclear family, ii examining the figures of the closeted gay father and husband and the ostensibly heterosexual wife and mother in Allison Bechdel’s graphic memoirs Fun Home (2006) and Are You My Mother? (2012) and Mike Mills’ films Beginners (2010) and 20th Century Women (2016). In the third chapter, I analyze how these works by the children of closeted fathers use non-linear narratives to overcome the historical meanings assigned to the lives of closeted men and establish affective connections to their fathers. Chapter four examines how Bechdel and Mills position their mothers, who are often reduced to stand-ins for compulsory heterosexuality in their husband’s stories, as figures queered by their proximity to LGBTQ history—a project later taken up by the Netflix series Grace and Frankie (2015-present). Together, these chapters demonstrate how queerness within families is not limited to the presence of LGBTQ individuals within them but that families of origin themselves, often seen as queer-antagonistic structures, contain people, experiences, and forms of affect that are rendered illegible within a conception of LGBTQ history that sees LGBTQ-identified people—and the families and communities that they make— as its sole province. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION .......................................................................................................................... 1 CHAPTER 1: SNATCHING AN ARCHIVE: GAY CITATION, QUEER BELONGING, AND THE PRODUCTION OF PLEASURE IN RUPAUL'S DRAG RACE ............... 19 CHAPTER 2: FLUNG OUT OF TIME: CAROL, QUEER TEMPORALITY, AND HISTORICAL VOYEURISM ........................................................................... 60 CHAPTER 3: “I JUST DON’T WANT TO BE LIKE YOU AND MOM”: FUN HOME, BEGINNERS, AND THE CLOSET’S AFFECTIVE AFTERLIVES .............. 103 CHAPTER 4: “I DON’T NEED A BOOK TO KNOW ABOUT MYSELF”: RESISTANT WIVES AND MOTHERS IN ARE YOU MY MOTHER?, 20TH CENTURY WOMEN, AND GRACE AND FRANKIE ........................................................ 144 CODA .......................................................................................................................... 179 WORKS CITED ......................................................................................................................... 186 iv INTRODUCTION EMORY: Thanks, sonny. You live with your parents? DONALD: Yeah. But it’s all right—they’re gay. — Mart Crowley, The Boys in the Band (36) 1. Introduction On 20 March 2019, as this dissertation approached completion, André Aciman confirmed that a sequel to his 2007 novel Call Me by Your Name would be published later that autumn. Find Me, the publisher’s blurb announced, would focus not only on the continuing lives of the book’s lovers Elio and Oliver but also on Elio’s father, classics professor Samuel Perlman, for whom “a chance encounter on the train leads to a relationship that changes [his] life definitively” (Harris). The announcement followed in the wake of the success of Luca Guadagnino’s film adaptation of the book (Sony Pictures Classics, 2017) which grossed $41.6 million globally (“The Numbers: Call Me by Your Name”) on a budget of $3.5 million (Katz). Though hardly a blockbuster, these box office numbers are thrilling for an international art house movie about queer desire, and the film has acquired a sizeable fanbase. The film served as a star-is-born moment for Timothée Chalamet and helped revive the career of Armie Hammer, who had spent much of the first half of the 2010s in critical and financial disappointments such as J. Edgar (Warner Bros., 2011) and The Lone Ranger (Disney, 2013). Many reviewers and fans also singled out Michael Stuhlbarg for his performance as Elio’s father, the character who receives so much attention in the publisher’s note announcing Find Me. Much of Stuhlbarg’s praise for his performance centers on a moment late in the film, after a devastated Elio returns home from seeing off Oliver on his journey back to America. The 1 scene’s dialogue comes almost verbatim from the novel. “You’re too smart not to know how rare, how special, what you two had was,” Samuel tells his son (223). In both the novel and the film, there is something unspoken between them, a refusal to pinpoint exactly what Samuel and his son share; Elio narrates: “His tone said: We don’t have to speak about it, but let’s not pretend we don’t know what I’m saying” (224). Samuel continues: “I may have come close, but I never had what you two had. Something always held me back or stood in the way. How you live your life is your business. But remember, our hearts and our bodies are given to us only once. and before you know it, your heart is worn out, and, as for your body, there comes a point when no one looks at it, much less wants to come near it.” Elio reacts: “Does mother know?” I asked. I was going to say suspeCt but corrected myself. “I don’t think she does.” His voice meant, But even if she did, I am sure her attitude would be no different than mine. (225) The ambiguity of Samuel’s statement, and Elio’s ambiguous response to it, carry over into Guadagnino’s movie. In an interview at the time of its release, Stuhlbarg emphasized this ambiguity: “It’s very possible [that Professor Perlman was gay]. I saw him as a very passionate, loving, generous spirit. So he very likely could be, that may have been the thing that he was alluding to. I’m not sure” (Stuhlbarg). In part, the scene serves as a kind of wish fulfillment for viewers who were once themselves young queer people: many viewers “wish that these words [of parental encouragement] had been said to them” (Stuhlbarg). But the encounter leaves Elio at least as confused as he is consoled: “Was my father someone else?” Elio asks himself. “And if he was someone else, who was I?” (225). Elio’s conundrum illustrates the destabilizing potential of 2 the queer parent; even for queer children, the revelation of a queer parent calls into question their own identities. The roles of queer parents in various forms of intergenerational transmission provoke deep anxieties about the coherence of narratives around which people articulate their own identities and their relationships to families. In order to examine the role of the queer parent in contemporary American culture, my dissertation examines media produced between 2005 and 2016: Alison Bechdel’s graphic novels Fun Home (2006) and Are You My Mother? (2012), and the former’s musical adaptation (2013 off-Broadway; 2015 Broadway), the reality competition cable television series RuPaul's Drag Race (LOGO, 2009-16; VH1, 2017-present), the streaming comedy series Grace and Frankie (Netflix, 2015-present), and the movies Beginners (Focus Features, 2010), Carol (Weinstein Company, 2015), and 20th Century Women (A24, 2016). LGBTQ political narratives of this period were dominated by triumphant narratives in which political successes move LGBTQ people from persecution toward inclusion, epitomized by the repeal of the Pentagon's Don't Ask, Don't

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