Screening the Closet:

The Discourse of Visibility, Sexuality, and Queer Representation

in American Film and Television, 1969-Present

By Melanie E. S. Kohnen

M.A., Heinrich-Heine-Universitaet, Duesseldorf, Germany, 2001

A.M., Brown University, 2002

A Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the

Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

in the Department of American Civilization at Brown University

Providence, Rhode Island

May 2010 © Melanie E.S. Kohnen 2010 This dissertation by Melanie E. S. Kohnen is accepted in its present form

by the Department of American Civilization as satisfying the

dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

Date ______

Lynne Joyrich, Advisor

Recommended to the Graduate Council

Date ______

Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Reader

Date ______

Robert Lee, Reader

Approved by the Graduate Council

Date ______

Sheila Bonde, Dean

iii Curriculum Vitae

Melanie E. S. Kohnen was born on July 23, 1975 in Duisburg, Germany. She completed her Magister Artium degree in English Languages and Literatures with a minor in Media Studies at Heinrich-Heine-Universität in Düsseldorf, Germany. During her studies there, she received a one-year DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service) scholarship to attend Wesleyan University in Middletown, CT. At Wesleyan, Melanie focused on American government, history, material culture and cultural studies. Upon her return, she began research for her thesis, eventually titled Crossing Borders, Re-Locating

Our Selves: Chinese American Women’s Identities After 1965.

While working on her thesis, Melanie received two additional scholarships. The first scholarship was a DAAD research grant that allowed Melanie to attend ifu, the

International Women's University, a pilot project sponsored by the European Union. Over the course of three months, she participated in lectures and workshops on the topics of migration, transnational communities, and globalization. As final project, she worked on a multimedia performance that combined photography, digital images, oral history, music and spoken word to trace transforming moments in the lives of twelve ifu participants.

The second scholarship was a John F. Kennedy Institute Library Research Grant at Freie

Universität in Berlin, Germany. The grant provided access to the John F. Kennedy

Institute's resources.

After completing her Magister Artium degree, Melanie joined the Ph. D program in American Civilization at Brown University. During her first two semesters at Brown,

iv she completed the requirements for an A.M. in American Civilization. She received a

Brown University Fellowship during her first year as a Ph.D. student and the Miss

Abbott's School Alumnae Dissertation Fellowship during one of her final years at Brown.

In the summer of 2008, she received the Historical Society of Southern California Haynes

Research Grant to support her dissertation research.

While working towards the completion of her Ph. D, Melanie taught a first-year and sophomore seminar entitled “'The Gay '90s?': Sexuality, Identity, and the Media in the 1990s.” She also developed a class called “From I Love Lucy to Lost: Television and

American Culture” for Summer @ Brown. Due to the popularity of the class, she has taught the course every summer since 2007. Melanie also worked as a Teaching Assistant for the Department of American Civilization and the Department of Modern Culture and

Media. She led discussion sections, gave lectures and graded papers in courses on film, television, new media, advertising, and America's urban development.

In addition to teaching, Melanie worked as a Teaching Consultant for Brown's

Sheridan Center for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education for five years. She observed and evaluated teaching in the humanities, sciences, and arts at both Brown

University and the Rhode Island School of Design. During her last three years at Brown,

Melanie also held the position of Managing Editor of Digital Humanities Quarterly, a peer-reviewed digital journal run through Brown's Women's Writers Project.

As a graduate student, Melanie published two articles. The first article, "Signal to

Noise: The Paradoxes of History and Technology in Battlestar Galactica," appeared in

v FlowTV: A Critical Forum on Television and Media Culture, in December 2007. In 2008, she contributed an essay entitled "The Adventures of a Repressed Farmboy and the

Billionaire Who Loves Him: Queer Spectatorship in Smallville Fandom" to Teen

Television: Essays on Programming and Fandom, an anthology edited by Sharon Ross and Louisa Stein. The collection was published by McFarland in 2008.

Melanie has accepted a position as Marion L. Brittain Postdoctoral Fellow in the

School of Literature, Communication and Culture at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

vi Preface and Acknowledgments

There are many people who have contributed to the rewarding, challenging, and exciting grad school experience I had at Brown. First and foremost, I want to thank the members of my dissertation committee, Lynne Joyrich, Wendy Chun, and Bob Lee.

Lynne is the very best advisor one can ask for, going above and beyond in supporting me while I finished my dissertation. Her incredibly detailed and always thought-provoking commentaries on chapter drafts pushed me to consider yet another perspective even when I thought I had exhausted a particular avenue of thought. Lynne is also an amazing teacher. Her seminar on queer cinema and video was the most rewarding and exciting class I took at Brown. She also introduced me to Television Studies—an introduction that allowed me to turn my lifelong passion for TV into the core of my academic research. I can say without a doubt that I would not be the scholar I am today without Lynne's guidance.

Wendy also deserves many thanks for her incisive commentary on my dissertation as work-in-progress. But I mostly want to thank Wendy for encouraging me to stick with

New Media Studies when I thought I wouldn't be able to wrap my head around it. Wendy reassured me that with time, and much, much more reading in the field, it would all make sense eventually. It did. Wendy also taught me the wonderful phrase, “if it doesn't hurt, you aren't learning,” which I have gone on to share with my students on a regular basis

(usually to their dismay). Wendy's insight showed me that frustration with one's research is not a sign of trying to do the impossible, but of being on the brink of an important

vii insight or discovery.

Bob has been a calming presence during the often stressful time of writing my dissertation. Most importantly, Bob's comments on my dissertation proposal encouraged me to consider race and ethnicity as central categories of analysis in my project. This encouragement had a profound impact on my research; indeed, the intricate connections between whiteness and queer representations constitute the central analytical axis around which my dissertation revolves.

Beyond my dissertation committee, many other people at Brown provided me with guidance and assistance. The Department of American Civilization and the

Department of Modern Culture and Media were my home bases during my grad student years. At AmCiv, Susan Smulyan always had an open door for me and taught me much about American advertising when I was a Teaching Assistant for her. Likewise, working as a grader for Ralph Rodriguez provided both much-needed financial assistance during my final years at Brown and a deep insight into the field of Ethnic Studies. At MCM, I have always felt very much at home even though I was not officially a grad student there.

I was fortunate to work as a Teaching Assistant for a number of MCM courses in critical theory, film, and new media. Teaching alongside Mary-Ann Doane, Wendy Chun, and

Lynne Joyrich has shaped my desire to connect research and pedagogy (and to teach poststructuralism to unsuspecting undergrads).

In addition to my home departments, I also need to mention Digital Humanities

Quarterly and the Sheridan Center for Teaching and Learning as two Brown institutions

viii that were of crucial importance to my life as a grad student. Digital Humanities

Quarterly offered me the possibility of gathering professional experience beyond academic research and teaching by hiring me as Managing Editor, a position I happily held for three years. During this time, I worked closely with Julia Flanders, the editor-in- chief of DHQ, who introduced me to the field of Digital Humanities and who was most patient in teaching me XML. I am most grateful to Julia and to DHQ for sponsoring me during my final year at Brown—without DHQ's assistance I would not have been able to finish my dissertation.

The people and programs at the Sheridan Center have been central to the development of my pedagogical outlook and skills. I want to thank Laura Hess and Kathy

Takayama for their wonderful professionalization seminar and for their assistance in developing my teaching portfolio. I also cherished my work as a teaching consultant for the Sheridan Center. As a teaching consultant, I observed many hours of graduate student teaching at Brown and the Rhode Island School of Design. Sitting in on astronomy lessons on top of Barus-Holley or watching a pottery demonstration at RISD allowed me to look beyond my disciplinary focus and encouraged me to think about pedagogy in multiple settings and for diverse groups of students.

I also want to thank everyone who provided me with a life apart from writing, researching, and teaching. At Brown, those people included the loyal Battlestar

Galactica viewing group, which, at its core, consisted of Julie Levin-Russo, David

Bering-Porter, Lynne Joyrich, and myself. We spent many a Friday night huddled around

ix a TV set trying to figure out if the Cylons indeed had a plan all along (the question remains unresolved no matter what Ronald D. Moore says). One of the most exciting events in which I participated at Brown was a result of these geeky TV pleasures, namely the (Re)Producing Battlestar Galactica panel in 2007. Many thanks also go to Sarah

Wald and Jessica Johnson for hours spent together in a projection booth during our shared

Teaching Assistantship and for much support beyond that semester. I also need to thank

Gill Frank and Angela Mazaris for many spirited discussions on the intersections of history and theory.

Of course there were also people beyond Brown who were invaluable during grad school and dissertation writing. It was certainly fate that Louisa Stein and I met at the

Media in Transition conference at MIT in 2003. Louisa is an amazing friend and academic partner-in-crime. Her dedication to her work and her passion for life is always inspiring. She has spent countless hours providing constructive criticism on drafts of my articles and conference papers over the years. We have attended many conferences together, including the incredible trip to SCMS in London in 2005. I'm looking forward to many more conference trips with her. Another good friend I made at the 2007 Media in

Transition conference is Anne Kustritz. I particularly want to thank Anne for introducing me to vidding and for sharing my enthusiasm of a good dessert.

This list of thank-yous wouldn't be complete without mentioning Grete Brewer-

Bakken, who taught me so much about writing, and without a huge shout-out to Tara

Pratt and Stephanie Kenney, who write the best TV show that is not currently on TV.

x Grete, Tara, and Stephanie constantly remind me that academia is not the end-all and be- all of existence, which is a very important reminder indeed.

Finally, I want to say thank you for my family's steadfast support. My mother has always had complete faith in me and has always supported me in whatever I wished to do, even if that meant that I would move thousands of miles away from home to pursue my Ph.D. on a different continent. Words cannot adequately describe how grateful I am to have my family's support, no matter what.

xi Table of Contents

Introduction 13

Chapter 1: All That Visibility Allows, or Mapping the Discourse of Queer 20

Visibility

Chapter 2: Towards the 'Gay 90s:' Redefining Queer Visibility Through the 63

Lens of AIDS

Chapter 3: Outside Space and Time: Screening Queerness in Brokeback 107

Mountain and Boys Don't Cry

Chapter 4: Kevin and Scotty Get Married (And Hardly Anyone is Watching): 142

Queer Visibility, Privacy, and the Boundaries of Everyday Life on Television

Concluding Remarks 185

Bibliography 192

xii INTRODUCTION

Queerness irreverantly challenges a linear mode of conduction and

transmission: there is no exact recipe for a queer endeavor, no a priori

system that taxonomizes the linkages, discruptions, and contradictions into

a tidy vessel. (Puar, xv)

This dissertation examines the discourse of queer visibility as it has unfolded through a proliferation of gay, lesbian, and queer representations in American film and television from 1969 to the present. Using the so-called explosion of gay visibility during the 1990s as a focal point, I analyze how and why a specific definition of queer visibility, namely one that adheres closely to a normative gay and lesbian identity, has become central to imagining queer subjectivities and practices in American culture. My analysis reveals how equating queer visibility with gay and lesbian identities is a limited and limiting conceptualization of a spectrum that includes a broader group of people, places, and ways of life.

I strongly believe that analyses of queer representations, practices, and subjectivities cannot, and should not, be contained in a series of linearly unfolding

13 14 examples. While my chapters follow a loose chronological order, each chapter traverses a range of time periods, media forms, and theoretical frameworks to provide an overview of the complex and often contradictory discourses that come together to shape queer media visibility. I examine queer practices and representations that cross sexual, gender, and racial identifications; I pursue connections across film, television, and print media; and I juxtapose academic and popular sources in order to articulate a broader way of understanding queer visibility.

My chapters examine crucial turning points in the recent history of queer visibility, such as the initial response to the AIDS crisis during the 1980s, Ellen

DeGeneres' coming out in the 1990s, the reliance on spatiality and temporality to screen race and queerness in recent films such as Brokeback Mountain and Boys Don't Cry, and the defense of white domesticity via an incorporation of gay male identity into television programs of the early 2000s, including Brothers & Sisters. Some of these turning points

—the AIDS crisis, Ellen's coming out, Brokeback Mountain—have received considerable scholarly attention. My reexamination of these events and media texts aims to make connections among aspects that have previously been considered to exist independently of one another. As such, I show, for example, how Brokeback Mountain and Boys Don't

Cry share a reliance on specific spatialities and temporalities to bring queer romance to the screen, and I demonstrate how struggles over the meaning of everyday life, family, sexuality, and race connects TV programs such as Ellen and Brothers & Sisters.

Moreover, existing accounts of these important moments in the discourse of queer media visibility obscure more than they reveal. An aspect that is often deliberately 15 forgotten in academic and popular writing is the critical role that whiteness plays in facilitating queer representations. Queer visibility depends on whiteness as a screen, and whiteness-as-screen serves a dual purpose. First, it functions as a projection surface for complex representations of sexuality, and second, it obscures the central importance of race in enabling these representations. Via the analyses I carry out throughout the following four chapters, my research advocates a broader perspective on the various screening processes that shape queer media visibility.

In Chapter 1, “All That Visibility Allows, or Mapping the Discourse of Queer

Visibility,” I introduce the broad historical and theoretical frameworks that shape queer visibility in American culture. The chapter begins with an interrogation of the central concepts of this dissertation: visibility, queerness, race, and the closet. I outline how the closet functions as a screen upon which queerness is rendered visible. Emphasizing the crucial importance of whiteness to these screening processes, I make an initial intervention in the existing scholarly discourses of queer media visibility, especially regarding the scope and implications of the so-called explosion of gay visibility during the 1990s. Rather than representing a progressive or liberatory development, I argue that the proliferation of specifically denotative gay and lesbian representations during the

1990s has tried to cement one form of queer visibility as the only form of queer visibility, thus obscuring other possibilities of rendering queerness visible (for example via connotative and other formal representational strategies). The second half of the chapter challenges the usual history of queer media visibility. Instead of dividing this history into a “before and after” story that proclaims an absence of queer media representations 16 before the abolition of the Hollywood Production Code (which banned any denotativere presentation of same-sex intimacy in film) in the late 1960s and a proliferation of queer visibility in film and TV afterwards, I advocate an approach that considers denotative and connotative elements as textually inseparable and as always co-existing in media texts.

This approach centers around an analysis that asks which forms of queer visibility have existed when, where, for whom, and under what circumstances. While other scholars have put forth similar approaches, my theorization of the closet-as-screen and its racialized underpinnings adds a new dimension to existing ways of analyzing the history and current state of the discourse of queer visibility.

Chapter 2, “Towards the 'Gay 90s:' Redefining Queer Visibility Through the Lens of AIDS” re-examines the significance of AIDS to the proliferation of gay, lesbian, and queer media representations. The AIDS crisis had a momentous impact on America's

GLBT community: it led to a radical reimagination of queer lives and practices. This chapter examines queer visibility during the 1980s from three distinct but overlapping angles with the aim of providing a thorough, but non-linear, insight into queer visibility during the AIDS crisis. The discourse of queer visibility and AIDS is fraught and complex, and I approach this complexity by bringing together significant aspects without trying to streamline them into a narrative of progressive development. The first part of the chapter analyzes how HIV and AIDS was rendered visible in the mainstream media during the 1980s. Newspaper and TV news reports channeled confusing information about HIV/AIDS into recognizable types and metaphors that drew on pre-existing ideas about connections among deviancy, queer sexuality, and disease; these types and 17 metaphors still shape how we think about AIDS and People with AIDS (PWA). The second part of the chapter focuses on the activist group ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to

Unleash Power), specifically the ways in which their posters, videos, and direct action dismantled and reorganized the discourse of queer visibility within the framework of

AIDS. The final part outlines the normalization of AIDS—that is, the ways in which its impact on the American nation stopped being perceived as emergency and became part of the background noise of ongoing social crises.

This normalization is of crucial significance to the so-called explosion of gay visibility during the 1990s. I argue that this explosion only became possible after the disarticulation of queer sexuality and queer identity that accompanied the normalization of AIDS: via the discourse of safe sex and via select media representations, including the film Philadelphia, a discourse of queer identity emerged that privileges monogamy, whiteness, and middle-class status over queer practices that defy easy categorization.

Whereas AIDS inflected nearly all queer media representations during the 1980s, the disarticulation of sexuality and identity allowed for an emergence of gay and lesbian characters and storylines that eventually blend seamlessly in to the media landscape.

The following two chapters examine select media texts and discursive shifts of the

1990s in more detail. Chapter 3, “Outside Space and Time: Screening Queerness in

Brokeback Mountain and Boys Don't Cry,” examines two films that have been hailed as breakthroughs for queer visibility. While media critics praised both Brokeback Mountain and Boys Don't Cry for their critical representation of gay and transgender lives and identities, I concentrate on the ways in which both films rely on distant spaces and times 18 to mobilize queer representations that are ultimately nonthreatening to both the norms of

Hollywood cinema and everyday life. Brokeback Mountain and Boys Don't Cry offer a contradictory engagement with the ideologically charged spaces of the West and the

Midwest: on the one hand, they seem to challenge common perceptions of these regions by situating narratives of queer lives and romances in them; on the other hand, the films encapsulate and contain queerness in remote spaces and times that seem distant from

“us,” the viewers. Moreover, both films draw on racialized histories to mobilize their storylines, but an engagement with the significance of race is almost completely screened out of the diegeses. Genre, mise-en-scene, and other formal aspects intersect to facilitate this screening of race and queerness and its containment in remote spaces and times.

Instead of considering Brokeback Mountain and Boys Don't Cry as films that broke with traditions of Hollywood film-making, I demonstrate how both films rely on mainstream cinematic traditions to create visions of queerness that appear revolutionary, but are ultimately very normative in their message about queer subjectivities and romances.

The final chapter, “Kevin and Scotty Get Married (And Hardly Anyone is

Watching): Queer Visibility, Privacy, and the Boundaries of Everyday Life on Television” continues my exploration of the media's uneven engagement with queerness and race.

Specifically, this chapter discusses how queerness became a normal and normalized aspect of serial network television between the late 1990s and the early 2000s. While the coming out of Ellen Degeneres and of her character on the sitcom Ellen in 1997 provoked a media frenzy that captivated Americans' attention for months, the wedding of two male characters on the drama Brothers & Sisters in 2008 went nearly unnoticed. Using the 19 comparison of these two television events as a springboard, I examine how queerness moves from something that is at odds with the rhythms of white, middle-class, American everyday life to being an important component of maintaining white ideals of privacy and domesticity. My analysis shows how the type of queer media visibility that has emerged since the normalization of AIDS in the early 1990s links into cultural discourses about the

American nation that emerged after the events of 9/11. America's redefined self-image has allowed for (and perhaps necessitated) a temporary and symbolic inclusion of those queer Americans who can adhere to specific class, race, and lifestyle norms. While one might understand the lack of a reaction to Kevin and Scotty's wedding as indication of greater inclusion of minority subjects on network TV, my analysis situates this media event in a larger cultural context of privacy and white domesticity and invites a cautious attitude towards overly optimistic assessments of televisual notions of “progress.”

All four chapters form cohesive units that pursue and examine one aspect of the discourse of queer visibility as it has emerged over the past forty years. Going beyond the practice of single case studies, each chapter includes a juxtaposition of multiple media texts to underline the numerous screening mechanisms that filter the discourse of queer visibility. Across all chapters, overarching clusters of meaning emerge that demonstrate how queer visibility shapes and reflects not only media representations, but the real and imagined geographies, histories, and peoples of the American nation. 20

CHAPTER 1

All That Visibility Allows, or, Mapping the Discourse of Queer Visibility

In April 1997, Ellen DeGeneres appeared on the cover of Time Magazine under the headline “Yep, I'm Gay.” This well-orchestrated coming out took no one by surprise; after all, DeGeneres and her character Ellen Morgan, the main character of the sitcom

Ellen, had had one foot out of the closet for months. This contradictory play of hide-and- seek characterizes much of the so-called “explosion of gay visibility” during the 1990s in the United States. Often referred to as the “gay 90s,” this decade saw a proliferation of queer representations and heated debates in both the popular and academic press over the implications of this allegedly new visibility. But was this apparently new-found visibility really all that new? Who was being included (and excluded) from this particular form of queer visibility? More precisely, in what ways does the kind of queer visibility that emerged out of the closet alongside Ellen obscure other possibilities and traditions of imagining queerness? These questions are central to investigating the discourse of queer visibility during the 1990s and beyond. Yet these questions are also too narrow to allow a 21 comprehensive mapping of this discourse, as the phenomena and conversations that comprise it cannot be neatly divided into “before” and “after” the 1990s, or into “visible” and “invisible” sexualities. Rather, this mapping requires a careful analysis of the many facets of queer visibility, particularly one that considers its focal point, namely the closet.

The cultural logic that underpins the image and metaphor of the closet plays out in screening processes of various types: the closet acts like a screen upon which images of queerness are projected even as it simultaneously screens out other facets of queerness.1

Intersecting discourses of race, sexuality, and gender shape and facilitate this screening of queerness. Whiteness plays a particularly crucial role in screening the closet: frequently, it acts as the screen upon which the most prominent images of queerness, such as Ellen

Morgan's and Ellen Degeneres' coming out, are projected. Yet while the closet-as-screen may appear solid at times, it is always porous and can never completely screen the more unruly facets of queerness from view.

This chapter offers an overview of the various facets and of the multiple and contradictory screening processes that comprise the discourse of queer visibility. I begin with laying out the multiple meanings and intersections of visibility and queerness. Thus, in the first section of this chapter, “To See is More Than to Know,” I interrogate what visibility signifies, particularly in relationship to knowledge, power, and sexuality, and then I move on to “The Many Shades of Queer” through an investigation of queer theory and its sometimes uneasy relationship to gay and lesbian identity politics. “The Closet as a Screen” questions “the closet” and “coming out” as central metaphors of queer

1 The idea of the closet as a screen was first articulated by Shane Phelan in Sexual Strangers: Gays, Lesbians, and the Dilemmas of Citizenship. I will elaborate on Phelan's concept and on my expansion of it in a later section of this chapter, namely “The Closet as a Screen.” 22 visibility by shedding light on the racialized underpinnings of these concepts. Moreover, I offer a few ways of reconsidering how queer visibility has been discussed in terms of media representations. “Hollywood is Fabulous, and Always Has Been: Queerness and

Representation” challenges the progressive narrative usually told about queer media representations (namely, as a linear advance from a time in which queerness was supposedly “invisible” in the media to the present era in which we are witnessing the

“explosion of gay visibility”). Together, these facets allow a preliminary overview of the discourse of queer visibility and my challenges to previous conceptualizations of it, both of which are then mapped out in more detail in subsequent chapters.

Visibility: To See is More Than to Know

The Oxford English Dictionary defines “visibility” in the following way:

a. The condition, state, or fact of being visible; visible character or quality;

capacity of being seen (in general, or under special conditions).

b. The possibility of (a vessel, etc.) being seen under the conditions of

distance, light, atmosphere, etc., existing at a particular time; hence

conversely, the possibility of seeing, or the range of vision, under such

conditions. 23

Visibility, then, signifies both the possibility of being seen and the possibility of seeing under certain general and special conditions. Accordingly, visibility always encompasses two processes: being identifiable and recognizable, on the one hand, and identifying/recognizing, on the other. In other words, visibility exists in tension between presence and perception, neither of which are stable categories. Presence, in particular, is a matter of coming-into-being where visibility is concerned. Furthermore, as the OED highlights, visibility is subject to certain general or special conditions that shape the moment of coming-into-being and the converse moment of being recognized. In fact, it is these general and special conditions that determine how and to what extent something (or someone) can be perceived and how we see it (or him/her).

Among the general conditions of visibility, we can identify the relationship between vision and knowledge. This relationship far exceeds the familiar phrase “to see is to know” and its suggested causality (i.e. that knowledge is the product and outcome of seeing something/someone). Rather, as Michel Foucault and others have observed, vision and knowledge are invested by relations of power, and they are often part of a larger undertaking that aims to control, to regulate, and to discipline (Discipline and Punish,

216-217). Foucault uses the example of the Panopticon, a seventeenth century prison model in which prisoners are continuously exposed to the unverifiable gaze of a guard, to formulate a theory of a disciplinary society. In disciplinary societies, observation of one's self and of others (in the form of constant assessment, regulation, and classification in institutions like schools, hospitals, factories, and prisons) is key to the accumulation of knowledge and the exercise of power. In such a system, it is presumed that the more you 24 observe, the more you know, and the more power you can exercise, while at the same time structuring your observations according to specific guidelines, capturing knowledge in forms and tables, and allowing the rules of the institution to guide disciplinary actions.

In the disciplinary apparatus of constant surveillance, both observee and observant are therefore part of, as Foucault puts it, “the panoptic machine, invested by its effects of power” (ibid, 217). Hence, at the very least, knowledge and vision interact and determine each other—one might only see something because one already knows of or about it, or seeing something might reaffirm previously existing conceptions of what one sees.

Moreover, the desire to see, to know, and to identify—in short, this “will to know”

(and to see/be seen)—is always already bound up in sexuality to the point where, in contemporary Western societies, “knowledge” is sexual knowledge (Foucault, The

History of Sexuality, 69). Foucault uses the practice of Christian confession as a starting point to develop his theory of knowledge, sexuality, and subjectivity. From a specific practice, the confession has spread to any model of engagement aiming to uncover

“hidden” information. In the give-and-take between the one who asks and the one who answers, the “truth” about a subject's inner self is brought to light, i.e. rendered visible; yet, this truth, according to Foucault, has no prior existence before its constitution in discourse. From the late nineteenth century onward, the truth about oneself was figured as sexual, to the point where sexuality became a problem of truth and of knowledge

(Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 65-68).

Visibility, then, is not simply a process of coming-into-being accompanied by recognition and identification, but rather is informed by knowledge, power, and sexuality 25

—dynamics that are central to subjectivity and society. In other words, the process of who and what becomes visible, in which ways, and to whom involves a multi-faceted negotiation with and within established regimes of power-knowledge. The same dynamics also regulate that which supposedly stays invisible. As I will elaborate later, invisibility is often a refusal to see rather than an impossibility of seeing—enacted, for instance, through the racialized screening processes of the closet. The interaction between power, knowledge, sexuality, and race, as well as the dichotomy of visibility/invisibility, are the central constitutive forces of the discourse of queer visibility. An analysis of this discourse shows why, and in what ways, visibility has gained such crucial importance to the articulation of queer desires, acts, and identifications. Before I elaborate on that, however, I want to sketch out what “queerness” means in this context.

The Many Shades of Queer

On a most basic and general level, “queer” designates acts and practices that defy the heteronormative. Beyond what the combination of the two words, “hetero” and

“normative,” implies (i.e. the imposition of heterosexuality as a norm), heteronormativity constitutes a specific form of social organization. Lauren Berlant defines heteronormative culture as follows, “a public culture, juridical, social, and aesthetic, organized for the promotion of a world-saturating heterosexuality” (16). “Queer,” then, while referring to specific sexual practices, also implies a stance that opposes how heterosexuality is used to organize central social institutions, including the law, the family, public and private space, and the media. This oppositional understanding of “queer” is most prevalent in 26 queer theory (and scholarly work drawing on its framework) as well as in certain forms of political activism. The insights of queer theory have allowed a disarticulation of sexual acts and sexual identities, thus facilitating the (perhaps by now painfully obvious) idea that a wide range of people, not limited to gays and lesbians, engage in “queer” sexual practices. Queer theory also insists on queerness as central to social processes. What queer theory thus allows, ideally, is both a focused, local analysis of queer lives and queer representations, and a connection of those localized analyses to broader discourses and social dynamics that goes beyond positioning an oppressed minority in opposition to or in conflict with a majority group. The term “queer” has also been adopted by scholars and activists as an umbrella term for “gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and other non- heteronormative acts, some of which may be heterosexual in nature.” I use “queer” in both senses, i.e. as an oppositional stance that challenges heteronormativity and as a short-hand (especially when I speak of the discourse of queer visibility, mostly because visibility is considered central to all the categories of identification that I listed).

However, I'm also aware that “queer” is the product of a specific historical moment—that it is a previously derogatory term that was reclaimed in a specific political context and that the term was defined not only in opposition to the heteronormative but also against other ways of defining non-heterosexual identifications. As James R. Keller and Leslie Startnyer observe:

Born in the desperate and contentious environment of the AIDS crisis,

'queer' adopted a more confrontational and radical political stance than

was typical of the gay liberation movement at that time—a movement that 27

has been characterized as essentially capitulationist, seeking to portray

gays and lesbians as safe and bourgeois, not so much a challenge to as an

emulation of heterosexual conventions and values. (3)

Whether or not queer politics was “really” more radical than those politics carried out under the label of “gay” and “lesbian” is an investigation I undertake in Chapter 2.

For now, it is important to note that “queer,” especially in academic writing, is often used in implicit opposition to identity politics and in support of a conceptualization of sexuality that emphasizes acts and practices over identification with a minority group often referred to as “the gay and lesbian community” (as if this is a stable category).

The conflicts surrounding the definitions of visibility and of queerness already indicate that queer visibility is a volatile and complicated matter. Queer visibility is often associated with the emergence and definition of the GLBT community as minority group in the U.S. and with the related political movements that strive for the inclusion of GLBT

Americans in terms of equal rights. Since the Stonewall riots in June of 1969—the event that has become commemorated as the originary moment for the gay and lesbian rights movement—being visible has often been understood as the cornerstone of GLBT identity.

The twin figures of coming out and of the closet shape this particular understanding of queer visibility. While coming out of the closet is often imagined as enabling revelations of communities and identities previously “hidden,” these processes also obscure as much as they reveal. For a more comprehensive understanding of this simultaneous process of revelation and obfuscation, it is necessary take a closer look at how Stonewall functions as a moment in gay and lesbian history often remembered as a turning point that 28 represents a collective coming out.

“Come Out, Come Out Wherever You Are”: Stonewall

As I previously mentioned, the riots that followed the police raid of the Stonewall

Inn, a gay bar in Greenwich Village, on June 27th, 1969, have become the focal point of

American gay and lesbian history. Accounts of who was there and what exactly happened differ, but the basic story goes like this: during a routine raid of the Stonewall Inn, patrons did not acquiesce to attempts of arrest but instead fought back. Clashes between queer patrons and the police continued for two more nights. Soon afterwards, the gay liberation movement formed and spread all over the country, with gay and lesbian people making their presence known to the media and to “average,” presumably heterosexual,

Americans. This story of Stonewall Riots is a seductive, inspiring, and profoundly

American story of triumph over adversity, a narrative that characterizes the popular stories of many other minority movements in the 20th century. Paradoxically, it also imbues the Stonewall Riots with qualities of the spontaneous and unique: portraying it as an event that was unprecedented and unstoppable. As this simultaneous figuring of

Stonewall as part of a standard story of minority struggle and as a unique event already suggests, historians and activists invested in GLQ history have demonstrated that the events that took place at the Stonewall Inn were neither unprecedented or unique: there had been a number of other clashes between police and gay patrons at bars in New York and other cities, and there most certainly had been other activist efforts on behalf of gays and lesbians before June 1969. 29

Despite the many historical accounts that document a vivid gay and lesbian subculture in various cities and the beginning of gay and lesbian activism in organizations such as The Mattachine Society and The Daughters of Bilitis from the 1950s onwards,

Stonewall still stands for an explosive moment, the historical significance of which was allegedly immediately apparent to everyone involved (see also McGary and Wasserman,

19). In other words, some of the activism, and certainly the riots, prior to Stonewall have been screened out from historical memory in order to facilitate the perception of

Stonewall as extraordinary event (rather similar to how, as I will later elaborate, much of the queer visibility during the years 1970-1990 was screened out to make room for the declaration of “the explosion of gay visibility” during the 1990s). The raid and the protests at the Stonewall Inn have thus become “recognized” as both the origin of queer visibility in the popular imagination and perhaps the most visible event of gay and lesbian history. In order to understand the various screening processes that contributed to the creation of Stonewall as the origin myth of queer visibility, it is necessary to look at how this event has been marked as both ordinary and extraordinary.

The raid at the Stonewall Inn falls squarely within the realm of the ordinary in the sense that raids of gay and lesbian bars were a common occurrence in the 1950s and

1960s. Sociologists Elizabeth A. Armstrong and Suzanna M. Crage argue that these raids were so frequent that a “script” detailing the behavior of police and patrons had emerged by the mid-1960s: “police entered the premises, stopped activities, and arrested patrons”

(728). While one might see a deviation from this script—as, for example, in the form of a riot—as extraordinary for gay bar raids, riots in general were common enough as part of 30 other protest movements in the late 1960s. Skirmishes confined to one bar might not even be regarded as outstanding considering the much larger riots happening at the time. In fact, John D'Emilio recounts that people saw the Stonewall riot and walked past, shrugging it off as “just another riot” (“After Stonewall,” 240). Additionally, the

Stonewall riots do not mark the first time patrons fought back against police. Remarkably similar events took place in New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco throughout the

1960s, but none of them attracted the attention or have been remembered to the degree that the Stonewall riots did and have. For example, when gay patrons of a San Francisco coffee shop called Compton's Cafeteria fought back against police in August of 1966, neither the media nor those involved in gay activism deemed the event outstanding or inspirational. Indeed, the San Francisco homophile movement, consisting largely of white middle-class men, looked down upon rioting as a form of “fighting back” (Armstrong and

Crage, 733).2

In contrast to the radio silence surrounding the Compton's Cafeteria riot, the 1967 raid of the Black Cat in Los Angeles attracted significant attention from activists and the media. Follow-up demonstrations against police brutality drew protesters from diverse backgrounds. Lillian Faderman and Stuart Timmons observe that “after a couple of years of witnessing other minority groups demand their rights, and even take to the streets for them, many Los Angeles homosexuals were now unwilling to absorb such outrage without response. PRIDE (Personal Rights in Defense and Education, a radical gay activist group founded in 1966) spoke for them, organizing multiple protests outside the

2 The San Francisco homophile movement didn't participate in the one-year anniversary commemoration of Stonewall, either. Only when the first Pride parades in New York and other cities were a success did they begin to recognize the Stonewall Riots as important event (Armstrong and Crage,733; 742). 31

Black Cat” (157). Faderman and Simmons point out that even though “hundreds of onlookers” assembled in addition to the protesters, and 3,000 informational flyers were handed out, “the demonstrations never caught the attention of the media, and the Black

Cat did not take the role in gay history attributed to the Stonewall Rebellion two and a half years later” (157). No long-term changes happened in terms of the relationship between police and the gay community; thus protests against the raid weren't seen as successful (Armstrong and Crage, 734). As one of the main reasons for why the protests remained relatively contained to the gay community, Faderman and Simmons cite the sprawl that characterizes the L.A. cityscape, which L.A. Residents navigate by car and not on foot. Consequently, “chance passersby [such as many of the Stonewall protesters had been] were scarce” (157). However, the raid did motivate activist Dick Michaels to turn his newsletter into a newspaper, which eventually became the major gay publication in the United States, the Advocate (Armstrong and Crage, 735).3

Split attitudes towards different forms of activism and city geography are thus among the factors that contributed to what happened in the immediate aftermath of the riots in San Francisco and Los Angeles. But they don't explain why Stonewall became understood as different from or outstanding in contrast to these events. Perhaps the activist climate in New York City was more favorable in 1969 (with the beginnings of a more radical activism sparked in the spring); more people walked around Greenwich

Village than they did in L.A.; and the funeral of Judy Garland led an edge of desperation to the mood in the gay community on June, 29th 1969 (D'Emilio, “After Stonewall,” 240). 3 In the creation of the Advocate, the story of gay liberation intersects with the history of television, as the people who created it put together the first copies of the magazine by using the ressouces at their place of employment, namely the print shop that printed the scripts for ABC daily soaps (Faderman and Simmons, 159). 32

Yet, as Armstrong and Crage contend, it is not the actual events that make Stonewall memorable, but the fact that it was remembered, and indeed, deemed memorable (744).

As after the raid on the Black Cat in Los Angeles, activists in New York immediately organized a reaction to the Stonewall raids, realizing that this event could be used strategically for political purposes. They called New York's print media and alerted them to the ongoing riots. Moreover, only three days after the Stonewall Riots, activists distributed flyers that already declared that the event “will go down in history as the first time that thousands of Homosexual men and women went out into the streets to protest”

(Teal, 8, qtd in Armstrong and Crage, 738). Three months later, at the Eastern Regional

Conference of Homophile Organizations in November 1969, New York activists proposed a resolution to turn the Annual Reminder, a yearly picket at Philadelphia's

Independence Hall that started in 1965, into an annual demonstration to commemorate

Stonewall under the name “Christopher Street Liberation Day” (Armstrong and Crage,

738). This push to make Stonewall a national commemorative event depended crucially on previously compiled mailing lists and gay independent media (ibid, 740). In June

1970, Gay Pride parades took place in New York City and Los Angeles, among other cities.

Thus, it is not Stonewall per se that is outstanding; rather, the immediate construction of Stonewall as an historic event at the hand of New York's gay activists made it outstanding. What is most significant about Armstrong and Crage's argument is the shift away from finding explanations for why Stonewall was or was not outstanding or different, and towards an understanding of Stonewall as carefully constructed tool that 33 activists used to advocate their goals, the most important of which were to claim a presence in the media (thus in the imagination of “straight America”) and to affirm the burgeoning discourses surrounding gay and lesbian identities. Thus, Stonewall is not an originary event that finally pushed gay activism out of the closet; rather, activists inscribed a particular narrative on the events that took place at the Stonewall Inn while at the same time building an agenda of visibility on this constructed narrative. The deliberate forgetfulness that surrounds the Stonewall Riots underlines the fragmentary and shifting constitution of queer visibility. What emerges forcefully in histories of

Stonewall is the constant reframing of events and identities, and the repeated questions of how to understand and represent oneself, “the movement,” and “the community” both to insiders and outsiders (and how to draw lines around all these categories in the first place). In the retelling of GLQ history, these contested visibilities are screened in order to render a particular version of queerness visible, usually one attached to the narrative structure of “coming out,” i.e. the story that something previously hidden is revealed at one point and stays visible from that point onwards. Stonewall as origin story of gay liberation is one example of the various screening processes that comprise the discourse of queer visibility.

Screening the Closet

As the various screening processes surrounding the Stonewall Riots show, it is misleading to think of “coming out of the closet” as a singular moment of crossing-over from a state or place that is “hidden” to one that is visible. Even though the concept of 34 coming out relies on a spatial metaphor that describes an apparently finite transition from one space into another, it is best imagined as a continuous process. Thus, instead of one all-encompassing announcement of one's gay or lesbian identity, “coming out” is a laborious, repetitive process without end—one that has been thought of as fundamental to queer identities, particularly after Stonewall. As Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick explains in

“Epistemology of the Closet,” every meeting between strangers “erects new closets whose fraught and characteristic laws of optics and physics exact from at least gay people new surveys, new calculations, new draughts and requisitions of secrecy or disclosure” (46, emphasis mine). It is interesting that Sedgwick chooses the word

“optics” here to discuss the closet when the term “visibility” is curiously absent from her overall discussion. Nevertheless, this word choice underlines the importance of visibility to understanding the epistemology of the closet: the spatial metaphor of the closet suggests an either/or state of being, which is at the foundation of queer visibility (one is either “in” or “out” of the closet, i.e. either invisible or visible), when queer visibility is in fact a continuous process during which multiple moments of being “in” and “out” intersect. Also interesting is Sedgwick's emphasis on “at least gay people,” suggesting that the dynamics of the closet are more “visible” to queer people than to straight people, who find their identities and ways of life resonating with the heteronormative demands surrounding them and who consequently might not “see” the pressure they can exert. In other words, the propagated difficulty in identifying queerness has more to do with the allegedly blinding forces of heteronormativity than with the visibility or invisibility of queerness. From this point of view, heteronormativity is so visible that it has cast other 35 sexual identifications into shadow.

Following this line of thought, Shane Phelan suggests that the closet actually acts like a screen: it “screens” queerness, or at least certain aspects of queerness, from view while simultaneously serving as the surface for heteronormative projections (98). This screening process leads, among other things, to the assumption that everyone is heterosexual until proven otherwise. However, the closet can never fully screen queerness from view; a specter of queer acts and identities always remains, even in those spaces that appear to be fully saturated with heteronormativity.4 Thus, it isn't so much that queerness, or at least certain aspects of queerness, are “invisible” by default, but that there has been a concerted effort in society to declare them invisible (in part by promoting heterosexuality as “normal” and “natural”). Deeming queerness “invisible” only obscures it via the screening process of the closet: queer acts and desires exist before and independently of coming-into-being in the moment of articulation, of “coming out.”

Moreover, efforts nominally aimed at removing queerness from public view—public here meaning a whole host of institutions and venues of representation (employment by the state, civil rights, such as the right to marry and receive certain benefits, narratives of queer romance in film and television, etc.)—didn't actually make queerness disappear, but marked it as “deviant” and discussed it as such. This “deviant” queerness manifested itself in the very spaces from which it was supposed to disappear, including sites ranging

4 The connection between deviant sexualities and secrecy/invisibility isn't an entirely new insight, of course. Both Michel Foucault and Eve Sedgwick have shown how this connection has become manifest over time. Sedgwick characterizes the increasingly intensifying association of sexuality and secrecy in the following way: “The gradually reifying effect of this refusal [of same-sex desire] meant that by the end of the 19th century, when it had become fully current—as obvious to Queen Victoria as to Freud—that knowledge meant sexual knowledge, and secrets sexual secrets, there had in fact developed one particular sexuality that was distinctly constituted as secrecy” (Sedgwick, 49). 36 from public parks to Hollywood cinema. Considering all of this, it is more productive to ask which forms of queer expression have existed where, when, and for whom, rather than holding on to a strict distinction between “visible” and “invisible.” That is, understanding the closet as a screen, as Phelan proposes, allows for a more precise mapping of this discourse of queer visibility. My analysis of the screening processes that are in effect in histories of the Stonewall Riots are an example of such an approach. But I want to take Phelan's conceptualization of the closet-as-screen one step further and argue that, while this screen serves as a projection surface for heteronormative ideals, it also allows for the coming-into-being of specific types of queer visibilities, namely those that can nominally adhere to certain class, race, and gender norms.

This broader understanding of the closet-as-screen becomes particularly important when one considers that even those scholars who are concerned with critically analyzing the alleged necessity of rendering queerness visible often also rely on a screening process to facilitate this coming-into-being as queer. As I previously argued regarding GLQ history, it is not only the demands of heteronormativity that screen queerness, but also those who, one might assume, are concerned with rendering the entire spectrum of queer identities, practices, and communities visible. The most frequently appearing screening process comes into effect in comparisons between sexuality, race, and sex. As a first observation in such analyses, scholars typically mention, often in a casual way, that sexuality needs to be rendered visible because it is not “written on the body” in the way that race and sex apparently are. For example, in 1983, Richard Dyer observed, “A major factor about being gay is that it doesn't show. There is nothing about gay people's 37 physiognomy that declares them gay, no equivalents to the biological markers of sex and race” (“Seen to be believed,” 20). More recently, in 2001, Suzanna Walters wrote,

“Unlike people of color, and women, gays are not necessarily or inevitably 'visible.' Most of the time, difference is not marked on our bodies” (28).

Such comparisons between sexuality, race, sex, and gender, however, yield incredibly problematic arguments for a number of reasons. One, in both Dyer's and

Walters' assessments, the imagined gays and lesbians lead lives that are removed from the perceived burden of constant visibility. They are by implication white: as whiteness is still the only racial category that can imagine itself as unmarked, queer subjects that exist outside of the regime of the visible are white by default.5 Two, the comparison stabilizes sex and race as categories in ways that are untenable; specifically, assertions like those made by Walters and Dyer render sex and race as easily “legible” in order to facilitate an analysis of the complex processes that allow queerness to become visible in media representations. What is obscured in this comparison are the ways in which racialization has an uneasy relationship to visibility as well: race isn't “visible” because of bodily markers, but because certain cultural discourses construct a specific way of “seeing” race that is always already an interpretation, not simply a reading of embodied “facts.”6 Three, this comparison neglects the fact that sexuality, rather than being merely a parallel category, is always bound up with race and sex: queer people are always also sexed, gendered, and raced in multiple, mutually constitutive yet often conflicting, ways (just as

5 For an account of how homosexuality became associated with whiteness by modeling gay politics on the Civil Rights Movement, see Guzman, 94. Also, this whiteness is inscribed by certain class norms. As I discuss in Chapter 3, those people who are positioned as “white trash” cannot inhabit the category of “unmarked” whiteness as their class position qualifies and intersects with their racial identity. 6 See Michael Omi and Howard Winant's Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s, especially 53-77. 38

“people of color” and “women” are constituted by discourses of sexuality as well as those of race and gender). In other words, comparisons between queer visibility, race, sex, and gender, and the implicit oversights of such comparisons, are problematic because they obscure crucial processes of racialization and their intersection with discourses of sexuality and gender. In fact, these oversights amount to what I want to call a screening of race—they “screen out” the importance of race and racialization in the construction of queer visibility.

This differentiation of race and sexuality into two categories that can be compared, but are considered to be separate, has a long-standing history. This tendency to consider processes of racialization and of categorizing sexual identifications as parallel but unrelated goes back to the late 19th century. Yet, as Shioban Somerville argues, concerns over how to define “black” and/versus “white,” and “homosexual” and/versus

“heterosexual” weren't parallel or analogous events, but rather linked and constitutive of one another (3). As such, the work of early sexologists, for example, borrowed from and relied on methodologies of categorizing bodies that emerged from studies trying to determine racial difference (ibid, 10). Another example of the intertwining of discourses of race and sexuality emerges in the way that the late nineteenth-century figures of the black rapist and the murderous lesbian were mobilized as threats to white womanhood and to white domesticity (Duggan, Sapphic Slashers, 3).

Even these brief examples show that ideas of homo- and heterosexuality have been bound up with specific concepts of race from the time that those ideas first circulated in both scientific and popular discourses. It is thus imperative to consider the 39 representation of both race and sexuality in conjunction with one another, not as separate categories. In fact, the discourse of queer visibility is replete with junctures that rely on the screening of race. For example, in addition to allowing the Stonewall riots to emerge as moment of origin of gay liberation, the screening processes at work in retelling the events at the Stonewall Inn also often screen out race. What goes often unmentioned in popular narratives about the Stonewall Riots is that those who participated in the riots were largely on the fringe of the gay and lesbian community in terms of racial and gender identifications (D'Emilio, “After Stonewall,” 240-41). More recently, during the

Congressional hearings on the question of whether or not to allow gays and lesbians in the military, those in favor of repealing the ban relied on making analogies between discrimination based on race and on sexual orientation, yet did not invite a single queer person of color to testify, thus upholding the impression that race and sexuality are separate matters and, specifically, that gays and lesbians are white (Berube, 243). The subsequent chapters offer more in-depth analyses of crucial turning points that reshaped the discourse of queer visibility and its concurrent screening of race, including the AIDS crisis of the 1980s, Ellen DeGeneres' coming out, the “breakthrough” films Brokeback

Mountain and Boys Don't Cry, as well as the recent television program Brothers &

Sisters.

If one unscreens the importance of race in shaping the discourse of queer visibility, its most fundamental concepts, such as the closet and coming out, appear in a different light. Manolo Guzman's study of gay Latino men, for example, refutes the idea that not coming out—that is, not to declare oneself as gay—to one's family or community 40 is both a failure and a reaction to an oppressive, homophobic environment. He argues that the absence of such a declaration in this particular cultural context “is not an imposition of the code of silence on homosexual expression. Rather, this absence of speech, no longer talking about things like marriage, represents a suspension of the assumption of heterosexuality. There is enormous amount of room for the expression of homosexuality under this absence of speech about homosexuality” (88). This assessment is crucial for three reasons: one, it demonstrates that “coming out” is a specific cultural product, namely one that is largely “Anglo” (i.e. American and white); two, a decision against coming out is not always a reaction to a hostile climate that suppresses all aspects of gay life; and three, that not-being-visible (in the sense of constantly coming-into-being as

“gay”) might create spaces in which queerness can flourish.

Understanding the cultural specificity of concepts such as “coming out” helps to interrogate the insistence on visibility as fundamental to the formation of queer subjectivities. This interrogation can then foster alternative ideas of how queerness can manifest itself in spaces where queer desires and acts undeniably exist but don't require explicit articulation in the (white American) tradition of “being out.” Interestingly, one of those spaces exists in the midst of the American cultural imagination: Hollywood cinema, and more recently, commercial television. Both have offered room for specters of queerness that are not definitely described or represented. At the same time, the insight that “being out” is a mostly (Anglo-)American concept also underlines that it is often closely aligned with whiteness, especially when it comes to what are often the most visible facets of queerness, namely those found in media representations. In the following 41 section, I sketch out various queer traditions in Hollywood cinema and in television to underline that the developments of the 1990s have a long history and especially to call attention to aspects of this history that are frequently as deliberately forgotten as the importance of race when it comes to mapping the discourse of queer visibility.

Hollywood is Fabulous, and Always Has Been: Queerness and Media Representation

As my previous thoughts on the central role of race in the formation of queer visibility indicate, media representations play a central role in screening the closet. In fact, in a mass-mediated society such as contemporary American society, the question of queer visibility is always tied to how this visibility is expressed in the media—in print,

TV, film, and, most recently, in digital media. Often, visibility and representation are conflated: queer visibility is only possible, only comes into existence, through representation.7 The equation of visibility and representation is another reminder that visibility is a discourse, not a pre-existing state of being that only finds expression in the media. Closely connected to the manifestation of queerness in the media is the perception of it (that is, the reception by members of the audience), as presence and perception are presumed as the two halves that constitute visibility. In fact, the way various spectators

“see,” that is, recognize and assess, manifestations of queerness in the media is a crucial aspect of the discourse of queer visibility. This close relationship between manifestations of queerness and the possibility of recognizing them also appears as a central motif in

7 “Representation” can also signify political representation, in the sense of queer Americans being recognized as political/civic constituents and thus as full citizens. The struggle over that form of representation is closely linked to struggles over queer visibility in the media, as queer images have often been a rallying point for or against gay and lesbian civil rights. I elaborate this more fully in Chapters 2 and 4. 42 many academic studies devoted to the exploration of queer visibility in the media. Ellis

Hanson's exclamation “I can see again!” in the introduction to Out Takes: Queer Theory and Film, Richard Dyer's choice of Now you See It as the title for his essay collection on gay and lesbian film, and the use of Spectacular Passions as the title of Brett Farmer's study of gay male spectatorships, among many other examples, all point to the fact that in academic as well as popular discourses, visibility is intimately linked to vision, i.e. the ability to see or discern queerness. Yet this discernment is a complex matter, involving both production and reception, as well as both what is screened and screened out. Queer visibility in the media, then, is a multi-faceted and fluid process, one that Alexander Doty so aptly defines as “those aspects of spectatorship, cultural readership, production, and textual coding that seem to establish spaces not described by, or contained within, straight, gay, lesbian, bisexual, transsexual, or transgendered understandings and categorizations of gender and sexuality” (Flaming Classics, 7).

One of the most important aspects to consider when analyzing queer visibility in the media is the fact that any overt representation of same-sex intimacy was, in effect, banned in Hollywood film and suspended in commercial U.S. TV for decades during the

20th century. In other words, during the heyday of Hollywood cinema, and through the early years of television, the closet-as-screen primarily functioned to keep queerness from manifesting itself on movie and TV screens. Importantly, these constraints were largely adopted voluntarily and not as a result of court orders or in response to other legal interventions. Rather, the ban grew out of a sense on the part of those who worked in the media industry of what Americans might be ready to see in film or TV. For the cinema, 43 the Hollywood Production Code was in effect from 1934-1968. For most of that time, the representation of any form of sexuality was extremely limited: heterosexual desire could only be shown within certain parameters (resulting in many closed-mouth kisses and in the apparent preference of married couples to sleep in separate beds), and “transgressive” sexualities, including interracial romance and any nominal representation of same-sex desire, were not shown at all—at least not in any “explicit” ways (even if, as I will adress shortly, “implicit” coding or connotation was widespread). The ban of both interracial and same-sex romance once again underlines the close alignment of race and queer sexualities, as both were deemed too “queer” for the imagined tastes of mainstream (read: white and heterosexual) America.

In 1961, the Code was revised to allow limited depictions of homosexual subject matter, and, in 1968, it was abolished entirely and replaced by a ratings system. This system supposedly shifted the responsibility for content from the producers to the audience: theoretically, everything could now be shown in films, but who was allowed to see this content was limited by age (Benshoff and Griffin, 93; 136). Since the most profitable rating is PG-13, however, production companies strive for content that will be approved for that rating. The desire to fulfill the requirements for earning this rating from the MPAA (Motion Pictures Association of America) constitutes another form of self- regulation as a large number of subjects (often related to sexuality rather than, for example, violence) are deemed inappropriate for the age group allowed to see films under the PG-13 rating. Consequently, screening processes are still at work in Hollywood today.

As for TV, networks mostly look to advertisers and their expectations when 44 deciding what subjects make for acceptable programming. While the FCC (Federal

Communications Commission) has regulatory power over U.S. TV, it hasn't enforced a singular set of standards similar to the cinema's Production Code; rather, it is networks and their Standards and Practices offices that, typically, voluntarily regulate TV content

(with some exceptions in which the FCC has issued fines for inappropriate content). The variety and type of queer content (and even what counts as “queer” content) varies among television networks. While ABC, NBC, Fox, and the CW subscribe to a very limited idea of queer visibility (at least in terms of explicit narratives of GLBT people), cable channels, especially those financed through subscriptions, such as Showtime and HBO, allow for a wider and more sexually explicit range of queer visibilities as part of their original programming.

Yet, despite these representational constraints, the existence of the Production

Code and of network self-regulation didn't (and doesn't) entail an absence queer representations from these media (the contrary, rather). They did, however, shape what kinds of queer visibilities manifested themselves, and in what ways. Furthermore, the prohibitions and their partial repeals (queer acts and desires can still only be shown in specific ways, after all) have also led to some critical blockages and oversights, inviting commentators to accept an overly simple division of queer visibility in a “before” and

“after.” For example, one might be inclined to say that before the Production Code was lifted, queer visibility manifested itself mostly through “connotation”—gestures, iconography, character typing, plot devices, genre structures—whereas, after a redefinition of this prohibition, “denotation”—openly gay and lesbian characters and 45 storylines—became more prevalent. This is an inaccurate division, however, since both denotative and connotative queer visibilities existed and continue to exist—and, in fact, are textually inseparable.

Even the terms “connotative” and “denotative” are somewhat problematic if one adheres to the idea that anything in the realm of the connotative is merely secondary to the supposedly real and unquestionable statement of the denotative (Barthes, 7). D.A.

Miller, in his analysis of Alfred Hitchcock's Rope (1948), shows how connotative queer elements in film manage to spread their meaning to all other signifiers precisely because the queerness they represent is unstable and not clearly defined (129). The ambiguity that connotative elements contain—leading spectators to wonder whether or not there is something queer about this character or that course of action—informs even supposedly safely heterosexual characters, rendering their sexuality as something to be doubted and by no means confirmed. In contrast, a denotative queerness that is clearly defined would not spread its signification in the same way; rather, it would be contained in the one character or course of action that is textually labeled as “queer” (or “gay” or “lesbian,” etc.). Thus, instead of considering queer connotative significations in film as secondary to denotative ones, I argue for them as different ways of indicating queer presences, both of which have specific consequences on the construction of meaning in the film as a whole.

Additionally, I join Alexander Doty in a refusal to consider queerness-via-connotation as mere “subtext” to the supposedly straight text; rather, queer and straight meanings co- exist on equal planes in the same text (Flaming Classics, 2). They are two sides of the closet-as-screen: what is projected denotatively onto it cannot exist independently of 46 what is seemingly screened out connotatively. In short, I consider denotation and connotation different registers of signification that appear alongside one another in cinematic and televisual texts. Instead of understanding connotative meanings as those that are “hidden” or “invisible,” and denotative meanings as those that are “apparent” and

“clear-cut,” it is more productive and more important to ask which forms of queer expression have existed where, when, and for whom.

With this in mind, I want to map a history of queer visibility in the media that recognizes both sides of the closet-as-screen via a few, very select examples. I will elaborate on parts of this history in more detail in subsequent chapters, but for now I provide a general overview that fosters an understanding both of the various ways in which queer visibility has been part of film and television and of how scholars have discussed this visibility. To start this trajectory, consider an assessment that Suzanna

Walters, writing in 2001, makes at the beginning of her “history of gays in TV,” as she calls it: “The new gay visibility on TV is surely a dramatic departure from the history of the medium. While film has long dealt with gay subjects, albeit in a stereotyped and

'tragic' way, television's 'family-focused' format seemed to insist that gays and lesbians were simply not part of the families that made up TV audiences” (59). The new “gay visibility” to which Walters refers is the proliferation of gay and lesbian images in the media during the 1990s, a development that is the main focus of her book All the Rage:

The Story of Gay Visibility in America. Walters positions this “new” visibility in contrast both to the presumed previous absence or invisibility of gays and lesbians on TV and to a long history of “gay subjects” in film (it's a little unclear whether she means “subjects” in 47 the sense of gay and lesbian characters or of gay and lesbian plots/themes, or perhaps both). She locates this difference in medium specificity—according to Walters, television's heteronormative, familial form (both in textual structure and contextual location) made it more difficult for television programming than film to represent gays and lesbians, at least until recently.

While I agree with Walters' overall assessment—namely that gay and lesbian images became more frequent during the 1990s—much needs to be added to the story and her analysis of it. For example, the “long” history of queer visibility in film is mirrored, to a certain extent, in television if one looks beyond the narrow conception of such visibility as indicating only programs “about gays and lesbians,” or, in other words, if one only considers the denotative projections onto the closet-as-screen. Indeed, the idea that there is a pre-constituted community that either finds representation on TV or does not is problematic (which, in all fairness, Walters discusses as well). Even gay and lesbian characters (named as such by themselves or other characters in the texts) found their way onto TV screens long before the 1990s (as, for example, in popular sitcoms such as All the Family and The Mary Tyler Moore Show in the early 1970s; in various

Made-for-TV movies like An Early Frost from the early 1980s onwards; or in drama series including Dynasty or Soap in the 1980s).8 Similar denotative and connotative mechanisms to those used to represent queerness in Hollywood films were used on TV as well (i.e. coded characters, situations, and plots), but whether or not those were always

“tragic” and “stereotyped” is a questionable notion. Particularly the issue of stereotypes and the various meanings they can hold deserves more consideration. Finally, Walters

8 See Larry Gross' chapter “Television Takes Over” in Up From Invisibility, 81-93. 48 introduces the imagined, straight audience which presumably has had much difficulty adjusting to queer visibility. This imaginary group of people commands the attention of media producers and scholars alike, with often peculiar results. These aspects—the constitution of queer visibility in film and TV, and the similarities and differences between those media, the question of stereotypes, and the imagined audience—provide a focus for my brief general overview.

As mentioned, film shares a number of connotations and denotations used to signify queerness with television, perhaps because queer cinematic coding was already well-established by the time that commercial TV became an institutionalized medium with its own narrative conventions. Yet there are significant differences between how, in general, film and TV frame narratives and images, of course, and “film” and “TV” aren't uniform media either. There have been different possibilities for queer representations in studio films and in independent films, for example, as there have been in network, cable, or public TV. Nevertheless, queer cinematic codes that came into being in the Hollywood studio system had an impact on both independent film and TV.

Considering the prevalence of progressive narratives that circulate when it comes to telling the history of queer visibility in the media—typically presented as a move from a homophobic past that disallowed queer representations to a more open climate that allows the portrayal of gays and lesbians—it is perhaps surprising to find that queer images have been part and parcel of Hollywood filmmaking from its beginning. For example, the relationship between Greta Garbo's character Christina and Elizabeth

Young's character Ebba in the 1933 MGM Grand film Queen Christina has all the 49 significations of a romance, including a shared kiss. It is films like Queen Christina that make one wonder if the institution of the Production Code was in part a response to the proliferation of queerness in studio productions. Yet even once the Production Code was enforced, an arsenal of connotative devices allowed the continued presence of queer images in Hollywood films. These include queer characters, which range from men who appear a little “too feminine” to women who are a little “too masculine” (corresponding to the idea that gender inversion was part of homosexuality, a theory that was popular in the early 20th century) to character types such as the “sissy,” “the sad young man,” or the

“spinster,” all of whom had a queer air about them.9 Furthermore, beyond specific characters and character types, entire genres became outlets for queer presences, including supernatural, horror, and musical films.10

All three genres broke through the conventions of the everyday, be it via the intrusion of alien and ghostly beings or the sudden eruption into song and dance, thus challenging and disrupting ideas of what qualifies as “normal.” Even the melodrama, which largely stayed within a realist framework, made “the normal” questionable by revealing the instability of marriage and family, often rendering them as institutions that confine and oppress, and by marking this instability through moments of stylistic, iconographic, narrative excess and rupture.11 Queer producers and audiences also

9 For detailed analyses of queer character types in Hollywood cinema, see, for example, Richard Dyer's The Matter of Images, Andrea Weiss' Vampire and Violets: Lesbians in Film, and Patricia White's UnInvited: Classical Hollywood Cinema and Lesbian Representability. 10 For a queer take on supernatural and horror films, see, for example, Harry M. Benshoff's Monsters in the Closet: Homosexuality and Horror Film and Rhona Bernstein's Attack of the Leading Ladies: Gender, Sexuality, and Spectatorship in Classic Horror Cinema; examples of queer analyses of the musical are D.A. Miller's A Place for Us: Essays on the Broadway Musical and Alexander Doty's “'My Beautiful Wickedness': The Wizard of Oz as Lesbian Fantasy” in Flaming Classics. 11 For more on Hollywood melodrama and its engagement with normalcy, see Christine Gledhill's Home is Where the Heart is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woman's Film. 50 contributed to the continued circulation of queer images. Some of the most famous

“classics” are outcomes of behind-the-scenes struggles over queer representations. My favorite anecdote from Vito Russo's history The Celluloid Closet details how, during the filming of Ben-Hur (released in 1959), screenplay writer Gore Vidal, director William

Wyler, and actor Stephen Boyd agreed to portray the relationship between main characters Messala, played by Boyd, and Ben-Hur, played by Charlton Heston, as one of former lovers to give it more depth (Russo, 76). Heston was never informed of this decision, but his performance certainly matches the emotional intensity of Boyd's acting, thus providing much fodder for possible queer readings of this relationship. And audiences did pick up on queer moments in, and queer facets of, Hollywood films, developing ways of “seeing queerly” that spread beyond the subcultural level to become available for a mainstream audience.12 While some historical examples (such as lesbians flocking to see The Uninvited or the more recent example of gay men finding queer pleasures in Top Gun) are probably not widely known, The Wizard of Oz and The Rocky

Horror Picture Show are recognized and enjoyed as queer cult classics by large numbers of people of varying sexual identifications (Benshoff and Griffin, 10, 66, 147; Doty,

Flaming Classics, 54).

After the Production Code was abolished in 1968 and homosexuality could be named as such in Hollywood film again, films began to appear that denotatively narrativized gay characters and gay urban life. This does not mean that the earlier queer registers disappeared or were replaced by “more visible” representations. Rather, the

12 For a more elaborate analysis of the ways in which straight audiences see queerly, see my article "The Adventures of a Repressed Farmboy and the Billionaire Who Loves Him: Queer Spectatorship in Smallville Fandom." In: Teen Television: Essays on Programming and Fandom. 51 before-and-after story often told about queer representations is testament to a shift in attention of those invested in queer images (a shift that is similar to the investment in coming out that characterizes narratives of gay lives and identities “before” and “after”

Stonewall). Both activists of the newly existing gay rights movement and some media scholars chronicling the history of queer media images give preference to discussions of the meaning of these new images because of the ways in which the strategies employed by the media themselves shifted in modes that dovetailed with new social discourses of visibility (see, for example, the work done by Larry Gross, Suzanna Walters, or Stephen

Tropiano). This shift in attention constitutes another example in which scholars who are invested in queer visibility use screening processes to facilitate their discussions: in order to highlight newly possible denotative queer representations, the continuing use of connotative queer elements needs to be screened out. Moreover, the discussion of post-

Code queer visibility often takes place within the framework of evaluating “positive” versus “negative” images and of decrying the prevalence of stereotypes in films and TV programs from the late 1960s onward.13

The so-called New Queer Cinema of the 1990s allowed for a point of convergence between connotative and denotative manifestations of queerness as well as an

13 Stereotypes relate to the idea of “positive” and “negative” images in the following way: a stereotype is considered a “negative” image because it reduces gays and lesbians to a limited number of character traits which may or may not relate to how gays and lesbians “really” are. Yet, in a circular logic, these characters traits are considered demeaning, in part, I would argue, because they have become stereotypes. However, the fundamental problem with the idea of dividing representations into “positive” and “negative” images is the fact that a representation will never be able “accurately” to represent reality. This is not only because the production of filmic and televisual representations is subject to a number of formal constraints that shape what and who is being represented in which ways, but also because “reality” itself is an entirely unstable concept that is always in part shaped by media representations. The complexity of stereotypes has been explored by Richard Dyer in A Matter of Image, Sasha Torres in Black, White, and In Color: Television and Black Civil Rights, and by Jose Esteban Munoz in Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. 52 engagement with stereotypes that goes beyond the “positive”/“negative” framework. The collection of independent films grouped under the label of New Queer Cinema challenges previous gay and lesbian films on the level of both formal and narrative structures and of subject matter. As B. Ruby Rich, who coined the term “New Queer Cinema,” put it in

1992, “Definitely breaking with older humanist approaches and the films and tapes that accompanied identity politics, these works are irreverent, energetic, alternately minimalist and excessive. Above all, they're full of pleasure” (16). Many filmmakers who contributed to New Queer Cinema were themselves queer and often from activist backgrounds. But films such as Peter Jackson's Heavenly Creatures (1994) or Nancy

Meckler's Sister My Sister (1994) demonstrate that straight filmmakers can also make films that construct queer subject matter in unexpected and challenging ways (Aaron, 9).

While this might seem like an obvious observation, the territorialism that is sometimes exhibited by queer filmmakers and queer media scholars over their cultural provenance of queer cinema makes such a statement necessary and important.

While New Queer Cinema broke with or reinvisioned the politics of positive images, it used and reworked both the queer cinematic coding of Hollywood film and the traditions of independent queer filmmaking. Instead of rejecting certain character types, like the gay villain, as stereotypical and/or tragic, films such as Swoon (1992)—an adaptation of Hitchcock's Rope (1948)—embrace “negative” images and show the productive and pleasurable forces that can be found in them. In fact, an engagement with and queer rewriting of classical Hollywood film is a recurring theme in New Queer

Cinema. For example, Todd Haynes' film Poison (1991) reworks horror, prison, and 53 documentary genres through an excessive use of their distinctive conventions—a move that calls attention to the naturalization of cinematic styles. Haynes further developed this approach in Far From Heaven (2002): embodying the generic markers of 1950s melodrama, the film also draws on the possibility of portraying both queer desires and interracial romance as such. I want to refrain from saying that the film makes a previously only implied queerness and interracial romance “visible” because the non- normative aspects of 1950s melodrama were visible, both to many audiences and to many people in the film industry. Rather, Far From Heaven brings together connotative and denotative manifestations of illicit sexuality—one example of many where both modes exist side-by-side in the same film. Thus, instead of approaching the film as one that undoes the suppression of queer and interacial images in Hollywood's past, it is more accurate to consider it as an insistence on the non-normative that has always been a part of our media culture.

Despite Far From Heaven's attempt to address both sexuality and race within cinematic codes and history, the one area in which New Queer Cinema did not break with

Hollywood's tradition is its engagement with race. Even though a few films, such as Lie

Down with Dogs (1995), Love! Valor! Compassion! (1997), or Jeffrey (1995), feature a diverse cast, an interrogation of the ways in which race and desire intersect often fall flat or are absent entirely. Jose Esteban Munoz calls these moments of diversity “detours into difference” that do not challenge the overall whiteness of these films (“Dead White,”

130). Another Todd Haynes' film, namely Safe (1995), represents an exception to this practice, Munoz explains, as it defamiliarizes both whiteness and heteronormativity. 54

Exploring the increasing illness-induced estrangement of a white married woman from the world of suburbia, Haynes relies on connotation to tell a parable about AIDS that engages with the correlation of sexuality and race without reducing it to a detour into difference (Esteban, “Dead White,” 136).

Turning now to TV, I want to come back to Walter's assessment of the nearly complete absence of queer representations on television before the 1990s. At the end of her “brief history of gays in TV,” she summarizes, “So, historically speaking, we have a move from an almost totally invisibility (and when visible, almost total stereotyping) to an increased presence, albeit a flawed, sporadic, and episodic one, to a backlash against that increased presence that then paves the way for the more substantive 'open door' that we are now witnessing” (65). Yet the before-and-after story embedded in her historical overview focuses almost entirely on denotative representations of queerness and accepts the binary categories of “visible” vs. “invisible” as the basis of this discourse. Walters makes one passing reference to potential “subtext” in the “best friends” sitcom Katie and

Allie (1984-1989) and one reference to the camp sensibilities of the prime-time soap

Dynasty (1981-1989), but otherwise, connotative queerness doesn't exist for Walters. Yet even if one were to focus only on those representations that are considered denotative, a rich history unfolds. The events that took place at the Stonewall Inn and the subsequent formation of the gay liberation movement received a great deal of mainstream media coverage; even before then, TV news reports dealt with the issue of homosexuality

(Benshoff and Griffin, 130). The AIDS crisis during the 1980s also led to numerous newspaper and television reports investigating gay life and communities. If major news 55 outlets as well as the aforementioned TV dramas and comedies engage with queer subjects, how can Walters insist that queerness was “almost totally” invisible before

1990? Further, in addition to these denotative representations, many of the connotative devices used in queer cinematic coding, as well as codes more specific to TV, are also at work in television. The worlds of homosocial sitcoms such as Katie and Allie, Three's

Company (1977-1984), and Laverne and Shirley (1976-1983) are ripe with queer meanings—to the point, for instance, where singular episodes featuring mistaken-identity plots (when the main characters are perceived as gay, which gives them a chance to articulate their heterosexuality) have the task of (unsuccessfully) containing all the queer possibilities offered through the shows' diegeses (Doty, Making Things Perfectly Queer,

43).

But even more direct links can be established between queer cinematic coding and current television. Smallville (2001-present), for example, a show detailing the youth of

Superman, features recurring appearances of genetically mutated “freaks” that lead the entire ensemble of main characters to wonder whether or not they might be “freaks” as well (and at this point, all of them have discovered that they, in fact, are). The articulation of difference via the “freak” metaphor is easy to discern here, and the long-standing equation of the supernatural with non-normative sexualities, as well as the dialogue that frames being a “freak” in terms that compare it to closeted homosexuality, firmly embed queerness at the center of Smallville's diegesis.

Considering all this evidence, it is simply incorrect to say that queerness was

“largely” absent from television until recently. In fact, I would suggest that the “explosion 56 of gay visibility” during the 1990s is a cementation of one form of queer visibility as the

(only) form of queer visibility. From this narrow point of view, queer visibility becomes compressed into gay and lesbian characters and/or plots that explicitly deal with gay and lesbian lives: categories that have specific boundaries and can be opposed to heterosexual characters and storylines. In contrast, as I mentioned earlier, connotative queer presences aren't as easily contained or defined: like the supernatural and “freakish” presences with which they were often associated in Hollywood films, they can appear anywhere at any moment, including commercial television. Thus, while the proliferation of gay and lesbian characters on TV during the 1990s made queerness tangible and undeniable, it can also be read as an attempt to limit how queerness can manifest itself on television, and it gives the illusion that anyone and anything outside of those marked characters or storylines is safely heterosexual. From this point of view, the developments of the 1990s aren't quite as hopeful as, for example, the cover story of Entertainment Weekly suggested when it announced that entertainment had come out of the closet—though the image of the closet is perhaps the perfect choice for these developments as it draws attention to some of the screening processes that regulate queer visibility and divide it into “visible” and “invisible” halves.

But it is not only connotative queer significations that are screened out of the stories told about the “gay 90s.” The importance of whiteness in the screening of the closet that enables these “new” queer representations doesn't play a role in either

Entertainment Weekly's nor Susanna Walter's account of the “explosion of gay visibility” despite the fact that most of their examples feature white gay and lesbian characters or 57 storylines. This is curious because the whiteness of those films and TV shows that are most frequently analyzed in accounts of the “gay 90s” is nearly blinding—for example, programs such as Ellen, Will&Grace, or Queer as Folk center on the lives of white people, yet this is rarely included as factor in discussing what kind of queer visibility is being represented there.14 To once more return to the metaphor of the screen, one realizes that it is the whiteness of the characters that their various sexualities are projected upon, rendering it as seemingly nothing more than the surface on which negotiations surrounding queer and straight sexualities take place. But, as I elaborated before (and will elaborate even further in Chapter 3 and 4), screening queerness always also includes moments of obfuscation, and in this case, it is the significance of race that is obscured.

By reinscribing whiteness as that racial category which doesn't have to explain itself, these programs continue the project of representing race and sexuality as unrelated social formations. Consequently, the persistence of whiteness in these programs is not simply or merely indicative of a failure to be more inclusive on the part of producers and networks, or a perpetuation of television's racial politics. Rather, whiteness becomes a necessary component of this particular expression of queer visibility.

Towards Homonationalism

A reconsideration of celebrating the “gay '90s,” and its racialized underpinnings, becomes a particularly pressing matter considering what, in describing our current political and cultural landscape, Lisa Duggan refers to as the “new homonormativity.”

14 Of course there are some notable exceptions here, both in terms of scholarly analysis—Rebecca Claire Beirne's essay on Queer As Folk comes to mind here—and in terms of programming—for example, The L Word, The Wire, Oz, and a range of reality TV programs such as The Real World feature queers of color. 58

Homonormativity comprises “a politics that does not contest dominant heteronormative assumptions and institutions but upholds and sustains them while promising the possibility of a demobilized gay constituency and a privatized, depoliticized gay culture anchored in domesticity and consumption” (179). In other words, the homonormative describes non-heterosexual identifications and ways of life that intersect with heterosexual ones in ways that don't challenge the overarching demands of heteronormativity. As examples of homonormative politics, Duggan lists groups and individuals that rose to prominence during the 1990s, such as the Log Cabin Republicans and the writings by gay conservatives such Bruce Bawer and Andrew Sullivan. Although there is, of course, some debate about this, certain gay rights organizations, such as the

Human Rights Campaign, might also fall under this banner. As Shane Phelan observes,

“[t]heir membership, agenda, and strategies are resolutely white, middle-class, and assimilationist” (100), suggesting that, even though we might imagine gay and lesbian political activism to pose a challenge to the general social order (perhaps due to the left- leaning history of these politics, or because they are consistently portrayed as such by their opponents), it will not always include that. In fact, advocacy carried out under the banner of gay and lesbian identity politics might only represent a fraction of those who identify as gay or lesbian.

It is this rendering visible of a particular kind of queer identity that frames the alleged explosion of gay visibility in the media during the same decade. In fact, homonormativity and the celebration of denotative queer media images as the most

“progressive” kind of queer visibility go hand in hand.15 For example, the emphasis on

15 In this context, it is interesting to consider Jasbir Puar's observation that “queer visibility also functions 59 domesticity and consumption that Duggan singles out as characteristic of homonormativity lends itself to an integration of gay and lesbian representations into the familial and commercial world of network TV. Indeed, the insistence on a clear division between denotative and connotative queer representations feeds into the project of recognizing only homonormative queer representations as significant, or even as the only forms of queer visibility.

Homonormative politics and representations become particularly suspicious after the events of 9/11. Given those events and their aftermath, in recent years, homonormative efforts have been yoked to a patriotic agenda. This “homonationalism,” as Jasbir Puar puts it, allows gays and lesbians of a certain class, race, and lifestyle to be symbolically included in the nation—symbolically, of course, because this inclusion doesn't erase inequalities in terms of access to certain rights (“Mapping,” 68). The underpinning of this inclusion is the opposition of the acceptable (straight or gay) subject to the abject subject, often embodied in the figure of the terrorist. Queerness and whiteness merge to produce proud American subjects that subscribe to discourses of

American exceptionalism and diversity and are positioned in opposition to racialized, queer others (Terrorist Assemblages, 2). This move towards homonationalism is prominently echoed and advocated in TV programming that relies on whiteness as a screen for the production of queer visibility (ABC's program Brothers&Sisters, which I analyze in-depth in Chapter 4, comes to mind as the clearest example). Consequently, the longstanding connection between heterosexuality and the nation that had disallowed

as marking of a moment of 'real' and definitive sexual subjectivity” (“Transnational Configurations of Desire,” 178). In other words, only denotative representations of queerness are deemed “real” whereas those which are “merely” connotative are dismissed. 60 identifiable queers as part of its imagined community is no longer as tenacious as previously assumed (Berlant, 19). This doesn't mean that heteronormativity is suddenly suspended, but rather that other concerns—particularly surrounding race and religion— have become so pressing that the demand to be heterosexual can be momentarily suspended in some cases. If particular gays and lesbians can still fit the remaining requirements that are tied to the heteronormative, such as a specific racial and class hierarchy or a specific model of the family and of long-term partnerships, they can be symbolically included in the nation.

Situating the screening of race and queerness in a broader context conveys the urgency of rethinking how to analyze and understand the homonormative versions of queer media representations. This urgency becomes particularly obvious when considering the flip side of the screening of race and queerness: not only does whiteness underwrite queer representations, but queerness is drawn into the project of maintaining white hegemony. In other words, homonormative queerness must be white in order to be integrated into the heteronormative framework of the nation. The “whiteness” in question here transcends a discourse of racial markers; rather, as Puar observes, it “functions to mark concluding impulses of a linear modernist telos of progress and development characterized by the 'arrival' of the subject often through class, educational, and income status” (“Transnational Configurations of Desire,” 178). This type of what one could call symbolic whiteness thus functions in tandem with homonormativity: the discourse of homonationalism constructs queerness and racial others in such a way that it allows even those who nominally do not fit the demands of heteronormativity and whiteness to be 61 included in the nation, while at the same time allowing the United States to appear as a nation that embraces a diverse, multicultural population. In light of these developments, the importance of recognizing the connection between whiteness and queerness, race and sexuality, when it comes to analyzing queer media representations becomes a crucial task.

Moreover, I argue that this normative discourse of queer visibility has been in the making for longer than either Duggan or Puar presume. While Puar locates the shift towards homonationalism after 9/11, and Duggan mostly discusses the 1990s when it comes to homonormativity, my analysis emphasizes the important recognition that the discourse of queer visibility, as it has developed since at least 1969, has contributed the stepping stones for the various screening processes that characterize the current state of queerness.

Indeed, by tracing out the ways in which whiteness has been a crucial factor in the facilitation of the so-called explosion of gay visibility in the 1990s, I tease out the moments that lay the groundwork of homonationalism which comes into full force during the post-2001 “war on terror.”

These insights about the various screening processes that influence the ways in which queerness manifests itself in society are crucial to a comprehensive mapping of the discourse of queer visibility. They once again underline that visibility is an unstable, contested category that is historically and culturally specific. Furthermore, as this brief discussion of the central role that whiteness plays in facilitating certain types of queer media representations during the 1990s shows, one of the most contested social sites in which queerness manifests itself is the media; indeed, it is film and television that have long had a decisive impact on how Americans understand queer identities. Consequently, 62 a diversification in analyzing the various ways in which queer visibility can manifest itself in film and on TV is an urgent project and much needed intervention in the screening of the closet. An analysis that demonstrates how denotative representations stand alongside connotative representations, even in the same film or TV show, that looks across genres, that takes both form and content into consideration—indeed, that undoes these very divisions—and that recognizes the crucial role that race plays in queer visibility produces a more thorough mapping of the discourse of queer visibility. This mode of analysis also makes it possible to link current and past modes of queer representations so as to underline that queerness has always existed in the midst of media representations. The following chapters undertake such an analysis and thus offer a new way of understanding and conceptualizing the relationship between visibility, sexuality, race, subjectivity, politics, and representation. CHAPTER 2

Towards the “Gay 90s:” Redefining Queer Visibility Through the Lens of AIDS

The dramatic increase in queer visibility did not begin with the gays-in-the military issue, of course, but with AIDS. For all our attempts to become visible in the years after Stonewall, nothing we were able to do for ourselves ensured our visibility so much as the horrible crisis that beset our communities in the early 1980s. It goes without saying that that visibility came at a terrible cost, the cost of hundreds of thousands ill, dying, and dead. But the cost is not only in lives but in the sort of visibility we achieved. (Crimp, Melancholia and Moralism, 278)

Douglas Crimp makes two important observations regarding queer visibility: one, that it surfaced most strongly in the American cultural imagination during the AIDS crisis, and, as is commonly thought, not after Stonewall or during the so-called “gay 90s;” and two, that the usual story about AIDS and the GLBT community, namely that it was a tragedy which ultimately managed to get (heterosexual) Americans to reconsider their attitudes towards GLBT concerns, needs to be interrogated. In many ways, the impact of

HIV/AIDS on queer identities, sexualities, and discourses forms the focal point of the thirty years I investigate in this dissertation. Reactions to AIDS within the gay community led to a radical reimagination of the type of “liberation” that the Stonewall riots initiated, on the one hand, and laid the foundation for the alleged “explosion of gay visibility” during the 1990s, on the other.

This chapter has three parts that deliberately overlap. The first part focuses on the language and images that emerges in press and TV reports about AIDS, rendering HIV

63 64

and AIDS visible in types and metaphors in the cultural imagination; the second part addresses activist responses to mainstream AIDS discourses; and the final part lays out how the disarticulation of gay identity and gay sexuality in light of the AIDS crisis was crucial for making the so-called “explosion of gay visibility” in the 1990s possible. The three sections cover similar ground from different angles in order to underline the complex intersections of queer visibility and AIDS and to show how profoundly ideas of queer identities and sexuality changed throughout the 1980s. Cindy Patton explains this type of exploration best when she says, “Here, in the landscape of the HIV epidemic, we will discover vast tracks of barren land, territories whose existence remains unspoken, perhaps even—for the time being—unspeakable” (Inventing AIDS, 3). Patton's vivid invocation of the co-existence of speech and silence and of chartered and unchartered territories underlines the significance of discourse (in its most literal definition as speech and in its more abstract meaning of media images, cultural protocols, regulatory mechanisms) and of geography (especially in regard to AIDS in the 1980s, the urban landscape of Manhattan) in understanding queer visibility within the framework of AIDS.

The weighing of speech against silence, of visibility against invisibility, of “being out” against “staying in the closet” are deliberations that are always central to queer identities but that come into sharp relief in ACT UP's (Aids Coalition to Unleash Power) protests.

Likewise, the struggle over geography, over the often indeterminate line of public and private, is central to the re-zoning of queer visibility during the AIDS crisis, and plays out most visibly in the debate over the closing of gay bathhouses and bars in Manhattan.

Choosing three overlapping angles from which to examine the AIDS crisis is also 65 a deliberate move against constructing one chronological narrative about AIDS. There is not one story about queer visibility and AIDS, but many; these stories start and stop, intersect and contradict one another. My intention is to provide an overview of how queer visibility was redefined during the 1980s, ultimately leading to the particular construction of queer visibility during the “gay '90s” but this overview necessarily remains partial

(both in terms of scope and focus).

Rendering AIDS Visible

The intersections of HIV/AIDS, non-normative sexualities, and visibility involve complex phenomena fraught with explanations projected in hindsight upon clusters of events and people. The competing narratives surrounding the first diagnosis of AIDS in the United States are a good example of this pattern. For example, even the seemingly objective assessment that doctors first diagnosed what would be called AIDS in a group of urban gay men in 1981 already represents a decision to privilege, or render visible, certain circumstances over others. Among the circumstances that fell to wayside as that historical narrative solidified are the fact that these men were diagnosed with medical conditions that only later on were brought into association with the label “AIDS”; that similar conditions were observed in IV drug users in the 1970s, but not recognized as indications of a potentially new virus; and that the identification of “gay men” as those affected by these medical conditions was based on a growing recognition of something called a “gay community,” a recognition that is an outcome of the gay liberation and gay rights movements of the 1970s. Thus, the by now familiar assessment that urban gay men 66 were the first to be diagnosed with AIDS is already based on a number of abstractions and on a narrative imposed on divergent circumstances. This narrative emerged in press accounts in the early 1980s and still circulates today as a short-hand “origin story” of

AIDS in America.16 The accompanying counter-narrative, mounted by AIDS activists, that explained how the initial diagnosis of AIDS only in gay men led to homophobia apparent in, for example, the preliminary designation of this new virus as “GRID” (Gay-

Related Immunodeficiency) and in the speculation that the “gay lifestyle” had brought this virus into existence is also based on a retroactively constructed narrative. While the activist narrative highlights how longstanding cultural associations among non-normative sexualities, deviance, and disease shaped the initial assessment of what would be called

HIV/AIDS, it also relies on the understanding that gay men were the first to be affected by the virus.

Instead of considering these two narratives—the one emerging in the mainstream press and the one popularized by activists—as competing for degrees of accuracy, and instead of considering the initial perception of AIDS as “gay disease” as a homophobic misinterpretation of “facts” (namely, that gay men were the first to be diagnosed), it is more productive to see this “early” history of AIDS, as well as its subsequent development, as intersection of various discourses. In this case, the perception that gay men constituted a specific group that doctors generally considered to be “healthy” made it possible to recognize that a repetition of unusual infectious diseases in these men was forming a pattern, rather than being merely a strange circumstance based on already

16 See, for example, “Hysterical Blindness.” Advocate, Issue 983 (October 4th, 2007), 64; “The State of AIDS, 25 Years After the First, Quiet Mentions.” The New York Times (June 5, 2006). 67 compromised health, as with the cases on “junkie pneumonia” in IV-drug users (Patton,

Inventing AIDS, 27). What emerges most strongly from this example is the overlaps between “cultural ideas” about gay men and about drug users, on the one hand, and

“medical facts” about diseases and public health on the other. These overlaps are then put into sharper focus via established regimes of “seeing” in the sciences and the media, both of which are institutions occupied by the pursuit of discovering—or at least narrating— the “truth.” In other words, “AIDS” is not simply a medical or public health crisis that is also a cultural or epistemological crisis, but it is always a medical and an epistemological crisis to the point that the two are too entwined to separate. Recognizing that it is impossible to separate the “medical” or “scientific” from the “cultural” dimensions of

AIDS, Douglas Crimp observes:

[This recognition] shatters the myth so central to liberal views of the

epidemic: that there are, on the one hand, the scientific facts about AIDS,

and, on the other hand, ignorance or misrepresentation of those facts

standing in the way of rational response . . . AIDS does not exist apart

from the practices that conceptualize it, represent it, and respond to it. We

know AIDS only in and through those practices. (“Cultural Analysis,

Cultural Activism,” 28)

Consequently, an assessment of the ways in which AIDS relates to non-normative sexualities and identifications and to visibility must thus not merely involve a cataloging of how homophobic media representations and political debates acerbated the AIDS crisis and skewed ideas circulating about gay men in particular (even if such associations can 68 and should be noted); it also necessitates charting the ways in which already existing notions of queer visibility and non-normative sexualities were reexamined and redefined through the lens of AIDS.

One way in which older notions of queer visibility served as basis for narrating the emerging story about AIDS and gay men was the media’s employment of a set of terms that seem objective, even based on “scientific” insights, but that perpetuated ideas that linked sexual deviancy and disease. A 1981 New York Times article addressing the unusually high occurrence of Kaposi's Sarcoma in gay men (an occurrence that becomes part of the “origin story” of AIDS in the U.S.) goes to great lengths to suggest that

“deviant” sexual practices consisting of “multiple and frequent sexual encounters with different partners” led to a weakened immune system which then allowed for the manifestation of Kaposi's Sarcoma (Altman, “Rare Cancer,” A20). As this example shows, the terminology frequently repeated in media reports addressing the “facts” about

HIV and AIDS contains more than the ability to describe a new virus and a new disease.

Rather, it sets up a connection between non-normative sexual practices and the spread of

HIV that becomes a staple in the discussion and representation of AIDS (and eventually becomes a crucial component in paving the way for the “explosion” of “gay visibility” in the 1990s).

This correlation also leads to the imaginary divide between a “general population” of white heterosexual Americans who remain mostly unaffected by AIDS and a number of “risk groups” that includes those who are most at risk of simultaneously being affected by AIDS and of “spreading” HIV to the “general population.” Thus, while the term 69

“general population” seems to imply “every American,” it is actually employed in media and political discourse as designation for an imaginary group of heterosexual Americans whose normative sexual practices have kept HIV infections at bay—unless, that is, they are unknowingly infected by members of “risk groups,” i.e. those associated with non- normative “life styles” or sexual practices.17 The standard repertoire of cited risk groups are gay men, bisexuals, drug users, and, in the early 1980s, Haitians.18 The opposition of a “general population” to “risk groups” furthermore suggests—falsely, of course—that one group engages in fundamentally different sexual practices than others and that HIV infection can be contained (or spread) on the basis of assumed membership in either a

“risk group” or the “general population.” This notion of containment becomes so entrenched that, even as late as 1989, an editorialist in the New York Times can suggest that “[t]he AIDS virus can be heterosexually transmitted to the regular partners of bisexual men and addicts, but is generally not spreading beyond these groups” (“Why

Make AIDS Worse Than It Is,” A22).

The idea of “risk groups” in the context of AIDS has served to marginalize further, yet also to bring under greater scrutiny, groups of people already perceived to be outside of the imaginary “general population,” and not, as the discourse of epidemiology

17 For more on how the dichotomy of “general population” vs “risk groups” shapes AIDS discourse, see Patton, Inventing AIDS, 103f; Watney, “The Spectacle of AIDS,” 73. For an excellent discussion of the moralist underpinning of seemingly neutral key phrases in mainstream media coverage of HIV/AIDS, see Jan Zita Grover, “AIDS: Keywords.” 18 Consider the following examples: “It first seemed that the new and often deadly disease called AIDS was limited to a few groups—homosexual men, intravenous drug users, Haitians, and hemophiliacs and others who receive blood transfusions” (Biddle and Slade, “A Wider Risk of AIDS Feared,” 1983); “Most cases have involved male homosexuals, intravenous drug users and people from Haiti” (Altman, “Research Traces AIDS in 6 of 7 Female Partners,” 1983); “At present, the established risk groups are homosexuals, intravenous drug users, hemophiliacs, and Haitians” (Altman, “Heterosexuals and AIDS,” C1, 1985); “Those at risk include homosexual and bisexual males; intravenous drug users; those from foreign countries where AIDS is believed to be endemic” (Collins, “AIDS Cases and Risk Groups” B4, 1985). 70 suggests, to contact and inform these groups about transmission and infection (a course of action that would involve safe sex education, which at least the federal government was not ready to endorse for a long time, Grover 28). Several articles in independent gay magazines such as Christopher Street discuss precisely this marginalization as early as

1981, urging gay men to resist the imbrication of morality and science. For example,

Lawrence Mass urges, “it's probably that some STD's that may be related to the current epidemic are being spread at the baths, but not because of the baths per se”

(“Understanding the Epidemic,” 25, emphasis not mine). Of course it is precisely the bathhouses that come under attack as points of origin for the spread of AIDS (for more articles that discuss the alignment of disease and deviancy, see Mass, “Cancer Signs” and

Lancaster, “What AIDS is Doing to Us”).

Within this context, a statement such as Undersecretary of Education Gary Bauer's explanation for why President Reagan had not yet publicly addressed the AIDS crisis in

1985—namely, “It [the “AIDS virus”] hadn't spread into the general population yet”— takes on an even more sinister meaning (qtd. in Grover, 23). More than a homophobic dismissal of the significance of AIDS this comment reinforces the idea that the “general population” of presumably heterosexual Americans is unaffected by, and perhaps even safe from, AIDS, and that the government's primary responsibility is to said “general population,” rather than to an insignificant “risk group” whose lifestyle exposed them to infection. As Leo Bersani so succinctly observes, “The 'general public' is at once an ideological construction and a moral prescription” (“Is the Rectum a Grave?”, 203).

Moreover, according those who engage in a “deviant lifestyle” the status of a risk group 71 justifies scrutiny of said lifestyle—rendering visible what had previously not been widely accessible (such as the bathhouse culture and associated sexual practices) or deeming presumably “private” matters to be of “public” interest and concern. Perhaps the most incisive example that comes to mind is the 1985 Bowers vs Hardwick decision, in which the Supreme Court upheld states' right to regulate consensual sex between adults via contested sodomy laws, but the debate about mandatory HIV testing also falls into this category (I will discuss Bowers vs Hardwick and state regulation of sexuality and privacy in more depth in Chapter 4). This is one of many instances that serves as reminder of how a greater degree of visibility does not automatically translate into libratory potential but rather may allow for more intensive regulation (which then can be dismantled and resisted, as the activism of ACT UP shows).

In laying out the underpinnings of some of the terms that shape the way in which

AIDS has been rendered visible, I have relied in part on scientific “facts” about HIV and

AIDS, but, as previously mentioned, it is important to keep in mind that medical science is not a bedrock of truth upon which one might construct a “neutral” or “correct” discourse of AIDS. Perhaps more so than for other viral diseases, the specific discourse of

AIDS is full of uncertainties and struggles regarding the scientific meaning of HIV and

AIDS. As Lee Edelman summarizes:

'AIDS', in the first place, and on the most literal level, lacks a coherent

medical referent, remaining a signifier in search of the determinate

condition or conditions it would signify. A diagnostic term describing the

state in which the immune system—compromised, it is currently thought, 72

through the HIV infection—can no longer ward off officially designated

opportunistic diseases. (“The Mirror and the Tank,” 94)

In other words, the definition of AIDS is so precarious that, for example, in 1991, the

Boston Globe reported on the possibility of the CDC (Center for Disease Control) adopting a new, 14-page definition of AIDS. Yet, despite the complexity to which this struggle for a coherent definition points, much simpler definitions of AIDS remain dominant in the popular cultural imagination. In other words, the relationship between the signifier “AIDS” and the signified medical condition it supposedly describes is rendered intelligible only through a suppression of the possible multiple medical manifestations of

“AIDS” and the replacement of multiple meanings by one definition. Thus, “AIDS” is an abstracted designation for an array of meanings that are all largely unstable. Even on the level of science and medicine, AIDS is consequently part of a discourse of contested visibilities in which certain significations are privileged over others.

This privileging of a particular “scientific” meaning of AIDS was cemented through the establishment of narrative patterns in media reports about AIDS. These reports created “reliable” visual representations for the varying cluster of symptoms grouped under the label “AIDS.” Paula Treichler observes that, even as early as 1984, when the documentary AIDS: Chapter One appeared on television, representational shorthands were already in place to convey easily accessible meanings to viewers; among those shorthands, Treichler names “viral images enhanced and magnified, background music that telegraphs significance, the AIDS crisis presented as a 'puzzle' being solved by an interdisciplinary detective team, laboratory footage shot and edited to simulate key 73 moments in the chronology of AIDS (Robert Gallo phones the CD), interviews with participants, schematic drawings of the immune system” (“Seduced and Terrorized,”

130). Familiar through frequent repetition, viewers might not question which images are paired with which statements, Treichler argues (ibid). The linear narrative of discovery, identification, and explanation of HIV/AIDS also obscures the decisions and disagreements within the medical and scientific community that shaped the emergence of the terms “HIV,” “AIDS,” and the definitions thereof.19

In addition to stabilizing the scientific meaning of AIDS via a set of visual shorthands, television contributed significantly to shaping what Douglas Crimp has called the genre of “portraits of PWA” (People With AIDS). Conceived as response to a call for a more “human” portrayal of AIDS, i.e. one that shows “the people” behind the medical

“facts” of HIV and AIDS, these images pictured AIDS patients clearly marked physically by the disease. Rather than producing a sense of shared “humanity,” the repetition of a specific set of images used to portray PWA as alone and visibly sick ultimately served to set them apart from the (heterosexual, HIV-negative) “general population,” which was expected to react with sympathy at best, loathing at worst (Crimp, “Portraits of People with AIDS,” 88; 90). Exceptions to this portrayal were the “innocent victims” of AIDS, i.e. those who were infected by a partner or by a blood transfusion. Children, not surprisingly, rank high among the list of innocent “victims.” As Crimp observes, “They are so innocent that they can even be shown being comforted, hugged, and played with”

(“Portraits of People with AIDS,” 90).

19 See Treichler, p. 160f. For a more in-depth analysis of the scientific construction of AIDS, see also Epstein, Steven. Impure Science: AIDS, Activism, and the Politics of Knowledge. University of California Press, 1996. 74

One common feature in all portrayals—no matter if they deal with the “guilty” or

“innocent” PWA—is the representation of HIV and AIDS as a private matter, thus obscuring the public health dimension of HIV and AIDS, specifically the government's inaction in terms of funding and education (“Portraits of People with AIDS, 91).

Television's inability or refusal to address the public health dimensions of the AIDS crisis is not a surprise, of course. TV's familial address to an imagined heterosexual audience meshes most comfortably with human interest stories, and not with an indictment of government inaction (especially because such an indictment would also force a confrontation with how television narratives contribute to the construction and interpretation of categories such as “risk groups,” “general population,” etc). The declaration of AIDS as a private matter while simultaneously showing reports and documentaries about PWAs is contradictory, and once again shows the complex ways in which AIDS has been rendered visible.

The scientific representation of AIDS and the portrayal of PWA come together in what Simon Watney characterizes as the “spectacle” of AIDS. This spectacle consists of a

“diptych” of images, namely, on the one side, a microscopic or digital image of the HIV virus, and, on the other side, images of “AIDS victims” who are physically marked by

AIDS. The spectacle is put on display for an outside observer, i.e. someone who is presumed to be part of the “general population” and thus not directly affected by AIDS, but nevertheless “already 'knows all he needs to know' about homosexuality and AIDS,” as Watney puts it (78, emphasis not mine). Joining the two sides in one visual discourse stages a morality play whose principles characters are “the image of the miraculous 75 authority of clinical medicine and the faces and bodies of individuals who clearly disclose the stigmata of their guilt” (ibid). A remarkable example of this discourse of

AIDS as morality play is “The AIDS Conflict,” a 1985 Newsweek article that frames the appeal to develop a “rational” approach to AIDS that “will do justice to both the extremes of innocence and depravity” by contrasting the case of a seven-year old girl and a gay man who engages in sex with frequently changing partners (17).

It is this morality play that inspires and enrages AIDS activist groups to make media coverage one of their main targets. But these groups, most notably ACT UP, did not simply produce “counter-narratives.” Rather, in the form of direct action, pamphlets, graphics, and videos, they dismantled and reorganized the discourse of queer visibility within the framework of the AIDS crisis.

ACT UP

In accounts that chart the significance and impact of AIDS on the GLBT community, ACT UP often plays a central role. ACT UP's very visible style of activism, always with the intention to disrupt established patterns of thought and action, represents one instance in which the AIDS crisis forced the gay and lesbian community to come together and push back against the homophobia embedded in media, scientific, and government discourses of HIV/AIDS, or at least that is how the conventional story about

AIDS and ACT UP goes. While this is certainly one way to think about ACT UP's role in the AIDS crisis, I'm more interested in, on the one hand, how ACT UP tried to redefine what queer visibility can mean (and indeed, ACT UP is often credited in part with the 76 reclaiming of the term “queer” for political and academic purposes), and, on the other hand, how this particular type of activism fits into the discourse that leads up to the “gay

90s.” For example, for all its creativity and inventiveness, not all of ACT UP's actions were new and radical interventions that reshaped the discourse of queer visibility; rather, the group sometimes also relied on traditional models of identity politics. I discuss these contradictions in my analyses of ACT UP's most famous graphic, the “SILENCE =

DEATH” poster, and their action on the twentieth anniversary of the Stonewall riots. But before I move on to these two specific forms of protest, I want to provide a little more background about the formation of ACT UP and the kinds of activism in which the group engaged in the late 1980s.

On March 10, 1987, Larry Kramer, author of several plays and well-known AIDS activist, gave a speech on AIDS as part of a monthly series at the Gay and Lesbian

Community Center in New York. He criticized both the usual suspects—the Food and

Drug administration, the National Institutes of Health, New York's health care system (or rather, lack thereof)—and, perhaps unexpectedly, a gay organization dedicated to education and action around HIV/AIDS, the Gay Men's Health Crisis (GMHC). In his speech, Kramer took issue with GMHC for its too “corporate structure and service orientation,” which supposedly made it difficult to do aggressive political activism.

Kramer asked if the assembled wanted to start a new organization “devoted solely to political action” (Crimp and Rolston, 26). That, according to Douglas Crimp and Adam

Rolston, was the beginning moment of ACT UP, the “AIDS Coalition To Unleash

Power,” which defined itself as “a diverse, nonpartisan group united in anger and 77 committed to direct action to end the global AIDS epidemic” (this definition was frequently repeated at ACT UP meetings and reprinted on ACT UP posters). This is a powerful account, yet as with all origin stories, it is imprecise; for example, ACT UP's most famous logo, SILENCE = DEATH, had already been used publicly by the Silence =

Death collective for several months prior to the formation of ACT UP, indicating that

ACT UP did not initiate some of the designs with which the group is associated. But it is certainly a compelling narrative, especially because the image of the GLBT community rallying its forces to fight back against the backlash caused by AIDS fits so well into the patterns of gay historiography that, perhaps not incidentally, emerged around the same time.

The first six months of ACT UP activism were dedicated to getting treatment to people with HIV and AIDS: “the central issue was getting AIDS treatments out of the

NIH [National Institutes of Health] and FDA [Food and Drug Administration] and into the bodies of those who are HIV-infected” (Crimp and Rolston, 36). But ACT UP's engagement with AIDS was not limited to battling with public health institutions over drug trials and treatment options. Rather, the members of the group understood and engaged AIDS as both a crisis of health and of signification. As such, ACT UP tried to shift the terms of the debate, for example from mainstream press and politics' usage of the phrase “AIDS victims” to “People with AIDS,” or from “dying from AIDS” to “living with AIDS.” ACT UP used print, graphics, and video to create different images of the

AIDS crisis: images that reveal the construction of and the bias contained in mainstream representations instead of merely opposing them. Thus, through its protests, graphics, 78 texts, and videos, ACT UP insisted that it is not enough to be visible, but that this visibility should challenge the dominant discourses of AIDS. This approach differs significantly from, for example, the AIDS quilt that formed part of the 1992 March on

Washington. While this quilt is certainly hugely visible and significant in terms of demonstrating the loss of life and doing important memory work, it is not a strategy that fully challenges the signification of AIDS; rather, it reinforces the implications that PWA are ultimately all victims—the genre of PWA is thus once again upheld and reinforced.

ACT UP quickly became (in)famous for its direct action campaigns featuring in- your-face graphics and chants that attracted media attention. In March 1987, the group's first protest shut down Wall Street. Newsweek, among other major papers and magazines, took note, but dismissed ACT UP (which is not mentioned by name) as just “angry protesters” with outrageous demands (Clark and Gosnell, 24). In January 1988, ACT UP directly challenged the mainstream media portrayal of AIDS. In their “Don't Go to Bed with Cosmo” action, the group brought attention to the false information in an article published in Cosmopolitan magazine. Based on “expert opinions,” most notably the one of Robert E. Gould, a psychiatrist, the article purports that straight women are not at risk for AIDS, not even during sex without condoms. In response, the ACT UP women's committee organized an action at the New York offices of Cosmopolitan, handing out condoms and informational flyers that attack the skewed information in the article. When the national media got wind of the protest, ACT UP activists were denied access to telling their side of the story—sometimes literally, as they were not allowed to be part of the studio audience at the Phil Donahue Show on the day that Robert E. Gould was there as a 79 guest (Crimp and Rolston, 40). In reaction to being barred from the Phil Donahue Show,

ACT UP activists produced the documentary Doctors, Liars, and Women: AIDS Activists

Say No to Cosmo. It aired on GMHC's weekly public cable access show and also circulated at film festivals, campuses, and community centers (ibid). Crimp and Rolston argue that “the video not only presents a counterargument to Gould's lies . . . but also provides information on how to organize a demonstration and on the role of women in

AIDS activism, including the role of self-representation” (ibid). In its attempt to provide information about AIDS while at the same time functioning as an activist tool, Doctors,

Liars, and Women is typical of the videos produced by various ACT UP affinity groups.20

In other words, ACT UP videos often engaged with question of representation on multiple levels: they take apart mainstream media representations of AIDS and of ACT UP itself; they offer a different point of view of HIV/AIDS; and they function as documentaries and testimonials about the group's organizing efforts.

SILENCE = DEATH

A black poster featuring an inverted pink triangle and stark white letters proclaiming SILENCE = DEATH has become ACT UP's most persistent and recognizable legacy. The slogan SILENCE = DEATH exemplifies the ways in which

ACT UP rendered AIDS and its impact on the GLBT community visible: on the one hand, it is unflinchingly direct, but on other hand, it has more complexity and

20 ACT UP defined “affinity group” in the following way: “A tradition of Left organizing, affinity groups are small associations of people within activist movements whose mutual trust and shared interest allow them to function autonomously and secretly, arrive at quick decisions by consensus, protect one another at demonstrations, and participate as units in coordinated acts of civil disobedience” (Crimp and Rolston, 21). 80 contradictions than one might expect from a two-word phrase (or other brightly colored and concise messages that ACT UP used over the years).

In recalling their first encounter with this graphic, people frequently insist its meaning was “immediately apparent.” For example, Bill Olander, who later becomes the curator of Let the Record Show, an ACT UP installation in the window at the New

Museum for Contemporary Art in New York City, observes that “[f]or anyone conversant with this iconography, there was no question that this was a poster designed to provoke a heightened awareness of the AIDS crisis” (Crimp, “Cultural Analysis, Cultural

Activism,” 33). Cindy Patton emphasizes that “[i]t was war zone graffiti, produced as slick, powerful poster warning anyone in a position to understand that this was our war,” while also remembering that “When I first saw this poster I believed it said 'Science =

Death.' I had no doubt that this was what I read” (Inventing AIDS, 127). While perhaps instantly recognizable, the meaning of the graphic remains unstable, slippery, and even, in Patton's case, a candidate for misreading. Crimp and Rolston offer yet another perspective:

SILENCE = DEATH declares that silence about the oppression and

annihilation of gay people, then and now, must be broken as a matter of

our survival . . . . But it is not merely what SILENCE = DEATH says, but

also how it looks, that gives it particular force. The power of this equation

under the triangle is the compression of its connotation into a logo, a logo

so striking that you ultimately have to ask, if you don't already know,

'What does it mean?'” (14, emphasis not mine) 81

What strikes me as most significant about Crimp and Rolston's interpretation of the graphic is not its apparent alignment with previous calls for a politics of visibility (i.e. that becoming visible is a means to liberation from oppression), but their emphasis on the question of signification itself. In other words, the force behind SILENCE = DEATH does not lie exclusively or completely in what it appears to say, but in its ability to elicit questions about possible meanings and, by extension, about how we arrive at what we think this graphic means. Lee Edelman, Stuart Marshall, and Cindy Patton have offered incisive critiques of these processes. I want to explore Edelman's take on the slogan and

Marshall's thoughts on the imagery to further explore the complex array of meanings called forth by SILENCE = DEATH, and I use Patton's analysis of the slippage between

“silence” and “science” to discuss the discursive constraints within which the graphic operates.

In “The Mirror and the Tank,” Edelman argues that AIDS is always already bound up with homosexuality, and specifically, that the act of anal sex figures in the cultural imagination as the “origin” of AIDS (98). Going beyond a repudiation of the homophobia implicit in this imaginary causal chain, Edelman argues that what is at stake here is the anxiety of maintaining a specific subject position, namely that of the active white male heterosexual subject: “Subtended by the always excitable fantasy of threat to this subject's agency, the originary myth linking 'AIDS' to the 'addictive' passivity of the anus in intercourse is immobilized largely in order to affirm, and thereby to shore against his ruins, the white male heterosexual as uniquely autonomous in his moral agency”

(101). The projection of an active/passive, top/bottom binary onto gay sex allows a 82 defense of said subject position. Edelman goes on to argue that AIDS activism that insists on a specific form of politics—Edelman briefly refers to ACT UP's direct action tactics— and that sets itself up against a so-called “non-political” position, associated with the presumably “narcissistic” gay male lifestyle of the late 1970s, ends up duplicating the same active/passive split that brought about the homophobic origin story of AIDS against which AIDS activism fights (110). In other words, sentiments within the gay community that condemn certain sexual practices as “unsafe” and “irresponsible” in the age of AIDS ultimately reaffirm the logic that fuels the homophobic moral panic surrounding AIDS

(Crimp makes a similar point in “Portrait of People with AIDS”). Edelman's analysis of the larger ideological implications of AIDS rhetoric that marks itself as anti-homophobic while at the same time advocating a normalized gay sexuality is an extremely useful addition to similar analyses by Douglas Crimp and Patrick Moore. As I will elaborate later on, this insight is crucial to understanding how the AIDS crisis shapes the discourse of queer visibility in the 1990s.

However, while Edelman's basic analysis is helpful in its assessment of how

“oppositional” positions may still adhere to and are at risk of replicating larger ideological frameworks, his take on AIDS activism overgeneralizes the different positions and groups that make up the designation of “AIDS activism.” For example, ACT UP did not merely oppose general discourses of AIDS but tried to show their construction.

Additionally, and more importantly, ACT UP did not participate in the moralizing denouncement of a “narcissistic” lifestyle, as Edelman suggests.21 In fact, ACT UP

21 While Edelman never directly makes the connection between his criticism of “activism” and ACT UP in “The Mirror and the Tank,” the fact the he mentions ACT UP as the one example of direct-action politics makes one wonder if he isn't thinking of ACT UP all along. 83 meetings were known as cruising spots. Patrick Moore recalls, “[t]hey [the meetings] provided a forum for socializing and cruising. But the Monday night meetings also developed the culture of ACT UP itself, a culture that was inclusive but not intensely competitive, highly sexual, intelligent, and chaotic” (128). Moreover, those who have both participated in and written about ACT UP, such as Crimp and Moore, subscribe to a sex-positive position.

While Edelman is concerned with the implications of the slogan SILENCE =

DEATH, Stuart Marshall engages with the visual component of poster. In “The

Contemporary Political Use of Gay History: The Third Reich,” Stuart Marshall analyzes the history of the pink triangle, specifically in relation to the persecution of homosexuals during the Nazi regime when the pink triangle was used as the concentration camp badge to designate homosexual men. Marshall wonders why ACT UP and other gay rights groups adopted a symbol so clearly associated with, as he puts it, “the inconceivable and unspeakable possibility of annihilation” (68). He also briefly makes the important point that being visible and identifiable will not always be a productive or appropriate choice.

Referring back to an interview with a gay man who survived the Nazi regime precisely because he did not reveal his sexual identity, Marshall argues that silence was a survival strategy: “SILENCE = SURVIVAL” (70). Marshall doesn't explore this point further, but

I want to underline the importance of historical contextualization for the persistent call to come out in both radical and “assimilated” queer and gay politics—a call that does not always heed the specific circumstances of a queer person's life and times. The relationship between speech and silence, visibility and invisibility is much more complex 84 than the demands of the slogans “come out wherever you are” and “SILENCE =

DEATH” make them out to be.

Additionally, yet conversely to a moment in time when visibility is not an option, there are moments and groups of people for whom “invisibility” is not an option. In other words, the option of keeping one's sexuality private is not always available to everyone in this country, as Jasbir K. Puar demonstrates in her analysis of the situation of non-U.S. citizens in American detention facilities after the events of 9/11. Detainees and their families do not have access to the same kind of privacy that is afforded U.S. citizens—for them, keeping their intimate and familial lives “private” is not an available option (see

Terrorist Assemblages, 141-151, and my analysis in Chapter 4). The frequent calls to register or physically mark HIV-positive people in the late 1980s are another example of how voluntary “coming out” can turn into a privileged choice not available for everyone.

New York Times Columnist William F. Buckley demanded in 1986, “[e]veryone detected with AIDS should be tattooed in the upper forearm, to protect common needles users, and on the buttocks to prevent victimization of other homosexuals” (A27). If calls such as

Buckley's had turned into laws, the decision of whether or not to be visibly queer would have remained the privilege of those are HIV-negative. Buckley’s editorial furthermore underlines the centrality of language to constructing a causal connection between queerness and AIDS: in Buckley's imagination, AIDS spreads in and through “risk groups” such as drug users and gay men; infection with AIDS is a form of

“victimization;” and sex between men is reduced to anal sex, a sexual activity so dangerous that it requires a warning label. 85

Regarding the pink triangle, Marshall argues that AIDS activists used it “to produce a specific ideological effect,” namely recalling genocide at the hand of the state.

Yet the implied analogy makes Marshall uncomfortable because it is historically imprecise. He also objects to its usage because it obscures the various processes through which AIDS becomes a moralizing discourse that regulates queer desire by constructing differences between “guilty” and “innocent” PWAs. “We cannot understand this [process] if we focus on genocide metaphors,” Marshall observes (87). Moreover, he is concerned that the use of this symbol obscures differences among PWAs because it projects

“political cohesion” around a specific identity (i.e. that of gay men). These points are worthy of consideration, yet, like Edelman, Marshall fails to recognize that SILENCE =

DEATH does not signify one coherent or stable meaning. Specifically in this case, it is not the symbol of identity-driven politics, as Marshall presumes. From the beginning,

ACT UP was concerned with issues related to AIDS that went beyond advocating on behalf of one specific minority group (ACT UP's fight for clean needle exchange in New

York City is perhaps the best example). Indeed I would argue that ACT UP began to implement exactly the kind of representation that Marshall calls for, namely one that

“must be polysemic, multiple, and perhaps, when it speaks about difference, contradictory” (89).

It is these contradictory and polysemic meanings in SILENCE = DEATH that

Cindy Patton tries to unravel when she analyzes her own initial misreading of the slogan as “Science = Death.” She insists that this misreading is no mistake because both science and silence have been part of the construction and destruction of gay and lesbian 86 identities since “homosexuality” emerged as category of identification in the late 19th century: “once the closet, now media blackouts; once psychiatry, now internal medicine,”

Patton summarizes (Inventing AIDS, 127). Both “oblivion” (i.e. the initial willful ignorance of AIDS on the part of mainstream media and politics that amounts to an imposition of silence), and “diagnosis” (i.e. the interjection of medical science in the life of a HIV-positive person that renders silence impossible), are threats not only to PWA, but also to those perceived to be “at risk” of HIV infection (ibid). As such, both silence and speech are equally dangerous. While Patton grants that silence can be a privilege— the “safety of camouflage,” in her words—it can also mean complicity in the construction of homophobic discourses, particularly when it comes to assessments of AIDS (Inventing

AIDS, 129). Speaking out against these constructions is not always an act of rebellion, however. Rendering one's self into speech via the “new coercive technology of confession” embedded in the HIV antibody test ultimately also serves to uphold the disciplinary mechanisms of the state (via registration of HIV status, for example) and of the scientific pursuit of the “truth” about AIDS (Patton mentions that scientists elicited and relied upon PWA talking about their sexual practices to establish the cause(s) of

AIDS, Inventing AIDS, 130). Yet Patton seems to favor speech—speech that doesn't allow itself to be contained in either scientific protocols or in television's human interest stories, but rather draws attention to the ways in which PWA are variably rendered as non- existent, as sources of scientific information, as “risk groups,” or as sympathetic

“victims” while at the same time refusing to comply with these categorizations (131).

While SILENCE = DEATH evokes and invites a range of interpretations 87 regarding the meanings of silence and speech, and of visibility and invisibility, as well as their connection and possibilities for political organizing, other ACT UP actions and graphics did not leave as much room for multivalent interpretations. The slogans and graphics that ACT UP used for “Stonewall 20,” an action to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of the Stonewall riots, engage in what one might call a very “traditional” politics of visibility that emphasizes coming out as the central building block of gay identities. Aside from providing yet another affirmation of the Stonewall Riots as the originary moment of gay activism—“This year [1989] we celebrated the 20th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots, the opening volley in the formation of the gay liberation movement,” Crimp and Rolston observe in passing—a number of contradictions emerge around ACT UP's self-defined relationship to gay and lesbian history and to “coming out” as politically significant action (98). For example, Crimp and Rolston underline that as members of ACT UP, “we see ourselves both as direct heirs to the early radical tradition of gay liberation and as rejuvenators of the gay movement, which has in the intervening decades become an assimilationist civil rights lobby” (ibid). The assessments Crimp and

Rolston make here are imprecise. First of all, the tradition of direct action that ACT UP follows traces back, in part, to the media “zaps” staged by the GAA (Gay Activist

Alliance). The GAA is actually a group that split off from the GLF (Gay Liberation Front, i.e. the group founded after the Stonewall Riots) because they thought the GLF was too ineffective due to its lack of organizational structure. In engaging with the mainstream media on the basis of pointing out “inaccurate” representations of gays and lesbians, the

GAA pursued a less radical agenda than the GLF. Also, Crimp and Rolston's 88 condemnation of the “assimilationist civil rights lobby” is rather unproductive. The kind of activism undertaken by groups such as the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force is certainly not entirely useless, even if their lobbying targets and advocates mostly on behalf of the white middle class, and, interestingly enough, critics of ACT UP use the same strategy to undermine ACT UP's validity and radicalism: they observe that members of ACT UP are mostly white middle-class men.

What makes Crimp and Rolston's imprecise observations so interesting, however, is that they constitute an intervention in the narration of historical events in order to bolster their own position as heirs and current advocates of the gay liberation movement

—much like the GLF shaped the perception of the events at the Stonewall Inn to lend substance to the emerging gay liberation movement. In addition to aligning itself with the

“radical tradition” of gay liberation, ACT UP also produced a booklet about the history of political gay and lesbian activism, namely A His&Her Story of Queer Activism, thus further strengthening ACT UP’s position in the historical development of GLBT organizing since Stonewall (note the use of the term queer in the title of their history).

Stonewall 20

On the anniversary of the Stonewall Riots, June 29, 1989, ACT UP staged an alternative pride march to the official parade. Instead of following the traditional route from Central Park to Greenwich Village, ACT UP chose to make its way along the inverse path, i.e. from Greenwich Village to Central Park. The defiance of the parade route laid out by those who ACT UP perhaps perceived as the assimilationist faction of 89 the gay and lesbian community was grounded in yet another emphasis on not only reclaiming, but rendering visible, radical gay history: “One piece of history uncovered by that effort [i.e. the compilation of His&Her Story of Queer Activism] was the symbolism inherent in the route of gay pride marches. In the early 1970s, we had marched out of the gay ghetto, up Sixth Avenue, and into Central Park for a militant rally. We had no police permits; we simply took to the streets and proclaimed our right to be everywhere” (Crimp and Rolston, 100). Again, this interpretation of the early gay pride parades is contradicted by other interpretations. The Christopher Street Liberation Day Parade didn't take place without permits—the parade was officially permitted (see reproduction of the permit in

Becoming Visible: An Illustrated History of Lesbian and Gay life in Twentieth-Century

America, 16). Also, the declaration that “we simply took to the streets” suggests that the parade was a spontaneous event when it was the outcome of months of careful planning on both an organizational and symbolic level (as I discussed in Chapter 1). What is once again most interesting about this assertion is the way in which Crimp and Rolston's proclamation of “the right to be everywhere” speaks less to a historic precedent than to an important and consistent feature of ACT UP actions and to their politics of visibility, namely ACT UP's frequent take-overs of significant public spaces such as Grand Central

Station or Wall Street.

During the parade, ACT UP members wore T-shirts with the slogan “I am out therefore I am” on them. Perhaps the declaration “I am out” is a marker of the passage of time: it is no longer necessary to encourage oneself and others to “come out,” as the gay liberation movement's most famous slogan, “come out, come out, wherever you are,” did. 90

Rather, one simply is “out,” and this position defines who one “is.” The declaration of “I am out therefore I am” aligns with the idea of coming out as libratory act and with the interpretation of the failure to come out as betrayal, notions that solidified over the next few years. The perception of coming out as some sort of queer duty becomes most obvious during the waves of celebrity outings during the early 1990s, a practice that was initiated by ACT UP member Michael Signorelli in his column for OutWeek. In its insistence on coming out as key to the constitution of subjectivity, “I am out therefore I am” differs significantly from SILENCE = DEATH in its incitement to visibility. While the Stonewall 20 slogan figures coming out as an individual act, structured around personal experience, SILENCE = DEATH is a predominantly anonymous, collective action of raising attention to structures of power and discrimination. SILENCE = DEATH also emphasizes process—the process of speaking, of discourse—not a one time occasion of “coming out.” In both cases, however, a similar kind of hope of change is pinned onto a public declaration.

As part of their description and analysis of Stonewall 20, Douglas Crimp and

Adam Rolston (both former ACT UP members) explain the design process for the “I am out therefore I am” T-shirt. The T-shirt is another example of ACT UP's use of

“appropriation art,” i.e. the construction of a piece of art out of pre-existing images or artworks with the goal of abdicating claims to originality and artistic “genius” in an effort to underline that “the 'unique individual' is a fiction, that our very selves are socially and historically determined through preexisting images, discourses, and events” (Crimp and

Rolston, 18). The emphasis on a criticism of the “unique individual” is important in the 91 context of the “I am out therefore I am” T-shirt. As I elaborated above, the slogan centers on the act of self-creation through the act of coming out—not exactly a denial of unique individualism. Crimp and Rolston go on to observe:

For the 20th anniversary of Stonewall the statement [i.e. publicly

announcing one's sexual identity] was given a new graphic emblem, ACT

UP's T-shirt with an image appropriated from artist Barbara Kruger.

Rewriting Descartes’ cogito, Kruger took a swipe at consumer-determined

identity: I SHOP, THEREFORE I AM. Our graphic played a Foucauldian

twist on hers, turning the confession of sexual identity into a declaration of

sexual politics: I AM OUT, THEREFORE I AM. (102)

The idea of the “I am out therefore I am” T-shirt as an appropriation of an anti- consumerist artwork playing on Descartes already offers enough of a referential entanglement without the reference to Foucault, which appears without further elaboration. The specific way in which Crimp and Rolston draw on Foucault's theory of the confession is curious indeed as their interpretation does not correspond to the ways in which this passge in The History of Sexuality, Vol.1 is most frequently interpreted. After all, in Foucault's theory, the confession is not an admittance of sexual preferences (in the classic understanding of “coming out”), but rather the production of subjectivity via the construction of sexuality. In other words, according to Foucault, one does not reveal a previously existing understanding of oneself as gay or lesbian, but rather the quest for the

“truth” about oneself that is pursued during the confession leads to a formation of subjectivity in the moment of confessing, with the constitution of sexuality as a subject's 92 perceived innermost “truth.”

Considering that ACT UP's politics are often brought into connection with the emergence of queer theory—a body of theory that heavily draws on Foucault—this

(perhaps willful?) misreading of Foucault once again draws attention to the construction of narratives about events and ideas. Stonewall 20 tried to recapture the perceived radical spirit of the gay liberation movement with the goal of inspiring AIDS activists and perhaps also to remind one another of the vitality of the gay community, a reminder that seems crucial at a moment when both people and institutions are at risk of annihilation due to the AIDS crisis. Looking back at his interpretation of the “I am out therefore I am”

T-shirt and other ACT UP graphics, Douglas Crimp states, “The AIDS activist graphics I wrote about in AIDS Demographics, for example, were produced for specific demonstrations, were about local issues of the moment, and thus have no meaning today except as mementos, documents, or examples of the type of work that might be made for other times and places” (“De-Moralizing Representations of AIDS,” 264). I respectfully disagree with Crimp on the perceived lack of the usefulness of ACT UP graphics. In addition to inspiring current forms of activism, they also provide insights into how queer visibility was understood during the AIDS crisis and into which kinds of narratives emerged around this visibility.22 These insights are crucial to understanding how the discourse of queer visibility evolved and changed over the years.

The graphics and interpretations surrounding SILENCE = DEATH and Stonewall

20 show that while ACT UP attacked the predominant representations of gays and

22 For examples of current activism inspired by ACT UP, see From ACT UP to the WTO: Urban Protest and Community Building in the Era of Globalization., an anthology edited by Benjamin Shepard and Ronald Hayduk. 93 lesbians that were circulating in the media at the time, they nevertheless also enacted a politics structured around visibility, thus emphasizing and reaffirming the centrality of visibility to queer identities. The uneven meanings that emerge around SILENCE =

DEATH and Stonewall 20 lay a claim to visibility, but one in which visibility is not fixed, but rather adaptable to different circumstances. While the insistence to speak out remains, what will be said and to whom changes, especially over time. ACT UP was certainly successful in making its voice heard in many ways—in capturing the media's attention, in gaining a few political victories, and in securing a place in gay and lesbian history. But as

Crimp and Rolston ask, “Such success can ensure visibility, but visibility to whom?” (19).

It is such questions of visibility, for which audiences and under which protocols, that become crucial to understanding the transition between the “dark” times of AIDS in the

1980s and the “explosion of gay visibility” during the 1990s.

The “end” of AIDS via the normalization of AIDS

By the early 1990s, a decade after the first diagnoses of what would be called

AIDS, the AIDS crisis was no longer perceived as an emergency, but had transitioned into a “permanent disaster,” discussed as such in the same breath as drug abuse, homelessness, and poverty. This transition from emergency to chronic social problem represents the first way in which AIDS was “normalized;” it becomes part of a list of social issues that are too overwhelming to be resolved and can thus be ignored (Crimp,

“Right On, Girlfriend!,” 174).

At the same time, the film Philadelphia (Jonathan Demme, 1993), a major 94

Hollywood production with an A-list cast consisting of Tom Hanks and Denzel

Washington, emerged and turned the spotlight on the impact of the AIDS crisis. What may seem paradoxical at first sight—the AIDS crisis fading into the white noise of constant social problem while at the same time being rendered highly visible through a mainstream Hollywood film—are actually two phenomena that go hand-in-hand. The press lauded Philadelphia as daring and critical, as if this film was the first time that

“America” was confronted with the AIDS crisis. Such a portrayal denies an entire decade of media representations and AIDS activism that significantly contributed to the image of

AIDS presented in Philadelphia. In fact, this most “visible” encounter with AIDS, in which Hollywood, and by extension, “America” is now finally able to deal with AIDS, also ushers in the end of AIDS via a normalization of AIDS: now that a major movie studio has brought us a story about AIDS that elicits sympathy for its “victims,” and this story has been lauded by critics and “average” Americans alike, AIDS can be conveniently forgotten about (just as a similar moment, in which, arguably, the height of queer visibility ushers in forgetfulness occured with Brokeback Mountain in 2005).

Philadelphia is thus not a turning point in the representation of PWA, but the culminating moment of this genre, or at least of its more sympathetic dimensions.

Philadelphia rehearses all its characteristics: the sympathetic victim, the properly monogamous relationship, the supportive family, the justice of the law, the containable discrimination in the form of prejudiced employers, the address to the “general population” and so forth. By rendering AIDS a personal matter, one that plays out between straight, HIV-negative individuals who react either with sympathy or fear to the 95 person with AIDS, Philadelphia once again favors a personalized view of AIDS, similar to ways in which TV news and special reports have framed the AIDS crisis. Among the issues that are conveniently left out of the picture yet again are the structural and institutional forms of discrimination against PWA as well as the ways in which media representations are implicated in the production of exactly those anxieties brought towards PWA that Philadelphia criticizes. Moreover, queer sexualities and communities are merely backdrops in the film, thus marked as “unimportant” when compared to the

“real” issues of the film, namely the injustice of discrimination and the appeal to sympathy towards AIDS “victims.” As Douglas Crimp puts it, “And what [director

Jonathan] Demme seems thus to be saying is that you have to dispense with what makes a queer a queer in order to get anybody else to feel sorry he's going to die” (“De-

Moralizing Representations of AIDS,” 256). I would go one step further and argue that the denial of queer sexuality and culture is not only necessary to elicit sympathy, but to allow for this form of mainstream visibility in the first place. The disavowal of desire between the gay couple featured in Philadelphia is crucial to constructing a narrative that demands the recognition, sympathy, and tolerance of their partnership.

Philadelphia is exemplary of the way in which AIDS “disappears” via the mechanism of normalization. It also shows how the “end of AIDS” via the normalization of AIDS sets up the conditions for, and in fact enables, the explosion of gay visibility during the 1990s: the process of normalization allows an uncoupling of the immediate association of AIDS and gay sexuality via the assurances that “good,” white middle-class gays have “grown up” and become responsible citizens. As such, they no longer present a 96 danger to the status quo (or the “general population”).23

There are several interlocking ways in which this disarticulation has come about, and I want to look at each of them in some detail. As I mentioned, Philadelphia was the pinnacle of a genre—the genre of portraits of PWA—that had been constituting itself throughout the 1980s. During that time, network television and mainstream movie representations of gay men with AIDS revealed a lingering hesitancy to represent intimacy between queer characters and relegated queer sexualities to an “off-screen” realm. An Early Frost, a 1985 made-for-TV movie that outlines a family's reaction to discovering that their son is HIV-positive, is perhaps the most widely known stepping stone towards Philadelphia. Secondly, the discourse of safe sex also plays a major role in this disarticulation: it equates “safe” sex with sex that occurs within a monogamous relationship, that happens in private, and that doesn't include any “risky” practices.

Finally, and directly related to the push for a specific definition of “safe” sex, the mainstream media ran stories about changes in “gay lifestyle” throughout the 1980s that condemned the careless and “promiscuous” days of post-Stonewall cruising and dancing in the 1970s. These three discursive processes allow for the emergence of a normalized gay visibility that is celebrated in the 1990s and that, by projecting itself as “first” and only type of visibility there is, screens out other ways of representing queerness, at least in the mainstream press and on TV.

Disco, Drugs, and Dick

23 Conservative gay journalist Andrew Sullivan most famously articulated this point of view in his 1996 New York Times Magazine article “When Plagues End: Notes on the Twilight of an Epidemic.” 97

The alignment of safe sex and monogamy as popularized in many safe sex discourses can be traced back to the 1980s through articles in both the gay and mainstream press. For example, as early as 1983, the New York Times put forth a narrative that begins to separate “good” gays from “bad” gays and that lauds a change of attitudes towards casual and/or public sex. The article “Homosexuals Confront a

Changing Way of Life” includes numerous quotes by gay men, most of whom are professionals or business-owners, who cite AIDS as an impetus for shifting their romantic priorities away from casual sex to long-term partnerships. Some opposing voices find an outlet in the article as well, but these opinions are deemed to be “behind the times,” held by people incapable of changing their habits. The article features a quote by Alan R.

Kristal, a doctoral student in Public Health, who argues that “They [men who frequent bars and bathhouses] are trapped in adolescent masculinity . . . and lack the social skills of forming relationships” (Norman, A1). Statement by “experts,” such as the one by

Kristal and others working in the field of medicine and science, frame the opinions given by gay men, thus allowing the experts a “final word,” namely one that endorses relationships and dismisses casual sex. The article clearly declares sex that takes place in private and within an exclusive relationship as “safe” and sex that is anonymous and public as “risky” and as contributing to the “spread” of AIDS. This dichotomy is then projected onto a narrative of gay liberation that deems the post-Stonewall days of disco and cruising as adolescent mistakes that AIDS brought into sharp relief, allowing for the realization that “growing up” means letting go of these mistakes in order to achieve

“real” liberation: “Everyone wants the same things—a home, a job you don't hate too 98 much, and someone to share it with . . . We've begun our liberation, now let's liberate ourselves,” Harvey Fierstein says (ibid). The idea that such moralizing condemns a significant part of gay culture does not cross the “experts'” minds. As one doctor observes, “A lot of gay people think you can't extract the life style from being gay. I think you can have a gay identity without the risk factors”—the “risk factors” here being sexual behavior that escapes the norm, of course (ibid).

It is not only mainstream press outlets such as the New York Times that underwrites this new gay morality. Gay magazines, such as Christopher Street, also feature similar opinions. In a 1984 feature article on “Surviving AIDS,” Lanzaratta Philip explains, “My most rewarding moments are the one-on-one conversations when I can relate to specifically someone's words. The intensity becomes similar to the 'old days,' when dishing was disco, drugs, and dick, not life and death” (32-33). Philip's statement sets up an analogy between gay life in the time of AIDS, when intimacy that does not rely on sexual relationships becomes the most rewarding kind, and before AIDS, when life revolved around the shallower pursuits of gossip, going out, and getting laid. Even though Philip deems this new kind of intimacy as rewarding, a hint of wistful remembrance is also palpable in the statement. Despite any potential nostalgia, however, the article makes it clear that the days of “disco, drugs, and dick” are over. A similar sentiment characterizes a 1985 editorial by Douglas Sardownick in the Advocate.

Speaking on behalf of young gay men, Sardownick explains that an increasing number choose monogamy as the first line of defense against “the new dangers of illness” (8).

While he admits that his three-year relationship began out of necessity, he also underlines 99 that, as someone who came of age in the early 1980s, he “had no history of untamed promiscuity to fall nostalgically back on” and that, for this generation of gay men, cruising is not an ideal lifestyle (ibid). In other words, it is not only mainstream press outlets that foster an alignment of safe sex with monogamy (an alignment that depends on the condemnation of the supposedly misguided and hedonistic late 1970s), but it is also the gay press that participates in this reframing of what many previously considered the embodiment of gay liberation.

It is important to keep in mind that neither the condemnation nor the celebration of the days of “drugs and disco” offer the “true” story of gay life in the late 1970s; rather, both are frameworks for organizing and understanding queer sexualities. It is the differing implications of these narratives that are most important to understand: one allows for the construction of gay sexuality that actively resists heteronormative patterns (but is not without its alienating and destructive elements); the other favors carving out a niche within the constraints of heteronormativity (one that possibly allows for participation and eventual acceptance into the nation).

The fight over the closure of gay bathhouses in New York City in 1985 is the incident that most clearly illuminates how intersecting discourses of “general populations” versus “risk groups” and a condemnation of “promiscuity” produce a framework for the renegotiation of queer visibility under the banner of safe sex.

Specifically, the deployment of a rhetoric centered around “saving lives” and “protecting public health” lead to a restructuring of how queer visibility became manifest in and through physical spaces such as bathhouses, bars, movie theaters, and other commercial 100 venues that had allowed for public sex. While New York State Governor Cuomo, New

York City Mayor Koch, and State Health Commissioner Dr. David Axelrod initially concurred with AIDS activists that bathhouses provided a space where “risk groups” could be educated about AIDS, they radically changed their position in the fall of 1985.

Not so incidentally, the news coverage surrounding the death of Rock Hudson on October

2, 1985 drove home the point that if a previously beloved film star could turn out to be gay and dying from AIDS, “anyone” could be at risk.24 Defending the state's authorization to close bathhouses if they posed a risk to “public health,” Axelrod explained Governor

Cuomo's decision to the New York Times in the following way: “I think he was increasingly concerned about public-health considerations, particularly about the spouses of bisexual males who did not know of their husband's proclivities and what impact that would have on the ultimate birth of children” (qtd. in Purnick, “AIDS and the State,” B4).

The implications of Axelrod's statement are staggering: aside from the suggestions that the goal of heterosexual marriage is reproduction (making future children the group that most deserves to be protected from AIDS) and that women are the victims of their philandering husbands, the construction and defense of “public health” in the state's imagination clearly only involves those who fully comply with the demands of heteronormativity. The ultimate risk here is not a virus, but deviancy.

24 Moreover, Rock Hudson's death reinforced the impression that AIDS is a “gay disease.” For example, headlines such as Life Magazine's “No One is Safe” do not indicate the realization that HIV, as a virus, could affect anyone, but rather that it is impossible to tell who might be part of a “risk group” and thus expose the “general population” to HIV (Patton, Inventing AIDS, 101). Richard Meyer argues that the revelation of Rock Hudson as a gay man with AIDS caused a feeling of betrayal among many Americans— a betrayal of an image of safe, straight masculinity, as so frequently put forth by Hudson's publicity shots from the 1950s (278). The images publicized along with the revelation of Hudson's struggle with AIDS can no longer contain the queer air that surrounded his earlier photographs: through a collapse of a specific representation of PWA (as physically marked by disease) and homosexuality into a synonymous relationship, these pictures shore up panic instead of dispelling it. 101

Thus, the way Axelrod and other officials constructed safe sex discourse redrew moral boundaries around specific sexual behaviors. The “deviant” act that was implied but not discussed in the struggle over New York City's bathhouses is anal sex, which was once again imagined as exclusively queer practice. As I elaborated earlier in my discussion of SILENCE = DEATH, mainstream discourses reduce gay sexuality to the practice of anal sex; moreover, anal sex becomes the imaginary site where AIDS originates and from which it spreads. Once the awareness of so-called “heterosexual

AIDS” cases began to rise after 1983, it became important to uphold a neat separation of heterosexual and queer sex practices. An admission that heterosexuals might also engage in anal sex became problematic as it rendered the neat separation of straight and queer sexualities slippery and vague, which in turn would have shaken the foundation of mainstream AIDS discourses that crucially depended on ideas of “risk groups” (such as gay men) as distinct from the safe “general population” (i.e. heterosexuals). As Cindy

Patton observes, “anal sex in heterosexuals must be explained away as a form of birth control, as an uncivilized 'mistake' about where to put 'it,' or as a kinky pleasure engaged in only with 'prostitutes'” (Inventing AIDS, 118). With anal sex safely ensconced in the realm of queer sex, “true” heterosexuals (i.e. those who are imagined to refrain from non-normative sexual practices, from drugs, and from contact with “risk groups”), no longer had to concern themselves with its dangers. Jonathan Alter's assessment of how the press handles covering AIDS in 1985 illustrates both the reduction of gay sexuality to anal sex and the separation of heterosexual sex from that practice: “[w]hile much remains unknown about how the AIDS virus spreads, no description is really complete without 102 reference to breakage of the rectal lining through anal sex. That is probably how the vast majority of the cases have been transmitted so far—a fact that underlines the remoteness of the AIDS risk from most people's experience” (“Sins of Omission,” 25).

The full extent of what the mainstream media imagined under the “deviancy” contained in the lifestyle of certain gay men emerged in a New York Times article about the closure of The Mineshaft, a gay bar that was the first to be shut down after the announcement of new measures in the fight against AIDS in the fall of 1985. Relying on reports by city health officials, author Joyce Purnick described The Mineshaft as “dark place” featuring “the accoutrements of sadomasochism.” The article ends on a quote by

Mayor Koch who deems the health officials' report “tough stuff to read” but imagines that the activities at The Mineshaft “must be horrific, horrendous in its actuality to witness”

(“City Closes Bar,” B3). It is these “dark” bars, bathhouses, and movie theaters that have no place in the new, “enlightened” gay lifestyle that is in the process of emerging in the second half of the 1980s. But the regulation and redefinition of queer visibility via interventions in the actual geography of New York City's gay neighborhoods doesn't end with the fight over bathhouses. During the 1990s in particular, a series of interventions on behalf of the city reduced public and commercial spaces that had long been sites for cruising and alternative sexual cultures. From the enforcement of the city health code in

1995 (disallowing any type of sexual encounter in commercial spaces, whether “safe” or not), through gentrification of spaces such as the Hudson river piers, to the establishment of new zoning laws in the same year (severely restricting where adult businesses could operate), the “new” gay visibility is not only modeled by “out and proud” characters on 103

TV, but is also carved into the urban landscape of U.S. Cities such as New York (Warner's

“Zones of Privacy,” 79-82).

Towards the “Gay 90s”

Once “gay sex” had been isolated from “heterosexual sex” and had been rendered a private act taking place within a monogamous relationship, the media was able to disavow the existence of gay sex altogether: gays in the mainstream media don't have sex at all. Thus, where once the connection between queer identities, sexualities, and AIDS seemed inseparable, and one could not confront or represent one without the others, discussions surrounding a more “responsible” way of life coupled with a moralizing safe sex discourse allowed a disarticulation of the automatic association of gay sexuality and

AIDS. The proliferation of “positive” images of gays on TV and in film could only happen after the at least superficial disentanglement of the perceived causal intertwinement of AIDS and queer sexuality. The continued absence of gay (and lesbian) sexuality on network television in particular can thus be explained by this normalization as well: being confronted with gay sex serves as a reminder of the still-present threat that non-normative identifications and practices pose to the heteronormative structures of

American society. The specter of AIDS is only one component of this threat, but perhaps the one that has been most effectively suppressed.

Among other effects, the normalization of AIDS in conjunction with the

“explosion of gay visibility” in the 1990s brought about prominence for a handful of conservative gay journalists who shape and align themselves with a homonormative 104 discourse. This perspective on AIDS is even more insidious than the blatantly homophobic attitude that was put forth by the media and certain politicians in the 1980s because it is wrapped in “sensible” arguments (such as the one that aligns monogamy with the prevention of AIDS) and supported by a conversion narrative (gay men used to lead lives of promiscuity and drugs, but the AIDS crisis made them “grow up” and become responsible). This type of “reasonable” argument, underwritten by the evidence of experience (or at least the claims of some people's experiences) becomes difficult to undo. Moreover, it bolsters the idea of “good” gays versus “bad” gays. It is astonishing to see the same myth that first surrounded AIDS—namely that only people who subscribed to a certain “lifestyle” (read, gay and promiscuous) would be susceptible to AIDS, and that, consequently, heterosexuals were not at risk, reappear here—albeit in slightly altered ways. It's a shift from “innocent” PWA (heterosexuals and children) and “guilty” PWA

(drug users and gay men, who are by default considered promiscuous) to “good gays”

(those who are monogamous, white, and middle class and seemingly never have sex) and

“bad gays” (those who refuse to “grow up” and let go of their promiscuous ways). If, in the 1980s, the specter of AIDS haunted all non-heterosexual acts and identities, the normalization of AIDS successfully banished this specter for those who would conform to the new images put forth in the explosion of gay visibility. Considering the notion of a growing acceptance of gays and lesbians (evidenced by the “new” media visibility) and the general, post-Philadelphia understanding that AIDS “victims” deserve sympathy, charges of homophobia outside of the acceptable parameters of hate crimes or legally recognized patterns of discrimination seem nonsensical and irrational. 105

In light of this, historical narratives such as the following brief overview of the years 1970-1990 that Molly McGary and Fred Wasserman put forth in Becoming Visible:

An Illustrated History of Lesbian and Gay life in Twentieth-Century America paint a picture of the relationship between non-normative sexualities, AIDS, and visibility that is not only simplistic but, I would argue, reactionary:

In large measure the gay liberation movement of the 1970s had been predicated

on coming out and on a politics of visibility. In the 1980s, AIDS created a whole

new level of visibility for gay people in American society as discussions of

homosexuality necessarily spread in the media, the classroom, and the home.

Middle America finally had to acknowledge AIDS and homosexuality as its gay

sons came home to die. While the epidemic and this new visibility engendered a

backlash in some quarters, the gay and lesbian community's extraordinary

response to the health emergency and the courage of people with AIDS prompted

a greater acceptance of and respect for gay people. (240; emphasis mine)

McGrary and Wasserman's story of yet another minority group's triumph over adversity obscures that, rather than coming out once and then fighting for increasing degrees of visibility, the gay community comes out over and over again: first in the 1950s as

“victims” of psychological disorders, then in the 1960s-70s with Stonewall and gay liberation, then in the 1980s with AIDS, and finally, in the 1990s with appearances in TV and Hollywood movies and with more political battles surrounding issues like gays in the military, hate crimes, and gay marriage. Moreover, a recognition of the normalization of

AIDS—the ways in which certain aspects of the AIDS crisis needed to be “forgotten” in 106 order to allow for the proliferation of “out” gay and lesbian characters on TV and in movies—that paves the way for the “explosion” of gay visibility has no place in this progressive narrative.

It is narratives such as the one offered in Becoming Visible that underline the importance of resisting the morality tales told about the AIDS crisis and, perhaps more importantly, about what Patrick Moore calls the “backstage years” of 1969-1981. As he observes in the introduction to Beyond Shame: Reclaiming the Abandoned History of

Radical Gay Sexuality, “It is very difficult to see those backstage years. They lie in shadow, hidden behind the scrim, illuminated only dimly by the light of AIDS. All scrims become opaque when they are lit from only one side and we, the audience, sit in the present, viewing those years through the lens of tragedy” (Moore, 3). Moore's use of a media-based metaphor (the scrim as screen) to describe historiography is very telling, pointing towards the complicated ways in which queer identites, sexualities, and media visibilities intersect. Against the opaque screen that only allows the projection of a progressive, moralizing narrative that sees the late 1970s as period of drugs, disco, and sex that “responsible” gay men have fortunately left behind, thus enabling them to emerge into media and political representation, one needs to mount a story of simultaneity: a struggle between different ideas about queer identities and visibilities, about “assimilation” and “liberation,” about “normative” and “radical” sex—stories that cannot be reduced to one or the other. CHAPTER 3

Outside of Space and Time: Screening Queerness in Brokeback Mountain and Boys Don't

Cry

During the last ten years, movie critics, audience members, and academics have hailed Brokeback Mountain (Ang Lee, 2005) and Boys Don't Cry (Kimberly Pierce,

1999) as “breakthrough” films regarding their representation of GLBT issues. Continuing the narrative of the so-called explosion of gay visibility that began in the early 1990s, both films are deemed another step forward for including a greater degree of queer visibility in Hollywood cinema. It shouldn't come as a surprise, then, that both Brokeback

Mountain and Boys Don't Cry rely on the same screening processes that accompany other

“breakthrough” media texts of the 1990s and early 2000s: namely the reliance on whiteness as screening surface for projecting queerness and the simultaneous screening out of the significance of race and of those aspects of queer identities and sexualities that defy easy categorization. Specifically, genre and mise-en-scene facilitate a screening of queerness in Brokeback Mountain and Boys Don't Cry, as these produce screening processes that encapsulate and contain the films' diegeses in distant places and times.

Instead of bringing queerness closer to the spectator, these screening processes render the representations of queer desires and identities non-threatening to both the norms of

Hollywood cinema and of American society.

Brokeback Mountain translates Annie Proulx's short story of the same name into a

107 108

film about a love affair between two ranch hands, Jack Twist and Ennis del Mar. Their affair begins in 1963, when Jack and Ennis spend one summer herding sheep on

Brokeback Mountain, and continues for the next twenty years in brief return trips to the mountain that reunites their otherwise separate lives. Boys Don't Cry is also the result of adapting previously written material for the screen. But in this case, the film is not based on a fictional narrative, but rather on newspaper accounts, oral histories, and police transcripts of transgendered Brandon Teena's life and murder in rural Nebraska in 1993.

Director Kimberly Pierce translates these sources into a tragic cinematic love story that explores the last few weeks of Brandon's life and his short relationship with Lana Tisdel.

Both films locate their diegeses in spaces and times that seem remote from “us”--”out there” rather than nearby. In Brokeback Mountain, the romance between Ennis and Jack spans decades, all of which are firmly anchored in the past. This “pastness” goes beyond specific markers of historical time to incorporate broader discourses of cinematic historicity, including generic markers of genres past their heyday, such as the classic

Western and the mid-20th century melodrama. In an allusion to another popular genre, namely science fiction, the Nebraska landscape depicted in Boys Don't Cry takes on an almost alien quality: blurring lights speed along dark highways that lead nowhere.

Despite its origins in “true” events that can be tied to a specific time and place, the film portrays characters and places as untethered and without a sense of who they are and where their lives are headed. This is not the “heartland” that is frequently portrayed as

America's moral center. Projected onto this backdrop, both Brandon Teena's struggle with transgender identity and his eventual murder also appear far-away, a product of a remote 109 almost other-wordly homophobic culture.

Locating the diegeses of both films outside of a particular space and time softens the potential disruption evoked by the cinematic examination of queer identities. At the same time, the spaces invoked in both films, namely the American West and the Midwest, are spaces that are central to the American cultural imagination. The paradoxical ways in which the West and the Midwest become both familiar and distant spaces are thus key to how Brokeback Mountain and Boys Don't Cry tell stories about queer media visibility.

In other words, the screening of queerness in Brokeback Mountain and in Boys

Don't Cry oscillates between two poles: one the one hand, the films offer seemingly provoking representations of queer lives in the ideologically charged spaces of the West and the Midwest, and, on the other hand, they contain this provocation in remote times and places. In fact, I want to underline that the praise for the breakthrough qualities of these films precisely depends on their encapsulation of queerness in a time and place that is alien and remote, and, as such, ultimately unable to impact neither Hollywood film- making nor everyday life in significant ways.

Not Quite Breaking Through: Situating Brokeback Mountain and Boys Don't Cry in the

Discourse of Queer Visibility

In terms of reception, themes, and their place in the discourse of queer visibility,

Brokeback Mountain and Boys Don't Cry overlap in many ways: both films tell stories about queer lives and identities in remote rural areas, ending in the violent deaths of their protagonists, and both have been hailed as breakthrough GLBT films. I want to sketch 110 out these similarities in more detail before moving on to examine the significance of space and time in the films' diegeses, mises-en-scene and narratives in more detail.

At first sight, both films seem to defy the traditional norms of Hollywood cinema and the cultural discourses circulating about the regions in which these films take place.

The idea of telling a love story between two men in a big studio movie with stars in the leading roles, or of addressing the rejection of gender norms on the part of a young trans- man in a widely distributed independent film, may seem like a challenge to both

Hollywood cinema and the idea of the pastoral West and of the Midwest as core elements to imagining the nation. One might want to applaud the producers and directors of these films for these “firsts.” Many reviews certainly did. For example, Adam B. Vary observes in his review of Brokeback Mountain for the Advocate:

Never before has a gay-themed film been as written about, reviewed,

lauded, awarded, discussed, dissected, parodied, and hyped as Brokeback

Mountain, so it's easy to forget amid this din that the film is deeply

moving millions nationwide one theater and one screen at a time,

communities sitting together in the dark and emotionally connecting with

this story. (np)

Equally effusive praise for the way Brokeback Mountain unites Americans in appreciating the story of Jack and Ennis' romance appears in magazines of varying political affiliations. The New Republic's Stanley Kauffman remarks, “[t]they [Jack and

Ennis] are as truly in love as two people can be,” Richard Corliss of Time Magazine proclaims that “America is now experiencing the Brokeback breakthrough,” and Leah 111

Rozen of People observes that “[a] haunting love story about two Wyoming cowboys who carry on a furtive romance for decades, its delicate storytelling and perceptive performances make it one of the year's best films” (20; np). Even the National Catholic

Reporter's movie critic Joseph Cunnen deems that Brokeback Mountain demonstrates

“good taste” and concludes his review with the questions, “If one sees this love as less than profound, the question remains, how many movie examples of deep love are there to place against it? Were the lovers in those other films as innocent as they are here?” (17).

Across the board, reviewers for magazines and newspapers lauded Brokeback Mountain both for the way it handled the portrayal of two men in love and for how it managed to transcend that context to tell a universally appealing story. While the reviews of Boys

Don't Cry don't reach for the same sort of superlatives regularly used in response to

Brokeback Mountain, movie critics still consider the film outstanding. Dennis King of

Tulsa World remarks that the film “says something enduring about the achingly complex business of being human, fitting in and finding love and acceptance” (np). Similarly,

Carol Cling of the Las Vegas Review-Journal deems that the film “transcends its suspenseful, inside-the-crime elements to explore more complex attitudes and emotions, from the mysteries of sexual identity to the all-American conflict between individualism and conformity” (np). Overall, reviews for both films stress presumably universal or

“human” themes, such as the quest for love, acceptance, and finding one's place in society. At the same time, mainstream media critics underline that these are remarkable achievements for films that engage with characters and topics that they perceive to be distant from the imagined reader of these reviews. The reviews thus anchor the 112

“breakthrough” qualities of Brokeback Mountain and Boys Don't Cry in the successful combination of breaking new cinematic ground by telling a gay and transgendered love story, respectively, and of communicating familiar cinematic themes at the same time.

The critics' praise for the films' allegedly effortless blending of new and established themes and storylines already suggests that the “breakthrough” qualities of

Brokeback Mountain and Boys Don't Cry might not be quite as disruptive as the term

“breakthrough” suggests. More importantly, by declaring these films “breakthroughs” that portrayed certain lives and identities for the first time in mainstream cinema, a whole history of previous queer lives and identities is erased, both in on- and off-screen terms:

Jack and Ennis weren't the first “gay cowboys” in mainstream film history, and Brandon

Teena not the first trans person to appear on screen. As such, Brokeback Mountain and

Boys Don't Cry fulfill a similar role for gay male love and for transgender identities that

Philadelphia served for cinematic renditions of the AIDS crisis: becoming hailed as breakthroughs while drawing on long-established patterns of queer representation, most of them not exactly progressive or productive.In addition, declaring both “firsts” not only denies these histories, but also allows the depiction of male-male intimacy and of transgender identity in Brokeback Mountain and in Boys Don't Cry, respectively, to become blueprints for subsequent portrayals of those relationships and identifications within the confines of the redefined discourse of queer visibility that emerged during the

1990s. For example, Milk (Gus van Sant, 2008) and Transamerica (Duncan Trucker,

2005) are two widely distributed Hollywood films in the past few years that address

GLBT issues in the wake of Brokeback Mountain and Boys Don't Cry. Both films engage 113 time, space, race, and sexuality in similar ways to their predecessors. In its exploration of

Harvey Milk's work and life, Milk is another example of a film that contains and constrains gay male love in the past, namely the 1970s, limits it geographically (to San

Francisco, which is already known that as a “gay” city), and ends in the murder of the gay protagonist. Transamerica tells the story of MTF Bree's cross-country journey with her son, whose existence she wasn't aware of until the beginning of the film. The film stabilizes racial identities almost to the point of caricature in order to facilitate a (rather poor) exploration of gender identity; for example, the Native American Bree encounters on the road perfectly fits the stereotype of the “noble savage” who is one with the land and who imparts words of wisdom. The employment of space and time to screen race and queerness in Milk and Transamerica thus echoes similar patterns in Brokeback Mountain and Boys Don't Cry.

The contradictions that emerge around the assessment that Brokeback Mountain and Boys Don't Cry are the first films to address “gay cowboys” or trans identities are compounded by the praise for the alleged breakthrough qualities ascribed to Brokeback

Mountain and Boys Don't Cry. Both films have been lauded for their ability to tell stories about “universal love” and the temporal defiance of a homophobic culture, but neither of those themes don't actually break with heteronormative ideas about space and time.

Neither Brokeback Mountain nor Boys Don't Cry offer what Judith Halberstam calls a queer time and space:

'Queer time' is a term for those specific models of temporality that emerge

within postmodernism once one leaves the temporal frame of bourgeois 114

reproduction and and family, longevity, risk/safety, and inheritance. 'Queer

space' refers to the place-making practices within postmodernism in which

queer people engage and it also describes the new understandings of space

enabled by the production of queer counterpublics. (In a Queer Time and

Place, 6)

While Brokeback Mountain and Boys Don't Cry offer momentary possibilities of creating lives outside of normative ways of life, the “breakthrough” aspects of Brokeback

Mountain and Boys Don't Cry fold back into a framework of homonormativity and do not create spaces and times outside of it. For example, the portrayal of Ennis' choices throughout Brokeback Mountain's narrative might be read as the desire to escape the expected milestones of a heteronormative life (settling down, marriage, children), but most reviews, as well as Annie Proulx and the screenplay writers of Brokeback Mountain, read these choices as being motivated by internalized rural homophobia and the impossibility of Ennis choosing a domestic life with Jack on a ranch of their own (I will elaborate on Ennis' choices and other queer possibilities in Brokeback Mountain later on in this chapter).25 Thus extratextual discourses have worked to contain glimpses of queer times and spaces in the film by labeling Ennis' choices as passive response to an oppressive environment, rather than an active stance against the demands put upon him.

The uneven potrayal of queer lives and identities in Brokeback Mountain and

Boys Don't Cry also encompass a focus on violence and murder. Both films end on the violent death of one of the protagonists: in the case of Brokeback Mountain, Jack dies

25 Author Annie Proulx and screenplay writers Larry McMurty and Diana Ossata outline their interpretations of the primary characters in Brokeback Mountain in Brokeback Mountain: Story to Screenplay. 115 alone on the side of the road. The film strongly implies that his death is the result of a beating by homophobic community members. In Boys Don't Cry, Brandon is first raped and then shot for the transgression of gender lines. Paradoxically, Jack's and Brandon's murders are points of both initiation and inertia in relationship to Brokeback Mountain and Boys Don't Cry. On the one hand, it is very unlikely that either of these films would have been made if they didn't involve horrific crimes that are supposed to elicit sympathy

(with the victims) and condemnation (of the circumstances that led to these crimes) in the audience. On the other hand, the murders also effectively shut down the possibilities of the queer lives and loves that the movies suggest; thus, the violence also works as another strategy of containment. The exertion of violence against queer characters has a long tradition in Hollywood cinema, and it is quite surprising to find this theme in films that are deemed “progressive” by mainstream media reviews and by many audience members.

As suggested by my previous two observations regarding the breakthrough qualities and the significance of violence in relationship to Brokeback Mountain and Boys

Don't Cry, the full significance of how the discourse of queer visibility works in these films only emerges when one reads textual against and alongside extratextual discourses

(such as movie reviews, interviews with the directors, screenplay writers, and stars, audience reactions, and academic analyses). In most cases, extratextual discourses offer various ways of reading the films' plots and characters as well as insights about their significance to our current cultural moment. I have already mentioned how the frequent interpretation of Ennis' actions in Brokeback Mountain as inability to act on his feelings for Jack in conventionally romantic terms, rather than a deliberate refusal to act according 116 to heteronormative expectations, serves to obscure possible queerly disruptive moments in the film. Another example of how extratextual discourses serve to constrain the potential queerness expressed in these movies happens via the attempt to separate the actors from their characters and to inscribe the actors' sexual and gender identifications as

“real;” as such, Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger need to be unquestionably straight, and Hilary Swank needs to be unquestionably female.26

While all of the above overlaps are significant, the most important connection between Brokeback Mountain and Boys Don't Cry remains their temporal and spatial disclocation and the ensuing possibility of screening out of race and queerness. It is this connection between space, time, race, and queerness that I want to explore in the remainder of the chapter.

Screening the West in Brokeback Mountain

Brokeback Mountain's ability to evoke sympathetic identifications depends on the location of its protagonists and narrative in a remote space and time, specifically in

Wyoming during the 1960s and 1970s. This space—Wyoming in particular, and the West in general—is central to the American imagination. The West is always both a real and an imaginary space that has key significance for how America imagines itself as a nation: it is the space of Manifest Destiny and of the frontier. The construction of this idealized

West depends on screenings of race and queerness. For example, the image of the cowboy as symbol of a rugged, straight, and white masculinity obscures a history that

26 For an excellent analysis of how star images and characters of Brokeback Mountain relate to one another, see Jessica L.W. Carey's “Performing 'Lonesome Cowboy' and 'Jack Nasty': The Stars' Negotiation of Norms and Desires.” 117 encompasses queer relationships between men, many of which were not white. Recent scholarship has shown that idealized accounts of the settlement of the West suppress both the range of intimacies that characterized the lives of cowboys in the 19th century

(encompassing social, erotic, and sexual relationships), and the racial diversity among cowboys (Patterson, 109). Even the term “cowboy” has its origin in the Spanish word vaquero (lit. “cowman); the idea of cowboys traveled from Mexico to the United States and became progressively whiter the more it circulated in American culture (Perez, 78).

Hiram Perez summarizes the screening processes at work in the emergence of the

American cowboys in the following way:

The Anglo cowboy's homosexuality is critical to Westward expansion. His

sexuality is quietly sanctioned by the nation as is the racial violence he

executes against American Indians, as well as Mexican ranchers who

remained in Texas, and even Basque shepherders . . . . If the cowboy is

recuperated as a hero after his demise due to land privatization, it is

perhaps due to a need to recast his role (and consequently that of the

nation) in the violent settlement of the American West. (82)

The emergence of the cowboys as white hero—in other words, the very position he occupies in many Westerns—thus depends on a willful forgetting of the historical circumstances of Westward expansion. What remains is not only a whitewashed image of the cowboy, but what Mary Patt Brady has called “imperialist nostalgia:” a longing for an idealized past that is devoid of a history of racial conflict (24). Consequently, while the designation of Brokeback Mountain as a “gay cowboy” movie was frequently used 118 flippantly, a careful consideration of this moniker reveals much about the ways in which

Brokeback Mountain participates in and uses dominant cultural narratives about the

Western and the American West.

At first, the description of Jack and Ennis as “gay cowboys” seems to be at odds with the image of the cowboy created in the classic Western. The Western genre, especially the frontier Western, has significantly contributed to how Americans imagine the West and the cowboy (Anderson, 17). From the point of view of some critics, the appearance of openly acknowledged desire between cowboys reveals the homoeroticism of the Western genre as a whole. As Eric Patterson observes, “Brokeback Mountain addresses the erotic element in the Western movie genre directly, forcing straight viewers to be aware of the sexiness of the cowboy figure that forms an important dimension of his appeal but that they would prefer to deny” (116). Specifically, Patterson draws attention to the tight jeans and shirts Jack and Ennis wear, neither of which are nearly as stylized as the cowboys costumes of the classic Western, but they do their part to tie Jack's and

Ennis's cowboy looks into a discourse of desire. Patterson thus argues that the film forces audiences to engage with the previously suppressed homoeroticism of Westerns and cowboys. Maybe, maybe not. While Jack and Ennis are certainly eroticized figures in the film (not dissimilar from many leading men in contemporaneous Hollywood cinema), the way in which Jack and Ennis are hailed as the first gay cowboys qualifies Patterson's argument. Positing Brokeback Mountain as the first movie of its kind marks Jack and

Ennis as extraordinary and suggests a break with the past—with films in which gay cowboys allegedly had no place—instead of a continuation. Brokeback Mountain's status 119 as “breakthrough” obscures previous historical and cinematic moments, including previous queer cowboy movies such as Midnight Cowboy (John Schlesinger, 1969) and

Lonesome Cowboys (Andy Warhol, 1968) or the position of the cowboy as erotic figure in gay male culture. The designation of Brokeback Mountain as “the” gay cowboy movie privileges the denotative representation of queerness over connotative ones. Previous connotative moments of queerness between cowboys are obscured via the now denotative queerness of Jack and Ennis. This pattern appears in many of the media texts that are considered part of the “gay 90s.”

Upon closer inspection, it turns out that identifying Brokeback Mountain as the

“gay cowboy movie” is a misnomer on two levels. First of all, Jack and Ennis are neither cowboys nor gay. Throughout the film, they take up a diverse range of occupations, including shepherds, ranch hands, rodeo participants, and seasonal laborers, but they are not cowboys in the traditional sense, i.e. men working with cattle. Secondly, they do not self-identify as gay. In fact, Jack and Ennis do not identify or label their sexuality at all.

The only identification of their sexual preferences comes in form of a rejection: both of them state that they are “not queer” without an elaboration of what they “are.” The continuous identification of Jack and Ennis as “gay cowboys” in reviews of Brokeback

Mountain therefore projects a sexual identity onto the characters to which they never subscribe in the film. Yet the “gay cowboy” label has stuck: extratextual discourses thus settle the question of identification even though it remains open in the film itself as neither Jack nor Ennis embrace a “gay” (or any other particular) identity. Ron Becker explains this need to pin down definitively queer identifications in the following way: 120

“For what might be called post-closet TV, gay men who are not out—who fail to identify with the label waiting for them, who refuse to accept the straight world's tolerance, who expose the gaping hole in the post-civil-rights logic—are a real problem. To maintain confidence in the clarity between gay men and straight men, these closet cases must be helped out” (127). In other words, in the supposedly gay-friendly 1990s and beyond, engaging in same-sex desire without subscribing to a corresponding label confuses the idea that being out is both a safe choice and expected. While Becker uses this argument primarily to discuss TV characters whose sexual identification remains unclear and thus problematic because it cannot be definitively opposed to that of straight characters, I would extend this reading of the need to label and identify characters as an aspect of the broader discourse of queer visibility as it emerged during the 1990s. The case of Jack and

Ennis certainly fits this pattern.

A further exploration of the “gay cowboy” moniker reveals that it relates to historical narratives of the West in equally complex ways as it does to the Western. Even though Brokeback Mountain seems to challenge the usual narrative of the West by revealing that yes, “gay cowboys” did exist, thus apparently revising ideas about the

West, the film also participates in the same screening processes that have been crucial to the construction of the West as idealized space in the first place. In other words,

Brokeback Mountain engages in its own screening of race and queerness to facilitate a love story of two white ranch hands. As such, Brokeback Mountain's narrative of tragic love, and the celebration thereof in the film's reception, participates in and reflects another central dynamic that has characterized the discourse of queer visibility as it has 121 emerged in the early 1990s: it reveals one aspect of queer visibility and defines it as all that there has been and could be while obscuring other possibilities of rendering queerness visible. But, as is always the case in these screening processes, race and other forms of queerness cannot be completely screened from view: alternative visions of race and queerness appear at the edges of the frame, in fleeting moments that are deemed insignificant in both the narrative and in reviews, but that are actually crucial to the construction of Ennis and Jack's romance.

With the exception of the denotative, that is, textually rendered sexual desire between Jack and Ennis, Brokeback Mountain fits into and reflects the prominent cultural narrative of the West, especially in the early part of the film. The mise-en-scene evokes familiar views of pristine mountains and valleys: it places Jack and Ennis into an idealized, timeless Western landscape. As Martin Manalansan observes, “[l]iterally and figuratively, Ennis and Jack are away from it all, from the turmoil of everyday life

(including women, family, and colored people) and from the messiness of history” (98).

The Western landscape of Brokeback thus isn't merely a backdrop to the developing romance between Jack and Ennis, but is rather an integral part to how we understand their romance. Moreover, instead of disrupting prevailing ideas about or reimagining the West, the idea of “gay cowboys” unscreens only one element that didn't appear in standard narratives of the West. This denotative rendering of Jack and Ennis' desire for one another still relies on the screening of race as whiteness simultaneously functions as projection surface for a gay romance and as filtering device for racial otherness. Situating Jack and

Ennis in a Western landscape that always already includes screenings of race and 122 queerness is thus a crucial component and facilitator of constructing this “neoliberal story of gay love” (Manalansan, 100). Brokeback Mountain might tell a story about “gay cowboys,” but the screening of race remains firmly in place.

Brokeback Mountain participates in the same kind of whitewashing that characterizes both narratives of the West and of the Western, in which the lives of white people figure prominently while non-whites take up the roles of the enemy or of insignificant side-kicks.27 In Brokeback Mountain, this pattern continues as racial difference appears insignificant to Jack and Ennis' life and romance. First of all, it does not appear important that Jack and Ennis are white; as so often in Hollywood film, their whiteness is a given and does not require further elaboration. The only time we are aware of racial difference is during Jack's trips to Mexico, where he cruises Mexican men for anonymous sexual encounters. “Mexico” as a cultural space is summed up in visual shorthands: in a brief establishment shot, people in bright clothes dance in a street of clay houses, music blaring from off-screen; the only legible store sign reads “Licoreria.” Jack quickly ducks into a dark alley, where men lounge against house walls. Red light streaming from a window confirms what the men's poses suggest. Jack nods at the man with the lightest skin tone and they disappear into the dark together. This scene takes up all of two minutes in the film. Despite the brevity of the scene, it is clear that Mexico is coded as a deviant space: Jack travels to Mexico to fulfill sexual needs, not to discover romantic love. As Roy Gundman observes, “banishing unromantic promiscuity beyond national borders is pandering to viewers' middle-class mainstream mentality” (np). The

27 For an elaboration on how race shapes the Western, see Mark Cronlund Anderson's Cowboy Imperialism and Hollywood Film. 123 unscreening of race in this brief scene thus only functions to reaffirm the love between

Jack and Ennis as “real,” whereas Jack's sexual encounters in Mexico occur out of shameful desperation. Locating cruising and anonymous sex in Mexico also allows the

West to remain a “pure” space that fosters the kind of intimacy Jack and Ennis experienced during the first summer on Brokeback. The grandiose vistas of the mountain stand in sharp contrast to the night-time setting of the Mexican market (Manalansan, 99).

The “queerer” elements of gay relationships and sexual practices are thus tied to a racially deviant space and effectively banished from the larger story about Jack and

Ennis' lives. Ultimately, Jack's trips are only important as signifiers of the emotional struggles that Jack and Ennis face in their relationship with each other.

In a climactic scene towards the end of the film, these emotional struggles erupt in a confrontation between Jack and Ennis that is key to understanding how screenings of race and queerness converge with narratives of the West in order to elicit sympathetic identifications. It is 1978, fifteen years after that summer Jack and Ennis first spent together on Brokeback. They have returned there for yet another of their infrequent trips;

Ennis is now divorced and Jack's marriage exists in name only. Just before they leave to return to their lives, Jack once again expresses frustration over how long it will take until they can see each other again. The following conversation takes place between them as they stand in the shadow of Brokeback Mountain:

Ennis: “You got a better idea?”

Jack: “I did once.”

Ennis: “You did once. Well, have you been to Mexico, Jack Twist? Hmm? 124

'Cause I hear what they got in Mexico for boys like you.”

Jack: “Hell yes, I've been to Mexico. Is that a fucking problem?”

Ennis: “I'm telling you this one time, Jack fucking Twist, and I ain't foolin'. What I don't know, all them things that I don't know, I'd get you killed if I come to know them. I ain't jokin'.”

Jack: “Yo, try this one, and I'll say it just once.”

Ennis: “Go ahead.”

Jack: “Tell you what: we coulda had a good life together, real fucking good life. Had us a place of our own. But you didn't want it, Ennis! So what we got now is Brokeback mountain. Everything's build on that.

That's all we got, boy, fuckin' all. So I hope you know that if you don't ever know that rest.”

Ennis mumbles something incomprehensible.

Jack: “You count the damn few times we been together in nearly twenty years and you measure the short fucking leash you keep me on. Then you ask me about Mexico, and you tell me you kill me for needing something I don't hardly ever get. You have no idea how bad it gets. And I'm not you, I can't make it on a coupla high altitude fucks once or twice a year! You are too much for me, Ennis. I wish I knew how to quit you.”

Ennis, crying: “Why don't you? Why don't you just let me be, huh? It's

'cause of you, Jack, that I'm like this. I'm nothin', I'm nowhere.” 125

Jack and Ennis had several similar conversations over the course of the film, but none of them ends in such a harsh confrontation. It is apparent that Jack's revelation that he has been going to Mexico in search of sexual encounters fuels Ennis' anger. His statement about being aware of what Mexico offers to “boys like you” reaffirms Mexico as deviant space within the diegesis of Brokeback Mountain. His threat of violence against Jack underlines just how threatening this deviant space is: it intrudes into the relationship

Ennis has with Jack, the one built around Brokeback. It needs to be rejected, perhaps even excised from pristine space of the West.

Drawing on this and other arguments between Ennis and Jack, many reviews designate Jack as the character who embraces his love of and desire for Ennis more fully.

This frequently repeated interpretation of Jack as the one who is more accepting of his desire and love for Ennis is bolstered by a homonormative framework: Jack's suggestion of settling down on a farm together fits well into the trajectory of particular civil rights discourses (especially around gay marriage) that dominated the mainstream discussion of

GLBT identities at the time Brokeback Mountain was released. Ennis' rejection of Jack's suggestion is seen as sign of internalized homophobia on Ennis' part, backed up by information we receive about a traumatic event during Ennis' childhood, during which

Ennis is forced to look at the mutilated body of man who was rumored to share a ranch with another man. But what if we read Ennis' rejection of Jack's plan as refusal of both homo- and heteronormative domesticity, as, for example, Hiram Perez suggests? Perez argues that “Ennis' 'cowboy lifestyle' in this modern context—which incorporates but cannot be reduced to queer sexuality—is arguably the greater threat to heteronormativity 126 and the American way of life: migrant, exclusively homosocial, communal, anti- industrial” (79-80). From this perspective, Ennis emerges as a queer figure who resists normative temporalities, both in his marriage and in rejecting Jack's proposal to settle down together.28 He defends his choice to have a life marked by transient moments and jobs and the occasional trip to Brokeback with Jack.

It is in this transience that we can find a queer time and space in Halberstam's understanding. Interestingly, this queer time and space once again opens up via the possibilities of silence (similar to my arguments about silence in Chapters 1 and 2). In the lines of dialogue I quoted above, and indeed throughout most of the film, Ennis listens to

Jack far more frequently than he talks to him. Instead of considering Ennis' silence as inability to articulate his thoughts and feelings, we can also see it as a refusal to define himself. As Ennis implores Jack, “[w]hy don't you just let me be?”. But Jack, and the logic of the discourse of queer visibility, demand self-identification from him. The designation of the film as “gay cowboy movie” and critiques of Ennis as repressed figure

(because he can't embrace a “gay” identity in the way Jack does) deny other queer readings of his life and choices.

“Pastness:” Where Western and Melodrama Meet

The significance of space and place, and their accompanying screenings of race and queerness, to Brokeback Mountain's narrative and reception intersect with a range of temporalities, all of which signify differing levels of what I call “pastness.” Pastness

28 For a similar take on Ennis' rejection, see also Gundman and Colin Johnson, “Rural Space: Queer America's Final Frontier.” 127 indicates a certain state of being that encapsulates an undefined (i.e. timeless) belonging in the past. This pastness works in Brokeback Mountain in conjunction with a remote location in the West, and, of course, with the various screening processes of race and queerness, to facilitate a mostly sympathetic and celebratory engagement with the film.

Brokeback Mountain's narrative takes place roughly between 1960-1980.

Providing a fixed time frame within which the film's narrative happens is the most obvious marker of temporal distance: Jack and Ennis' lives take place in a time that is historically removed from the contemporary spectator of the early 2000s. But despite this precise marking of time, Jack and Ennis' lives also seem to be taking place outside of time—historical milestones of the decades during which Brokeback Mountain takes place, for example the Vietnam war or the Civil Rights Movement, don't touch Jack and

Ennis' lives. This sense of their lives taking place outside of time underlines and works in conjunction with the spatial distance between “us” (the audience) and “them” (Jack and

Ennis): their lives unfold in such a remote place that even events of allegedly nationwide importance don't reach them or touch their lives. This particular conjunction of being outside of historically grounded time and space then facilitates the recognition of Jack and Ennis' story as one of “universal” love, an identification that also heavily depends on whiteness (as the discourse of whiteness represents whiteness as unremarkable racial categorization which then allows it to function as projection surface for the struggle surrounding sexual identities).

However, I want to argue that the most significant tool for creating distance, namely the one that facilitates the sympathetic identification with Jack and Ennis, doesn't 128 take place through the anchoring of the plot in a distant time and place, but via

“pastness.” This pastness envelops Brokeback Mountain in two ways: First, the film involves a transgeneric mix of Western and melodrama, two genres that, despite the occasional revival, are perceived as unpopular and are strongly associated with classical

Hollywood cinema. In the words of Time's movie reviewers, Brokeback Mountain is “a gay western art film—a triple whammy of unfashionable genres” (Corliss et al).

Secondly, Brokeback Mountain's narrative itself emphasizes Jack and Ennis as being stuck in the past.

In terms of genre, labeling Brokeback Mountain as the “gay cowboy movie” is a misnomer: Brokeback Mountain is not a Western in the classic sense; rather, it is a transgeneric film that meshes together conventions from the Western with that of the melodrama.29 Consequently, labeling Brokeback Mountain a “gay cowboy movie” does more than obscure that Jack and Ennis are neither (or necessarily) “gay” nor “cowboys” and that racial difference is neglected as playing a role in their lives. In addition to constraining a fluidity of sexual identifications through sexual labels (i.e. by labeling Jack and Ennis as “gay”), the use of textual labels (i.e. the “Western” label) also tries constrain the generic fluidity of the film itself. This is particularly important since it is the transgeneric quality of the film that is crucial to the screening of race and queerness apparent in the reception of Brokeback Mountain. While Jack and Ennis dress and talk like cowboys, and they move through a landscape that is identified with the figure of the

29 For a more elaborate explanation of Brokeback Mountain's transgeneric elements, see Chris Berry's “The Chinese Side of the Mountain,” in which he discusses the inclusion of Chinese melodrama and yaoi elements in the film, and Joshua Clover and Christopher Nealon's “Don't Ask, Don't Tell Me” for the containment the generic mix of Western and melodrama entails. 129 cowboy in the American cultural imagination, they also find themselves in situations more closely associated with the melodrama. In particular, Jack's and Ennis' conflicted domestic situations carry signifiers of the melodrama. Ultimately, it is Brokeback

Mountain's transgeneric mix that facilitates the screening of various possibilities of queerness in the film by rendering previously connotative queer moments in Westerns singularly visible via the romantic (and melodramatic) love story between Jack and

Ennis. These queer moments undergo a codification of sorts in which the homonormative model of domesticity as desired outcome of gay romance overshadows other queer possibilities (e.g. the possibilities that surface in Ennis' silence and apparent inaction in response to Jack's seemingly more active proclamations of commitment).

The pastness facilitated via transgeneric elements also allows an amalgam of several Wests to emerge. The beginning of the film shows us the pastoral wilderness that was created by writers and painters in the 19th century and that inspired the ideas of the frontier and the doctrine of Manifest Destiny; we also see images of the West as shaped specifically by the Western, putting forth a specific type of rugged white masculinity

(never entirely devoid of connotative queerness, however). As the film progresses, the mise-en-scene transforms into a West in which cowboys don't have a place anymore; a space of big farms, economic decline, and settled lives. Thus, through a combination of generic and narrative markers, the text itself encapsulates Jack and Ennis' romance in the pastness of one summer, in a space—Brokeback mountain—that once was but can never exist again and only lives on in nostalgic memory. The relationship Jack and Ennis have during the summer on the mountain thus serves simultaneously as an anchor of their lives 130 and as something that has irrevocably been lost, just like the pastoral West that provided the backdrop of that summer.

Inside of Space and Time: Jack, Ennis, and the “Down Low”

While genre, diegesis, and narrative work hard to imprint a sense of pastness onto

Brokeback Mountain, broadening the focus beyond the film's text and its immediate reception context offers a way of understanding how Brokeback Mountain speaks directly to current debates about race, sexuality, and queerness. As I explained in the previous sections, the screening of race in Brokeback Mountain's mise-en-scene and in its diegesis underlines the importance of whiteness to constructing particular forms of queer visibility and challenges the “progressive” message most reviews found in Brokeback Mountain as the tragic love story of two “gay cowboys.” The implications of and answers to the question, “what if Jack and Ennis were black?” brings the importance of whiteness to the sympathetic reception of Brokeback Mountain (and to the film's importance to the discourse of queer visibility) into even starker relief. In “Why I hate that I loved

Brokeback Mountain,” Dwight McBride asks precisely that question and argues that

“[t]wo African American men could not possibly have been viewed as representing universal gay male experience in the way that the whiteness of the characters in

Brokeback Mountain can and does” (96). In other words, the whiteness of Jack and Ennis is key to the presumed universalism of Brokeback Mountain's “message” (which most critics identified as being about love and as communicating Jack and Ennis' struggles in ways to which “we” can easily relate). Furthermore, McBride underlines that Jack and 131

Ennis fulfill a “sense-making norm” of gay identity that goes beyond whiteness and includes a masculine and non-queer appearance and demeanor, all of which come together to make them figures ready for sympathetic identification (97). Consequently,

Jack and Ennis fit into the parameters laid out for queer media visibility throughout the

1990s and beyond. Other similarly sympathetic figures include the media renditions of

Matthew Shepard and the portrayal of fictional characters such as Will&Grace's Will

Truman. But Jack and Ennis also fit into the trajectory of recent queer media visibilities in other, perhaps more unexpected, ways.

Specifically, the fact that they continuously cheat on their wives is often either overlooked or excused as by-product of a homophobic environment that doesn't allow

Jack and Ennis to be with the people they really want to be with, i.e. each other, and that imposes love-less marriages on them. Whiteness is again the crucial component in evoking sympathy and identification here. A contextualization of interpretations of Jack and Ennis' marital digressions in the media discourses surrounding black men on the so- called “down low” demonstrates most clearly just how significant whiteness is to the type of queer visibility embodied by Jack and Ennis.

In 2005, the year in which Brokeback Mountain was released, the debate about black men who have sex with other men without either identifying as “gay” or without openly acknowledging their queer desires had been going on for a few years. Key to this discussion is the argument that sexual practices on the “down low” significantly contribute to a rise in HIV infections within black communities. Martin Manalansan succinctly summarizes the contradictory arguments about the “down low” in the 132 following way: “Often they [black men on the “down low”] are seen to be vestiges of tradition, lagging behind in the march toward sexual and gender cosmopolitanism. At best, they are victims of cultural norms in need of education and rescue. At worst, they are both internally homophobic, self-hating imposters getting the best of both worlds”

(99). Manalansan's observation points towards the ongoing debate about the difficulties of reconciling queer and black identities and the various explanations for these difficulties, the most prominent of which tend to emphasize the existence of homophobia in black and other non-white communities. One of the problematic implications of explanations structured around homophobia is that one supposedly cannot be both black and gay and that black men who have same-sex partners need to privilege racial identifications over others or fear exclusion from the black community. As I explained in

Chapter 1, the idea that one needs to choose between one's racial and sexual identifications is an overly general assessment that assumes race and sexuality are separable and separate, rather than always-already intertwined, discourses. Overall, debates about the “down low” posit black men's sexual practices as important problem that needs to be addressed and solved because it puts female partners at risk of HIV. The ways in which the “down low” is embedded in larger discourses about the intersection of race and sexuality is often left out of these debates. It is easy to see how the cultural discourse surrounding the “down low” is very different from the celebratory reception of

Jack and Ennis' allegedly tragic romance.

In this context, Richard Pitt comments on the interpretation of Brokeback

Mountain as tragic romance, remarking specifically on the film's reception, in which Jack 133 and Ennis' unfaithfulness to their wives is, for the most part, regarded with sympathy, and not with judgment. He argues that it is the characters' whiteness and their temporal and spacial remoteness that saves them from receiving the same condemnation that black men on the “down low” have received in recent years. One might interject and remark that these are two historically different situations that require different responses, especially because Jack and Ennis' affair takes place before the identification of HIV/AIDS.

However, Pitt's comparison of two Oprah shows devoted to the subject, one featuring white married men who identify as gay and one featuring black men who have sex with men on “down low” demonstrates that it is not so much a historically different situation, but rather racial difference, that makes the incisive difference in interpretation here (255-

256). While the show focusing on white couples is framed within a discourse of sympathy and of criticizing especially rural homophobia, the show addressing the down low condemns infidelity and shifts the focus of sympathy away from black men. Pitt does not address the continuous disarticulation of race and sexuality in American culture, a disarticulation that has contributed to the association of whiteness with gay male sexuality and of blackness with heterosexuality.

Going even beyond that, I argue that we can see this dichotomy (of Jack and

Ennis becoming sympathetic via their whiteness and black men on the down low being criticized due to their racial identification) as another outcome of the screening processes accompanying the discourse of queer visibility in the 1990s. During the 1980s, white bisexual men were one of the risk groups routinely identified with the spread of AIDS.

As I explained in Chapter 2, they were often blamed for spreading HIV/AIDS to the 134

“general” population of heterosexual Americans because they had sex with both (gay) men and (straight) women. The causal linkages between the sexual practices of bisexual men and the spread of HIV are obviously reductive and biased; yet, they served as a blueprint for many stories about AIDS and the “general” population during the 1980s.

After the disarticulation of queer sexuality and queer identity in the early 1990s, AIDS fades into the background of cultural conversations about sexuality, at least regarding white gay and lesbian Americans. AIDS is increasingly connected to blackness (AIDS in

Africa, the down low) or to promiscuity (which, as Pitt shows, has been racialized, 257).

This shift—separating AIDS from its almost immediate connection to white bisexual men to black men on the “down low” or populations outside the United States—allows for the emergence of the sympathetic white bisexual married man who suffers from continuing homophobia and cannot be “out.” The portrayal of Jack and Ennis fits into these discursive shifts and illustrates how important whiteness is to the sympathetic depiction and reception of their relationship.

“That's Not Even On the Map:” Boys Don't Cry

As I mentioned in the introduction to this chapter, Boys Don't Cry narrates the last few weeks of transgendered Brandon Teena's life, focusing on his brief relationship with

Lana Tisdell. In contrast to Brokeback Mountain, Boys Don't Cry is based on “true events” surrounding the murder of Brandon Teena in Falls City, Nebraska, in 1993.

Similarly to Brokeback Mountain, screening processes involving race and sexuality in

Boys Don't Cry relate to space and time in fraught and complex ways. 135

Most academic analyses and popular reviews focus solely on the representation of transgender identity in Boys Don't Cry, ignoring how a screening of race facilitates Boys

Don't Cry's narrative focus on Brandon's transgender identity.30 On the rare occasion that analyses address the significance of race, they usually only debate the absence of Philip

De Vine, who, in the historical events upon which the film is based, was a black, straight man who was murdered alongside Brandon Teena and Lisa Lambert.31 But the screening of race in Boys Don't Cry goes beyond this absence. In fact, I suggest that race isn't absent from Boys Don't Cry at all. Rather, racial meanings haunt the film. Racialized discourses, such as the alien-ness and alienation that characterizes both the Nebraska landscape and the characters, are mobilized in order to facilitate the narrative and our identification with Brandon.

While, unlike the vague “pastness” previously discussed, Boys Don't Cry is narratively connected to a specific time and place, namely Falls City, Nebraska in 1993, the film's mise-en-scene and its use of other formal strategies nonetheless foster a sense of being outside of a historically specific time and space. As Christina Dando puts it, “It

[the landscape in the film] is virtually timeless. There is also a sense of both place and placelessness. While the landscape is distinctively Plains, it could be described as nowhere” (100). We often think of something that is “timeless” as something that transcends its own historical context so that it will continue to have meaning because it encapsulates some core cultural meaning. Yet in Boys Don't Cry, the “timeless” Nebraska

30 See, for example, David Ansen's review “Walk Like a Man, Talk Like a Man”in Newsweek, Michael H. Kleinschrodt's “'Boys' Director Seeks Understanding for Tragic Victim” in the Times-Picayune, and John Keenan's “Portrayals Illuminate 'Don't Cry'” in the Omaha World Herald, 31 Jennifer Brody's “Boyz Do Cry: Screening History's White Lies” is a good example of such an analysis. 136 landscape is evacuated of context and meaning; it becomes a “nowhere” that is left untethered and disconnected. Its alien qualities are underlined in the film by sped-up editing sequences with the aid of time-lapse photography that blur lights against the night sky, by shots of nearly monstrous, lit-up factories, and by imagery of revolving overhead power lines.32 This unfamiliar landscape is not the heartland of picket fences and family values. Rather, the portrayal of the alien and alienating Nebraska landscape is positioned as a critique of the heartland that underlines the fear of difference in rural spaces.

Ultimately, however, this critique draws on its own stereotypical representations of rural

America to cement the distance between Nebraska as space “out there” that does not relate to “us.”

In addition to the use of time-lapse photography and other formal strategies, the alienation of Falls City also occurs on a narrative level. Where Brokeback Mountain's narrative anchored Jack and Ennis' lives in the American past, Boys Don't Cry's narrative firmly anchors Falls City as a space that is remote and distant in an almost otherwordly way. As Brandon's cousin Loni puts it, “That's not even on the map.” In the conversations that Loni and Brandon have throughout the film, Loni again and again underlines that

Falls City is a place where Brandon doesn't belong, and that is a dangerous environment for anyone who falls outside the norm. Loni thus marks Falls City as a homophobic,

32 The alien qualities of the Nebraska landscape also recall a different context altogether, namely the intrusion of a foreigner, of an “illegal alien” into the American state. The discourse of illegal aliens is most immediately connected to the relationship between Mexico and the U.S., and is characterized by a long history of racial conflict. While it is certainly easy to imagine Brandon as the “illegal alien” that intrudes into a territory where he doesn't belong—and is violently punished for it—the larger context of race is evacuated from the alienness and alienation that pervades Boys Don't Cry's diegesis. The border-crossings Brandon undertakes are firmly located and constrained within the discourse of gender and sexuality, which eclipses the ways in which Boys Don't Cry borrows from discourses of race and racialization in order to tell a story about Brandon's transgender identity. 137 violent town that rightfully doesn't show up on any maps. When Brandon shows him a picture of Lana, the girl Brandon is in love with, Loni remarks that she is attractive “if you like white trash.” Loni articulates what the mise-en-scene has already hinted at, namely that the people who live in Falls City are, in the words of Lisa Henderson,

“trapped by limited options in a limited place, by duplicity, by histories of violence and a lack of autonomy” (301). By calling upon and naming the residents of Falls City “white trash,” Loni once more underlines the distance between “them” and “us” for the viewer.

However, what disappears from view through this labeling is that “white trash” has been racialized in contradictory ways. John Hartigan argues that “instances of the name 'white trash' register racial pollutions: moments when decorum of the white racial order has been breached or compromised or, perhaps more important, where the imaginary boundary between whiteness and blackness is undermined” (115). The label “white trash” functions as a means of distancing a group of poor whites from normative whiteness, on the one hand, and as a way of policing the boundaries of normative whiteness, on the other hand. Frequently, “white trash” is connected to particular social and geographic locations—a discusive strategy that limits the potential for disrupting racial boundaries to specific and often remote and rural spaces. While Boys Don't Cry relies on the distance created by this label, the films also evades a confrontation with the underlying racialization of “white trash”; the racial and class dimensions of “white trash” in Falls

City remain unexplored, blending into a backdrop that supposedly signals homophobia and violence and not much else. As such, the explicit evocation of “white trash” works in conjunction with the alien landscape of Falls City to underline the idea that it is only 138

“those people” in Falls City who could be responsible for such a brutal crime as the rape and murder of Brandon Teena.

Another abject aspect of white identity also did not make it into the film.

Evidence that one of Brandon's murderers was associated with a white supremacy group is not part of Boys Don't Cry's diegesis. Consequently, the possibility that the murder of

Brandon, Philip, and Lisa goes beyond a hatred of Brandon's gender transgressions is lost in Boys Don't Cry. The possibility that these murders are imbricated in a much more complex refusal of difference articulated in the transgendered body of Brandon and the racialized body of Philip does not have a place in the narrative or mise-en-scene. The continuous disarticulation of this intersectionality is also evident in director Kimberly

Pierce's explanation for why she decided against the inclusion of De Vine's murder: it seemed too “tangential” to her. The impression that race was tangential to Brandon's story arises out of the notion that race and sexuality can be separated, and, particularly in this case, that Brandon's murder was not connected to De Vine's. By marking De Vine's death as tangential, it is relegated to a matter of being 'in the wrong place at the wrong time', which could be said of many instances of racially motivated violence, but denies the way in which spaces and times are saturated with racial meanings in the first place. Much like

Brokeback Mountain, Boys Don't Cry engages in the continuing refusal to acknowledge the intersectionality of race, gender, class, and sexuality.

But what is perhaps most interesting about this narrative positioning of Falls City is that Loni, the character who informs us of Falls City as a “nowhere” populated by

“white trash,” is a white, gay man himself. What do we make of the fact that Loni situates 139

Falls City and its residents for us? Moreover, how do we read Loni's continuous challenges to Brandon's transgender identity? For example, when Brandon asks Loni why people threaten him after he flirts with a girl at roller rink, Loni replies, “Because you're not a boy...why don't you admit that you're a dyke.” Loni thus occupies a curious position: on the one hand, he lives in a trailer in rural Nebraska, which might align him with the same class position as the residents of Falls City, but on the other hand, he clearly rejects the alienation that comes with being labeled as “white trash” and with the queerness of Brandon's transgender identification. At the same time that he is the one who marks Falls City as stereotypical rural town, his own positioning breaks up the supposed uniformity of space in Boys Don't Cry: his gender, sexual, and class identifications slot into much more normative places than those of the remaining characters. Indeed, he embodies the kind of queer visibility that has emerged as the norm: gay and of an unremarkable that is, an unmarked class and whiteness. It is perhaps not surprising that he is the one who claims the authority to categorize those around him and who asks the kinds of questions that the spectator might about why Brandon would choose to remain in an environment that is hostile and offers no perspective for the future. In asking these questions, Loni not only locates himself outside of Falls City but situates Falls City as a site of white trash and queerness in opposition to a much more normative gay culture. In so doing, he disavows his own location in a rural, poor area and characterizes himself as normatively white precisely via his gay identity. The audience's identification with Brandon thus emerges out of the tension between rejecting Loni's efforts of putting down Brandon's desire to create a new identity and life for himself 140

(crucial components of the American dream and especially of westward expansion, after all) and recognizing that the “white trash” environment of Falls City doomed Brandon's efforts from the start.33

Conclusion

Locating the events depicted in Brokeback Mountain and Boys Don't Cry outside of space and time not only facilitates the celebration of these movies as part of the “gay

90s” but allows a willful ignorance of the racialized and queer landscapes and times that make the kinds of queer visibility portrayed in these films possible in the first place; as such, celebratory accounts of the films' significance and breakthrough qualities are further examples of how the screening of race and of unruly elements of queerness is crucial to the discourse of queer visibility as it has emerged since the early 1990s. Both

33At this point, at least a brief note on Matthew Shepard's murder and subsequent televisual renditions of his life is necessary. In discussions of Brokeback Mountain and of Boys Don't Cry, the name Matthew Shepard comes up frequently. On the one hand, it makes sense to mention him, as he lived and died in Laramie, Wyoming, the same state in which Brokeback Mountain takes place. Moreover, his death is attributed to anti-queer violence, much like the murders of Jack Twist and Brandon Teena. But this is where the similarities to Brokeback Mountain and Boys Don't Cry, at least in terms of the fictional retellings of Shepard's life and murder, end. In contrast to Brokeback Mountain and Boys Don't Cry, the various renditions of Matthew Shepard's life and murder are clearly located in the here and now: while newspaper reports of Shepard's murder initially depicted Laramie as a homophobic place “out there,” subsequent fictional depictions, especially The Laramie Project (Moises Kaufman, 2002) resist that depiction and seek to locate Laramie at the heart of America, simultaneously suggesting that homophobic murder can happen anywhere and that “hate is not a Laramie value,” thus refusing the stereotype of the homophobic, rural Western town. Additionally, Matthew Shepard has become a projection surface for activism in support of including sexual orientation in hate crimes legislation, especially on a federal level. His story is thus explicitly tied to political debates that were taking place at the time of his murder and of the release of The Laramie Project, and sympathy with Matthew Shepard has been used to rally activists and politicians in support of new hate crimes legislation. In all of this, Shepard has almost completely disappeared: The Laramie Project is about Laramie's struggle with the aftermath of the murder, and The Matthew Shepard Story (Roger Spottiswoode, 2002), a film made for television, deals with Shepard's parents' search for meaning after their son's murder. While Brokeback Mountain and Boys Don't Cry focuses on Jack, Ennis, and Brandon, the various fictional accounts about Matthew Shepard screen out Matthew nearly completely; he only appears in accounts other people give about him. One has to wonder if it is this absence that allows The Laramie Project and The Matthew Shepard Story to be so directly linked to a “real” space and time: Matthew's queerness is safely located off-screen and can no longer touch the audience. 141

Brokeback Mountain and Boys Don't Cry rely on the same screening processes that accompany other “breakthrough” media texts of the 1990s and early 2000s, such as, in terms of films, Philadelphia, Transamerica, and Milk, in terms of TV, Will&Grace,

Queer As Folk, and Brothers & Sisters. Specifically, these texts rely on whiteness as projection surface for rendering queerness visible, while simultaneously screening out of the significance of race and of those aspects of queer identities and sexualities that defy categorization.

In the specific case of Brokeback Mountain and Boys Don't Cry, the screening of race and queerness works in conjunction with genre and mise-en-scene to encapsulate the films' diegeses in a distant place and time. In other words, these films primarily situate queer lives and identities outside of time and space through temporal and spatial dislocations; these dislocations are anchored in screenings of race and queerness rather than located in historically specific times and places. Whereas popular reviews situate both Brokeback Mountain and Boys Don't Cry as breakthrough movies that critically engage queer lives and identities, I argue that the films' engagement (and lack of engagement) with race, sexuality, space and time render the representations of queer desires and identities non-threatening to both the norms of Hollywood cinema and of

American society. The following chapter continues my exploration of the mainstream media's uneven engagement with screenings of race and queer sexualities. Via a comparison of Ellen with Brothers & Sisters, I argue that queer visibility on television in the early 2000s draws gay identities into a project of maintaining white domesticity and privacy. CHAPTER 4

Kevin and Scotty Get Married (And Hardly Anyone is Watching): Queer Visibility,

Privacy, and the Boundaries of Everyday Life on Television

When Ellen Degeneres and her character Ellen Morgan came out in April 1997, the coming-out episode was the culmination of a media frenzy that had been going on for months.34 As Steven Capsuto observes, “The Ellen controversy became the news story that no one could escape. It was everywhere” (388). When Kevin Walker and Scotty

Wandell got married on Brothers & Sisters in May 2008, the episode received little more than a yawn in response. No extensive press coverage or Time Magazine covers accompanied this wedding, and no one really cared that Luke McFarlane (the actor who plays Scotty) had come out a month earlier.35 In one of the few reviews discussing the wedding, Matthew Gilbert muses that, in contrast to the “brouhaha” surrounding Ellen's coming out, “on the day of Kevin and Scotty's nuptials, which arrives after much on- screen making out by the couple, there seems to be only TiVo-setting and shoulder shrugging” (np). All in all, Kevin and Scotty's wedding in the season two finale of

34 For the sake of convenience, I will refer to the double coming out of Ellen Morgan and Ellen Degeneres as “Ellen's coming out” for the remainder of the chapter. Blurring the lines between the star and the character was very much a part of this double coming out, and acted as an attempt to lend an air of authenticity to Ellen's televisual coming out. As Lynne Joyrich observes, “By having Ellen DeGeneres come out of the closet just shortly before Ellen Morgan did, television assures us that we can recognize homosexuality through and through when we see it, that it can't be faked—despite the competing corollary admission that this conflated Ellen's' sexuality had been faked until this point” (25). 35 McFarlane came out in an interview with the Globe and Mail, a Canadian newspaper, in April of 2008. See Chelin, Pamela. “A Commitment to Himself.”

142 143

Brothers & Sisters was an utterly mundane event. What happened in the ten years between Ellen and Brothers & Sisters that explains the difference in reception? The answer sounds simple, but comprises complex discursive shifts: between 1997 and 2008, queerness became a normal part of the mainstream media landscape. One might consider this development as sign of the television industry's and the audience's increasing embrace of queer visibility in the form of gay and lesbian characters. In other words, the absence of frantic media coverage of Kevin and Scotty's wedding could indicate that we have gotten used to seeing queer characters as part of our television programming and have come to consider their presence as normal. However, it is precisely the apparently mundane qualities of Kevin and Scotty's wedding that need further investigation as something other than a mark of progressive developments. The ways in which their wedding—and their relationship in general—blend apparently seamlessly into the diegesis of Brothers & Sisters and into TV programming in general reveal much about the further normalization of queer media visibility and its function in regulating who can count him- or herself as part of the American nation in the early 2000s.

This chapter traces the various processes that allowed for this normalization—as such, I investigate Kevin and Scotty's wedding as part of a larger shift in televisual renditions of queer visibility. Specifically, the incorporation of openly gay characters into

TV's everydayness constitutes a move beyond the solidification of whiteness as projection surface for queer visibility (which, as previously detailed, had occurred earlier in the 1990s) and towards homonationalism (which becomes particularly pronounced after the events of 9/11). 144

The Story of Ellen, Bill, and Monica, or, the (TV) Closet Is Not For Queers Only

It would be an understatement to say that Ellen's coming out has been a focal point of scholarly analyses devoted to exploring the so-called explosion of gay visibility during the 1990s.36 Much like the mainstream press's endless commentary on Ellen's coming out, scholars have also provided abundant analyses of what many have come to regard as yet another turning point in the history of queer media visibility. Tempting as it may be to divide this history into “before Ellen” and “after Ellen,” declaring Ellen's coming out a “first” requires much clarification and moments of deliberate forgetfulness.

After all, Ellen was not the first lesbian character on television; rather, she was the first lesbian character to come out on a prime-time network program. As Anna McCarthy remarks, “In keeping with the characteristics of coming out as a speech act, the episode had 'nothing to do with the acquisition of new information'; rather, it was a largely ceremonial first, an occasion we were all supposed to remember as the moment when queer lives finally became part of mainstream television” (594). Within the discourse of 36 Almost every scholarly analysis of GLBT media images of the 1990s at least mentions Ellen's coming out in passing. The more substantial analyses include: Becker, Ron. “Gay Material and Prime-Time Network Television in the 1990s.” In: Gay TV and Straight America; Capsuto, Steven. “The Ellen Morgan Story (or How to Win a Toaster Oven): Television: 1994-1998,” In: Alternate Channels: The Uncensored Story of Gay and Lesbian Images on Radio and Television; Cragin, Becca. “Lesbians and Serial TV: Ellen Finds Her Inner Adult.” in In: Keller, James R. and Leslie Stratyner. The New Queer Aesthetic on Television: Essays on Recent Programming; Didi, Herman. “'I'm Gay': Declarations, Desire, and Coming Out On Prime-Time Television”; Dow, Bonnie J. “Ellen, Television, and the Politics of Gay and Lesbian Visibility”; Gross, Larry. “Hollywood's Gay Nineties.” In: Up from Invisibility; Hubert, Susan J. “What's Wrong With This Picture?”; Moore, Candace. “Resisting, Reiterating, and Dancing Through: The Swinging Closet Doors of Ellen DeGeneres? Televised Personalities.” In: Beirne, Rebbeca (ed). Televising Queer Women: A Reader; Streitmatter, Rodger. “Ellen: Coming Out, On Screen and Off.” In: From "Perverts" to "Fab Five": The Media's Changing Depiction of Gay Men and Lesbians; Tropiano, Stephen. “'Not That There's Anything Wrong With It': Homosexuality and Television Comedy.” In: The Prime Time Closet: A History of Gays and Lesbians on TV; Walters, Suzanna. “Dossier on Ellen.” In: All the Rage; Yescavage, Karen and Jonathan Alexander. “What Do You Call a Lesbian Who's Only Slept with Men? Answer: Ellen Morgan. Deconstructing the Lesbian Identities of Ellen Morgan and Ellen DeGeneres.” 145 queer visibility, Ellen's coming out thus plays a similar function to the Stonewall Riots, the early days of the AIDS crisis, and the successes of Brokeback Mountain and Boys

Don't Cry: it is a carefully constructed moment that has become significant because we chose to bestow an originary quality upon it.

Many scholarly debates about Ellen's coming out turn a focused lens on the construction of this originary moment, foregrounding its significance to media portrayals of queer identities. Analyses that tie Ellen to other media events that challenged

Americans to confront their ideas about sexuality, most notably the affair between Bill

Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, are surprisingly rare (Lynne Joyrich's essay

“Epistemology of the Console” is one example that does make connections among Ellen,

Bill, and Monica). In other words, most scholarly examinations of Ellen's coming out explore the months of media coverage leading up the coming out episode in 1997 and analyze the cancellation of Ellen a season later. For example, Steven Capsuto, Susan J.

Hubert, and Larry Gross provide in-depth descriptions of the press coverage and the production discourse that surrounded Ellen between 1996 and 1998. Suzanna Walters picks apart “The Puppy Episode” (the episode in which Ellen Morgan comes out) and reveals its heteronormative underpinnings. Adopting a more comparative approach,

Becca Cragin analyzes Ellen Morgan's character in the context of televisual lesbian representation, and Didi Herman discusses Ellen in relation to the British TV program

Bad Girls. While all these essays provide important insights into the immediate cultural, production, and reception context of Ellen's coming out, they do not situate it in a more broadly conceived discourse of queer visibility, i.e. one that goes beyond a discussion of 146 the potential progressive value of this media event and that situates it in a broader context that takes, for example, the structures of television as a medium or the reliance on racialized discourses in the facilitation of queer visibility into account. But it is exactly such a broad conceptualization that is necessary to understand how Ellen's coming out relates to the affair between President Bill Clinton and former White House intern

Monica Lewinsky and that underlines the importance of considering the connections between both events.

The details of and fallout from the affair between Clinton and Lewinsky dominated news headlines for much of 1998. Starting on January 21, 1998, rumors about the affair unfold in the mainstream media, followed by Clinton's admission of the affair on August 17, 1998, and the House of Representatives' vote in favor of impeaching the president on December 19, 1998 for perjury during his grand jury testimony about his relationship with Monica Lewinsky. In the relentless pursuit of details about the affair, something became clear rather quickly: there was something rather queer about Bill and

Monica's relationship. As Debbie Nathan puts it:

Those folks [in the mainstream media] dominated the yada-yada about the

President’s adulterous immorality and his 'exploitation' of a poor intern,

but few were frank enough to admit what was really bothering them: that

the sex between Bill and Monica wasn’t just extramarital, it was also oral-

genital and oral-anal. That, according to the moth-eaten 'crimes against

nature' laws, is barely one step from-horrors!-sodomy. (20)

The discovery that the American president, a figure who embodies the ideals of the 147 nation, might stray off the heteronormative path caused anxiety in some (Kenneth Starr comes to mind) and inspiration in others (a how-to instructional video tape called Bend

Over, Boyfriend, which was targeted at heterosexual couples, became a best seller that year).37

The fundamental logic that drove both the media frenzy surrounding Ellen's coming out and the Clinton/Lewinsky affair is the open secret. In both cases, questions such as “is she...?” and “did they...?”, and the deferral of definitive answers to these questions, drove the press frenzy in ever tighter circles around the near-certainty of knowing that yes, Ellen is “really” a lesbian and yes, Bill and Monica “really” had sex.

This give-and-take of providing and withholding knowledge is central to what Michel

Foucault has called the spiral of power and pleasure: “The pleasure that comes of exercising a power that questions, monitors, watches, spies, searches out, palpates, brings to light; and on the other hand, the pleasure that kindles at having to evade that power”

(The History of Sexuality, 45). It is precisely the pleasurable limbo between almost- knowing and refusing to confirm that saturated the intense media coverage in response to hints about Ellen's coming out and rumors about a relationship between Bill Clinton and

Monica Lewinsky. But what is most significant for understanding how the story of Ellen,

Bill, and Monica relates to queer media visibilities is that this dance around what we can know and how we know what we know about sexuality, especially queer sexuality, is

37 Kenneth Starr was the Independent Counsel for a range of investigations relating to President Clinton, including the legal aspects of the Clinton-Lewinsky affair. The Starr Report: The Independent Counsel's Complete Report to Congress on the Investigation of President Clinton became infamous due to its lengthy and detailed descriptions of the sexual acts in which Clinton and Lewinsky engaged. For an analysis of the Starr Report, see Ann Cvetkovich's “Sexuality's Archive: The Evidence of the Starr Report.” For more on the popularity of Bend Over, Boyfriend, see Debbie Nathan's “Sodomy for the Masses.” 148 central to the structure of television as a medium. As Lynne Joyrich has argued, “Indeed, television is a crucial site for the exploration of the logic of the closet not only because of its central role in establishing (and suspending) knowledge in postmodern culture but also because US television itself is located at the intersection of many of the same conceptual divisions that Sedgwick described” (23). In other words, television both transmits ways of knowing (queer) sexuality via its narratives and via its position at the intersection of various cultural discourses.

The most significant of those discourses that TV negotiates is the border between public and private, which television continuously narrates for us as it “constructs knowledges identified both as secret (domestically received) and shared (defined as part of a collective national culture)” (23). The construction of knowledges that are both secret and shared is a theme that winds its way through the story of Ellen, Bill, and

Monica, and later, through Kevin and Scotty's wedding. For example, in “The Puppy

Episode,” Ellen announces her lesbian identity publicly at an airport by accidentally speaking into a microphone hooked up to the terminal's announcement system. During the Clinton/Lewinsky affair, one of the persistent questions in TV news coverage was whether or not the private life of a president impacts his public duties and whether or not a president even has a truly private life. In contrast to these articulations and questions of publicity, Scotty and Kevin get married in the privacy of Kevin's mother's home. While the latter is perhaps not that surprising considering TV's domestic focus, the private marriage of Kevin and Scotty takes on another meaning when one asks who has access to that kind of privacy, and who can choose to keep their personal affairs private and who 149 cannot (a question I will investigate in more depth later on in this chapter). As this brief overview shows, the public/private dynamic at the center of the story of Ellen, Bill, and

Monica and of Kevin and Scotty's wedding directly relates to what Lynne Joyrich has called the “epistemology of the console” (named after Sedgwick's concept of the

“epistemology of the closet”). In turn, these televisual events also offer an opportunity to investigate how televisual epistemology structures the interdependence of queer visibility and hegemonic whiteness.

The overlapping events of Ellen's coming out and of the Clinton/Lewinsky affair challenged television's epistemological structures even as it also reaffirmed them. For example, the sexually explicit subject matter that frequently surfaced in the reporting of the Clinton/Lewinsky affair and of Clinton's impeachment incited what Foucault tems a

“repressive hypothesis” scenario: while commentators constantly declared that certain explicit details about Bill and Monica's affair couldn't be articulated on television, there was nevertheless an endless incitement to discourse about those details (revealed, of course, in a veiled and consequently seemingly tantalizing fashion) (Joyrich, 24; Torres,

104). Ellen engaged in a comparable dynamic of unveiling and evasion. The constant stream of hints and allusions to Ellen's soon-to-be-official lesbianism on and off the show between the fall of 1996 and the spring of 1997 were so self-aware that they exemplified and narrated television's epistemology (Joyrich, 33). For example, the opening scene of the 1996-7 season of Ellen takes place in Ellen's bathroom, where she sings the famous

West Side Story lyrics “I feel pretty / I feel witty / I feel pretty and witty and – hey!”, confounding viewer expectations to hear the word “gay” at the last moment when no 150 running water emerges from the tap. This tension between an unspoken yet shared knowledge illuminates both the dynamic of the open secret and of televisual epistemology.

Considering that the televisual closet isn't for queers only—as Joyrich demonstrated most clearly—why is this connection among Ellen, Bill, and Monica raised so rarely? As I have emphasized throughout the preceding chapters, it is important to remember that, in regard to queer media visibilities, the closet functions as a screen, and that this screen most frequently becomes embodied in the whiteness of the characters whose sexuality is under negotiation. What role does whiteness, and discourses of race in general, play in the story of Ellen, Bill, and Monica? The short answer is, a rather large one for each case. However, the deployments of whiteness that are mobilized in the discourse of queer visibility in Ellen's coming out and in the Clinton/Lewinksy affair are markedly different—in Ellen's case, her normative whiteness allowed race to become the allegedly invisible projection surface upon which her coming out was projected; it only became visible (and thus problematic) when the show tried to explore her everyday life as a lesbian beyond the moment of coming out (more on Ellen and her whiteness in the next section).

In the case of Bill Clinton, his whiteness never quite fit the normative mold, and an exploration of how his racial and sexual identity has consistently been rendered

“deviant” via a connection to his “white trash” origins reveals much about why his affair with Monica Lewinsky turned into a perceived threat to the nation itself (McElya, 158).

Specifically, it is the idea of the president engaging in queer acts that makes the Clinton- 151

Lewinsky affair so threatening: after all, if the president does it, why shouldn't the rest of

America, too? In order to ward off such conclusions, both the mainstream press and the team around Kenneth Starr constructed Bill Clinton as a man who violates the norms of white masculinity and who had indulged in excessive behavior throughout his life

(McElya, 159). As Jonathan Alter puts it in an opinion piece for Newsweek, “Everyone in

Clinton's immediate family suffered from some kind of compulsive disorder or addiction”

(31). By marking Bill Clinton as a thoroughly queer figure, he stands apart from the nation, rather than standing in for the nation.

It is the perceived difference between how Ellen and how Bill Clinton relate to queer sexualities, whiteness, and the nation that makes these two events seem to so different despite their similar underlying logic of the closet. Furthermore, it is the resolution of these differences via the move toward homonationalism that paves the way for the allegedly mundane nature of Kevin and Scotty's relationship on Brothers &

Sisters. In order to understand how this shift took place, I now take a closer look at how

Ellen's lesbian identity challenged the boundaries of televisual everyday life.

A “Gay Rosa Parks”? Ellen's Struggle with Everyday Life38

“The Puppy Episode” was a huge ratings success (Becker, 166). Subsequent episodes, some of which dealt with Ellen's exploration of her newly “out” status and some of which didn't explicitly engage her lesbian identity at all, did not receive high

38 In her discussion of Ellen's continuous use of analogies of race and sexuality—specifically, the show's strategy to portray being gay as being analogous to being a person of color—Anna McCarthy concludes that “the producers affirmed a model of public visibility through which DeGeneres could characterize herself as a gay Rosa Parks” (605). 152 ratings (Becker, 170). At the end of season five, a year after Ellen came out, the program was canceled. There are many different theories for why viewers lost interest in Ellen and for the network's decision to cancel the show, many of which revolve around the idea that

Ellen was “too gay” or “not gay in the right ways.” Aligning herself with the first explanation, Suzanna Walters, for example, argues that Ellen had ultimately become too centered on “gay life.” Walters herself applauds the program for engaging with subjects such as lesbian parenting (since the woman whom Ellen dates has a daughter) and the adjustments that Ellen's parents go through to reconcile the “old” (presumably straight)

Ellen with the “new” (lesbian) Ellen (88, 92). It is those praiseworthy plots, Walter explains, that triggered “double standards and heterosexual unease” among producers and network executives and that ultimately led to Ellen's cancellation (94). In contrast, Steven

Capsuto investigates the production discourse surrounding Ellen's last season in his quest for an explanation. He concludes that the reason for the cancellation does not stem from the show's engagement with Ellen's lesbian identity, but rather from the increasing difference in the network's and the producers' vision for the program. These differences caused the program to lose a clear direction—during one week's episode, Ellen would be fully immersed in what Walters called “gay life,” and in the next episode, Ellen would stumble into a situation reminiscent of the pre-coming-out episodes. Weary of network policing of what plots could and could not air on the show, not to mention the addition of a “TV-14” rating to some episodes, the show increasingly tried to “prove a point rather than to entertain” (Capsuto, 402). In the end, Capsuto argues, “the show was simply no longer funny enough to survive” (403). Finally, Lynne Joyrich demonstrates how both 153 positions, i.e. that Ellen had become “too gay” or was not gay in the “right way,” fold into the overall logic of television: “The questions, then, over what's too gay or not gay enough, what's 'funny that way' or what's simply queer . . . revealed once again that the door of the closet can swing both ways, that sexual knowingness remains a fault line for knowing TV” (38). Put differently, the struggle over Ellen's last season speaks not only to the question of how to incorporate a lesbian character into a sitcom, but opens up a broader view of how discourses of queer visibility intersect with the fundamental structures of television as a medium. It is this intersection of queerness and televisuality that Anna McCarthy pursues in her analysis of Ellen's last season.

Rather than attempting to explain whether or not the show suffered from a heteronormative backlash or to estimate how much good the program did for queer media visibility, McCarthy argues that the post-coming-out episodes of Ellen speak most directly to the ways in which queerness and television form mesh or don't mesh (596).

The one thing that becomes most apparent in the attempts to negotiate Ellen's lesbian identity within the confines of the traditional sitcom is that, while her coming out as one- time event did not disrupt televisual seriality, her ongoing queer presence, and its function as central narrative element, very much went against then-established sitcom seriality (597). McCarthy succinctly summarizes this contradiction: “Queer TV, in short, could make history as event television but not as what we might call 'uneventful' television” (ibid). From this point of view, the main problem with the last season of Ellen was not whether or not Ellen was “too gay,” but that queerness and televisual everydayness didn't cohere into an ongoing narrative. This is perhaps not a surprise 154 considering that queer visibility on television was still something remarkable in 1997. Put differently, the ways in which queerness was rendered visible on TV relied on plots and characters that stood out in one way or another from the rest of the diegesis.

In Gay TV and Straight America, Ron Becker offers a detailed description and analysis of gay and lesbian characters and storylines that appeared on television between

1989 and 2002. The most noticeable way in which gay characters stood out from their straight counterparts was the lack of intimate relationships. Becker anchors television's hesitant pursuit of this subject matter in the controversies over a 1989 episode of thirtysomething that depicted two men sitting next to each other in bed. The episode effectively disappeared from television as it was never shown again, not even in reruns

(Becker, 138). As I explained in Chapter 2, the disarticulation of sexuality and identity was a crucial precondition to the so-called explosion of gay visibility during the 1990s.

As this explosion took shape, gay characters appeared on TV with increasing frequency, but most often in the same types of storylines in which they had appeared since the 1970s

—as victims of homophobic violence, as participants in mistaken identity plots (in which a straight character will be mistaken for gay due to or in the presence of a gay character), or as initiators or recipients of straight characters' experimentation with same-sex attraction (so that the number of lesbian kisses during “sweeps” periods grew throughout the 1990s to the point where it has become a cliche). In addition, the inclusion of an openly gay and lesbian supporting character could lend an edge to an otherwise not particularly noteworthy program: “including a gay neighbor, a lesbian sister, or some queer plot twist was not only possible but lucrative for those networks and producers 155 anxious to differentiate their product in a saturated market of Friends and Seinfeld imitators” (Becker, 158). Even the successful sitcom Will&Grace, which premiered only a few months after Ellen went off the air, relies on Will's and Jack's gay identities as focal points of plots and jokes—in fact, they need to stand out in order for the show to succeed.

If Will and Jack's gayness were unremarkable, there would be no difference between

Will&Grace and the many other sitcoms revolving around a male and female lead character (and, consequently, the program would probably not have been the success that it was).

The clash between queerness and serial television's emphasis on everyday life has much to do with homonormative discourses emerging during the 1990s. While the increasing prominence of homonormativity after the AIDS crisis of the 1980s allowed for the proliferation of gay and lesbian characters and issues in the media, the accompanying normalization of queer lives and identities on and off the screen had not “progressed” far enough to resolve all contradictions, especially when it came to integrating queer subjects

—both in the form of queer American citizens or in narratives told about them—into the nation. Considering that Ellen, with her white, middle-class, house-and-business-owning, and romance-seeking existence fits the demands of homonormativity, one would expect her to fit into the norms of television as well. Yet, her lesbian identity makes her televisually stand out. This points to one of the cracks in the discourse of homonormativity; namely, that, despite fulfilling the core demands of heteronormativity, i.e. adherence to gender, class and lifestyle norms, there is still something queer here that creates difference (and distance) between homo- and heteronormativity. Throughout the 156

1990s, this difference became particularly apparent in discourses around civil rights, especially regarding the presence of openly gay and lesbian Americans in the U.S. military and the advocacy for the legalization of gay marriage. Despite the increasing visibility of gay and lesbian subjects during the 1990s, brought about by the media and political advocacy, the alignment of queerness and everyday life remained filled with friction. While gay and lesbian rights activists and some media scholars consider this friction as an impediment that needs to be resolved so that gay and lesbian Americans can blend into everyday life both off and on screen, other activists and scholars have insisted that it is precisely those queer elements that one should strive to preserve as crucial differences not in terms of exclusion, but rather as building blocks for rethinking social norms and social structures in general. Aligning herself with the latter position, McCarthy points out that, in those moments when Ellen's lesbian identity clashes with TV seriality, queer possibilities open up. Instead of regarding the uneven moments of the last season as contributing to Ellen's “failure,” one can consider them as instances that allow the emergence of questions about the televisual structures that allow or prohibit queer media visibilities (596).

However, these questions only reach so far, and they do not reach far enough to facilitate a critical engagement with the role that race plays in discourses of queer visibility. Despite the fact that references to race appear with increasing frequency during the last season of Ellen, the importance of whiteness-as-screen for the rendition of queer media visibility remains unremarkable yet again. Instead of engaging with the intertwined nature of race and sexuality, Ellen continues the project of portraying those categories as 157 comparable, but separate, discourses. McCarthy discusses this representational strategy in two ways. First, she demonstrates how proclamations of “advances” in television's portrayal of queer characters, on the model of “advancement” of non-white subjects, functions as self-reflexive commentary on the progression of the history of television. In a self-congratulatory way, “like race” approaches to queer visibility suggest that over time, television has become increasingly inclusive, so that after accepting non-white characters into the fold of televisuality, we can now include gay and lesbian characters in

TV programming as well. Second, McCarthy considers this comparative strategy as evidence for the limited ways in which Ellen discussed the challenges of queer lives.

While episodes addressed singular moments of homophobia, often in ways that likened them to racial discrimination, these storylines did not confront more insidious forms of what McCarthy calls “oppressive straight behavior” that happens in a repetitive or systemic fashion (607).

I want to go one step further and underline that what stands out most clearly are the ways in which the parallels between being gay and being a person of color attempt to deflect attention away from the particular racialized queer visibility Ellen draws on; namely, the one that relies on whiteness-as-screen. If the unevenness of Ellen's last season opens up questions about the relationship between queerness and televisual seriality—and the representation of queerness on TV in general—then these ruptures might also allow the crucial importance of whiteness to emerge as something noticeable.

This becomes particularly possible in the contradiction between the way class and racial elements of Ellen's identity allows her to appear as “the girl next door”—as a stand-in for 158 the average American—and the way in which her sexual identity continuously marks her as different. The frequent parallels that Ellen draws between race and sexuality thus simultaneously allow the show to perpetuate the idea of televisual history as progressive and to deflect attention away from the continued importance of racialized discourses to televisual representations. Moreover, it draws attention away from the fact that while whiteness has long been one of the key factors that determined who was and was not allowed symbolic inclusion into the nation, it is not enough to grant access to the nation even if one lives up to the demands of homonormativity. Even in the 1990s, complete access to an “unremarkable” everyday existence is thus denied to queers on and off- screen alike.

Despite moments of rupture, the links among Ellen's lesbian identity, her whiteness, and the ways she fits into the everyday life of television and of the nation remain safely ensconced behind the closet-as-screen. While television in 1997 was able to manage coming out as a one-time event, the continuous process of coming out, and its continuous challenge to the heteronormative fabric of everyday life, proved too much.

The last episode of Ellen inserts Ellen into many televisual “firsts,” such as the first discussion and portrayal of pregnancy on TV during I Love Lucy, but does not offer a narration of her coming out. It seems, as McCarthy suggests, as if the episode implies that a full integration of queerness into televisual history can only happen at some future point

(609). This future has already come and gone in 2008, when Kevin and Scotty get married. 159

Brothers & Sisters: Just Another White TV Family?

For the past three years, Brothers & Sisters, an ABC drama revolving around the

Walker family from Pasadena, CA, has blended seamlessly into the television landscape.

Despite ABC's enthusiastic description of the show as “compelling one-hour drama series” that allows viewers to experience “the complicated maze of American lives today” by following the lives of “five enmeshed and somewhat damaged adult siblings and their strong, but devoted, mother Nora Walker,” there is nothing truly new or remarkable about the show's characters or narratives

(). Not even the presence of openly gay lawyer Kevin Walker (played by Matthew Rhys) as second-oldest of the siblings elicits critical interest. The Walkers are just another white, upper middle class TV family who experience moments of crisis on a weekly basis.

The initial reviews of the program ranged from lukewarm endorsements to biting dismissals, and they didn't address Kevin's presence as openly gay character at all.

Dorothy Rabinowitz of the Wall Street Journal characterized Brothers & Sisters as

“instantaneously seductive finished product” while the Washington Post's Tom Shales concluded that “The show, premiering on ABC tomorrow night, aches with sensitivity, throbs with sensitivity, and reeks of sensitivity.” Indeed, the program's initial conflict, which pitches conservative Kitty Walker (played by Calista Flockhart) against the rest of the family, all of whom are liberal, soon fizzles out into a “blood is thicker than water” truce that only breaks up for conveniently placed storylines (such as Kitty's support of

Robert McCallister, one of California's Republican senators and Kitty's eventual 160 husband). Other storylines engaging presumably sensitive political issues, such as youngest sibling Justin Walker's drug abuse after a tour in Iraq, play out in similarly predictable ways and don't shake up either televisual form or Walker family unity.

Despite the hesitant critical reception of Brothers & Sister's pilot episode, ABC has certainly profited from the show over the past three seasons. It consistently delivers good ratings, especially in the coveted demographic of 18-49-year-olds, leading to the show's early renewal for a fourth season in the spring of 2009 (Stanley, np). Additionally, the incorporation of three openly gay regular characters in Brothers & Sisters has contributed to ABC's reputation of being a “gay-friendly” network among some media outlets (in addition to Kevin, the other two gay characters are Scotty and Saul Walker,

Kevin's uncle, who comes out to the family in the episode in which Kevin and Scotty get married). For example, in a cover story on Kevin Walker and on actor Matthew Rhys for the Advocate, Dennis Hensley observed that “Last year, while we were getting used to a world without Will&Grace, Queer as Folk, and Six Feet Under, and the number of scripted gay characters was at a 10-year low, ABC gave us something we've said we always wanted: a gay series regular on a network show whose romantic and sexual life is given the same treatment as everyone else's” (np). Other critics were less enthused about the “sameness” awarded to gay television characters on ABC's shows: “ABC became a kind of haven for gay characters who were as addled - and ultimately dull - as their straight counterparts. (Look no further than 'Brothers & Sisters.'),” Wesley Morris of the

Boston Globe pointed out (np). In a way, Morris and Hensley are both right in their assessment. While Hensley's remark leans towards the overly optimistic, as Kevin's love 161 life is portrayed in much less explicit ways than the intimate encounters in which his heterosexual siblings engage, Kevin and Scotty are certainly treated as “the same” as the straight couples within the diegesis of the show, at least by members of the Walker family

(whether or not they are all equally dull is a matter of personal opinion, of course).

Overall, the differing standards network television applies to the intimate aspects of same-sex and of heterosexual romance are rather noticeable on Brothers & Sisters, “gay- friendly” network or not.

ABC has also come under fire for the ways in which the network has handled the storylines of queer characters on programs such as Ugly Betty and Grey's Anatomy during the 2008-09 season. While the exit of MTF transsexual character Alexis Meade on Ugly

Betty was most likely due to actress Rebecca Romijn's pregnancy (and two other queer characters, Mark St. James and Justin Suarez, continue to thrive on the show), the abrupt ending to the lesbian romance between characters Callie Torres (Sara Ramirez) and Erica

Hahn (Brooke Smith) on Grey's Anatomy led to much speculation among fans and media critics that their relationship had become too “steamy” for ABC's liking. Indeed, after a season-long arc that allowed Callie and Erica's friendship to turn into romance at a slow pace, their relationship apparently ends after a five-minute disagreement about an issue unrelated to their personal lives. Erica walks to her car and is never seen on the show again. While Shonda Rhimes, one of Grey's Anatomy's executive producers, explained that Callie and Erica's story had run its course, both fans and media critics speculated that the network had put pressure onto the show's producers to return to safe, heterosexual waters.39 The controversy around Grey's Anatomy indicates that while Kevin and Scotty

39 Regarding the controversy surrounding the end of Callie and Erica's relationship and the firing of 162 might blend into Brothers & Sisters' diegesis, the management of queer visibility on other

ABC programs doesn't run quite as smoothly.

Aside from a passionate 2007 Emmy acceptance speech that lead actress Sally

Field delivered about the war in Iraq, Brothers & Sisters has not attracted any controversy. Considering the show's traditional narrative focus, this is not surprising.

While Brothers & Sisters likes to take on current politics from time to time (as in Justin

Walker's deployment to Iraq or Robert McCallister's run for the Republican presidential nomination), the real narrative motor of the show's narrative arcs are the secrets that slowly surface in the wake of family patriarch William Walker's death in the first episode.

Over the course of the show's existing three seasons, viewers discover that he mismanaged the family business, Ojai Foods, leaving it teetering on the edge of bankruptcy; that he had a decades-long affair with Holly Harper, who fights her way into

Ojai via William's will; and that he had an illegitimate child, Ryan (who appears on the show during season three after the viewer has already met Rebecca, Holly's daughter, who everyone believes to be William's illegitimate daughter until a DNA test at the end of season two reveals the truth, namely, that she is not a “real” Walker). While one might expect the viewer to be enthralled by the continuous presence of open secrets on the show, the utter predictability of these secrets deprives them of their epistemological pull:

“It's all so horribly, punishingly familiar,” declares Tom Shales in his review for the

Washington Post (np). But as I mentioned earlier, it is this familiarity of narratives and

Brooke Smith, see, for example, de Moraes, Lisa. “'Grey's' Lesbian Doc Fails the 'Chemistry' Test,” Marikar, Sheila. “Why Did 'Grey's' Get Rid of Gay Romance?”, McNamara, Mary. “Critic's Notebook: 'Grey's Anatomy,' Blasted for Brooke Smith Firing, is Behind the Gay Character Learning Curve,” Mitovitch, Matt. “Grey's Actress "Really, Really Shocked" by Ouster from Show,” and Wallenstein, Andrew. “Why Did 'Grey's Anatomy' Cut Lesbian Dr. Hahn?”. 163 characters that demands further investigation. The bland veneer of white, upper middle- class hetero- and homonormativity that covers Brothers & Sisters' diegesis shows definite cracks and cannot completely screen out the racialized underpinnings that support it. In fact, the Walkers' involvement in the California citrus industry links Brothers & Sisters to longstanding historical narratives of racial conflict and their erasure in popular culture.

Brothers & Sisters constantly reminds its viewers that the Walkers are a close-knit family. Indeed, the diegesis rarely expands beyond familial boundaries. Nearly everything in the Walker siblings' lives revolves around other family members or the family business, Ojai Foods, which grows, processes, and ships a range of fruit. In typical

TV fashion, there isn't much of a separation between family and work lives—most members of the Walker family are working or have worked for Ojai Foods, and the program makes it clear more than once that the business and the family are inseparable. A crisis at Ojai effects everyone on a deeply personal level, not only because the family's wealth is tied to the well-being of the company, but because the family's unity and their history is also tangled up in it. This deep intertwinement is most clearly symbolized in the family ranch, which is located in the Ojai orchards. While the family resides in Pasadena, family members visit the ranch at various points throughout the series and frequently express fondness for the land that surrounds the ranch.40 For example, in episode 1x07,

Kevin tells Scotty that he lost his virginity “both times” while staying in Ojai for the summer: “First to this girl, Sarah Gimble. The second one a summer later to this guy, this total stud; everyone in Ojai was in love with him.” Other family members also tie important milestones in their lives to the family ranch—Ojai thus becomes a cornerstone

40 Ojai is the smallest town in Ventura County, CA (http://www.ci.ojai.ca.us/). 164 in their personal and familial identities.

Despite the central importance of Ojai Foods to the construction of the Walkers' family identity, the viewer learns next to nothing about the origins or the day-to-day business of the company. While this is unsurprising (considering that the company mainly serves as way of generating familial conflicts, and thus storylines), it nevertheless glosses over the screening of race that is in effect here. Ojai Foods makes the Walkers who they are in more ways than one—it supports their family unity, but it also ensures their class and race status. The tidbits that emerge about the history of Ojai Foods firmly tie the company to the history of Southern California's citrus industry. While the town of Ojai is not directly located in what Matt Garcia and others have referred to as the “citrus belt,” which comprises the San Gabriel and San Bernandino Valleys, the founding of Ojai

Foods in 1926 and its primary business focus on growing, packing, and distributing fruit establish a connection between the Walkers' family history and the citrus belt's agricultural history (Garcia, 19).41

The California citrus industry boomed between the late 18th century and the

1960s, attracting farmers from the Midwest and agricultural laborers from Mexico and from among the growing number of Asian American immigrants. The accumulated wealth in the citrus industry significantly contributed to the economic development of the greater Los Angeles region during the first half of the twentieth century, a factor that is often overlooked today (Garcia, 2). In the early part of the twentieth century, white citrus farmers took pride in creating a new community based on agrarian ideals while

41 To be more precise, Garcia observes that the citrus belt “stretched sixty miles eastward from Pasadena, through the San Gabriel and San Bernandino Valley, to the town of Riverside” (19). 165 disavowing the labor of Mexican and Asian Americans that sustained the profits and livelihood of farmers (Garcia, 46). Towns that developed around the citrus industry were largely segregated, and the work available on citrus farms was racially segmented, with the lowest-paying jobs going to non-white workers (Garcia, 77). Ultimately, in the 1970s, the citrus industry entered into a decline that eventually led to the near-complete disappearance of orchards in the citrus belt. Yet, even though the citrus industry isn't as dominant in the greater Los Angeles area as it was in the first half of the twentieth century, it has left its mark on patterns of residential settlement and on labor structures

(Garcia, 260).

Although Brothers & Sisters is set in present-day California, the program's representation of Ojai Foods evokes the feel of a traditional pre-1970s citrus company in that it still engages mainly in the business of growing, packing, and selling fruit (Tommy

Walker eventually leaves Ojai to found a winery called Walker Landing). Apparently, the

Walker family did not give in to the temptation of selling their land when the citrus industry went into decline. Moreover, the whitewashed world of Ojai and of the Walkers' social circle is both reminiscent of the segregated world of the early citrus industry and a reflection of the continuing self-segregation of housing in the LA. area. Despite of Ojai's historical lineage as part of the citrus industry, this history never enters into the denotative representation of Ojai Foods. The only traces of this history appear in the form of old advertisements that hang in Sarah Walker's office or in brief comments, such as

Sarah's “oh god, not a labor dispute” in response to issues arising when Ojai Food tries to expand its business into China. 166

The evasion of history here recalls the engagement with history I discussed in

Chapter 3. There are obvious parallels between the simultaneous reliance on and disavowal of histories of racial conflict in Brothers & Sisters, on the one hand, and in

Brokeback Mountain, on the other hand. Both texts screen out race while at the same time depending on it to construct narratives of white romance and family life. The significance of California's racialized history is screened out of Brothers & Sisters to make way for a normative story about a white upper class family; in Brokeback

Mountain, racialized discourses of the West are screened out to construct a romance about two white cowboys. And yet, these racilialized histories persistently linger at the edge of the frame. Similar to the symbolic meaning of the West to Brokeback Mountain's diegesis, the mythology of the citrus industry is an important component of Brothers &

Sisters' depiction of white wealth. As Garcia explains, “While wheat, cotton, and grapes have had their images tarnished by revelations of labor exploitation, grower vigilance, and absentee landlords, citrus has usually escaped such criticism. Even today, the image of oranges a vision of prosperity in abundance” (17). In many ways, then, this image of citrus fruit as symbols of abundance in America diverts attention away from the racial tension between Mexican laborers and Anglo landowners that shaped the citrus industry.

Considering this symbolism, perhaps it is no surprise at all that the Walkers own a fruit company. Ojai Foods provides a shorthand for wealth without evoking an immediate association of racial and class tension, and thus it becomes a supposedly blank slate that functions as setting for family conflicts.

The aim of my brief digression into California's agricultural history is not to 167 lament television's continuing misrepresentation of said history, but rather to draw attention to the ways in which shows like Brothers & Sisters contribute to ways of deliberate forgetting of racial conflict in favor of embracing whitewashed historical symbols, such as the vintage fruit ads in Sarah's office. More importantly, the representation of Ojai Foods as a business that appears devoid of a particular history and that only has meaning as a core part of the Walkers' collective identity is part the scaffolding that upholds whiteness as screen for the type of queer visibility inhabited by

Kevin and Scotty, which is also devoid of links to racialized discourses such as the ones emerging around gay marriage.

As I will demonstrate, Kevin and Scotty's wedding, far from disrupting the family unit (as opponents of gay marriage might argue), serves to unite the Walkers in a time of crisis. Moreover, Kevin and Scotty's queer identities shore up the discourse of whiteness on which Brothers & Sisters' diegesis crucially depends. Drawing queer identities

(specifically, in this case, gay male identities) into the maintenance of hegemonic whiteness is a salient feature of the type of homonationalism that came into full force during the war on terror in which the American government has engaged since the attacks on 9/11. As I argued in Chapter 1, whiteness and queer visibility have become interdependent in new and insidious ways in the past eight years. Simultaneous to the emergence of whiteness as a projection surface for a specific type of queer visibility, queer subjects, identities, and visibilities are called upon to uphold and reproduce the centrality of whiteness to imagining the America nation. Specifically, as Jasbir Puar explains, the heteronormative demands of the nation are temporarily suspended to 168 welcome previously excluded queer subjects who fulfill certain class, lifestyle, and racial norms (Terrorist Assemblages, 32). This inclusion in turn allows the U.S. to appear as a democratic and multicultural nation and to portray itself in contrast to nations that are seen as oppressive and violently homophobic (most significantly, those nations that the

U.S. faces in its so-called war on terror). Those simultaneous shifts represent what Puar refers to as “homonationalism.” In this context, the multicultural facade put forth in

Brothers & Sisters, which declares the Walkers to be an “average” American family that does not “see” racial or sexual difference, takes on greater meaning than that of just another show that blends into the television schedule. Through a close analysis of “Prior

Commitments,” the episode in which Kevin and Scotty get married, I unpack the implications of Brothers & Sisters' diegetic encouragement to turn a blind eye to the program's complicit participation in a cultural logic that drives ever-finer lines of division between those who can and cannot be part of the nation.

“Holy Mantrimony”42

In classic season finale fashion, the Walker family is in turmoil at the beginning of

“Prior Commitments”: Ojai, due to a failed export deal with a Chinese company, is on the brink of bankruptcy; Kitty's continuing struggles to get pregnant seem to hit a brick wall when another round of IVF proves unsuccessful; and Rebecca deals with the consequences of discovering via DNA testing that she is not a “real” Walker after all.

Kevin and Scotty themselves have finally left some relationship troubles behind and

42 During “Prior Commitments,” the episode in which Kevin and Scotty's wedding takes place, Justin Walker refers to his brother's impending marriage as “holy mantrimony.” 169 overcome Scotty's parents' homophobic reaction to their impending wedding. By the end of the episode, all those troubles are (at least momentarily) forgotten and the joy over the wedding smooths over any familial rifts (such as Kitty's and Robert's Republican values that make them nominally opposed to gay marriage as legal institution). Overall, the episode underlines once more that Walker family unity will eventually triumph over any adversity. Indeed, it is the questions of who does and who does not belong to the family, and who has access to the private, domestic world of the Walkers (and, by implication, that of the “average” white American family) that is under intense negotiation in this episode.

Kevin and Scotty's decision to get married is a spontaneous one, originally brought about by concerns over Scotty's lack of health insurance. After Scotty gets injured at work, Kevin suggests that they register as domestic partners so that Scotty can be part of Kevin's health care benefits. Scotty rebuffs Kevin's offer by explaining that he wants his wedding to be “special” and that being “practical” is not enough of a reason to become domestic partners since domestic partnership “is it, our only legal option,” as

Scotty emphasizes (2x14, “Double Negative”).43 Kevin explains that he isn't sure if he will ever be ready “for that”—the “for that” presumably being a wedding based on romantic love and commitment. But only an episode later, after an emotional conversation with his uncle Saul, during which Saul comes out to Kevin, he is indeed ready to propose to Scotty in the “proper” romantic way. Most importantly, Kevin 43 At the time the episode was written and aired, gay marriage had not yet been legalized in the state of California. The California Supreme Court's decision of May 15, 2008 that led to the legalization of gay marriage went into effect on June16, 2008 (). Proposition 8, a ballot initiative that passed on November 5, 2008, added an amendment to California's constitution that once again rendered gay marriage illegal. 170 explains that he is grateful for being able to come home to a person like Scotty and that he wants to form a family with him. Scotty happily accepts Kevin's proposal, and they decide to get married the following Saturday (“why wait?” is the reason Kevin gives to his surprised mother Nora after telling her the news). Nora immediately insists that the wedding should be held at her house—a site of many important Walker family events, including numerous family dinners. The extended Walker family is present for the ceremony, which takes place in the lavishly decorated living room. Kitty officiates at the wedding and gives a brief speech about how sometimes the impossible can indeed become possible, which the viewer is encouraged to understand as a comment on both the possibility of gay marriage and on Kitty and Robert's desire to have children. When it turns out that Kevin and Scotty forgot to bring rings to the ceremony, Kevin's brothers immediately donate their wedding rings so that the ceremony can continue and Kevin and

Scotty can exchange vows. The wedding concludes with a kiss, much cheering, and a family meal.

“Prior Commitments” highlights a salient feature of Brothers & Sisters' diegesis: a near-fetishistic preoccupation with domestic spaces, especially the home of Nora Walker.

A focus on interior, domestic spaces is, of course, a prominent feature of television in general, both in terms of narrative and of production (it is cheaper to film on sets than outdoors or on location). Yet, the intense and narrow focus on the Walker family on

Brothers & Sisters elevates the attention paid to private, familial spaces to new televisual heights. The characters rarely venture beyond their boundaries—most scenes take place at characters' homes or at Ojai, which in itself is a familial space due its central 171 importance to the Walkers' collective identity. Kevin and Scotty's wedding in the living room of Nora's home reinforces the importance of domestic space in two related ways: first, their wedding serves as moment of unity during a time of crisis. The wedding allows the Walkers to congregate at Nora's home to seek refuge from the ongoing crises in their lives, and even partially to resolve them. The domestic functions in a classic televisual way here: it is the answer to all problems. Secondly, a traditional notion of privacy, with an emphasis on domesticity, is deployed more specifically to articulate a particular form of gay inclusion in the domestic sphere. Gay inclusion via the concept of

“privacy” has played an important role in both the Lawrence v. Texas (2003) decision that lifted the ban on sodomy and thus legalized consensual same-sex relationships in all states, and in the subsequent advocacy in favor of legalizing gay marriage. In order to understand how the intense attention paid to domestic spaces on Brothers & Sisters works as part of a push for homonationalism, I want to take a step back and look at the significance of the Lawrence v Texas decision and the media coverage around gay marriage in more detail to tease out connections among whiteness, privacy, and domesticity.

The Supreme Court's decision in Lawrence v. Texas rendered the remaining state bans on sodomy unconstitutional and overturned the court's 1986 decision in Bowers v.

Hardwick, which had affirmed state bans on sodomy. Overall, this decision has been hailed as a major victory for gay and lesbian civil rights and as a sign that queer

Americans are one step closer to being equals to straight Americans under law. As Daniel

Gordon explains, the major difference between the Bowers and the Lawrence decision is 172 the Court's focus: in Bowers, the judges were preoccupied with the legal dimensions of regulating sexual acts (including sodomy), whereas in Lawrence, the debate centered on intimacy within the private sphere (5). Considering the cultural context within which these decisions took place, the shift in focus is unsurprising. The AIDS crisis had dominated public debate about gay men's sexuality in 1986, when the court deliberated

Bowers v. Hardwick. Moreover, as I discussed in Chapter 2, anal sex was often constructed as the originary site of AIDS and as the sexual act that threatened the health and stability of the nation (which was figured as embodied in the “straight majority” that appeared to be in constant danger of becoming infected with HIV). Deciding whether or not the state should have a right to regulate consensual sex between adults thus took on a particularly urgent dimension in 1986, especially since the sexual act in question was portrayed as the origin of the health crisis threatening the nation. By 2003, the AIDS crisis had largely disappeared from public discourse. Furthermore, the proliferation of homonormative images and values, along with the disarticulation of sexuality and identity in queer media visibility, had brought concerns about domesticity and consumption to the forefront of debates relating to the gay and lesbian community. A focus on intimacy and privacy in the Lawrence decision responded to the homonormative concerns and debates that had gathered momentum throughout the 1990s and early

2000s. The Supreme Court's decisions in both the Bowers and Lawrence cases thus link into wider cultural discourses about the ways in which queerness relates to American culture.

Indeed, the decision to legalize consensual same-sex acts within the private, 173 domestic sphere underlines the necessary disappearance of queer sexuality from public view, a mandate that was also a precondition for the so-called explosion of gay media visibility during the 1990s. The concession that the state should not interfere with same- sex acts that happen in private is therefore implicitly balanced by a condemnation of similar acts in public. This particular understanding of privacy the Court put forth in

Lawrence is more traditional than the one developed in other recent decisions, which had extended a notion of privacy beyond actual domestic spaces (Puar, Terrorist Assemblages,

118). The reinscription of privacy as a physical domestic space consequnently becomes an underlying requirement for the legalization of same-sex sexuality.

In a way, then, the ruling in Lawrence, which is frequently perceived as liberatory, actually continues to restrict queer practices due to assumptions about privacy and domesticity. Moreover, it raises the question of who has access to the kind of privacy that the Court outlined and privileged in Lawrence. As Jasbir Puar points out, “Lawrence-

Garner can offer protection only to those who inhabit the fantasy of, and can mark and traverse across, bounded notions of public and private” (Terrorist Assemblages, 125). The possibility to decide which areas of life to keep private, and the option to have access to a private, domestic space, is a privilege that is not accorded to all residents of the United

States. This privilege depends crucially on race, class, and citizenship status.44

Particularly the perception of private domestic space as something that exists outside of the state's reach and that functions separately from the public sphere has strong racial

44 Connections among property, privacy, race, sexuality, and citizenship have longstanding histories and are in fact central to the ways in which legal and symbolic access to the nation has been policed; see, for example, Ian F. Haney Lopez' White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race and Lisa Lowe's Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics. 174 underpinnings. Feminists of color have long criticized this perception as illusionary. They have pointed out that, while the opposition of “public” and “private” might seem to hold true for white men and women, it does not necessarily apply to minorities who often experience closer state scrutiny of their “private” lives (Puar, Terrorist Assemblages,

124). Puar builds on this notion and discusses the status of non-citizens in American detention facilities, thereby highlighting the importance of citizenship in addition to race and class status in determining what kind of access U.S. residents have to privacy and to inclusion into the nation. For example, she describes the arrests of Muslim men made in the wake of the Patriot Act of 2001 as instances in which families are torn apart without legal recourse to resist the arrest and subsequent detention of family members.

Knowledge of where or why their relatives have been taken away remains sparse or is not available at all (Puar, Terrorist Assemblages, 146). These cases, Puar argues, show that

“the intimate is a protected space of citizenship” (ibid). Her analysis also demonstrates that among non-U.S. citizens, heterosexuality is no longer sufficient to access the privileges, including privacy, afforded by adherence to heteronormativity.

Access to and command of the type of privacy that remains free of state intervention (or one that maintains the illusion of freedom from intervention) is thus an important aspect of white privilege. It is important to keep in mind that “whiteness” in this case extends beyond previous constructions of racial difference. As Puar explains, the type of normative whiteness that includes access to privacy “is not strictly limited to white subjects, though it is bound to multiculturalism as defined and deployed by whiteness” (Terrorist Assemblages, 31). The Lawrence decision is instructive regarding 175 this deployment of multiculturalism: after all, one of the defendants, Tyron Garner, is a black man. Even though sodomy laws have historically been used to police interracial couples in particular, racial difference does not prominently figure in either the Court's opinion or the celebratory discourse in response to Lawrence.45 Tyron Garner's black identity is screened out of the significance of Lawrence; his name does not even appear in the shorthand Lawrence v. Texas under which this decision will be remembered. Even if inadvertently, the Lawrence decision thus reaffirms whiteness as central to the ways in which queerness becomes visible in American culture. Via the Lawrence decision, the

Supreme Court adopts a homonormative stance and inscribes it into legal precedence.

This inscription is another instance of homonationalism: by extending the right to engage in certain queer sexual acts in private, queer subjects are both welcomed into the nation and asked to support its normative race and class structures. Rather than being excluded from the nation, queer Americans are drawn into the project of maintaining a certain idea of the nation.

While the particular alignment of queerness, homonormativity, and inclusion into the nation that forms homonationalism comes into sharper relief during the war on terror, it is a process that has been in the making for a long time. For example, California's domestic partnership laws, adopted in 1999, include a shared residency requirement.46

Same-sex couples who want to register as domestic partners need to prove that they live together—a requirement that heterosexual couples do not have to fulfill when they 45 The use of sodomy laws to regulate interracial relationships and sexual encounters stretches all the way back to the turn of the twentieth century. See Nayan Shah's “Between 'Oriental Depravity' and 'Natural Degenerates': Spatial Borderlands and the Making of Ordinary Americans.” 46 According to California's Family Code section 297-297.5, the first requirement that applicants for domestic partnership have to fulfill is the following: “Both persons have a common residence” (http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/cgi-bin/displaycode?section=fam&group=00001-01000&file=297-297.5). 176 register for marriage. The shared residency requirement thus underlines particular norms of privacy and domesticity (purported signals of long-term partnership) for the legal inclusion of same-sex couples into state benefits. As I argued in Chapter 2, an emphasis on monogamy and domesticity as important aspects of gay male relationships already emerged in the media discourses of the 1980s, when it became a way of differentiating

“good gays” (i.e. those who would not spread HIV to the so-called general population) and “bad gays” (i.e. those whose sexual practices supposedly put the nation “at risk” of

HIV). The disarticulation of sexuality and identity in queer media visibility during the

1990s builds on that. Via the consolidation of whiteness as screen for queer visibilities, this trajectory eventually merges into a homonationalist discourse. Broadening the context of homonationalism beyond the war on terror allows a recognition of how queer media visibility structured around ideals of domesticity and privacy has been drawn into definitions of race, sexuality, and the nation for the past three decades.

In the wake of the Lawrence decision, those in the mainstream media seemed to agree that gay marriage would be the top priority and next legal battle for gay and lesbian civil rights. For example, the cover of Newsweek the week after the Lawrence decision depicts a white gay couple under the headline “Is Gay Marriage Next?” (July 7, 2003). A focus on domesticity and privacy is front and center of Newsweek's coverage of the

Supreme Court's decision. “It was a homey scene. Standing in their warm kitchen on a winter's day in 2001, Julie and Hillary Goodridge, a couple for 16 years, played the old

Beatles song 'All You Need Is Love' for their young daughter, Annie:” this is how the cover story claiming that Lawrence v. Texas inevitably leads to a fight for gay marriage 177 begins (Gegax et al, np). The opening paragraph continues by detailing how Annie's parents did not initially have a response to their daughter's insistence that, if they really loved one another, they would get married. Spurred on by their daughter's observation,

Julie and Hillary tried to obtain a marriage license in Massachusetts in 2001, but were denied (as gay marriage was only legalized in Massachusetts in 2007).47 The paragraph concludes with the observation that “last week Hillary and Julie—and every gay person who wants to be married or adopt a child or hold a job or receive a government benefit or simply enjoy the right to be respected—received a tremendous boost from the highest court in the land” (Gegax et al, np). The article goes on to describe the details of the

Lawrence decision and how it would shape the “war” over gay marriage.

In addition to mainstream media coverage, the Lawrence opinion itself anticipates attempts to use the decision in the legal fight for gay marriage. Justice O'Connor emphasizes in her concurring opinion that defending “traditional” definitions of marriage would justify state intervention in and regulation of gay relationships (Hunter, 203). From her point of view, should a gay marriage case come before the Court, the decision would most likely uphold a differentiation of marriage between same-sex and heterosexual partners as constitutional. Justice Scalia, in his dissenting opinion, disagrees, and asserts that the Lawrence decision opens up the potential of legalizing gay marriage via a

Supreme Court case. The possibilities enabled by the Lawrence ruling, he argues, would entail a severe “disruption of the current social order” (Gordon, 13). Scalia's dissenting opinion, which, in large parts, reads like a treatise on the perceived threat of

47 Julie and Hillary Goodridge were the plaintiffs in the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court case that led to the legalization of gay marriage in the state (Goodridge v. Department of Public Health, 798 N.e. 2D 941, 2003). 178

“homosexuality” to the American nation, outlines in detail how the legal precedent established in Lawrence could lead to a further broadening of gay and lesbian civil rights, including the right to marry.

All of these issues are relevant to Brothers & Sisters. In the context of the

Lawrence decision, California's domestic partnership laws, and mainstream media coverage on the subject of gay marriage, the intense focus on privacy and domesticity in the episode “Prior Commitments” almost appears as a prerequisite for Kevin and Scotty's wedding. Indeed, it becomes difficult to imagine their wedding taking place anywhere else than Nora's home, the symbolic center of the Walker family. After all, supporting storylines that weave around the wedding deal with the definition of family and of domestic arrangements. Kevin and Scotty's concerns blend in seamlessly with the problems preoccupying the other Walker siblings as all of them face questions of how to define familial bonds and allegiances. Moreover, it is Kevin and Scotty's wedding that finally offers the possibility of resolving some of these conflicts—it thus becomes a catalyst for decisions about the Walkers' family unity and, by implication, about access to white, domestic spaces. A brief discussion of the supporting plots revolving around

Kevin, Kitty, and Rebecca helps to illuminate these connections.

Instead of having a bachelor party, Kevin decides to drive to Arizona to visit

Scotty's parents in the hope of unravelling their resistance to the wedding. Scotty's parents aren't nearly as supportive of Scotty as the Walkers are of Kevin, and, while they claim to have accepted Scotty's gay identity, they do not agree with his decision to get married. Even after Kevin tries to reason with the Wandells by telling them that 179

California law supports domestic partnerships, they refuse to attend the wedding. Yet, for viewers, the trip to Arizona reaffirms the legality of Kevin and Scotty's commitment. The storyline underlines that Kevin and Scotty have a right to be domestic partners under

California law, and that they inhabit the kind of privacy that is the prerequisite for accessing that legal right both literally, as they live together in Kevin's loft, and in a more symbolic sense as they fulfill the homonormative requirements that allows them to be part of the nation.

For Kevin's sister Kitty and for family friend Rebecca, the wedding becomes a decisive moment for the realization that families come in all shapes and sizes.

Throughout the season, viewers have seen Kitty's struggle to become pregnant and have witnessed her insistence on having a biological child despite a miscarriage and various rounds of failed IVF. During the preparation for the wedding, however, Kitty changes her mind about adoption: rather than considering it as a last resort, she realizes it is simply a different way of constituting a family. Rebecca has a similar realization about what makes a family: she realizes that she doesn't have to be William Walker's biological child to be a Walker. Nora tells her that “there is more to family than DNA” and that Rebecca has become a part of the Walker family already. Sarah reaffirms that statement by observing that “we're like the Mafia, us Walkers; once you're in, you can never get out.”

Moreover, since Rebecca isn't an actual relative of Justin's, their foreshadowed romance can finally begin in earnest (since, during the season leading up the “Prior

Commitments,” Rebecca and Justin's friendship has taken on an increasingly romantic dimension). The relationship between Rebecca and Justin eventually leads to a marriage 180 proposal at the end of season three.

Overall, “Prior Commitments” suggests that biological ties aren't the only family ties that matter, and that families can and do form in ways that are not based on biological kinship. Taken at face value, this is a welcome message as the reimagination of familial bonds is of central importance to queer politics and its aim to reimagine social structures of everyday life. However, as it was articulated in Brothers & Sisters and other media texts, this apparent message of diversification is deeply embedded in homonational and other racialized discourses and thus merely uses a veneer of multiculturalism ultimately to uphold an ideal of white domesticity. While “Prior Commitments” offers multiple ways of reimagining what a family could be, the episode still reaffirms familial domesticity as a norm of social organization, and as a norm that will persist under outside pressure. After all, Kevin and Scotty's wedding offers the Walkers a moment of respite from their ongoing crises and it serves as an opportunity for finding a resolution for some of them, such as Kitty's desire for a family and Rebecca's anxiety of being excluded from the Walkers.

The episode, and Brothers & Sisters in general, represents this new “diverse” domesticity as exclusively white space. Whenever the Walker family expands, the new family member turns out to be white (whether via marriage or via the addition of previously unknown siblings). Both the introduction of suspected and actual illegitimate children of William Walker, Rebecca and Ryan, and the eventual adoption of a baby girl by Kitty and Robert preserve the Walkers' white domesticity. At the same time, both storylines draw on historical and cinematic discourses of interracial relationships and 181 families. Stories about the discovery of interracial children after a prominent white man's death have circulated in the news in the past decade—Thomas Jefferson and Strom

Thurmon are perhaps the most well-known examples.48 Even in our current allegedly multicultural climate, these kinds of discoveries still provoke anxiety about the crossing of racial lines (and the revelation that these lines are always-already unstable). In the context of visual media, they also tie into the longstanding cinematic fascination with mapping ways of “seeing” race. Susan Courtney argues that the miscegenation clause that was part of the Hollywoood Production Code between 1930 and 1956 had two major consequences: one, it established cinematic coding that taught spectators how to “see” race in Hollywood movies, and two, it supported the idea that racial categories are self- evident (104, 124). Moreover, Courtney outlines how these ways of “seeing” and visualizing race depended on the reinforcement of traditional gender norms, particularly after it became possible to show interracial relationships on the screen (248).

In Brothers & Sisters, these discourses about the crossing of racial lines and their visualization in the media only appear fleetingly. Regarding the appearance of illegitimate children, there is never any doubt about their whiteness: the Walker siblings' suspicion that they may not be their father's only children begins with the discovery of a photograph of a white baby at the Ojai family ranch and the siblings' futile efforts to trace said picture to any of the known Walkers. Their quest to discover their long-lost sibling leads to the introduction of Rebecca, who everyone assumes to be William's daughter 48 Regarding Jefferson, see, for example, Lucian K. Truscott IV's New York Times editorial “The Reunion Upon a Hill,” Annette Gordon-Reed's book Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy, and Peter Nicolaisen's article “Thomas Jefferson, Sally Hemings, and the Question of Race: An Ongoing Debate.” Regarding Thurmond, see, for example, Kevin R. Johnson's article “The Legacy of Jim Crow: The Enduring Taboo of Black-White Romance” and Essie Mae-Washington's book Dear Senator: A Memoir of the Daughter of Strom Thurmond. 182 until she takes a DNA test. Half a season later, Ryan is introduced on the show, and he turns out to be William Walker's actual illegitimate child. Throughout all of these rather convoluted storylines, there is never any doubt about Rebecca or Ryan's white racial identity.

There is a brief moment, however, when Brothers & Sisters very deliberately engages in racial anxieties, namely during a preview for episode 3x07, “Do You Believe in Magic?”. Kitty and Robert are in the middle of an adoption, and the preview provides a sneak peek at their meeting with the birth mother of their future child. The preview pairs a shot of a woman who is visually signified as African American announcing, “I'm

Trisha, your birth mom!” with shocked expressions on Kitty and Robert's faces. While lingering on Kitty and Robert, we hear Trisha say “Surprise!” off-screen. The preview clearly tries to suggest that Kitty's and Robert's shock and surprise is triggered by Trisha's non-white racial identity and by the implication that their child will not be white, either.

This association is fueled by both the normative whiteness that suffuses Brothers &

Sisters' diegesis and by the racialized history of Hollywood cinema. The former leaves the viewer unprepared for the possibility that Kitty and Robert might adopt a non-white child, and the latter provides a pattern for understanding their surprise as anxious reaction over the prospect of an interracial adoption. Yet during the actual episode, the preview's racialized suggestions turn out to be at least denotatively false: Kitty and Robert's shocked expression is in response to learning that Trisha is a neuro-surgeon, and not a med student, as they had assumed. The dialogue even reassures us that Kitty and Robert do not have any race-based biases: “You said ethnicity doesn't matter,” Trisha asks 183 rhetorically, and then cheerfully goes on to explain that she is of Korean and African

American descent, and that her baby's father is white. She concludes the overview of her family history by telling Kitty and Robert that they are “in for a surprise,” presumably regarding the ways in which this multiracial ancestry will manifest in a visual way. Even though this scene is supposed to affirm that, as good multiculturalists, race doesn't matter to Kitty and Robert, there is an intense focus on racial lineage and the possibilities of

“seeing” race that does rather the opposite—it shows that racial difference, especially its visual signification, still matters.

Both the veneer of multiculturalism and the defense of white domesticity in the unfolding narratives of Rebecca and Ryan as illegitimate children and of Kitty and

Robert's adoption depend on Kevin and Scotty's relationship—and specifically their wedding—as an important anchor. From this point of view, Kevin and Scotty's wedding does more than defend the Walkers' family unity in a time of crisis. Rather, Kevin and

Scotty's commitment to homonormativity allows a defense of the Walkers' white, upper- class identity, and, more importantly, their uncontested right to privacy within the family home. In addition, the wedding functions simultaneously as an outward sign of televisual and social progress (by asserting that gays and lesbians have the right to marry on TV and in real life under certain conditions) and yet still as an impediment to that progress, as it reaffirms longstanding criteria, such as whiteness and heteronormativity, that regulate and restrict who has access to civil rights, to privacy, and to symbolic inclusion in the nation.

From this point of view, the decade that passed between Ellen's coming out and Kevin and Scotty's wedding might be seen as both momentous and anti-climactic. In contrast to 184

Ellen's struggles with integrating lesbian identity into televisual everydayness, Kevin and

Scotty's wedding not only blends seamlessly into the diegetic world of Brothers &

Sisters, but it becomes a site of primary importance for the reinforcement of televisual and social norms. CONCLUDING REMARKS

When I began my investigation of the discourse of queer visibility in recent

American culture, my main focus rested on the questions of how and why visibility has become such an important concept to expressing queerness in film and television. My research has taken me into directions I did not anticipate, but that turn out to be vital to understanding in what ways a preoccupation with visibility came to the forefront of queer media representations.

First and foremost, there are the intricate connections between queer visibility and whiteness, which most clearly emerge by considering the closet as a screen. Normative ideas of whiteness serve as projection surface that, similar to the epistemology of the closet, screen different facets of queer visibility. Consequently, whiteness is intrinsically connected to prominent ideas of what queer media visibility ought to look like. At the same time, the significance of whiteness is downplayed—it appears as merely a backdrop to portrayals of queer lives and practices. More precisely, in many of the films and TV programs that have been hailed as “breakthrough” moments, i.e. those that have become most visible to the popular American imagination as queer media texts, whiteness acts as

185 186 a screen upon which particular notions of queerness are projected. From the 1980s onward, queer media visibility solidifies as denotative, gay and lesbian representations that correspond to white homonormativity. Examples of this pattern include Philadelphia,

Ellen, Will&Grace, Queer as Folk, Brokeback Mountain, and Brothers&Sisters, all of which had and have significant popular appeal.

While the apparently seamless integration of whiteness and homonormative in gay and lesbian representations seem to overshadow other possibilities, queer media texts also contain moments that allow the recognition of the closet-as-screen at work. As such, unscreening these moments forms the most important aspect of my research: throughout this dissertation, I foreground that multiple queer modes—both denotative and connotative, for example—emerge and persist simultaneously. Likewise, processes of raciliazation can never be completely screened out of queer media texts. My chapters investigate this connection between whiteness and queer visibility across a wide field of events, time periods, and places to foreground the closet-as-screen's impact on debates surrounding race, sexuality, gender, citizenship, activism and everyday life in the United

States.

Tracing and unscreening queer visibility across different temporalities and spaces rendered aspects of queerness visible to me that I had not originally considered or anticipated. Among those aspects are the cycles of forgetting that enable “breakthrough” moments in queer history and media visibility, the deep connections between queer visibility and (imagined) urban and rural landscapes, and the significance of silence in moments of coming out. Historiography, geography, and modes of speech are interwoven 187 with discourses of whiteness and queer visibility in ways that exceed a strictly media- based analysis. In these concluding remarks, I want to bring these seemingly disparate threads together to once again underline the far reach of the discourse of queer visibility and its deep impact on American culture in the past 40 years. Additionally, they also open up the most exciting and urgent avenues for future investigations of the discourse of queer visibility.

Across all four preceding chapters, my analyses highlight how the significant

“firsts” in queer history and in queer media representations depend on simultaneous moments of deliberate forgetting. Among these “firsts” is the celebration of the events at the Stonewall Inn in 1969 as the first gay riot, a notion that was carefully constructed during the Eastern Regional Conference of Homophile Organizations in late 1969 and upheld by events such as ACT UP's Stonewall 20 action in 1989. Marking Stonewall as the “first” riot not only obscures earlier skirmishes between gay activists and the police, but also allows the emergence of a before-and-after story of gay liberation—a pattern that characterizes the discourse of queer visibility. Similar stories wind around the Production

Code, the AIDS crisis, and Ellen's coming out. All of these stories emphasize an opening up of new possibilities and radical change. As such, they underline that the end of the

Production Code enabled the denotative portrayal of gay and lesbian characters and subject matters in Hollywood film, that the AIDS crisis forced mainstream America to acknowledge the gay and lesbian community, and that Ellen's coming out paved the way for the so-called explosion of gay visibility on television. While these are important developments, they only represent half of the story, so-to-speak. For example, even after 188 the Production Code was lifted, the connotative registers that had been used to signify queerness in Hollywood cinema continued to thrive right alongside the new denotative possibilities. Likewise, while the AIDS crisis certainly prompted the circulation of reports on gay and lesbian ways of life, it also brought about a disarticulation of queer identities and queer sexualities—in other words, the mainstream media's acknowledgment of gays and lesbians critically depended on normalizing queerness. The ensuing explosion of gay visibility, most vividly embodied in Ellen's coming out, further defined this normalization, pushing queer media visibility closer to homonormativity, and, after the events of 9/11, to homonationalism. Indeed, the quotidian existence of Kevin and Scotty on Brothers & Sisters, which is so unremarkable that even their wedding comes and goes without making a blip on the media radar, points towards the emergence of a homonationalist definition of queer visibility as its most authentic and desirable form.

Along with before-and-after stories, the specificities of space and time also emerge as crucial components of my investigation of the discourse of queer visibility.

Indeed, processes of normalization, queerness, and race all are deeply connected to temporality and spatiality. As such, the history of AIDS in New York cannot be separated from the urban landscape of Manhattan. The normalization of queer identities in the late

1980s and early 1990s brought with it the normalization of Manhattan's geography: spaces once visibly queer, e.g. numerous bathhouses and gay clubs, were shut down in the name of public health and reinvented in a more “family-friendly” manner (the overhaul of Times Square is certainly the most prominent example, but the Hudson piers also come to mind). 189

In addition to the real space of Manhattan, the imagined spaces of the West and the Midwest become crucial to the manifestations of queerness in the films Brokeback

Mountain and Boys Don't Cry. In Brokeback Mountain, longstanding cultural ideas of the

American West frame the romance between Jack and Ennis—ideas that screen out, among other things, the significance of race to imagined pastoral Western landscapes, including the idyllic Brokeback mountain. While the idea of “queer cowboys” appears to disrupt established ideas of the West, homonormative ideals shape the gay romance at the center of the film and critically depend on the screening of race afforded by the mythic

Western landscape. Similarly, Boys Don't Cry seems to expose homophobia in the rural

Midwest. But this exposure relies on widespread preconceptions of rural America, particularly of so-called white trash culture. While the film retells the events surrounding the murder of transgendered Brandon Teena in a sympathetic way—the aspect of Boys

Don't Cry that the mainstream press celebrated—both narrative and diegesis evade an engagement with its reliance on undifferentiated ideas of race and class.

The last aspect that winds through my investigation of the discourse of queer visibility is the relationship between speaking out or remaining silent, which is mapped onto the opposition of being visible or out and being invisible or in the closet. The insistent push towards more visibility in the decades that I investigate marks the decision not to be visibly queer as insufficient and even oppressive. Beginning with the gay liberation front's slogan “Come out, come out, wherever you are,” the mandate to be out and to speak out has rendered silence undesirable. Yet again, the foregrounding of one particular form of queer lives and practices, in this case to be out, is embedded in 190 questions of raciliazation and normalization. For example, non-white cultural traditions offer insights into how not being visibly queer may open up spaces in which queer practices can thrive. In these cases, silence cannot be equated with an oppression.

Moreover, cross-cultural comparisons allow the recognition that coming out is a predominantly white American cultural concept that might not translate into other national contexts.

The significance of silence also emerges in the context of AIDS. While ACT UP stands behind the idea of SILENCE = DEATH, other aspects of the AIDS crisis of the

1980s, for example the suggestion to mandate HIV testing for specific parts of the population, point towards silence as a privilege. In this context, both the need to speak out about the devastating consequences of HIV/AIDS and the possibility to withhold identification as queer or as HIV-positive become powerful and contested cultural modes.

After Ellen's coming out, the possibility of the co-existence of speech and silence dwindles, at least within the context of queer media visibility. The increasing embrace of gay and lesbian subject matter in film and television make the refusal to come out not only undesirable, but tragic. Within this framework, mainstream reviews read one of the major narrative arcs of Brokeback Mountain, namely Ennis' refusal to embrace a settled life with Jack, as a sign of internalized homophobia when it would also be possible to read it as a refusal of homonormativity. Within the contemporary context of failures and successes in gay marriage legislation, Ennis emerges as tragic figure who will not even lay claim to the limited possibilities afforded by his homophobic environment. Other possibilities do not emerge as readily because they are obscured by cultural discourses 191 that favor homonormativity.

The oscillation between a homonormative outlook emphasizing modes of queer life and practices that align with whiteness, productivity, and stability and a point of view that favors multiplicity and uncertainty characterizes the current moment of queer visibility. My research negotiates between these sides of the closet-as-screen: I trace out how predominant modes of queer visibility have come into being over the past forty years while also demonstrating that alternative points of view can never be completely screened out. Taking the so-called explosion of gay visibility during the 1990s as anchor, I have developed the concept of the closet-as-screen to tease out the crucial moments in the discourse of queer visibility. My mode of investigation allows for a critical understanding of the conflicts surrounding homonormative and homonationalist paradigms of queer visibility. In examining a wide variety of media, time periods, and cultural contexts, my research has focused on clusters of meaning that might not seem to have connections to queer visibility at first glance, but that, upon closer investigation, are suffused with mechanisms, screens, and lenses that enable and regulate how queerness manifests itself in American culture. BIBLIOGRAPHY

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