Copyright by Taylor Cole Miller 2012 The Thesis Committee for Taylor Cole Miller Certifies that this is the approved version of the following thesis: “Hello America, I’m Gay!” – Oprah, Coming Out, and Rural Gay Men APPROVED BY SUPERVISING COMMITTEE: Supervisor: Mary Celeste Kearney Janet Staiger “Hello America, I’m Gay!” – Oprah, Coming Out, and Rural Gay Men by Taylor Cole Miller, B.A.; B.S.J. Thesis Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts The University of Texas at Austin May 2012 Dedication Crystals of frost sparkled off flowers placed on my brother’s grave shortly after he died, upon which one day waited a butterfly. He became a symbol of hope and a symbol of peace for my family, illustrating how death is not an end but yet another of life’s journeys. In the year I have taken to write this, I stumbled through a particularly difficult and frankly awful period of time. On the darkest of those days, I opened the door of my apartment in the evening to a cloud of monarchs, and I was once again reminded of everything I strive for in my life’s journey. I give this work for brother as he lives on in the wings of the butterfly. Acknowledgements I am inspired by and grateful to the men who shared with me many hours of their personal lives to make this project possible. Your stories are inspirational, your hearts are kind, and I thank you for allowing me the opportunity to experience both. I express my sincerest gratitude to my parents for all they have done to see me succeed. My journey toward a bright future is paved with your blessings. I send all my love to my sisters, nephews, and niece. My dearest thanks to my best friend and confidant Mary. Your laughter, your smile, and even your spastic puppy bring happiness and light into my life. I wish also to acknowledge my close friend Alfred L. Martin, Jr. Thank you for calmly and supportively talking me through every crisis along the way. We both know they were not few. I have nothing but praise for my supervising committee who did more work to shape me into a scholar than I ever could have asked for or dreamed possible. Janet, thank you for pushing me to make my work better and giving me the faith that it was achievable. Mary, I cannot begin to articulate how grateful I am to have you as a shining example of academic excellence. Your tireless efforts to see me succeed raise me up. I have been honored to be your student, and that is not a word I use lightly. Any good piece of scholarship begins and ends in the presence of our cats – those feline familiars who keep us company through our struggles and give us plenty of excuses for breaks. I am grateful for my kitty Pitters, even though she showed her protest with more veterinary appointments in four short thesis-writing months than the rest of her eleven-year life combined, and a snuggle for my sweet Janie who always pops up just when I need it, and who I am sure will be more than happy to see me sleep again. Yes, you both get soft food tonight. Finally, thank you to Oprah Winfrey for twenty-five seasons of sweet inspiration. v Abstract “Hello America, I’m Gay!” – Oprah, Coming Out, and Rural Gay Men Taylor Cole Miller, M.A. The University of Texas at Austin, 2012 Supervisor: Mary Celeste Kearney Recent queer scholarship challenges the academy’s longstanding urban and adult oriented trajectory, pointing to the way such studies ignore rural and heartland regions of the country as well as the experiences of youth. In this thesis, I craft a limited ethnographic methodological approach together with a textual analysis of The Oprah Winfrey Show to deliver portraits of gay men living in various rural or heartland areas who use their television sets to encounter and identify with LGBTQ people across the nation. The overarching aim of this project is to explore the ways in which religion, rurality, and Oprah coalesce in the process of identity creation to form rural gay men’s conceptual selves and how they are then informed by that identity formation. I will focus my textual analyses through the frames of six of Oprah Winfrey’s “ultimate viewers” to elucidate how they receive and interact with her star text, how they use television sets in the public rooms of their homes to create boundary public spheres, and how they are impacted by the show’s various uses of the coming out paradigm. In so doing, this thesis seeks to contribute to the scholarship of rural queer studies, television studies, and Oprah studies. vi Table of Contents Introduction ..................................................................................................................1 My Experience – “I Feel the Love” .........................................................................2 Review of Literature ..............................................................................................12 The Televolution of Tabloid Talk ......................................................................13 From Po’ Colored Girl to Powerful, Wealthy Woman...................................... 19 To the Pews: Theoretical Perspective and Methods of Study ................................26 Chapter Overview ..................................................................................................36 Chapter One: From Dorothy to Glinda – Oprah’s Reconceptualization of the Diva.............................................................................................................................. 39 “Just Follow the Yellow Brick Road” ....................................................................42 Ray’s Experience – “When I Think of Her, I Just Think of Goodness” ................51 “Toto, I Have a Feeling We’re Not in Kansas Anymore” ......................................58 Marques’ Experience – “She Embodies Grace” .....................................................63 “My Unconquerable Soul” .....................................................................................70 Chapter Two: Refashioning the Family Room – Watching Oprah in a Boundary Public Sphere.............................................................................................................. 74 Breaking Down the Public/Private Sphere............................................................. 77 Michael’s Experience – “From a Place So Secluded” ...........................................83 Parasocial Interactions and Oprah Winfrey – “Touching the Television Screen” ..90 Caleb’s Experience – “The Devil Entered Your Home Through the Television” 102 “It Will Get Better – Someday” ...........................................................................112 Chapter Three: The Truth Will Set You Free ... or Aflame: The Coming Out Imperatives of Sleaze and Spiritual Oprah ...........................................................115 vii Presenting Homosexuality in Oprah’s “Sleaze” Seasons .....................................119 Logan’s Experience – “It Confirmed My Fears” .................................................125 Toby’s Experience – “‘Why Tell Us Now?’” .......................................................134 From Sleaze to Spiritual: Oprah’s Quality Programming ....................................141 Ray’s Experience – “I Started Feeling This Guilt” ..............................................148 Being Gay is a Gift from God!............................................................................. 154 Conclusion ................................................................................................................158 Limitations of Memory Mining............................................................................ 160 Contributions and Future Research...................................................................... 163 Bibliography .............................................................................................................167 viii Introduction “I would have to say, I believe that no matter what, no matter what difficulty, no matter what dark hour befalls me ... there’s a rainbow in the cloud.” -- Oprah Winfrey1 In the first-ever hour of The Oprah Winfrey Show (Oprah), the eponymous host introduces what she says is her intention in creating the series: “This show always allows people, hopefully, to understand the power they have to change their own lives. If there’s one thread running through each show we do, it is the message that you – you – are not alone” (1986). As Oprah says these words, she points into the camera and into her viewers’ eyes to help them believe that, through the beautiful new world of Oprah, they now belong to a community. This thesis is a project to study a neighborhood in that community populated by rural gay men, of which I am a part, whose disenfranchisement with our cultural and geographical surroundings was healed at least in part by our spectatorship of the show and our welcome citizenship in that community. Before I delve into a textual analysis of both Oprah and the voices of the men I have included in this project, I believe it is important to inaugurate this thesis with an autoethnography, which, as Matt Hills writes, is useful in illuminating “the tastes, values, attachments, and investments” of a community I believe my own voice can help illuminate (72). Extending Hills’ work, Kristina Busse and Karen Hellekson argue that the autoethnography is “an awareness of our subject positions that creates a stronger, not a weaker, affect” of critical analysis (24). In