November 11, 2005
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Jim Crow Goes To Hollywood
© The Author, 2005The problems with makeover television shows are almost too numerous to count. On top of the fact that makeover shows define beauty by white, upper-class standards and successfully drive hordes of women into debt as they try to shop away how horrible the most recent episode of What Not to Wear made them feel about their appearance, makeover shows also make paramount a character that I positively loathe: bitchy gay guys.
Now I know that you, my very cool and liberal readership, are collectively gasping in horror thinking, “that horrible little Chicago Art Twat is a gay hating bigot! The rise of gay visibility in the media is wondrous evidence of society’s growing acceptance of queer lifestyle!” But think of my dissent this way: would Fredrick Douglass consider Sambo or Pickaninnies a move in the right direction for black acceptance?
My guess is no.
The fact is, that although Six Feet Under is able to accurately portray the queer lifestyle as it actually is (aka: normal, everyday life), there are an overwhelming number of reality based programs—most of them involving makeovers—that rely heavily on the gay equivalent to Aunt Jamima for good ratings.
Straight America is wildly entertained by the gay man. It’s just so quaint how he thinks his way is better than our way; look how he “pooh-poohs” our interior design—it’s so adorable! I just love his witty remarks! Look how he cringes at our fashion choices! Go ahead—let him into your closet to scorn your clothes; after all, he likes it in there!
Dance, gay man, dance.
And yet when gay men abandon the parodies of themselves for one fucking minute to ask for something as simple as civil rights, America’s canned laugh track comes to a screeching halt.
It makes me sick.
There is something so wrong and so deeply ruined about a country that pulls this sort of crap time and time again; we are a disgrace.
Those SUV driving, flag waving Americans who say that we are free are obviously not gay. They are obviously not poor. They are obviously not anything but white and privileged. Freedom is just a trophy for those who are rich enough to buy it or those who hate themselves enough to pay for it in other ways. Just ask the bitchy gay man. He is free to “be himself” on television, just as long as it sells.
_______________________________________________________________________So, what are we going to do to stop this horrible cycle?
::Random Tangent::
December 9, go see Broke Back Mountain. The gay characters in it are not subservient to a larger plot about straight people. The gay characters are not bitchy mannequins, but actual people, with actual pulses and actual sweat and actual tears. This movie matters; make America recognize that with your spending power.
Comments (9)
Warning: Holy long entry Batman. But then again, when you pose such a provocative question, what do you expect?
Your comparison feels like it should have been obvious to anyone intellegent, but it’s shockingly honest. And brilliant. I took a class in college on African American women’s lit. We watched a movie on the Jim Crowe/Sambo/Mammy/Pickaninny stereotypes and it was brutally shocking. Even more so because it was so recent yet so foreign to me. The movie showed all the merchandise created around this stereotype and it was all beyond disturbing. Yet, with the exception of the Aunt Jamima syrup, they were things I’d never seen before. I’m sure I am a top contender for the title of most naive 23-year-old on the planet, but to have never been aware that white actors used to charcoal their faces and paint white clown-like smiles around their lips to portray black people in movies? My conservative “education” did a damn good job of keeping dirt under rugs and cobwebs out of corners.
In an upper-level American humanities class, we studied the first musical film. I can’t remember the name of it–it’s something like The Jazz Man. We listened to music clips, learned the history of the (white) musician, and were expected to know all of this for the exam. It wasn’t until I took the African American women’s lit class the next semester that I was even aware that the lead singer was painted black the entire movie, playing an African American. This more than shocked me, it made me angry. This fact was a deliberate omission of something highly relevant from my American humanities class. I took the amazing women’s lit class my last semester and realized only then that my education from a school owned by the Mormon church was less of an education than it was an…I don’t know. I don’t want to bash BYU. It’s an easy target and I did have some amazing classes and professors, but then there were way too many like that Amercan humanities class.
So on to your question. I’m sure this next sentence will make me look like a moron, but here goes. I think it’d be interesting to find out what made that creepy Sambo/Mammy paraphanelia fade away into obscurity. I’m sure other people will post and assure my poor sheltered soul that all of that imagery is far from obscurity, but the fact is is that I honestly never knew it existed until I was 22 and saw a documentary on it. It was so jarring and disturbing that I talked with my mom about it and she knew exactly what I was talking about, She grew up in Utah and lived here all of her life, with the same exposures that I have. Less actually, without the internet and cable tv. I think the reason she knew about all of that stuff was simply because she’s older; it all occurred more recently for her. Sometime between the period of life where she acquired most of her cultural knowledge and this period of my life where I’m acquiring most of mine, the Crowe/Sambo/Mammy/Pickaninny stereotypes rapidly fell out of mainstream culture. Something caused the face charcoal, the Sambo dancing, and the exaggerated talk of Jar-Jar Binks (who should die, along with all the people responsible for his character) to stop. Suddenly, for some reason, it wasn’t funny anymore.
I mentioned in one of my earlierposts that I was reading The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell. I got halfway through then stopped, but the book tries to explains how epidemics start. Not just health epidemics, but fashion epidemics or even reverse epidemics where there is a sudden drop in the popularity of something. I may be explaining this wrong, so if this interests you, check the book out from the library and read just the first section; it gives a basic run-down of the entire book. The tipping point refers to a moment when three factors converge to cause a slow moving epidemic to suddenly tip and pour forth with incredible force. Like a dam finally breaking. These converging factors are tiny and seemingly insignificant. When homosexuality is no longer stereotypical and people are trying to figure out why, if anyone pointed to the tiny events or factors that led to the tipping point, they’d be laughed at.
The book uses Sesame Street as an example. I hope it applies to the point I’m trying to get across. At the time it was created, child psychologists were adamant that it was damaging to mix reality with fantasy in anything presented to children. So the muppets stayed in the skits and the real people stayed on the street. As a result, Sesame Street originally didn’t have Big Bird, Snuffleuapagus (sp?!), or Oscar the Grouch. (The horror!) The creators screened a pilot in front of a group of kids and were shocked to find out that while they all loved the skits, hardly any of the even paid attention to the street scenes. The streets were just adults doing boring adult things. Since the street was the show’s pivotal central metaphor, the creators had a problem. So they took a gamble and went against the experts and at the last moment, added muppets like Big Bird that lived on the street and Oscar that lived in a trash can and had the muppets interact with the people. This was not the only reason Sesame Street was a huge success, but it was one small factor that contributed to its tipping point. I’m sure the creators and executives assumed more kids would watch and stay captivated with show, but the level of attention grew exponentially, not just with the street scenes, but with the skits as well.
I’m confident that the horrible cycle WILL break and will break suddenly and no one will be able to pinpoint why. I kind of wish I’d read the whole Tipping Point book now. I think in the end it explains how to take advantage of knowing about what causes a tipping point. But even with ambitous goals, awe-inspiring leaders, one hundred million dedicated people, and all the financial backing in the world, nothing can change the way people think. We could boycott Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, but I don’t even watch that anyway, so I don’t think it would make much of a difference. I don’t want to sound too much like an NBC ‘The more you know’ commercial here, but the only realy changes we can make are with the people we are close to. No one is going to change the way they think because of what some Senator says. But people listen to their brothers, best friends, or daughters.
As I look out my window and see my Grand Vitara (a small SUV, apparantly the car designed by Satan) and the American flag put up by the local scout troop for Veteran’s day, I wonder if freedom is genetically embedded into my white skin or my heterosexual tendencies. Maybe a bit of both.
Heh. You know what I just realized about five seconds ago? That paragraph in your post where you turn me (and a big chunk of Americans) into an ugly (yet entertaining) stereotype made me really angry, as you might have sensed from my last paragraph.
You know what I just realized about four seconds ago? Your writing is brilliant. I’m white, American, healthy, relatively thin, from an upper-middle class family, college educated woman. Besides some of the discrimination against women (which has never affected me much) I’m someone who has not and most likely never will have just one aspect of myself turned into an ugly caricature. Sure, I may get mocked for driving an SUV or being religious, but those kind of things are choices. You don’t choose to be black and you don’t choose to be gay.
I apologize for publishing a novel on your site, but this is such a great topic to discuss. I’m looking forward to coming back and reading what other people have to say. Good thing these reply boxes don’t have a character limit…well, good thing for me.
::Not So Random Tangent:: I alluded earlier to the fact that I am a Mormon. I’m not sure how common this knowledge is, but Mormons not only discourage the legalization of gay marriage, but donate a lot of money to keep the marriage laws the way they are. Since this is a bit off point and a sensitive subject that I’m not sure I want to discuss in an open forum, I won’t comment on it here. Plus, it would take me much much longer to explain, so if you’re concerned or curious over my views about this, send me an email at jamiebyu@lycos.com. Just don’t email me assuming you know exactly what my opinions are and criticizing them before I’ve even said anything. You might be surprised at what I have to say. You may disagree with my opinions after you’ve heard them, and if that’s the case, then by all means, criticize away.
I just reread my post and it makes less sense than I thought it did when I wrote it. First off: I said Mormons donate a lot of money to keep the marriage laws the same. What I meant by that was that the Mormon Church donates the money. I don’t send in any checks to some organization against gay marriage. I pay tithing, but the Church only uses tithing to build churches, temples, and fund Brigham Young University. The Church had a lot more income sources than tithing.
I don’t think I’ve explained the Tipping Point very well, but I really do think that’s what will break the cycle. It requires three factors to be successful. The ‘epidemic’ that needs to be tipped is doing away with homosexual stereotypes. In my first reply, I said you could have an army of one hundred million people, but the tipping point theory’s first requirement is called the law of the few. When AIDS was first diagnosed, a staggering number of the patients were able to trace back their contraction of virus to one man. It only takes a few people with a lot of influence to get an epidemic going.
There’s what’s called the stickiness factor. The ‘epidemic’ has to stay in the body long enough for the person who caught it to give it to someone else.
The third factor is interesting; it’s called the power of context. In 1964 and woman was stabbed to death after being attacked three times while trying to run away down the street. There were 38 witnesses in their apartments who saw the whole thing, but no one called the police. This event prompted a scientist to do a study where a woman in an empty class room would fake a seizure. He’d sometimes have just one student in another classroom, sometimes they’d have four students in various classrooms. Each time, the other students knew how many other people there were in each adjoining classroom. The study showed that the more students there were, the less likely anyone was to get up and help the woman having the seizure. Essentially, what the power of context proves is that to get people to actually get up and change their behavior, you need to manipulate their environment. As long as everyone thinks “Someone else will do it” no one will.
So that’s the basic theory. How do turn that into concrete actions to spread the epidemic of ending gay stereotypes?
Wow. All that and I end up with the exact same question that I started with. I really don’t know. I had a friend who said we just had to wait for all of our parents to die then there’d be no problem but I know plenty of people my age that are even worse than my parents. And who wants to wait that long?
You know what? I’m on crazy migraine meds. They make me ramble. For some reason, putting this theory in the context of gay stereotypes is really interesting to me, but I hope that not just a side effect of the meds. I should probably go to my own site and waste space there.
Okay, Highway Crossing Frog–you are sweet and thoughtful and I thank you for your insight. But please, PLEASE consider this: Being gay is not an epidemic. Crappy portrayals of it, fuelled by an epidemic of bigotry from mainstream America, are an epidemic. Big difference. Gay people=good. Mainstream America=bad. And try not to bring AIDS up in exclusive relationship with gay people. It is horrifying, especially since you, a straight woman is part of the demographic that hurts the worst from AIDS.
Yes–there are subtler versions of the Sambo on television today. It is not gone. But it fades away when civil rights movements happen. This is not elusive. It takes a group of people recognizing an err and uproaring about it.
Thanks for being so beautiful about genuinely wanting to think about the world around you–that is a wonderful thing that I hope you never lose it.
From a sociological and pop-culture standpoint, this development is not surprising. You can no longer use blacks for minstrelry. Yet how can the affluent white male director work into comic relief that will make his affluent white audiences feel superior and not self-conscious? Enter the gay character. Really, the director thinks as he reflects and sips his expensive imported wine, shouldn’t “their type” be happy to be included in my wonderful world at all? It’s not like I’m vilifying them … just showing off their quirks. It’s a win-win, really.
This is a pervasive way of thinking, but hardly accurate. It’s a bit of tokenism — allowing the directors to say they are showing diversity — but just a rehashing of degrading stereotypes, just a different group. While many of my gay friends are funny or act a bit fabulous, they are in no way so over-the-top and look-at-me. As a matter of fact, I had no idea any of them were gay when I met them … in many cases, I did not learn this for many years.
Is it, in all cases of depiction, conscious bigotry? I wouldn’t go that far. The self-parodying gay characters seen in the makeover shows cooperate quite willingly. It makes for great TV and, since the Fab Five and the likes are well compensated and have rung up endorsements, it’s hardly indentured servitude. So are they, perhaps, part of the problem? Do they not care?
Right-wing columnists like to refer to an alleged gay lobby that controls Hollywood and supposedly has an undue influence on politics. It’s a convenient bogeyman, since most conservative pundits aren’t dumb enough to pick on ethnic minorities. But it’s also a ludicrous notion … if this were the case, where are the ennobling portrayals of gay characters and supportive legislation?
In the meantime, the character is not going away. With the growing size of the Latino population and the expanding influence of Asians, I don’t see another minority that will find itself in this role. But it’s sad the role even exists.
wow, those comments are really long. I don’t have much to contribute besides the fact that I agree with you. Something is wrong with America. I’m hoping that America will open it’s eyes and provide homosexuals with the same civil rights as they did black, but that’s going to be hard because a lot of people are against same sex marriages. I want to see Broke Back Mountain, it looks like a really good movie. thank you for your post. hope you have a great weekend. autumn
Woah now. I do NOT think that being gay is an epidemic. I am SO sorry if anything I said sounded like that. I’m glad you can read past my muddled attempts at grasping something so obviously far outside of my realm of experience and see that my intent is not out of malice. The ‘epidemic’ I’m talking about is NOT homosexuality but the parody of the gay stereotype in Hollywood.
And I can see now that using epidemic, AIDS, and homosexuality in the same comment was just bad form. I didn’t not mean for those things to be connected and relay some kind of subtle undertone message. I clearly don’t have the same sensitivities as a lot of other people concerning these things, but looking back at it, that should have obvious. Won’t happen again.
Here’s what I think I was trying to say. The parody and prevelence of gay stereotypes in Hollywood has emerged in tv and movies at a staggering rate over the last five or so years. I don’t think there’s anything we can do to stop such a force, but I do think it will be stopped. And I think the thing that stops it will be a meeting of small things at the right time and the right place. What these things will be, I don’t know. But I do agree that regardless of anyone’s personal feelings about homosexuality, the way it’s stereotyped, parodied, and marketed by Hollywood is detremental to everyone.
Hey Truly, you’ve been tagged! See my site for details when you get a chance.
Now off to work on that certain bundle of joy I’ve been intending to send your way.
your post rings true, although i gave up on those makeover shows not for the guys, but for the promotion of a quick fix for anyone whose thigh is a bit flabby or nose too prominant.
more importantly, i am still laughing, and will continue to do so for awhile, over your statement “dance, gay man, dance.”
fucking hysterical. As usual, I love reading you. have a great week.
It’s almost like the TV people want us to believe that being gay is an entirely separate culture, with different ideals and beliefs and whatnot—a culture that is centered entirely around sexual orientation, which is, according to the TV people, the sole purpose of their identity. It irritates me beyond belief that practically every gay character on television seems to be on the show for the expressed purpose of constantly talking about his or her sexual orientation, as if there were nothing else to life than sex. Of course, there hardly is any focus on homophobia—something that needs to be exposed and ridiculed to the point that homophobic people will finally learn to be ashamed of themselves for their childish beliefs.