9 years ago, a television show hit Showtime that was so outrageous, so different from what was historically shown in the United States, that people had to stand up and take notice. Queer as Folk chronicled the lives of a group of gay friends in Pittsburgh and their trials and tribulations.
The show was received extremely well critically, and was easily one of the most popular shows on Showtime’s entire lineup. In fact in 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, and 2005, QAF was nominated as Best Drama Series (winning the award in 2001), an event put on by GLAAD in NYC yearly to honor gay achievements in the media. During NYC’s Pride Parade, the stars of the show were honored as conquering heroes who had broken the rainbow barrier and made television hospitable to gay people. So successful was the male-dominated story line that Showtime tried again, with much less success, with a female storyline in a similar series called The L Word, a show that never reached the popularity or level of critical acclaim that Queer as Folk Did.
In short, the show did everything in a very short time. Awards, critical acclaim, shooting stardom for the actors, and for the most part did it all without preaching at people and lecturing them. It was edgy, hip, fun, sexy, and at times, even downright raunchy.
Oh yeah, did I mention the raunchy part? Hmmm… You see, QAF was as uncut (no pun intended) as it gets. Scenes were raw, and most episodes bordered on hardcore (while they never showed penetration, they didn’t exactly shy away from hip on keister contact, either). Characters like Brian Kinney (played by Gale Harold) and Emmett Honeycutt (played by Peter Paige) rarely showed restraint of any kind in the show, and Kinney often added drugs into the mix alternating between coke, weed, and ecstacy whenever he could. Kinney was on and off throughout the series with Randy, played by Randy Harrison, a “barely legal” who he met at Babylon, the club often featured in various episodes of the show.
At club Babylon, the hallways were littered with people performing oral sex on each other and bathrooms that served as rooms you could get an easy quickie in. At times, the action even happened right on the dance floor in plain view of the rest of the people there. Restraint? Not likely, which is quite odd because the gay community at large is always talking about how important it is to be safe and AIDS aware. In many ways, QAF sent the polar opposite message: Be promiscuous. If you get it, you get it.
Very little of what appeared in QAF could be considered “on message” with organizations like GLAAD or Gay Men’s Health Crisis. While it was a hell of an entertaining and compelling show, it violated most of the rules of gay organizations and yet, because the characters were gay, rarely received any criticism. Drugs? Under-age sex? Public sex? Risky sex? Stranger sex? No worries! QAF is groundbreaking!
So imagine my surprise when the head of GLAAD came out swinging after seeing Bruno, and his accomplices in the media followed suit. Jarred Barrios, head of GLAAD, outwardly condemned the movie to anyone who would listen.
LOS ANGELES, Calif. –
The Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation said Friday that “Bruno,” the new film starring Sacha Baron Cohen, reinforces negative stereotypes and “decreases the public’s comfort with gay people.”
GLAAD president Jarrett Barrios, who saw an early screening of the film, said that “the movie was a well-intentioned series of sketches — some hit the mark and some hit the gay community pretty hard and reinforce some damaging, hurtful stereotypes.”
In a style similar to his popular Borat character, Baron Cohen brings Bruno, a flamboyantly gay Austrian fashionista, into ridiculous situations with unsuspecting everyday people.
Universal Pictures, which released “Bruno,” sought GLAAD’s input on the film and invited staff members to advance screenings, Barrios said.
The organization “shared a number of concerns, and unfortunately, the scenes that we had the biggest concerns about remained in the film,” Barrios said.
One such scene shows Bruno in a hot tub with his adopted infant son and two naked men involved in a sex act.
“Scenes like that don’t help America understand the hundreds of thousands of gay families who get up every day, do the carpool then rush home to make dinner and be with their children,” Barrios said.
Similarly, the movie’s mock marriage scene “doesn’t help Americans understand the lives of gay couples who are denied the rights and protections of marriage in 43 states,” he said.
And this one…
Barrios said that while he believes the filmmakers had good intentions and that some moviegoers will see the satire, “some people in the gay community will be as troubled as GLAAD is that the movie doesn’t decrease homophobia, but decreases the public’s comfort with gay people.”
Wow. Barrios seems really concerned about the impression Bruno might create, yet his attacks on Bruno don’t jive with his acceptance of QAF in the slightest. Someone else noticed GLAAD’s history of double-standards. The Boston Phoenix, all the way back in 2001, saw this coming.
Let’s face it: art — in the form of movies, television, or books —interprets reality. It is frequently symptomatic of cultural change. But it is not in itself, in any way, reality. If GLAAD executive director Garry actually believes that Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back will increase queer-bashing against young gay men and lesbians, one wonders what she thinks about the years she spent with MTV, a network that did more than most to promote brainless, dehumanizing, and insulting portraits of women.
Making matters worse is GLAAD’s seemingly capricious standard for what and who is homophobic. Take Showtime’s Queer as Folk, which was singled out as the Outstanding Drama Series at this year’s GLAAD Media Awards — even as the organization said that Jay and Silent Bob Strikes Back posed ” a threat to gay and lesbian people. ” Queer as Folk is a lavishly produced mini-series that portrays gay men as sexually obsessed and promiscuous. The characters are catty and mean-spirited. They lust after teenage boys and care about nothing outside their own little circle. By contrast, Jay and Silent Bob is a funny look at homophobia in Hollywood. George Mansour, a Boston-based film booker and industry-acknowledged expert on queer films, asks of Jay and Silent Bob: ” How is this anti-gay? No one but an idiot is going to think that Jay and Silent Bob are role models and will want to emulate them — it’s like emulating the Three Stooges. ” In the end, Mansour claims, ” the movie goes out of its way to show how gay they really are. If anything, this is the most explicit defense of being queer we’ve seen in years. ”
But the politics of representation are riddled with inconsistencies. Take GLAAD’s decision last year to award Anne Heche the Stephen F. Kolzak Award for her contributions to lesbian visibility. Well, Heche has since gotten married — to a man. Also last year, GLAAD awarded Elton John the Vito Russo Award for his contributions to gay art and life. Not one year later, at the GLAAD Media Awards dinner in New York, the audience was urged to boo John because of his high-profile performance with Eminem at the Grammy Awards, actions that supposedly ” violate the spirit of the award. ” If you go further back — before GLAAD — you’ll find that in the early 1970s three films were singled out by gay activists as profoundly homophobic and dangerous to gay people: William Friedkin’s The Boys in the Band, as well as The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant and Fox and His Friends, by openly gay filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder. All three films were picketed by the Gay Activists Alliance in New York and by other groups across the country. Today, these films are considered classics of gay cinema, and each is taught in gay-and-lesbian-studies courses at colleges and universities across the country. Asking simplistic questions like ” Is this a positive image of gay people? ” or ” Is this good for gay people? ” in the long run gets you very little. ” It’s weird enough talking about fiction in terms of ‘good images’ and ‘bad images,’ ” says novelist Christopher Bram, whose book Father of Frankenstein was made into the award-winning film Gods and Monsters. ” It’s even harder with comedy, where so much humor is based on making you laugh at something you shouldn’t laugh at. There is the current crop of straight filmmakers like Kevin Smith and Trey Parker and Matt Stone, who do South Park, and they are obsessed with homosexuality. But they are not homophobic, they are not scared of homosexuality. “
The targets have changed, but the message is no clearer than it was 8 years ago.
Flickr Photo: hkwitzen
In my mind, I have trouble respecting GLAAD as an organization when they can’t even be open and honest about what constitutes a work of art that will create negative opinions of gay people. If Bruno does (and nothing says it won’t, by the way, I’m not even arguing that point) why was GLAAD silent on QAF and why did they give it awards!? If they’re truly worried about the opinion of non-gay americans (or breeders as I’ve heard us referred to in a derogatory way), why do they continually allow that freak show down Fifth Avenue every year? If anything is going to hurt the average american’s perception of gay people, how about a guy in a dominatrix outfit and angel wings spanking his lover in the middle of the busiest thoroughfare in Manhattan?
I have no problem with it, but then again, I don’t harbor any ill-will toward gay people. I have gay friends. That QAF cover on the top is autographed to Beth and I. I just don’t like disingenuous people, and considering what GLAAD has let go over the years and what they continue to stand behind, I find it hard to call them anything but phony opportunists trying to attach themselves to something in order to boost their visibility.
I just wish more people saw it that way.