Gay Gorillas in the Mist

I love sitcoms. I'm talking mid-late 90's situational sitcoms-- you know, those that reinforce gender stereotypes, where the laugh track is abundant, and they live in a metropolitan city because they are just like us. I'm not even trying to be facetious here; sitcoms are great. Some of the reading I did this week in regards to my independent study was focused on two sitcoms: Ellen and The Ellen Show. And no, I'm not referring to her talk-show. Nay, these shows worked side-by-side to introduce Ellen DeGeneres as a lesbian to mainstream audiences.

But why aren't we talking about Antarctica's secrets? Was it the original Gossip Girl?

In her article from Queer Popular Culture, Jennifer Reed outlines the mounmental work that Ellen did for the LGBTQ+ community in regards to queer representation on television. Today in 2016, we may be asking ourselves, "what's the big deal? I see plenty of gay people on my screen ALL the time." And while that may be true to a certain degree, Reed initially argues that, "Mass media is where public life happens at this point in Western history" (p. 10). Indeed, it is easy for us to sit around, assuming that we know that we learn from what we watch, but what we fail to address at times is how largely we are influenced by our daily programming.

Reed elaborates on this further when she discusses how Ellen manages to maneuver between queer, gay, to even postgay. These differences are spaced out through the duration of Ellen's two sitcoms of Ellen and The Ellen Show. In her first series, Ellen is living the life as an asexual woman, never being able to form a connection with another man. Reed highlights plot lines that indicate how Ellen is blossoming into a gay woman, and by portraying her as such, Ellen subverts the label of straight and gay. Thus, she is in this middle ground, a queer middle where she can subvert any and all expectations of her gender performance and/or sexual preference. Of course, due to the nature of the program, these are used for laughs, but Reed argues that this was a sweet spot for Ellen and for young gays across the country. The fact that Ellen was even hinting at her sexuality through the series, as well as her appearances on talk shows, indicated a drastic transition into our consumption of queer culture on mainstream television. Basically, this was huge!

"I'm gay." Two words that brought Ellen to the forefront of popular culture. The truth came out and the world needed to be ready to accept it. After winking at the camera for almost the entire fourth series of Ellen's run, she comes out as a gay woman. How cool is that? It is! Today, we may find it commonplace, and we still are problematizing coming out narratives as privileging heterosexuals' acceptance of one's queerness. But in 1997, wow. It makes me wish I had been there to witness it. As Reed dives into what this meant for gays everywhere, she also acknowledges that the series then took on an inadvertent responsibility. She notes, "If we think of television as a teacher, the question becomes who was being taught and what" (p. 17)? Essentially, Ellen being gay was a phenomenon. Okay, great, Where do we go from here? And what precisely can we take away from that.

Well, Ellen got cancelled. And shortly after, The Ellen Show premiered. This series was about a different woman with the same first name, and while she identified as gay, Ellen explicitly stated that she did not want the happenings in this show to be that of a gay woman. She argues that there is so much more to her personally than being a lesbian. Reed mentions here, that from moving from queer to gay, Ellen was now in a postgay phase of her cultural identity. In other words, this was a movement that hit on the idea that there are numerous facets to the queer identity. Focusing on one's sexual orientation would only delegitimize the complexities of those who identified as gay.

In just writing that, I understand what Ellen was hoping to convey. However, by merely avoiding politicizing her own queer identity, she could fit in... just like everyone else. I wholeheartedly understand that I am more than my gay self. I could give you a laundry list of the elements of my being that exceed that of my label as "gay." What troubles me, though, is the shunning of the queer label as a means of fitting in, as a method of connecting with a mainstream audience. That is not to say that Ellen should have become the spokesperson of gay rights, that she would be front and center in gay parades. What I am saying, by taking into account the write-up from Jennifer Reed is that, at some point, by carrying the burden of becoming one of the first, prominent gay figures in the media-- especially with the surge in media coverage pertaining to gays everywhere-- Ellen could have managed to saddle both sides of the spectrum, as a way to reach all audiences. Or, maybe, Reed puts it best on page 25: "Perhaps what television is teaching here is not the correct way to be a gay person, but that one can define that for oneself."