*CLICK*

This post was submitted by "CK".

Who else read Ben’s post on killing your television? He made some really good points. Yes, TV promotes a surplus amount of consumerism, stereotypes, and personal image distortion. It creates a culture of homogeneity (and not the good kind of “homo” either). But is the tube worth kicking?

I personally don’t have a cable at the moment, but TV has played essential roles in my life. Before I came out I used to watch Queer as Folk and Will and Grace, slowly inching closer to the sexuality I was about to reveal to my suspecting family. Brian Kinney (Queer as Folk’s main character for those unfamiliar) became an icon of unapologetic homosexuality for me. While he, as a character, would never use these words, he acted as if he was “here, queer, and the world had better deal with it.” That kind of confidence was empowering. I fell into the fantasy of a gay life that seemed to work, as if being gay was possible. At 16, and unexposed to the gay culture us TNG readers are familiar with, that was a revelation.

Simultaneously, gay shows on TV were just fantasies, and maybe not the best examples to follow in retrospect. Nevertheless, I still feel that television has the capability to empower, and even create communities of gay folk. In fact I think TV has been essential to forging and strengthening bonds especially in the gay community.

How? Well think about it: Homos exist in diaspora. The identifying factor of a gay person isn’t geographical, economic, or political. For myself, being gay isn’t about where I am, how much money I make, or who I’m voting for…it’s about dick. Now for some it may be about pudenda. For some it may be about combinations of the two, but in some way being gay is about sex and sexuality.

Now, sans those with voyeuristic preferences, sex tends to be private. I don’t know about other readers, but all my romping happens in the bedroom behind closed doors, and usually I remember to close the blinds too. So, if being gay is about sexual identities, and sexual practices tend to stay private, how do gay people find each other to create communities? Is there a gaydar switch that networks us into each other’s bedrooms that I’m missing, or is a different apparatus at work?

This is where TV comes in: it’s a connective device. In a community that can choose when to be stealth and when to show itself (via fitting gay stereotypes or not), other mechanisms of collection are essential to forming community. Gay people aren’t connected by the physicality of location. It’s not like being American, where living in America (with obvious exceptions) makes one an American. We’re connected by the culture we choose to create. In thinking about burying the boob tube, we might do well to consider the synergistic relationship between the culture of gay people, and the ways TV and gay programming influence that.

The constitutive elements of a person’s sense of belonging are inexorably tied to the kinds of media they consume, and gay people eat up TV. Programming like Project Runway, AbFab, Queer Eye, etc… have all played roles in creating points of collectivity amongst homos. Whether it’s a night time gathering to watch Queer as Folk, or a conversation about how great last night’s L-Word episode was, TV creates a point to bond over, and an excuse to talk about being gay. Talking about sexuality leads to ideas about sexuality, and those ideas are weeded through until the good ones surface into core components of a community.

Wrist flopping, men in capris, and the word “fetch” are not genetically inherited. Those stereotypes result from the formation of popularized culture. Now, I’m not saying that the promotion of stereotypes is good, or that the assimilationist images of gay people that a lot of TV projects are helpful, but you can’t deny that TV helps create points of similarity and community. Gay TV shows gay people what some of the cultural characteristics of the community are outside of the bedroom. While a lot of those promotions are exactly the kind of thing TNG tries to get away from when they say get “over the rainbow,” they are building blocks. Hey, it’s a start.

Gayopolis probably wouldn’t collapse if we all kicked the TV; gay bars, clubs, neighborhoods, and other locations are all places supplement the creation of gay culture. I certainly think TV helps in some ways though. Ok ok, part of this is because Randy Harrison (Justin on Queer as Folk) makes me hot. Despite that, TV represents an underutilized piece of infrastructure in the creation of gay culture. I’d write more, but LOGO is about to have a Queer Eye Marathon. Clicking on the tube and off the internet...