Huffington Post Article: ‘Gaycism’ and The New Normal: The ‘Hot’ Trend on TV Is Bigotry!!!
Nico Lang
Co-Creator and Co-Editor, In Our Words
In recent months, there’s been a lot of chatter on the interwebs about this thing called “gaycism” on the TV. As defined by Lauren Bans of GQ, gaycism is “the wrongheaded idea that having gay characters gives you carte blanche to cut PC corners elsewhere.” In her example, Bans cites shows like Modern Familyand freshman comedy Partners as emblematic of this trend. Modern Family is an Emmy-juggernaut, a critical darling and a much-lauded champion of LGBT characterization on TV, but that progressivism comes at the expense of Gloria, the lone woman of color. Sofia Vergara is a terrific comedienne and kills in the role, but the brunt of her jokes revolve around her flimsy command of the English language. Gloria’s B-story FOR AN ENTIRE EPISODE dealt with her use of malapropisms, like “doggy dog world” and “don’t give me an old tomato,” because being foreign is her whole purpose on the show. Oh, and having boobs.
Although Modern Family has gotten away with Charlie Chan-ing South American women (so fiery! yelling!) for three seasons, Two Broke Girls came under fire earlier this year for the same stuff. But the difference between the two is that Modern Family is racist like that friend you have who wears Native American prints from Urban Outfitters until you say something about it and then they apologize and never do it again. You know they mean well, and “flesh colored” band-aids provewhite privilege is hard to spot sometimes. However, Two Broke Girls is like your white gay friend who thinks he’s entitled to say whatever he pleases because he’s been oppressed, so he’s allowed to oppress other people and call it being an “equal opportunity offender.” He’s earned the right to be a racist, insensitive asshole, because I guess he asked Audre Lorde and she said it was okay?
For example, look at Michael Patrick King. For the queers in the audience, we know MPK as the man who brought us Sex and the City, a series notably gaycist with its Lena Dunham-esque exclusion of anyone not white, except for the groundbreaking depiction of Miranda’s sexy fling with a chocolatey black man. However, King recently upped the gaycist ante with Two Broke Girls, a show the New Yorker referred to as “so racist it is less offensive than baffling.” The show reduces black men to sweet ol’ jive-talkers, Eastern Europeans to crazed sex hounds and Asian Americans to Long Duk Dong and “Yellow Panic” stereotypes. On the latter, Andrew Ti of “Yo, Is That Racist?” notes, “It’s distressingly easy to imagine the writers sitting around and listing off every single ching-chong stereotype, ultimately deciding with some sorrow that a Fu Manchu mustache would be impractical for budget reasons.”
And when Michael Patrick King was asked about it a panel for Two Broke Girls earlier this year, was he like your friend who vowed never to shop at Urban Outfitters again? Nope. He was like your friend that then buys a bunch of Native American print underwear afterward and then dances half-naked on a coffee table bragging about how edgy he is — because he’s, like, pushing boundaries or whatever. In defense of being a racist douche, King eloquently summed up the problem with a heaping helping of white gay male privilege, “I’m gay! I’m putting in gay stereotypes every week! I don’t find it offensive, any of this. I find it comic to take everybody down, which is what we are doing.”
Into this controversy steps The New Normal, the new Ryan Murphy show about two gay men who decide to raise a baby together, a show that marries Murphy’s trademark tonal inconsistency “with more gay jokes and regular old racism than Gallagher’s stand-up act.” All of Murphy’s shows have huge problems, and Glee has faced heavy criticism for not only being super racist, but also for being super transphobic, which was recently kiiiind of rectified by introducing the character of Unique, a young trans* woman of color. However, as the Cracked article on the show argues, the real problem is that everyone is a “something” on the show, and all the characters conform to broad caricatures, “like the awkward Jew with the afro, the black girl who always sings the big gospel notes, the gay kid with the great fashion sense, the overachieving Asian [and] the fiery, underprivileged Latina.” Although you could argue that in high school, everyone conforms to a stereotype, Cracked‘s Ian Fortey notes the Michael Patrick King logic behind that rationalization: “Glee’s producers think that by shoving their parade of characters and their intense stereotypes in your face, rather than having them be subtle, it’s cool, because they’re acknowledged.”
Similarly, The New Normal announces its offensive stereotypes as if it were shouting them through one of Sue Sylvester’s bullhorns. TNN has already caught a lot of flack for its “lesbian problem,” as it reduces all lesbians to “ugly men” with “gingerbread man bodies,” but this is pretty much the tip of one big problematic, racist iceberg. In one greatmoment for the history of gay characters, main gay Bryan (Andrew Rannells) refers to vaginas as “tarantula faces,” with the implication that gay men think vaginas are icky and gross. Elsewhere, he prances around a lot, listens to Lady Gaga, talks about dressing his baby up in Marc Jacobs clothes and does lots of other stereotypically “gay things.” This is not progress. This is pretty much the same crap that shows like In Living Color (see: their “Men on Film” sketches) used to pull, except now the “Equal Opportunity Offenders” are on “our team” (aka. Team Queer). As a self-proclaimed “femme,” I know there’s nothing wrong with being effeminate, but nothing about Murphy’s characterization of femme males feels particularly nuanced.
The problem is that instead of writing actual characters, Murphy falls back on tired tropes, showing his writing hasn’t evolved out of high school cafeteria labels. On top of Bravo Gay Bryan and his Butch Gay partner (Justin Bartha, who gets to watch football and do “dude stuff”), we have a Precocious Child (Bebe Wood), a Single Mom With Big Dreams (Georgia King), a Sassy Black Woman (Nene Leakes) and a Homophobic, Racist Grandma (Ellen Barkin, who deserves so much better). Some of these stereotypes are harmless, but Leakes’ and Barkin’s characters make my brain hurt, as they seem to be taken from deleted scenes from Crash. Barkin’s Nana exists in some Paul Haggis-ian alternate universe where people can just shout racist invective all the time, in place of actual conversation. And in The New Normal, the people around them just shrug it off or laugh at them dismissively. Because old people are so old, amiright?
Nana has a lot of people to offend, and like Andrew Ti, I can picture her crossing off a Glenn-Beck-created checklist for every episode. Jews? Check. Gays? Check. African-Americans? DOUBLE CHECK. To give Nana a lot to complain about, Ryan Murphy casts Real Housewife Nene Leakes to be the embodiment of every single stereotype about black women this side of an Aunt Jemima bottle. Leakes plays Bryan’s assistant, and in her first scene, she discusses stealing her boss’ credit card to buy new shoes, ones (of course!) covered in rhinestone bling.
When’s she’s not stealing, Leakes has a constant “mhmm” expression on her face, as if she spontaneously developed a case of Lana Del Rey lips. She serves no other purpose on the show except to be loud and to and validate Bryan and David — in the same way that most TV shows and films use people of color solely as vehicles for white narratives. General, non-gay-specific racism is nothing new in the media. Non-whites are always relegated to supporting roles where they are acted and commented upon by the white characters (e.g. Bryan and Nana), but rarely get their own agency or the ability to write their own narratives. (Both of the creators of The New Normal are white.) After all the criticism The Help received for similar issues, I’m surprised this ever made it past NBC’s people. I know the struggling network is desperate for anyone to take it to the prom, and Ryan Murphy is SO HOT right now, but this is just pathetic.
All of this overt stereotyping makes it particularly hypocritical when Leakes calls out K-Mart Sue Sylvester for being racist, asking Nana to take her “dirty, racist mind back to the South.” I couldn’t believe that the pot dared to call the kettle African-American, until I realized that the problem was that Murphy and Ali Adler (his out lesbian co-creator) don’t see any problem with Leakes’ character. TV sitcom writers don’t necessarily have to care about white privilege or how stereotyping perpetuates a system of systemic injustice, as they are more concerned with putting on a show and getting viewers. Murphy and Adler will do whatever is necessary to get laughs, even if that means offending people, because pushing buttons is part of comedy! Haven’t you seenBrickleberry?
In response to that reasoning, Lindy West writes:
This fetishization of not censoring yourself, of being an ‘equal-opportunity offender,’ is bizarre and bad for comedy. When did ‘not censoring yourself’ become a good thing? We censor ourselves all the time, because we are not entitled, sociopathic fucks. Your girlfriend is censoring herself when she says she’s okay with you playing Xbox all day. In a way, comedy is censoring yourself–comedy is picking the right words to say to make people laugh. A comic who doesn’t censor himself is just a dude yelling. And being an ‘equal opportunity offender’–as in, ‘It’s okay, because Daniel Tosh makes fun of ALL people: women, men, AIDS victims, dead babies, gay guys, blah blah blah’–falls apart when you remember (as so many of us are forced to all the time) that all people are not in equal positions of power.
To Murphy and co., it’s not being racist, it’s being politically incorrect, which Debra Dickersonargues is often the same thing:
The rhetorical cul-de-sac where white hate went–in goes racism, out comes political incorrectness. Use of this phrase is a tactic designed to derail discourse by disguising racism as defiance of far-left, pseudo-Communist attempts at enforcing behavior and speech codes. However, vicious, brainless, knee-jerk, or crudely racist a sentiment may be, once it is repackaged as merely ‘un-PC’ it become heroic, brave, free-thinking, and best of all, victimized.
And that sense of victimization is exactly what makes the gaycism in The New Normal so troubling, because it makes the show feel entitled to being offensive. Shock humor is the only type of humor The New Normal knows, and it insists on shoving it down our throats, like when Nana thanks a young Asian girl for “helping build the railroads” and offhandedly remarks that “when [she] was in school, they learned about presidents that owned people like [Barack Obama].” Shows likeSouth Park and Louie do a good job of using racially charged and politically incorrect humor as a way of critiquing societal and systemic norms, rather than indirectly supporting that oppression through just mindlessly regurgitating stereotypes. In contrast, nothing about Nana’s statements subverts the status quo, and the laughter only derives from the fact that Nana is saying the things we aren’t supposed to or allowed to say. She’s just being “real” and “honest,” like a second-rate Archie Bunker.
However, in the case of Bunker, the jokes were on him, as the show served as a critique of the conservative ideologies that made him racist, and Bunker’s punchlines only served to show what a xenophobic jerk he was. The New Normal doesn’t do that, and in fact, they have Bryan and Nana bond over both being Asian racist, so everyone’s racist and it’s okay. Because Murphy doesn’t know when to quit, the show’s fourth episode, “Obama Mama,” has Bryan and David then reflect on their racism — when they realize that they have no black friends. Because I guess having black friends makes you not racist, they try to get some to fix the problem. Spoiler: They don’t actually make any. However, they are nice to an interracial family for approximately two seconds, which istotally the same thing as challenging societally constructed racial biases. As Barney taught us, fleeting recognition of existence = friendship = post-racial society. Racism solved. Not only does this skirting of the issue uphold the show’s racial status quo, but it also centers on a false notion: Mel Gibson starred in four Lethal Weapons with Danny Glover and look how he turned out.
Remember hipster racism? This is that turned up to 11, like Murphy throwing a big blackface partyon TV and saying its okay because it’s “ironic.” However, the biggest problem with pointing this out is that people often don’t realize that ironic racism is still just racism. And what actually makes the show’s racism so doubly troubling is that the act of being systemically oppressed should make people more aware of the ways in which they have the ability to marginalize others, because they have experienced the same thing themselves. The New Normal is even ABOUT that marginalization, specifically the discrimination Bryan and David (or “Bravid”) face for being two men who want to raise a child. Although the show is on the surface purely entertainment, Murphy has an explicitly political agenda, one he announces at almost every turn, the same way he did when he made bullying a major storyline in Season 2 of Glee. The message in TNN is that all families are normal, which (although problematic) comes from a good place and is necessary in a political climate where even some in the LGBTQ community, like Rupert Everett, think two men can’t raise a child together.
As the gay parenting is the central subject matter of the show (rather than a supporting storyline, like in Modern Family), The New Normal is (whether I like it or not) a landmark show, and how Murphy defines “the new normal” will matter to same-gender parents everywhere. This isn’t one of Murphy’s haunted house yarns; this is people’s actual lives that Murphy is representing. As Spider-Man’s uncle once said, with that “power comes responsibility,” and like David and Bryan, same-gender parents want their children to grow up in a better, more inclusive world for all people, no matter their color or preference. In the third episode where, after being gay bashed in an outlet mall, Bryan tells David he doesn’t want to raise a child in a world where people so openly discriminate against each other. If Bravid ever have that child, I only hope that Ryan Murphy heeds that wish. Their baby deserves better.
Note: An earlier version of this post was featured on In Our Words, a Chicago-based online salon covering all things queer, and was updated to take the newest episode into account. You can find the original here.
Globe & Mail Article: Toronto Ombudsman Finds Mayor Rob Ford Is A Racist Tried To Rig Civic Appointments!!
The Globe and Mail
Published Thursday, Sep. 27 2012, 12:57 PM EDT
Last updated Thursday, Sep. 27 2012, 3:43 PM EDT
Toronto Mayor Rob Ford is disputing the findings of a new report from the city’s ombudsman that alleges his office interfered in the civic appointments process, including asking bureaucrats to remove a line from newspaper advertisements seeking “diverse” candidates.
The report describes how unnamed employees of the mayor’s office meddled in the way the municipal government selects ordinary citizens to sit on some 120 boards, including the boards of the Metro Toronto Convention Centre, the Toronto Parking Authority, the Toronto Police Services Board and the Toronto Public Library Board.
The mayor’s office first asked for post-election recruitment to be postponed, then demanded it be condensed into such a short time-frame that candidates could not be screened properly, according to the report from Toronto ombudsman Fiona Crean.
“It will look to cynics as if the fix is already in for appointments and the process is just for show,” an unnamed bureaucrat wrote to the city manager in a June 9, 2011 e-mail, expressing concerns about the tight timeline.
“We now have a governance process that is no longer based on any recognizable principles.”
Mr. Ford said Thursday that he “didn’t interfere in any process.”
“I’ve actually cleaned up the process that we had before. It’s a very clean and above board transparent process and it went very well,” the mayor told reporters after a ground-breaking ceremony for a new aquatics centre in Scarborough.
The report also found that the mayor’s office directed that recruitment ads not be placed in the Toronto Star, a newspaper with which the mayor and his councillor brother Doug Ford have a long-running feud.
“The [City manager’s office] informed my investigator that when they raised this with the Mayor’s staff, they were told that ‘we do not like the Star,’” the report says.
The mayor’s office denies it asked that the ad be kept out of the Star, according to the report.
In the end, recruitment advertisements appeared only in the National Post, Toronto Sun and Metro.
One of the goals of the city’s appointments policy is to fill boards with qualified citizens of different genders and racial and ethnic backgrounds, a subject on which the municipal government keeps careful statistics.
The report suggests the mayor’s office tried to undermine that goal.
“[City Manager’s Office] staff informed my investigator that they were asked by the Mayor’s Office to remove the statement in the advertisement that encouraged applicants from the City’s diverse population to apply. Staff refused to do so,” according to the report.
Mr. Ford said that was not true. “No, that’s not what happened,” he said, adding it was city staff, not his political staff that did not “reach out in terms of diversity.”
Asked if he was against diversity, Mr. Ford laughed. “That’s a ridiculous question,” he said.
According to a “diversity summary” of public appointments, 70 per cent of the citizens selected for boards under the Ford administration were white — the same percentage as in the second term of his predecessor, David Miller.
More men were tapped under Mr. Ford (70 per cent) than during Mr. Miller’s second term (53 per cent).
However, more applications actually flooded in under Mr. Ford than under Mr. Miller. The city received 1,927 applications for 167 positions in 2011-2012, up from 1,316 applications for 125 posts in 2007-2010.
At least one candidate with a serious conflict-of-interest nearly slipped through the laxer-than-usual process, Ms. Crean wrote.
In that case, the report describes an acrimonious closed-door meeting of the civic appointments committee at which an unnamed councillor pointed at staff and said, “I’m going to get you,” and added that bureaucrats had other councillors fooled, but not him.
“Some staff described the panel chair’s manner as ‘threatening.’ One staff described the process as ‘gruelling’ and ‘humiliating,’” according to the report.
The trouble apparently began when someone pointed out at a Nov. 16, 2011 meeting that a candidate who had previously been marked as qualified actually had a conflict-of-interest – he was an agent who appeared frequently before the adjudicative committee on which he was seeking a seat.
When the issue was raised, the same unnamed male councillor who allegedly threatened staff asked for those concerns to be put in writing. But a letter never surfaced.
The alleged threats from the councillor – who was also the panel nominating chair – came at the next meeting of the civic appointments committee, which was Jan. 16, 2012, although that date is not specified in the report.
Only one board was dealt with at both the Nov. 16 and Jan. 16 meetings: The Sign Variance Committee, whose nominating panel was chaired by Ford ally Giorgio Mammoliti.
Mr. Mammoliti said Thursday that he asked for such a letter at the Nov. 16 meeting, but he said he did not know if he was the councillor identified in the report.
He “unequivocally” denied threatening staff at the meeting. “Never in my 23 years in politics have I used that kind of language,” Mr. Mammoliti said in an interview Thursday.
The chair of the civics appointment committee, Frances Nunziata, said she did not recall any member of the committee upbraiding staff as described in the report.
Ms. Nunziata, the council speaker and a Ford supporter, said the mayor’s office did not tamper with her committee’s choices.
“Every decision that was made was done at the committee … I’m not aware of any interference or direction from the mayor’s office,” she said.
The ombudsman’s finding prompted harsh criticism from the councillors who chaired the civic appointments committee in Mr. Miller’s second term.
Councillor Adam Vaughan, a staunch critic of the mayor, said members of the current committee should be fired at mid-term and replaced with a new slate of councillors.
“I just don’t think they’ve done their jobs,” said Mr. Vaughan, chair of the committee in the second half of Mr.Miller’s last term.
Councillor Janet Davis, who chaired the committee in the first half of the same term, said Mr. Miller and his staff stayed out of the process. She called the alleged meddling by Mr. Ford’s staff “unprecedented and inappropriate.”
“The interference from the mayor’s office so compromised this process that we need to make sure that there are new guidelines and practices to stop it in future,” she said.
Ms. Crean and two of the city’s four accountability officers — the integrity commissioner and the lobbyist registrar — are locked in a battle with budget chief Mike Del Grande, an ally of Mr. Ford.
Citing their need to remain independent from city council, they have refused to provide a line-by-line accounting of their budget requests for 2013, according to Mr. Del Grande.
“The three of them, led by the ombudsman, are very, very concerned about their independence. I pointed out to them that it really doesn’t have anything to do with their independence per se, it’s reviewing their numbers,”he said.
Ms. Crean was ill and not available for interviews Thursday.
With a report from Elizabeth Church.
Wonderful Dallas Voice Article: Gay & Lesbian Characters On Television Still Too White Lacking Racial Diversity.
Rainbow families in TV and film still lack color
NBC’s sitcom The New Normal breaks new ground this week as the first mainstream show starring same-sex parents — two gay dads. ABC’s Modern Family, which features two gay dads in its ensemble cast, won an Emmy for Outstanding Comedy Series last year. Yet these shows, for all the tremendous good they are doing to raise the visibility of lesbian and gay parents and our children, follow a tradition of mainstream depictions of LGBT parents as upper middle class and white. When will we see LGBT parents of color, or LGBT families in lower income brackets?
Most of the best-known regular or semi-regular gay and lesbian parents on TV are white and at least reasonably well off. They include: Melanie and Lindsay of Showtime’s Queer as Folk, Michael and Ben of the same, Carol and Susan of Friends, Leslie and Maureen of Showtime’s Nurse Jackie, Abby and Kathy of ABC’s NYPD Blue, Laurie of Ellen (the ’90s ABC sitcom), Fran and Kal of the HBO movie If These Walls Could Talk II, Janine and Sandy of the Lifetime movie What Makes a Family, and Nora and Anne of ABC Family’s The Secret Life of the American Teenager, as well as Cam and Mitchell of Modern Family and Bryan and David of The New Normal.
The new lesbian mom on TV this fall, Anne of NBC’s Go On, is dealing with the death of herpartner — a fresh and worthy plotline. But she, too, adds no color to our palette.
We have seen just a few lesbian and gay parents who are people of color or multiracial. They, too, are always solidly middle class — and always one half of a couple with a white person: Sandy and Kerry of ER (Sandy is Latina; Kerry is white), Callie and Arizona of Grey’s Anatomy (Callie is Latina; Arizona is white), Keith and David of HBO’s Six Feet Under (Keith is black; David is white), Bette and Tina of The L Word (Bette has a white mother and a black father; Tina is white), and Hiram and LeRoy (Rachel’s dads) of Glee (Hiram is white; LeRoy’s race is never specified, but actor Brian Stokes Mitchell, who plays him, is African-American, German, Scottish and Native American).
Gay and lesbian parents in mainstream movies are also a white bunch. They include Nic and Jules of the Academy Award-nominated The Kids Are All Right (2010), Robert of The Next Best Thing (2000), Armand of The Birdcage (1996), Renato of La Cage aux Folles (1978), and Tick of The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994). A rare exception is Wai-Tung of The Wedding Banquet (1993), who is Taiwanese (but whose partner, Simon, is white).
The only fictional same-sex parents on TV who are both people of color are Kima and Cheryl of HBO’s The Wire and Eddie and Chance of Noah’s Arc. Noah’s Arc did not run on a general-interest network, however. It was broadcast first on LGBT-focused network Logo and rebroadcast one summer on BET J, a spinoff of the Black Entertainment Network.
The truth is far different. Researchers at UCLA’s Williams Institute have found that black and Latino/a individuals in same-sex couples are roughly twice as likely to be raising children as white ones. (There is little data on transgender parents or single gay and lesbian parents.)
And children being raised by same-sex couples are twice as likely to live in poverty as children being raised by married, opposite-sex parents. We rarely see those aspects of our community on TV or film, however.
On a possibly promising note, though, singer and actor Jennifer Lopez is producing The Fosters, a pilot for ABC Family that features a lesbian couple with a “multi-ethnic mix” of four foster, adoptive and biological kids. It is unknown what race or ethnicity the parents are. Lopez, who is Latina, will not be one of them, but perhaps her influence will mean they show some variety. Deadline.com has also reported that one of the mothers is a cop, and the other is a private school teacher — moderate-paying jobs that could mean it is hard for them to support their large family.
The problem, of course, is not just with depictions of LGBT parents, but of LGBT people in general. But gay and lesbian parents are a hot item right now, as witnessed by the success of The Kids Are All Right and Modern Family, and the buzz about The New Normal and The Fosters. I hope their success leads to more new shows — shows that highlight even more facets of real LGBT families.
I welcome The New Normal and know it will help people continue to see lesbian and gay parents as part of the tapestry of American life. Such representation is vitally important. But until mainstream America can see LGBT people in all our diversity — and not simply as LGBT reflections of the White, upper-middle-class American ideal — we will not have made progress toward true equality for our whole community.
In fact, insofar as media images of LGBT parents continue to reinforce being white and upper-middle-class as the ideal, they may be hindering progress towards the broader goal of inclusion for all people.
The problem is not with any one show or film — but collectively, they create an image that is not that of our multiracial, multiethnic, economically varied America.
Dana Rudolph is the founder and publisher of Mombian (www.mombian.com), an award-winning blog and resource directory for LGBT parents.
This article appeared in the Dallas Voice print edition September 14, 2012.
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