She would much rather be coming out as a lesbian now than when she did, 20 years ago, writes Suzanna Danuta Walters in All the Rage: The Story of Gay Visibility in America (University of Chicago Press). The abundance of gay themes and characters -- on television, in the movies, in advertising -- is a clear sign of increased social acceptance. But the Georgetown University sociologist argues that cultural visibility not only is inadequate to ensure civil rights, but can lead to new forms of homophobia.
Q. Why are gay people more visible in the mass media now?
A. It’s a confluence of factors. One is that gays have become a political constituency to be reckoned with. Another factor is good old American corporate capitalism: Gays are being identified as a niche market as niche marketing has grown. You can’t discount AIDS as a factor that catapulted gayness into public life. The fourth thing is the Clinton administration, which changed the social and political climate.
Q. What’s the downside of increased visibility?
A. It’s no longer wholly legitimate to recycle the obviously denigrating stereotypes -- the killer queers, the lisping, mincing, menacing homos, the vampire lesbians -- so homophobia takes much more subtle forms. Forms, for example, equating gay sexuality with straight sexuality and thus stripping gay identity of its powerful difference. Or making gays the hip accessories to heterosexuals, who exist merely to reflect on the tolerance of their heterosexual friends. Another example is gay parents. The writing on them in the popular press is very positive as long as their parenting practices are recognizable. So a lesbian single mother who wants to raise a child in a more communal way is not visible. What’s visible are the PTA-going, gardening, suburb-living parents who say, “All we want is for our family to be just like every other family.”
Q. Aren’t all mass-media images two-dimensional?
A. Absolutely. But for gays, it remains a question of so few having to represent so many. We see largely upperclass, white, gay males who are desexualized, not the richness and diversity of the gay community.
Q. What show has been most successful in depicting realistic gay characters?
A. What Roseanne did was phenomenal. Gay characters were integrated into the sitcom. They weren’t just incidentally gay -- but they weren’t all gay, all the time, either. Another thing she did was to foreground the homophobia of the main characters. Our beloved Roseanne and our beloved Dan were revealed to be struggling with their own bigotry. Now homophobia is invisible. The implication is, “Pack up your tutus, the ball is over.” Of course, the reality is we still can’t get married, we still don’t have a law passed against employment discrimination, and hate crimes are on the rise.
http://chronicle.com Section: Research & Publishing Page: A12
