Queer Representation, Visibility, and Race in American Film and Television

Screening the Closet

Melanie Kohnen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781136519895
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: LGBT Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This book traces the uneven history of queer media visibility through crucial turning points including the Hollywood Production Code era, the AIDS crisis of the 1980s, the so-called explosion of gay visibility on television during the1990s, and the re-imagination of queer representations on TV after the events of 9/11. Kohnen intervenes in previous academic and popular accounts that paint the increase in queer visibility over the past four decades as a largely progressive development. She examines how and why a limited and limiting concept of queer visibility structured around white gay and lesbian characters in committed relationships has become the embodiment of progressive LGBT media representations. She also investigates queer visibility across film, TV, and print media, and highlights previously unexplored connections, such as the lingering traces of classical Hollywood cinema's queer tropes in the X-Men franchise. Across all chapters, narratives and arguments emerge that demonstrate how queer visibility shapes and reflects not only media representations, but the real and imagined geographies, histories, and people of the American nation.

All That Visibility Allows, or Mapping the Discourse of Queer Visibility

DOI: 10.4324/9780203152706-1

In April 1997, Ellen DeGeneres appeared on the cover of Time magazine under the headline “Yep, I’m Gay.” This well-orchestrated coming out took no one by surprise; after all, DeGeneres and her character Ellen Morgan, the main character of the ABC sitcom Ellen, had had one foot out of the closet for months. This contradictory play of hide-and-seek characterizes much of the so-called “explosion of gay visibility” in the United States during the 1990s. Often referred to as the “gay 90s,” this decade saw a proliferation of queer media representations and heated debates in both the popular and academic press over the implications of this allegedly new visibility. But was this new-found visibility really all that new? Who was being included (and excluded) from this particular form of queer visibility? More precisely, in what ways does the kind of queer visibility that emerged from the closet alongside Ellen obscure other possibilities and traditions of imagining queerness? These questions are central to investigating the discourse of queer visibility during the 1990s and beyond. Yet these questions are too narrow to allow a comprehensive mapping of this discourse, as the phenomena and conversations that comprise it cannot be neatly divided into “before” and “after” the 1990s or into “visible” and “invisible” sexualities. Rather, this mapping requires a careful analysis of the many facets of queer visibility, particularly one that considers its focal point, namely, the closet and its relationship to race.

In the discourse of queer visibility, the closet acts both as screening surface and filtering device. The cultural logic that underpins the metaphor of the closet plays out in screening processes of various types: the closet acts like a screen upon which visions of queerness are projected even as it simultaneously screens out other facets of queerness.¹ Much like the epistemology of the closet regulates knowledge of (queer) sexuality, the closet-as-screen regulates which types of queerness become visible in the media and which ones remain invisible (or at least harder to see). While the closet-as-screen may appear solid at times, it is always porous and can never completely screen the more unruly facets of queerness from view. Moreover, intersecting discourses of race, sexuality, and gender shape and facilitate this screening of queerness. Whiteness plays a particularly crucial role in the filtering of queer visibility. The closet-as-screen appears as a blank surface—a white screen upon which queer images are projected. In the moment of projection, we focus our attention on the images, forgetting that it is the blank, white screen that makes these projections possible.² Throughout this book, I insist and demonstrate that whiteness shapes the discourse of queer visibility even when the constitutive role of whiteness is often left out of accounts describing crucial moments in the history of queer visibility, such as Ellen Morgan’s and Ellen DeGeneres’ coming out. Accounting for the interdependence of race and sexuality at the center of queer visibility is only possible when we understand how the closet functions as a projection surface and a filter for queer visibility that is suffused with racial meanings. Failing to recognize that the blank screen that makes queer visibility possible is fundamentally tied to discourses of whiteness perpetuates a history of willful forgetfulness.

This chapter offers an overview of the multiple and contradictory screening processes that comprise the discourse of queer visibility. I begin with laying out the multiple meanings and intersections of visibility and queerness. Thus, in the first sections of this chapter, “Screening the Closet” and “The Closet and Race,” I interrogate what visibility signifies, particularly in relationship to sexuality. These sections question “the closet” and “coming out” as central metaphors of queer visibility by shedding light on the racialized underpinnings of these concepts. Moreover, I offer a few ways of reconsidering how queer visibility has been discussed in terms of media representations. In “The Gay 90s?” I offer an initial assessment of the normative white queer media visibility that emerged during the 1990s by comparing two Entertainment Weekly articles from 1995 and 2011. Both articles proclaim a never-before-seen degree of queer visibility in the media that is based on an active forgetting of many previous instances of queer media representations. I close the chapter with a consideration of queer visibility after 9/11 when a post-closet outlook merges with a post-racial perspective that pervades TV programs such as ABC’s Ugly Betty (2006–2010). Together, these sections allow a preliminary overview of the discourse of queer visibility and my challenges to previous conceptualizations of it, both of which are then mapped out in more detail in subsequent chapters. Throughout this chapter, I argue that a recognition of the deeply entwined discourses of race and sexuality, especially of queerness and whiteness, is crucial to understanding the mechanics at work in screening the closet.

Screening the Closet

The Oxford English Dictionary defines “visibility” in the following way:

1. The condition, state, or fact of being visible; visible character or quality; capacity of being seen (in general, or under special conditions).
2. The possibility of (a vessel, etc.) being seen under the conditions of distance, light, atmosphere, etc., existing at a particular time; hence conversely, the possibility of seeing, or the range of vision, under such conditions.

Visibility, then, signifies both the possibility of being seen and the possibility of seeing under certain general and special conditions. Accordingly, visibility always encompasses two processes: being identifiable and recognizable on the one hand, and identifying/recognizing on the other. In other words, visibility exists in the tension between presence and perception, neither of which is a stable category. Presence, in particular, is a matter of coming-into-being where visibility is concerned. Furthermore, as the OED highlights, visibility is subject to certain general or special conditions that shape the moment of coming-into-being and the converse moment of being recognized. In fact, it is these general and special conditions that determine how and to what extent something (or someone) can be perceived and how we see it (or him/her).³

However, visibility is not simply a process of coming-into-being accompanied by recognition and identification, but rather is informed by knowledge, power, and sexuality—dynamics that are central to subjectivity and society. In other words, the process of who and what becomes visible, in which ways, and to whom involves a multifaceted negotiation with and within established regimes of power-knowledge. The same dynamics also regulate that which supposedly stays invisible. As I will elaborate later, invisibility is often a refusal to see rather than an impossibility of seeing—enacted, for instance, through the racialized screening processes of the closet. The interaction of power, knowledge, sexuality, and race and the dichotomy of visibility/invisibility are the central constitutive forces of the discourse of queer visibility. An analysis of this discourse shows why, and in what ways, visibility has gained such crucial importance to the articulation of queer desires, acts, and identifications.

As the various screening processes surrounding the boundary between visibility and invisibility indicate, it is misleading to think of “coming out of the closet”—which we can understand as a moment of rendering one’s queerness visible—as a singular moment of crossing-over from a state or place that is “hidden” to one that is visible. Even though the concept of coming out relies on a spatial metaphor that describes an apparently finite transition from one space to another, it is best imagined as a continuous process. Thus, instead of one all-encompassing announcement of one’s gay or lesbian identity, “coming out” is a laborious, repetitive process without end—one that has been thought of as fundamental to queer identities. Likewise, queer representations are not fixed, but rather subject to constant negotiation as production circumstances, cultural context, and reception practices change. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick explains the negotiations involved in coming out in the following way: every meeting between strangers “erects new closets whose fraught and characteristic laws of optics and physics exact from at least gay people new surveys, new calculations, new draughts and requisitions of secrecy or disclosure” (46, emphasis mine). It is interesting that Sedgwick chooses the word “optics” here to discuss the closet when the term “visibility” is curiously absent from her overall discussion. Nevertheless, this word choice underlines the importance of visibility to understanding the epistemology of the closet: the spatial metaphor of the closet suggests an either/or state of being, which is at the foundation of queer visibility (one is either “in” or “out” of the closet, i.e., either invisible or visible), when queer visibility is in fact a continuous process during which multiple moments of being “in” and “out” intersect. Also interesting is Sedgwick’s emphasis on “at least gay people,” suggesting that the dynamics of the closet are more “visible” to queer people than to straight people, who find their identities and ways of life resonating with the heteronormative demands surrounding them and who consequently might not “see” the pressure heteronormativity can exert. In other words, the propagated difficulty in identifying queerness has more to do with the allegedly blinding forces of heteronormativity than with the visibility or invisibility of queerness. From this point of view, heteronormativity is so visible that it has cast other sexual identifications into shadow.

Following this line of thought, Shane Phelan suggests that the closet actually acts like a screen: it “screens” queerness, or at least certain aspects of queerness, from view while serving as the surface for heteronormative projections (98). This screening process leads, among other things, to the assumption that everyone is heterosexual until proven otherwise. However, the closet can never fully screen queerness from view; a specter of queer acts and identities always remains, even in those spaces that appear to be fully saturated with heteronormativity.⁴ Thus, it isn’t so much that queerness, or at least certain aspects of queerness, are “invisible” by default, but that there has been a concerted effort in society to declare them invisible (in part by promoting heterosexuality as “normal” and “natural”). Deeming queerness “invisible” only obscures it via the screening process of the closet: queer acts and desires exist before and independently of coming-into-being in the moment of articulation; that is, independently of the process we refer to as “coming out.” Moreover, historical and current efforts nominally aimed at removing queerness from public view—public here meaning a whole host of institutions and venues of representation, including employment by the state; civil rights, such as the right to marry and receive certain benefits; narratives of queer romance in film and television, etc.—didn’t actually make queerness disappear, but marked it as “deviant” and discussed it as such. This “deviant” queerness manifested itself in the very spaces from which it was supposed to disappear, including sites ranging from public places to Hollywood cinema (I will elaborate on this history in Chapter 2). Considering that visibility itself is an unstable and changing concept, holding on to a strict distinction between “visible” and “invisible” is an insufficient way of thinking about the ways in which queerness exists in American culture. Rather, we need to ask which forms of queer expression have existed where, when, and for whom. These questions are particularly important for an analysis of queer visibility in film and television as certain manifestations of queerness might appear visible (or legible) to some and invisible (or illegible) to others. Consequently, understanding the closet as a screen, as Phelan proposes, allows for a more precise mapping of this discourse of queer visibility. I want to take Phelan’s conceptualization of the closet-as-screen one step further and argue that while this screen serves as a projection surface for heteronormative ideals, it also allows for the coming-into-being of specific types of queer visibilities, namely those that can nominally adhere to certain class, race, and gender norms.

The type of queer visibility that appears most frequently in current mainstream film and television centers on white gay and lesbian characters that lead supposedly normal lives with normal problems. The alignment of queer visibility, normativity, and whiteness might appear unremarkable considering that most diegeses in film and television revolve around white characters’ lives. However, queer visibility and its link to whiteness can only appear unremarkable due to long cultural processes that mask the cultural labor they perform under the idea of inevitable progress. This story of progress sketches the development of queer media visibility from absence to marginalization to integration—in other words, it is a classic coming out story. As with any classic coming out story, this process of becoming visible is not quite as straightforward as some popular and academic histories present it. After all, what queer (in)visibility means and how it manifests itself is by no means straightforward or obvious. As a first step in unraveling the seeming simplicity of queer visibility’s coming out in the media, it is necessary to understand that race, and specifically discourses of whiteness, are central to the closet-as-screen.

The Closet and Race

The closet-as-screen regulates and shapes the discourse of queer visibility. It determines who and what we consider as queer in film and television. While heteronormativity is usually considered the decisive factor in regulating discourses of sexuality—that is, in determining the lines between queer and straight, normal and non-normal, visible and invisible—race is an equally important factor. In fact, the closet and the closet-as-screen are shaped by discourses of race in a fundamental way. Indeed, racialized discourse suffuses the very idea of the closet. We can trace the entanglement of race and sexuality to the historical moment in which the idea of modern sexual identity emerged. A turn to history also offers an insight into the persistent presence of the blank screen at the center of the closet and its racialized implications in any theory of queer visibility.

Most theories of the closet, including foundational texts such as Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality and Eve Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet, build on the idea that sexuality emerged as a defining aspect of modern subjectivity sometime in the nineteenth century. Indeed, both Foucault and Sedgwick argue that sexuality is fundamental to understanding the organization of modern subjectivity and society. A discussion of how discourses of race shapes the emergence of sexuality does not occupy a large role in History of Sexuality and Epistemology of the Closet or in many other subsequent texts that are considered to be part of queer theory. The lack of engaging with discourses of race is a fundamental oversight considering that, according to Marlon B. Ross and Siobhan B. Somerville, the recognition of sexuality as a category of identification was a thoroughly racialized process.

Both Ross and Somerville offer compelling analyses of the central role racialized discourses and worldviews played in the classification of homosexuality in the nineteenth century. After all, by the time sexologists began to divide people’s identities, practices, and bodies into hetero- and homosexual, discourses of race had already established categories for “normal” and “abnormal” bodies and people (Ross 164). In particular, sexual deviance was often subsumed under racial deviance. From Ross’s point of view, the possibility of recognizing homosexuality as deviating from sexual norms depends on a person whose identity and body can be constructed as a ...