The Generic Closet

Black Gayness and the Black-Cast Sitcom

Alfred L. Martin, Jr., Alfred L. Martin

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780253054623
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Even after a rise in gay and Black representation and production on TV in the 1990s, the sitcom became a "generic closet, " restricting Black gay characters with narrative tropes.

Drawing from 20 interviews with credited episode writers, key show-runners, and Black gay men, The Generic Closet situates Black-cast sitcoms as a unique genre that uses Black gay characters in service of the series' heterosexual main cast. Alfred L. Martin, Jr., argues that the Black community is considered to be antigay due to misrepresentation by shows that aired during the family viewing hour and that were written for the imagined, "traditional" Black family. Martin considers audience reception, industrial production practices, and authorship to unpack the claim that Black gay characters are written into Black-cast sitcoms such as Moesha, Good News, and Let's Stay Together in order to closet Black gayness.

By exploring how systems of power produce ideologies about Black gayness, The Generic Closet deconstructs the concept of a monolithic Black audience and investigates whether this generic closet still exists.

ONE

BUILDING AND REBUILDING GENERIC CLOSETS WITHIN THE BLACK-CAST SITCOM INDUSTRY

IN THE OCTOBER 2012 ISSUE of Out magazine—one of the national magazines that specifically and explicitly target lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender readers—the editors wrote “The Big Gay TV Timeline” as part of a package they called “Primetime: How the Evolution Was Televised.” The piece began with gay images on television in 1965 with Paul Lynde and his first appearance on Bewitched (ABC, 1964–1972), not as Uncle Arthur but as a “jumpy driving instructor.”¹ The package traces representations of gay men and lesbians on television through eras, genres, episodic representations, and recurring characters. It even covers female characters who were not gay but were the object of gay men’s adoration like Dorothy, Rose, Blanche, and Sophia from The Golden Girls (NBC, 1985–1992). As it does this work, it also makes one thing clear: the history traced by Out is rooted in whiteness and white television. Out mentions Black gay characters including Carter Heywood from Spin City, Keith Charles from Six Feet Under (HBO, 2001–2005), and Snoop and Omar from The Wire (HBO, 2002–2008), but no characters from Black-cast television are mentioned within that history. The magazine inexplicably does not even mention Noah’s Arc (Logo, 2005–2006), which has historical import if only for its distinction as the first television series to feature a main cast entirely comprising Black gay characters.

I want to use Out’s version of gay television history to situate the concerns engaged in this chapter. First, Black television’s relationship to Black gayness is vastly different than white television’s relationship to gayness. In other words, the “Gay ’90s” (as dubbed by the September 8, 1995, Entertainment Weekly cover) were the white gay ’90s, rooted in the differences in how white and Black audiences are industrially imagined: white audiences are segmented and partly imagined as liberal with a tendency to consume content with LGBT characters, whereas Black audiences are understood as conservative and antigay. Second, some of these different audience imaginations have their nexus in how Black television, in a bid for a kind of televised Black authenticity, draws on the rise of hip-hop commodification, which is always already understood as antigay (however problematic that generalization might be). Third, Black television is precarious within the media industries. Jennifer Fuller argues that Black television representation is “shaped in part by the contemporary workings and limits of television production.”² To be sure, the media industries are no longer necessarily segregated by race, but they remain “mediated by racial hierarchies and commercial imperatives.”³ In other words, when Fox loaded up on Black-cast series, only to dump those series once it had secured broadcasting rights to Sunday Night Football in 1994, it served as a “lesson” for Black-cast sitcoms. Black-centered television production, like the film industry’s temporary engagement with cinematic Blackness in the 1970s and 1990s, would be allowed only as long as white executives thought reaching Black viewers was a valuable endeavor and one that would continue to serve as a market differentiator.

The tethering of whiteness and gayness, the mediation of Black homophobia, and the precariousness of Black television converge with an additional industrial practice that comes to bear on the Black-cast sitcom: flow. Initially conceptualized by Raymond Williams, flow describes the television industrial process of scheduling not only programming but also the commercials between the programming. As Nick Browne succinctly sums it up, flow imagines a television network or channel as a “relay in a process of textualizing the interaction of audience and advertiser.”⁴ Scheduling helps to make sense of television’s flow and is industrially shaped by programming shows with similar tone within close proximity.⁵ Brett Mills further illuminates the industrial logic behind this pairing system when he asserts that comedy is an “industrial tool for cohering specific audience groups, with the implication that such groups find similar things funny, and have similar responses to particular character types.”⁶ But Amanda Lotz rightly argues that this scheduling strategy of pairing “like with like becomes problematic when networks assume that similar ethnic identities among casts equates to similar content.”⁷ Lotz’s discussion of flow is important to some of the concerns that undergird this chapter, particularly the industrial practice of “Black blocking.”

Black blocking extends Lotz’s notion of channels, networks, and streaming platforms using ethnicity as a marker of similarity by positing that it increases precarity for the Black-cast sitcom. Put another way, if a channel or network only programs Black-cast content on, say, Monday night, and assuming the schedule is filled with sitcoms, that means only six Black-cast programs can be on the network or channel at any given time versus a white- or multicultural-cast series, which is understood as “universal” and programmable virtually anywhere. The net result is reinforcement of the precariousness of Black-cast content, which serves to structure and discipline the kinds of “risks” these series take.

Fig. 1.1. Entertainment Weekly cover proclaiming the 1990s the “Gay ’90s” because of the explosion of LGBT representation within television.

Through an examination of the industrial histories of UPN, TBS, and BET, this chapter proposes that the Black-cast sitcom creates and recreates the generic closet—not necessarily because of some innate antigayness but because of the precarity of Black television production. Showrunners do not want to take a chance on “risky” content, with risk referring to a sustained engagement with Black homosexuality. Veteran showrunner Ed. Weinberger encapsulates this precarity: “I don’t think [BET has] encouraged gay Black characters because they are fearful of alienating their audience. I think they’re afraid that there is still a prejudice [about homosexuality].”⁸ Importantly, Weinberger gestures toward an industrial imagination of Black audiences rather than any semblance of audience research. Thus, the generic closet’s enduringness is rooted in fiction, not necessarily fact.

As I will argue throughout this chapter, precarity becomes an organizing logic for Black-cast sitcoms. It encourages productions to color inside the industrial lines drawn around Black-cast television, and this approach reconnects to how audiences are understood and imagined, without the benefit of market research. And thus the (lack of) imagination of urbane (versus “just” urban) Black audiences, an overreliance on hip-hop’s (partial) homophobia, and Black television’s precarity are interlocking discourses that result in building and rebuilding the generic closet.

This chapter is a deep dive into the industrial weeds of UPN, TBS, and BET. It is important to understand how these networks come to Blackness in order to understand how they come their (brief) engagement with Black gayness. This historical sketch shifts the question from “How did Black gayness appear within Black-cast sitcoms?” to “Why did Black gayness appear within Black-cast sitcoms?” More to the point, this chapter underscores the industrial logics that underpin the creation of Black-cast sitcoms and their subsequent limited inclusion of Black gayness by detailing the Black-cast sitcom’s engagement with the generic closet.

To explore the creation of Moesha, Good News, All of Us, Are We There Yet?, and Let’s Stay Together and their reification of the generic closet, it is first necessary to understand the post-network television environment, which began in 1986. At that time, Fox launched with a few hours of programming in a bid to become the fourth broadcast network (after DuMont’s failed attempt at being a fourth network in the 1940s and 1950s) and break up the “Big Three” networks’ (ABC, CBS, and NBC) monopoly over TV content. Roberta Pearson theorizes this era as TVII, which dates “roughly from the 1980s until the late 1990s . . . [and] is the era of channel/network expansion, quality television, and network branding strategies.”⁹ The multichannel environment encouraged startup networks (netlets) and channels to take “risks” within their programming—a risk that was often rooted in representations of Blackness as a means to attract critical attention and underserved demographic segments (always with an eye toward selling those demographics to advertisers). Jennifer Fuller details how “the proliferation of broadcast and cable channels in the 1980s and 1990s increased the competition for audience shares and threatened to muddle distinctions between the growing number of cable channels and broadcasting networks. In response, channels made greater efforts to remain distinct and cultivate viewer loyalty. . . . Broadcasters began to select and promote their line-ups not just in terms of what shows might be successful in certain time slots, but as a way to create a network brand.”¹⁰ I quote Fuller in detail here because her understanding of the interconnectivity between Black representation and network branding is important to the work I undertake in this chapter and in The Generic Closet more broadly. Because Blackness is a brand strategy to promote product differentiation, it retains its precariousness: when the brand needs to differentiate in a new way, that strategy will be abandoned.

Fox recognized a hole—and a potential branding strategy—in Black television representation as the major three networks became whiter (in terms of their series) in the 1980s. The major networks had Black-cast hits like Benson (ABC, 1979–1986), Gimme a Break (NBC, 1981–1987), and The Cosby Show (NBC, 1984–1992), among others, but for many Black viewers, these programs did not ring true to their lived experiences. Jannette Dates finds that the series Benson “fit the pattern that scripted African American male characters as innocuous true-believers in the system, who supported, defended, and nurtured mainstream, middle class values, concerns, and even faults” before contending that on Gimme a Break, Nell Carter played a “proud but servile, cocky but nurturing, loyal” mammy.¹¹ In their reception study of The Cosby Show, Sut Jhally and Justin Lewis acknowledged that some critics believed “the Huxtables’ charmed life [was] so alien to the experience of most black people that they [were] no longer ‘black’ at all.”¹² Ultimately, the success of The Cosby Show resulted in a whitewashed television environment in which Blackness was enacted and deployed within television’s established white cultural norms. Put simply, many of these Black-cast series were largely understood as series with Black faces but whit...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Television in Black and Gay
• 1. Building and Rebuilding Generic Closets within the Black-Cast Sitcom Industry
• 2. Scripting the Generic Closet in the Writers’ Room
• 3. Comedy, Laughter, and the Generic Closet
• 4. Black Queens Speak: The Generic Closet, Black-Cast Sitcoms, and Reception Practices
• Conclusion: Trapped in the Black-Cast Sitcom’s Generic Closet
• Appendix A. List of Black-Cast Sitcoms with Black Gay Characters
• Appendix B. Interview Script for Black-Cast Sitcom Viewers
• Appendix C. Interview Script for Industry Professionals
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author