The Queer Fantasies of the American Family Sitcom

Tison Pugh

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780813591735
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: LGBT Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

The Queer Fantasies of the American Family Sitcom examines the evasive depictions of sexuality in domestic and family-friendly sitcoms. Tison Pugh charts the history of increasing sexual depiction in this genre while also unpacking how sitcoms use sexuality as a source of power, as a kind of camouflage, and as a foundation for family building. The book examines how queerness, at first latent, became a vibrant yet continually conflicted part of the family-sitcom tradition.  Taking into account elements such as the casting of child actors, the use of and experimentation with plot traditions, the contradictory interpretive valences of comedy, and the subtle subversions of moral standards by writers and directors, Pugh points out how innocence and sexuality conflict on television. As older sitcoms often sit on a pedestal of nostalgia as representative of the Golden Age of the American Family, television history reveals a deeper, queerer vision of family bonds.  
 

1

The Queer Times of Leave It to Beaver

Beaver’s Present, Ward’s Past, and June’s Future

Television entered mainstream American culture in the 1950s, with the queer fantasies of the family sitcom genre, family-friendly programming, and the preternaturally innocent child emerging along with it. Within the field of television studies, American family sitcoms of the 1950s and early 1960s, in their shared depictions of smiling clans populating suburban Edens, have long been viewed as sugar-coated fare divorced from the era’s gendered, racial, and socioeconomic discontents. Such readings, accurate in the main, nonetheless whitewash the genre’s and the era’s complexity, inculcating a de facto presumption of heteronormativity that brooks little room for dissent. Time’s ostensible linearity obscures its deeper meanings, with the chimerical illusion of forward progress masking history’s inevitable contradictions. Leave It to Beaver (1957–63) exemplifies the gentle respectability of the 1950s nuclear family as portrayed on America’s televisions, yet when one allows for the queerness of time in framing its characters, Beaver, Ward, and June emerge both as representatives of a 1950s suburban bubble and as characters impossible to contain within it. With the program ranging across the past of Ward’s backstory, the present of Beaver’s gendered misadventures, and into the future of June’s role as a cultural icon, fleeting yet intriguing visions of familial queerness coalesce, collectively dismantling assumptions about the stifling sexual politics of television’s early years.

Certainly, the 1950s occupy a privileged position in the American imaginary: prosperity reigned in the years following World War II as veterans returned home and built a suburban paradise, with President Dwight D. Eisenhower presiding over a nation expanding its international influence. Such are the lessons that the gospel of 1950s nostalgia preaches, and in many ways this nostalgia defines the decade, as Jean Baudrillard affirms: “The fifties were the real high spot for the US (‘when things were going on’), and you can still feel the nostalgia for those years, for the ecstasy of power, when power held power.”1 Fredric Jameson, while acknowledging the decade’s allure, complicates this vision by stressing how its televisual portrayals in effect created its legacy: “This is clearly, however, to shift from the realities of the 1950s to the representation of that rather different thing, the ‘fifties,’ a shift which obligates us in addition to underscore the cultural sources of all the attributes with which we have endowed the period, many of which seem very precisely to derive from its own television programs; in other words, its own representation of itself.”2 These images created enduring stereotypes of American families: white, comfortably (upper) middle class, and happily ensconced in the suburbs. Stephanie Coontz, concurring with Jameson’s view, believes that television programs define the decade for many: “Our most powerful visions of traditional families derive from images that are still delivered to our homes in countless reruns of 1950s television sit-coms.”3 As she further demonstrates, however, this vision of the 1950s white, suburban family itself represents a historical anomaly, one that arose in response to a host of demographic factors, including younger ages for marriage and motherhood and increased fertility (and thus the advent of the baby boom generation).4 Nostalgia defines many viewers’ relationship to 1950s television, no matter the rose-colored glasses necessary to overlook the period’s numerous problems, particularly the secondary status of women and racial minorities and the destructive silence enveloping GLBT people.

But as much as we may think we know the 1950s, any attempt to define a period inevitably falls to the impossibility of capturing a zeitgeist beyond its roughest contours. As several queer theorists have recently explored, time is often (mis)used to crudely construct a blanket sense of historical normativity that hides the varieties of existence within, and resistance to, a given era. Elizabeth Freeman questions the tyranny of “chrononormativity,” which she eloquently defines as “the interlocking temporal schemes necessary for genealogies of descent and for the mundane workings of domestic life,” and which she expands to include “the use of time to organize individual human bodies toward maximum productivity.”5 Chrononormativity presumes that humans will accede into dominant ideological regimes, particularly those of gender, sexuality, and social class, yet such a process is almost inevitably rendered queer through the contortions of identity essential for propagating normality. Recognizing history’s weight and time’s gossamer reach, Carolyn Dinshaw calls for “the possibility of a fuller, denser, more crowded now that all sorts of theorists tell us is extant but that often eludes our temporal grasp.”6 This concept of a now suffused with moments beyond its immediate passing subverts the facile view of time’s linearity and complicates efforts to determine the meaning of narratives whose span includes the historical past from which they emerge, the contemporary present of their production, and the ensuing decades of their reception. Studies of television programs must urgently attend to the queer and queering ramifications of time, particularly because no program can be cordoned off solely to its years of production but by necessity must engage with the past (both in its creation and in its backstories) and with the future (in its always shifting reception). Dismantling simplistic assumptions of chrononormativity, television’s inherent flow challenges the linearity of time through the multitudinous temporal construction perpetually in play in watching a given program.

Leave It to Beaver, in its crosscuttings of temporality, testifies both to the allure of chrononormativity and to its ultimate limitations. The program adheres to the core structures of the family sitcom: father Ward (Hugh Beaumont) and mother June (Barbara Billingsley) live comfortably and contentedly with their sons, Wally (Tony Dow) and Theodore “the Beaver” (Jerry Mathers), in a suburban hamlet where together they confront the gentle challenges of growing up. In each episode, one character errs and consequently learns an important lesson, with Beaver often, but by no means always, filling this role. During the series’ six seasons, Wally and Beaver mature, with the program concluding as they respectively prepare to enter college and high school. But as Kathryn Bond Stockton so ably demonstrates, children do not “grow up”—with the implicit heteronormative assumption of “growing up straight”—as much as they “grow sideways”: “‘Growing sideways’ suggests that the width of a person’s experience or ideas, their motives or their motions, may pertain at any age, bringing ‘adults’ and ‘children’ into lateral contact of surprising sorts. This kind of growth is made especially palpable . . . by (the fiction of) the ghostly gay child—the publicly impossible child whose identity is a deferral (sometimes powerfully and happily so) and an act of growing sideways, by virtue of its future retroaction as a child.”7 Stockton focuses on the “ghostly gay child” in her analysis, yet the apparently stultifying innocence of 1950s domestic sitcoms obscures the necessity to consider the “ghostly straight child”—one who navigates an intriguingly queer journey to heterosexuality. In this regard, families that appear bastions of sexual normativity often merely camouflage their underlying queerness.

Further along these lines, Leave It to Beaver portrays Beaver on the edge of queerness, such that Ward frequently voices concern over his son’s sexual development. Yet as much as Beaver represents the marginalized child growing sideways into heterosexuality, so, too, do Ward’s clumsy efforts at child raising in the program’s narrative present and the specters of parental abuse in his past frame his maturation as an ultimately queer process. While the series stresses Beaver’s (and to a lesser extent, Wally’s) maturation as its primary story line, its depictions of Ward hint at the possibility of his sideways growth from a battered childhood into a confused adulthood. In a similar vein, June Cleaver has been both lionized and vilified for the image of 1950s domesticity she embodies, yet Barbara Billingsley subverted June’s chrononormative and nostalgic appeal in her later career by cagily and campily restaging the impossibility of this maternal ideal. As evident from these chinks in its late 1950s and early 1960s foundation of domestic respectability, Leave It to Beaver presents the Cleavers as an exemplary and wholesome family while tamping down the queer potential simmering underneath its suburban facade.

Chrononormativity and the 1950s Family Sitcom

Chrononormative readings of 1950s family sitcoms stress their patriarchal foundations, in which a wise, patient father and a nurturing, stay-at-home mother raise two or more cute children, with The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet (1952–66), Make Room for Daddy (1953–65), and Father Knows Best (1954–60) modeling this paradigm. These programs depict family life as a harmonious ideal, with only the mildest disruptions to the family unit sparking an episode’s plot. The narrative prominence of Ozzie Nelson, Danny Thomas’s “Daddy” Danny Williams, and Robert Young’s “Father” Jim Anderson registers in their show’s titles, and, as Nina Leibman argues, various other televisual techniques maintain the spotlight on the father: “Dad’s implicit power is rendered in the flow and content of familial conversation, in his omnipresence for both disciplinary and praise-giving occasions, in his frequent position at the center of the narrative, and in his visual and aural dominance.”8 Congruent with this perspective, Horace Newcomb observes that “domestic situation comedies . . . offered a soothing view of the traditional family, content with basic values of the home—warm, comforting, and designed along lines of gender authority”;9 David Halberstam posits that “the family sitcoms reflected—and reinforced—much of the social conformity of the period. There was no divorce. There was no serious sickness, particularly mental illness. Families liked each other, and they tolerated each other’s idiosyncrasies.”10

Leibman’s, Newcomb’s, and Halberstam’s observations about the traditional structures of 1950s family sitcoms are realized throughout Leave It to Beaver: Ward benevolently rules the home from his book-lined study; June lovingly tends to her maternal duties in the kitchen; and although Beaver may angrily shout “rat, rat, rat!” at Wally during moments of pique (e.g., “Beaver’s Birthday,” “Beaver’s Electric Trains”), the vast majority of episodes feature the boys enjoying each other’s company, despite their age difference.11 One could quibble with Halberstam’s statement that 1950s sitcoms eschew such topics as divorce and mental illness, for Leave It to Beaver tackles these themes in such episodes as “Beaver’s House Guest” (in which Beaver’s friend Chopper must deal with the emotional repercussions of his parents’ divorce) and “Beaver and Andy” (in which Beaver realizes that the Cleavers’ handyman suffers from alcoholism). Because the program condemns the former and sympathetically portrays those who struggle with the latter, the spirit of Halberstam’s point holds, especially since both disruptions occur outside the family unit itself. Virtually every episode of Leave It to Beaver confirms Leibman’s, Newcomb’s, and Halberstam’s readings of 1950s sitcoms, so it would be folly to deny the force—indeed, the accuracy—of chrononormative interpretations.

Further advancing this chrononormative perspective, the nostalgic vision of the 1950s as a time of suburban comfort and financial prosperity carries through in the period’s sitcoms, imbuing them with an optimistic vision of America as a nation striving for ever greater heights. In his study of media depictions of America’s suburbs, David Coon observes, “Family sitcoms from the 1950s and 1960s, such as Leave It to Beaver and The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, helped to develop an onscreen image of suburbia as a utopian space filled with desirable homes, happy families, and trouble-free lives,”12 while Hal Himmelstein criticizes this utopic viewpoint: “Television’s myth of the suburban middle landscape became an idealized representation of the quality of life of upwardly mobile white Americans divorced from the social infrastructure that allowed that mobility (we are inevitably upwardly mobile at another’s expense).”13 Within this 1950s celebration of the nation’s wealth, Leave It to Beaver modestly concedes, but never trumpets, the Cleavers’ financial comforts. June acknowledges the rise of the suburbs by referring to Levittown (“Larry’s Club”), and one of the series’ few story lines carrying over separate episodes depicts the family house-hunting for a larger residence (to which they have relocated in the third season’s early episodes, with the boys curiously still sharing a bedroom). In a virtual ode to American prosperity, June soon reports that, according to a real estate agent, the Cleavers could sell their new home for a $10,000 profit (“The Spot Removers”). The program carefully maintains the Cleavers within the realm of the middle class—as Ward explains, “No, Beaver, we’re not rich. We’re what you might call ‘comfortable’” (“Stocks and Bonds”)—all the better to position them as a defining family of the era and thus to erase the divisions between America’s social classes and any discontents they might foster among the program’s viewers.

While many viewers appreciate Leave It to Beaver as a homey, happy time capsule from the 1950s, the program concomitantly announces its modernity. Its creators present its characters not as relics of the past but as testaments to the changing times, and these themes frustrate chrononormative readings either steeped in nostalgia or lamenting the program’s hidebound mores. Most significantly in this regard, despite current evaluations of Ward and June as an unrealistic and outmoded couple of the past, the program depicts their marriage and parenting as progressive and representative of the latest advances in gender relations. In her 1952 volume on child raising, Sidonie Matsner Gruenberg upholds the standard marital division of labor while also encouraging parents to share household responsibilities: “Many young couples realize that at some points the father has to be protected for his main job outside the home, but that at other times he has to protect and help the mother. When both feel responsible toward each other and to their common purpose, their cooperation is functional and flexible rather than set in a fixed pattern of sharply divided and arbitrarily assigned tasks.”14 Such sentiments were reinforced in the popular magazines of the day, such as Otis Lee Wiese’s 1954 editorial in McCall’s that trumpeted, “Today women are not a sheltered sex. . . . [Parents] are creating this new and warmer way of life not as women alone or men alone, isolated from one another, but as a family sharing a common experience.”15 So to judge Ward and June as exemplars of 1950s parenthood necessitates that one query the temporal standards on which such an evaluation rests: those of the program’s present or those of today. At the very least, Ward and June’s marriage appears in harmony with the progressive visions endorsed by Gruenberg and Wiese, thus encouraging viewers to see their relationship not as a regrettable relic of yesteryear but as a dynamic exemplar of shifting family responsibilities that had been even more sharply divided by gender in the past.

Throughout Leave It to Beaver, traditional gender roles and separate domestic spheres are maintained yet progressively expanded, as evident in the semiotic resignification of aprons. Ward often helps June wash the dishes, at times wearing an apron when doing so (“Eddie’s Sweater”). From today’s perspective such a concession registers as picayune to the point of meaninglessness, yet June’s umbrage at the phrase “apron strings” indicates her impatience with maternal stereotypes:

Ward: It’s perfectly natural for a kid to want to get away from his mother’s apron strings.

June: What do you mean—my apron strings?

Ward: Nothing. That was a poor choice of words. (“Boarding School”)

Aprons metonymically capture both the era’s shifting gender roles and the crosscurrents in temporalities that undermine chrononorma...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction: TV’s Three Queer Fantasies
• Chapter 1. The Queer Times of Leave It to Beaver: Beaver’s Present, Ward’s Past, and June’s Future
• Chapter 2. Queer Innocence and Kitsch Nostalgia in The Brady Bunch
• Chapter 3. No Sex Please, We’re African American: The Cosby Show’s Queer Fear of Black Sexuality
• Chapter 4. Feminism, Homosexuality, and Blue-Collar Perversity in Roseanne
• Chapter 5. Allegory, Queer Authenticity, and Marketing Tween Sexuality in Hannah Montana
• Chapter 6. Conservative Narratology, Queer Politics, and the Humor of Gay Stereotypes in Modern Family
• Conclusion: Tolstoy Was Wrong; or, On the Queer Reception of Television’s Happy Families
• Acknowledgments
• List of Television Programs
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index
• About the Author