Symbolic annihilation
By
Brandon S Morley |
POSTED AT
12:00 AM ON Apr. 3, 2006
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The Jack Twist character played by Jake Gyllenhaal in "Brokeback Mountain" has a line summing up how I feel about the way homosexuals are portrayed in 21st century mainstream media: "This is a bitch of an unsatisfactory situation."
Thanks to television shows like "Will & Grace," the gay culture is slowly creeping its way into mainstream entertainment, but just because it's creeping doesn't mean it's creeping in the right direction.
The NBC sitcom is a show giving more than 30 million Americans a weekly dose of homosexual hysterics about two gay men and their respective fag hags. This homosexual entry into mainstream television is both a good and bad thing for the gay rights movement: Gays are central characters in a national television show produced by one of the major networks. Its duration for eight seasons shows that mainstream America is OK with gay people, so long as they aren't "too" gay, or as long as they are "funny," or as long the characters appeal to stereotypes already in place.
But the show also continues a trend where homosexuals are second-citizens in the world of entertainment, and it's not the only time.
As soon as the civil rights movement started taking off, the subservient roles blacks had, in both television and film, started to grow, slowly but surely. It's not unusual at all now to see a black hero leading a cast, and for a time, there was talk the next James Bond would be black. Gays aren't so lucky.
My mom thinks "Will & Grace" is funny, and watches the show regularly. She thinks it's cool to see gay people clown around, the same way white people lapped up the Sambo characters from the "Amos & Andy" days. While Mom thinks it's funny, I think it's worse than getting called a "fag." You can ignore one bigot, you can't ignore a long-running sitcom and subtext it keeps alive.
Look at the story line of the show and characters, and you'll see why.
"Will & Grace" disarms television viewers and softens the tension they feel toward depictions of homosexuality. The show never depicts intimate gay love scenes, or has explicitly gay dialogue between Will -- the successful and very straight-acting lawyer -- and Jack, Will's swishy foil. The show also reinforces the stereotypes many have towards the gay culture. Will is successful because he "acts" straight, or normal. Jack is funny because he "acts" gay.
This appeals to a mainstream middle-America who demonstrated in the last presidential election they didn't like gay people because it doesn't show gay men as people, it shows them as caricatures. But thanks to films like "Brokeback Mountain," a love story between two ranch hands in rugged 1960s Wyoming, gays might finally begin to achieve the same level of equality in films and television that black characters have.
Nominated this year for eight Oscars and winning three, "Brokeback" shows full frontal nudity, sex and dialogue that actually hits on the issues faces by homosexuals working as cowboys, and living incognito among an intolerant society. This is the first time any film has entered into the mainstream film culture actually showing gay characters with depth, and not simply keeping them around as token fags for the sole purpose of grabbing a laugh with a funny walk, or a lisp.
This film takes the first step and raises gays to a higher status in mainstream entertainment, a raise that's long over due.
"Will & Grace" goes off the air in late May and, hopefully, Hollywood will remember a place called Stonewall and continue the fight with more films like the one set in the grasslands of Wyoming.