VH1's Totally Gayer Delivers More Fluffy Fun
Malinda Lo, March 2004

Described by VH1 as “bigger, harder, sassier, and sexier than ever,” Totally Gayer (the follow-up to last summer’s Totally Gay) picks up where its younger (gay) brother left off, and continues to chronicle what seems to be the gaying of America pop culture, from the Britney-Madonna kiss (you didn’t think they’d leave that out, did you?) to Rosie’s wedding in San Francisco. Although it fails to engage critically with any real gay issues, once again Totally Gayer is a fun-spirited and campy romp through what straight America thinks of gay culture.

Divided into five segments that cover television, pop music, strange gay boy festivals, Broadway, and quirky vocabulary words, Totally Gayer still includes weird puppet animation and a plethora of minor gay male celebrities. As in Totally Gay, lesbian representation is minimal; although there are quite a number of straight female celebrities interviewed, only three lesbians (singer/songwriter Linda Perry, reality show contestant Ebony Haith, and actor Leisha Hailey of The L Word) are among the interviewees. Leisha Hailey gets about 0.2 seconds of screen time, so perhaps only two lesbians were included. This is not an impressive number, considering that Totally Gay also included only three lesbian interviewees.

Nearly all of the lesbian content on Totally Gayer is found in the first ten minutes, which focus on television and The L Word. Unfortunately the significance of The L Word is blunted by the inclusion of brief interviews with four straight men who lounge on a couch and goggle at the girl-on-girl action in standard frat-boy style, thus reducing The L Word to nothing more than titillation for straight male viewers.

In a positive sign of growth, however, Totally Gayer does include a brief mention of bisexuality in a segment on the television show Two and a Half Men, in which the actress Marin Hinkle grapples for about three difficult seconds with her character’s sexuality. But before we are given the opportunity to do anything more than question why Karen from Will and Grace wasn’t included, Totally Gayer moves on to declare that gays on television are so prevalent now that the only way to shock America is to make gay characters totally normal. Enter actress Michelle Clunie, who plays the character of Melanie on Queer as Folk, as representative of the trend toward normalizing gay characters and their relationships on television. Clunie says, “The letters we receive from lesbians are very emotional, saying it’s wonderful to see that you can have two women having a normal everyday relationship.”

However, the segment on the “Pinking of Pop” does contain the best interview clip of the entire show, because this is where the one and only famous lesbian celebrity is featured: singer/songwriter Linda Perry, formerly of the band 4 Non-Blondes, and now a successful music producer behind some of the success of Pink and Christina Aguilera. She also has a mohawk and looks like an actual lesbian, which is fantastic.

Interspersed with clips of Pink’s videos, Linda Perry says, “She’s a little butchy, you know, and then she can be really feminine. She switches.” This tiny segment provides the most important vocabulary word of the entire program. Forget VH1’s corny terms like “shebrew” (a Jewish lesbian) or “dykon” (lesbian icon). The word that America has probably never heard before is “switch,” as in a lesbian (or gay man) who can take on top or bottom roles in intimate encounters. Unfortunately, that definition never made it to the screen; it was probably too gay for VH1.

The only other mention of lesbianism in Totally Gayer comes toward the end of the hour, in which reality show contestant Ebony Haith of last year’s America’s Next Top Model is interviewed. In case you might have forgotten her from her fifteen minutes of fame, Haith was an African American lesbian competing with a bunch of straight women for a modeling contract, who was very straightforward about her sexual orientation and even brought her girlfriend on the show. On Totally Gayer Haith says, “I really felt as though I needed to be honest from the get-go….The way usually dark-skinned African American women are portrayed, especially being gay, I’m feeling like I have a lot to represent. I didn’t want to represent a woman that could be walked over.”

Haith’s short interview is one of two moments in Totally Gayer that did pause on a serious issue, and we should give kudos to the producers of the program for including Haith’s comments on race. The only other serious moment in Totally Gayer features Rosie O’Donnell’s comments about her marriage to Kelli Carpenter O’Donnell on the steps of San Francisco’s City Hall—complete with inspirational music and hopeful commentary about equality.

The remainder of Totally Gayer covers such diverse topics as an American Idol contest for gay (boy) country western singers, gay (boy) rodeos, advertising featuring gay men or targeted toward gay men, fashion by gay men, gay cartoons, and gay puppets on Broadway. When Peppermint Patty of Charlie Brown and Velma of Scooby Doo were referred to as “cartoon dykons,” though, it was obvious that this show was produced without the editorial input of a single actual lesbian. Hello, did anybody ever watch She-Ra?

Although Totally Gayer is totally fun, it is clear that lesbian culture is still considered much less fun than gay male culture, with its stereotypically outrageous drag queens and fashion mavens. Perhaps VH1 doesn’t understand that lesbians have camp too—drag king shows are just as fun and flirtatious as drag queen shows.

Although drag kings may not have made it to the big time, it is arguable that gay puppets on Broadway haven’t either. And gay puppets are really not sexy. Drag kings are. In fact, drag kings could be the definition of “bigger, harder, sassier, and sexier than ever,” whereas gay puppets can pretty much only be “smaller” and “softer.”

Which brings me to my fantasy for part three of this “documentary” series, which we might call Totally Freaking Gay. In this episode, we would have more face time for butches, who are always excluded from television because of the shocking power of their gender bending that clearly strikes fear into the heart of television executives everywhere. (Obviously, drag queens or effeminate gay men are not nearly as scary; they’re just your hairdressers.) Totally Freaking Gay could also include segments about drag king shows to demonstrate that lesbians can actually have fun and even make fun of themselves.

In the segment on lesbians on television we might have a panel of four single dykes who comment on how hot the sex is on The L Word, in contrast to the endless mind-numbing repetition of lesbian mommy drama on Queer as Folk and ER. We might have lesbian fashionistas (and they do exist—somewhere) explain the importance of spiky hair and motorcycle boots. And if VH1 is worried that lesbians are too butch to be on TV, Totally Freaking Gay could always feature the annual Dinah Shore weekend in Palm Springs, where hundreds of scantily-clad bikini-wearing L.A. femmes hang out by the pool, drinking fruity drinks and seriously cruising each other.

In the meantime, lesbians and bisexual women across America will have to be satisfied with Totally Gayer’s portrayal of lesbians in pop culture. Considering that the worst that can be said of the representation of lesbians and bisexual women in Totally Gayer is that it is extremely positive, swallowing another dose of VH1’s sugar-coated pro-gay programming won’t be too hard.