When
the December 2003 issue of Vanity Fair
hit stands with its "TV's Gay Heat Wave!" cover,
it became the latest in a string of high-profile articles
in the last several months devoted to the topic of the increasing
prevalence of gay characters in entertainment. The
San Francisco Chronicle, The L.A. Times, USA Today, and The Washington
Post are just some of the news outlets that have reported on this
subject in the last three months, spurred on by events like the
recent lesbian kiss on All My Children
and the success of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy.
"With
Will & Grace, Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, and Boy
Meets Boy, Prime Time has come out," writes Ned Zeman
in this issue of Vanity Fair. "In this year of Gay TV, with
at least nine gay centric shows in prime time, the real question
is: Which show is the gayest?"
And
by "gayest" he clearly means "gay men," since
he goes on to give an abbreviated history of gays on TV which includes
mention of only one lesbian character (Ellen)--and only one
off the nine current gay-centric shows touted by Zeman in the headline
revolves around gay women (The
L Word). The rest either focus exclusively on gay men or
only include lesbians as an afterthought (Queer
as Folk).
Only
two out of a few hundred prime time shows are focused on lesbians,
and both are on premium networks that only a fraction of the country
has access to? This might be the year of Gay Male TV, but it's hardly
the year of Lesbian TV.
There
has been improvement in the last few years in lesbian and
bisexual visibility on TV, and the media is correct to note this;
but there's been a far greater increase in gay
male visibility on TV, and that's what
articles like this one in Vanity Fair are really talking about--which
is fine, as long as they don't market it as an article about gay
men and lesbians.
Even
the photos accompanying the Vanity Fair article betray its focus
on gay men: of the ten women included in the photo shoot, three
play straight women on gay male series--including both of the women
on the cover (Debra Messing and Megan Mullally from Will
and Grace)--which means the photos only include seven actresses
who play lesbian or bisexual characters, compared to fourteen men
who play gay characters. There are plenty of other actresses who
play gay characters on TV, like Sonja Sohn on The
Wire, Roma Maffia on Nip/Tuck,
and Mary McCormack on K Street,
so it's not like there weren't other options available besides inserting
women who play straight characters on gay-male shows--but that would
have required Vanity Fair to take a balanced approach to the subject,
which it clearly feels no need to do.
The
fundamental problem with this article
and others like it is that they mistakenly assume gay men
are an acceptable proxy for gay women.
We discarded at least decade or two ago the centuries-old notion
that men are acceptable representatives for women in general, and
few journalists today would even think of writing an article about
how men and women's soccer is on the rise, for instance, and then
use the increase in visibility for male soccer teams as their only
example. Or an article about how a specific drug affects men and
women, and then cite only the increase in deaths among men as evidence.
Yet
they somehow feel no similar sense of responsibility when writing
articles about gay men and lesbians.
In
their rush to trumpet the dawn of a New Gay Era in order to sell
more newspapers/magazines, many mainstream journalists and editors
have allowed shoddy journalism to prevail, because it's easier to
talk about gay men as if they represented all gay people rather
than have to explain the differences between the number and ways
in which gay men and women are portrayed on TV. Truth complicates
the issue, and complicated issues don't sell as well as breezy generalizations
that are easy for the American public to digest over breakfast.
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