The rainbow age of telev.., p.1
The Rainbow Age of Television, page 1
Copyright © 2024 Shayna Maci Warner
Cover © 2024 Abrams
Published in 2024 by Abrams Press, an imprint of ABRAMS. All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2024935811
ISBN: 978-1-4197-6257-4
eISBN: 978-1-64700-715-7
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Dedicated to
SUSAN, SCOTT, SARAI, NYX, ISABELLA, BRYCE.
THANK YOU FOR LOVING ME.
THANK YOU FOR BEING THERE.
Also dedicated to
GREY’S ANATOMY.
YOU KNOW WHAT YOU DID.
Contents
INTRODUCTION: On Owing Everything to (and Wanting More from) Queer TV
CHAPTER 1: For the Very First Time
CHAPTER 2: QIA2S+: Firsts and Far to Boldly Go
Queer & A: Lilly Wachowski
CHAPTER 3: Just a Regular Jodie: Recurring, Regular, and Lead Queer Characters
Queer & A: Jamie Babbit
CHAPTER 4: The Rainbow Age Meets the Gray Area
Queer & A: Jessica Sutton
CHAPTER 5: Everybody Dies
Queer & A: Stephanie Beatriz
CHAPTER 6: Gays in “Real” Life
Queer & A: Melissa King
Queer & A: Sasha Colby
CHAPTER 7: For the Very Second Time: Reboots and Revisions
Queer & A: Jennifer Beals
Queer & A: Tanya Saracho
CONCLUSION: The End of the Rainbow
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
NOTES
INDEX OF SEARCHABLE TERMS
Introduction
ON OWING EVERYTHING TO
(AND WANTING MORE FROM) QUEER TV
My first loves were television and women.
If we were to meet in person, this would probably be one of the first fun facts you learn about me: a little more than a decade ago, right before I came out as bisexual, I only knew I loved television and that for some reason I was still obsessed with my pretty middle school teachers. I could rewind even further to my first Television Woman love, Piper Halliwell (played by nineties icon and landmark lesbian kiss recipient Holly Marie Combs1) on the WB’s sister-witch epic Charmed (1998–2006). Perhaps I knew that there was more than just admiration at play, but at the time, I simply didn’t have the language to describe what stirred within me when Piper vanquished monsters using her bare hands and pure strength of will.
I would be able to specifically point you to season 4, episode 12, “Lost and Bound,” as my favorite episode, but I probably would not willingly share with you that it’s because Piper finds a young, ostracized boy in need of help and serves him chocolate chip cookies while soothing his worries about hurting people because of his inherent, uncontrollable predilection for starting spontaneous fires. She reassures him he’s special, just like her, only she has learned to control her urges and channel them into a talent. In light of her approval, he is loved by a group of similarly feared outsiders; all he needed was a mentor to show him he wasn’t evil at his core. Lest I center my journey solely on the metaphor of belonging, I must also mention that Piper’s ultra-2000s fashion of the episode featured a squeaky pair of leather pants.
Maybe Piper Halliwell is the first witch I can fully pinpoint as the reason I am like this (in love with older women in leather), but it wasn’t until Dr. Calliope Torres (Sara Ramirez) fell in lust with Dr. Erica Hahn (Brooke Smith) on a certain groundbreaking, never-ending medical soap that, as Dr. Hahn might say, the big green blobs on trees became leaves. That’s right. Grey’s Anatomy (2005–) made me gay.
Yes, this is a simplification and fodder for anyone who would like to yoink this book from the hands of impressionable, naturally straight children (as if they needed another weak excuse), but from the moment Dr. Torres so magnificently displayed the signs of confusion, disbelief, then confirmation that girls could kiss boys and girls, I saw my own long-present dear friendships and adulation sharpen. Ramirez, who most recently played an utterly divisive fuckboy on the Sex and the City (1998–2004) reboot, And Just Like That . . . (2021–), is now publicly out as queer and nonbinary, but Callie Torres was a beacon far before that.
Brilliant, temperamental, driven, and vulnerable by turns, Dr. Torres felt like a real person struggling to claim her identity not as her parents or partners outlined it, but as her own. She was a fully developed, multifaceted bisexual person, albeit one who made terrible decisions and worked in a hospital where everything that could go wrong did. It’s a tough job to stay in the good graces of a highly invested soap fandom as a relatable, beloved character, especially in the throes of every imaginable melodramatic turn only a maniac like a Grey’s writer could fathom. (For instance, becoming pregnant with the child of a platonic best friend and said child being conceived directly before her ex-girlfriend returned from Malawi to plead for her hand in marriage and delivered amid musical hallucinations sprung from a traumatic car crash.) In large part thanks to Ramirez’s expressiveness and distinct ability to convey hunger and heartache, Dr. Torres more than pulled it off. Amid long-familiar HomoTV 101 themes like gay panic, family estrangement, and reconciling religious upbringing and sexuality, Dr. Torres somehow remained charismatic and distinct throughout a ten-year run, before Ramirez chose to depart the series in 2016.
I’ve written about Dr. Torres, and Sara Ramirez, before, and one of my most embarrassing moments was admitting to Ramirez that I wrote a GLAAD-published article celebrating their unknowing contributions to my and many others’ affirmations of our own identities. I was in love with many before them, and I have had an equally difficult time looking any of the actors or creators of my favorite characters directly in the eyes (but I am willing to try). The enormity of such a gift as recognition is overwhelming. Queerness* is the best thing to ever happen to me, so it’s no surprise that I, and many others, would feel a personal attachment to the people who made our lives nameable.
Seeing that one aspect of myself on television was life-changing, and that’s the primary reason I wanted to write The Rainbow Age of Television. The number of LGBTQIA2S+ characters on television has exploded since my mom first asked if Santana (Naya Rivera) and Brittany’s (Heather Morris) sweetly twisted relationship on gay TV monarch Ryan Murphy’s second high school satire, Glee (2009–2015), made me gay (close, but no stethoscope). So has the outspokenness and fervency with which viewers claim characters as their own. It’s gotten to a point that I’m more likely to have heard about the supposed flaws or perfections in a queer character’s design and read an essay-length tweet thread dissecting their fan base than I am to have actually seen the show being referenced. One thing is certain: in these turbulent twenties, we have no shortage of queer (primarily cisgender lesbian or gay but increasingly gender-nonconforming) characters. In attempting to write this book, I’ve had to face the happy and stressful truth that I will never be able to account for, or even become acquainted with, everyone’s favorite character. However, the quality, nuance, and dimensionality of many roles in this overflow of queer characters can often still feel shallow. Or, far worse, boring.
For the purposes of this book, I define the Rainbow Age as in its infancy with Will & Grace’s (1998–2006) success, picking up speed with queer cable series circa 2000, and fully integrated into the American television landscape by 2013 until its seeming peak in 2023. While there has been a chronological explosion and expansion of representation by numbers alone, I want to talk about the quality, longevity, and meaning of queer representation in an age no longer solely accountable to Nielsen ratings, the historical measurement of audience viewership, but continually jeopardized by a fervent culture of conservatism and arbitrary algorithms. I want to explore how depictions of queers have evolved alongside the medium as out queer people have increasingly become not only a target audience but also a growing behind-the-scenes population. Driving this examination is an exhausting question: Does queer representation still mean the world to queer people and to me? Or is “representation” only a buzzword used to dissuade us from demanding more from our most widely distributed cultural products, even as what we lay a fierce claim to continually shrinks and slips through our fingers?
The First of Many Notes on Representation
When I first started crafting this project, I was sincerely driven by the concept of representation. I didn’t recognize it as what it is: an ideological tool, a marketing ploy, a way to fundraise for organizations that make money off the image of young and eager queers. I simply knew that women on television, and the people playing them, had made it possible for me to feel joy in my own image and name. The more I talked to other queers about it, the more I realized that so many felt similarly to me. For many of us, our first gay friends were not the elders or activists who paved the way. Rather, they were the beautiful faces that beamed into our living rooms or out fr om hastily ripped and uploaded YouTube compilations with titles like “The OC Lesbian Storyline Part 6.”
As Stephen Tropiano, professor, television scholar, and author of the essential text The Prime Time Closet, relays, after television began to compete with the pervasiveness of film, it became the first contact that visualized to so many of my generation of queers (and several generations before) who we could be.2 That also meant it perpetuated that we could be cast aside, murdered, converted to heterosexuality, or disappeared into the ether of an abruptly pulled contract, but that’s not all that far-fetched given Western historical precedents. Traumatizing as those frequent storylines were, the important parts still seemed to be in the very concepts of existence and reflection. When a queer character stayed on for more than a guest arc and engaged in only a few harmful stereotypes, it was a victory for all—even if the character looked, acted, and felt nothing like us. Right?
At this point in my life, I’ve struggled with writing about queer representation. I was twenty-one years old when GLAAD awarded me a small grant and the much more impactful “Media Advocate” title that eventually garnered this book contract. At the time of writing (rewriting) this introduction, I have a much more cynical bent toward the business of entertainment and a recurring flare of shame that accompanies a fascination with something as viciously monetized as “representation.” Most days, I wonder: Does any of this matter?
Yes. And no. And yes. And it depends on who you ask. Queer representation on television is still important to this particular bitter, media-obsessed dyke because television is what I first grasped onto to experience a queer life. Even if I’m grieving the naive part of me that thought perfect representation would save us, I still love watching! Be it network or cable or streaming or a network’s streaming offshoot on a badly glitching app, television is still wildly important because of its function to sell us so many things: an escape, a belief, a sense of belonging, a collective history.
Beautiful, sparkling, increasingly poorly lit television is designed to make us receptive to a product. Or an idea or a feeling that will make a product more enticing. Historically regarded as one of the lowest, most barbaric forms of populist entertainment by the Hollywood big-screen elite (that is, before television began stealing their moviegoing viewer base), television nevertheless has shaped our culture. At its most basic and original form, it was meant to communicate directly to the American populace—those with purchasing power.
From the earliest days of scripted television, when it was just finding its footing in the transition from radio, the medium was meant to evoke friendly images of people “we” (read: white or aspirationally white suburbanites) might know, buying things “we” might need. As an illustrative early example, Mama Hansen (Peggy Wood), the titular warm, compassionate German-immigrant matriarch from the nostalgic 1949–1957 television show Mama, would care for her family as her viewers presumedly cared for theirs. And she’d use warm, compassionate Maxwell House coffee and nutritious, family-friendly Post cereal to do so.
From the 1970s’ advent of direct advertising to today’s use of direct data mining, advertisers have become hyperalert to the far more socially, economically, and ethnically diverse makeup of American society, and white Western European, two-parent, two-point-five-children households are no longer the only group whose eyeballs are worthy of competition. It may seem like stating the obvious, but the deviants have some purchasing power, too. But can capitalism bend that much-evoked moral arc of the universe forward?
New portrayals of LGBTQIA2S+ identities have become so publicly correlated with progressive politics and inclusive television that it might feel better to willfully pass over the fact that queer characters are inextricably tied up with financial dealings. We may feel so excited about finally seeing series regular queer and trans characters on television that we don’t care to investigate further than their screenwriters and actors and take brazen PR at its word. A series as groundbreaking as Pose (2018–2021), Steven Canals’s 1980s-set ensemble drama, notable not only for its glittering origin stories of New York City’s ballroom culture but also for its investment in trans workers above and below the line, was rightly hailed for its rarely explored, historical tragi-celebration of the lives of queer and trans people of color. However, as historian, filmmaker, and butch icon Jenni Olson reflects, while in praise of the show, the series would not have been picked up if not for the involvement of the already mega-successful, cisgender white producers Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk.
As Olson explains, while the show is driven by Black trans people—not just characters, but actors, writers, directors, and choreographers—it is also constrained by people who stand to make the most profit . . . and take the fewest risks. “Like everyone else,” Olson notes, the Black trans creatives behind the authenticity of the show “are also having to cope with the powers that be [saying], ‘You can’t say that,’ or, ‘Oh, that’s too much for TV.’ They are being compensated, but they are also creating a product. [Pose’s network] FX is not doing this just out of the goodness of their hearts. They’re not a nonprofit being.”3
Speaking from my own disillusionment, it can feel dismissive to boil down additions of our favorite characters to monetary stakes, data collection opportunities, and corporate pinkwashing,* but it is also refreshing to acknowledge that the viewer doesn’t owe networks anything. If we don’t like what we see, there’s no obligation to keep watching or cling to any single network or show as the promised revolutionary.
It is worth noting that television can be and regularly is used as a political weapon and a means of mass literacy in all different subjects, two overlapping uses that are also diametrically opposed in a congressional hearing. The perpetrators of these perpetually escalating culture wars recognize the ability of television to cater to, inform, and affirm audiences outside a formal education—and they know just how dangerous for them that can be if messaging strays from state regulation of bodies and brains. The debatable effectiveness of said messages is closely intertwined with the reason anyone might sit down to watch a show in the first place: quality storytelling that comes from somewhere other than your own tired brain.
Some viewers return to television week after week—or four-episode drop after two-episode soft rollout—for the deep, personal connections they’ve developed with their fictional counterparts over a long-form series, connections that may not be otherwise available, especially as a young person living under the guardianship and rules of a household they don’t control. Some come for the storylines that provide brand-new information on the lives of others—or lives that could be theirs. Some come for titillating depictions of the most censored, shadowy, and moralized aspects of human existence: sex, money, and power. Some come for just the smallest evidence that they are not alone. And some just want to watch somebody else’s house burn down for once. Like you, I have been all of these “some” ones.
Storytelling, like any good superpower, turns good, evil, and/or propagandistic according to the ways in which someone uses it. When done right, television is an enthralling enough medium of storytelling that it just might change a person’s entire conception of themselves and their relationship to the world, or at least fulfill a specific craving and make life slightly more bearable for thirty minutes. When done wrong, it somehow still manages to get six seasons and a spin-off because enough people are talking about how offensively wrong it’s been done. As a non-scientist, I have no real jurisdiction to say that it isn’t also rotting our brains and increasing the strength of our glasses prescriptions, but there is no denying that television and digital media have immense access and opportunity when it comes to knowledge production and persuasion. As Tropiano so concisely says, television is important because it’s casually enmeshed in the very fabric of American culture.4 Everywhere we are, so, too, is television.
Over the course of coming out in a post-Glee, now post-Roe world, I’ve come to realize that everything that goes into the dissemination of knowledge about queer people through the middlemen of sponsors, executives, producers, streamers, and the camera itself is a factor in “good representation.” Nobody can dissuade me from my strongly held belief that it only took watching a melodramatic bisexual storyline to begin my very first explicit deviation from fourteen years of compulsory heterosexuality—but how do we look at that individual comfort and enlightenment in a world where most networks have caught on to needing at least one queer character on their show to check a box and call that catering to a monolithic “community”?
