The first episode of Ugly Betty aired in New Zealand a couple of days ago. My short review is that it looks awesome (although the ending was way too pat, and if the point is supposed to be that if you’re smart you can succeed I will stop watching).1
One aspect bothered me, and that was the part of Betty’s presumed to be gay cousin – Justin. He wanted to watch fashion TV, and was slightly effiminate, and I suspect that from this the audience was supposed to deduce the sexuality of a 10 year old.2
It probably didn’t help that immediately after watching Ugly Betty I watched a few episodes of Arrested Development.3 In this show there is also a character that the audience is supposed to believe is gay, based on a general sexual awkwardness and a feeling of oddness. I’ve been bothered by this particular trope ever since Andrew in Buffy.
I find the idea that we can deduce someone’s sexuality from their gender conformity, or anything else besides their sexual desires, is completely regressive.
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that these characters are always men. A woman who acted and dressed butch, and whose sexuality was uncertain wouldn’t be amusing, she’d be pathetic. The joke (such as it is) is dependent on a society that views feminine traits as inferior in general and inexplicable in men.
For all the fancy dressing (and all these shows are in some ways progressive or alternative) these characters are basically more gender policing.
I would actually like to see a male character who gave off all sorts of effeminate vibes was sexually attracted to women, or reveal that a character who behaved in typically masculine ways was in fact in the closet.4
- I also saw America Ferrar’s golden globe acceptance speech, where she said “It’s such an honor to play a role that I hear from young girls on a daily basis how it makes them feel worthy and lovable and they have more to offer the world than they thought.” I believe her, but do want to pont out what a sad inditement on the world that is. [↩]
- I’ve only seen the first episode so I could be wrong and I’m sure people will let me know in the comments if I am. [↩]
- Also awesome, don’t get me wrong. I keep on having a new favourite joke, for a long time it was the fact that none of the family could tell any Latino people apart, then there was the Atkins diet episode, but my new favourite is “they won’t do anything to me, it’s shoplifting and I’m white.” [↩]
- Of course on Buffy this happened with the Larry character, and it was great. Except the actor was a Christian homophobe and they killed him off. [↩]
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I am irresistably reminded of a skit by a comedy troupe (Boys in the Hall? I’m not sure) entitled Lenny the Effemite Heterosexual, in which Lenny brings home the woman he’s been having an affair with, and nobody, not even his wife, will believe him because everyone is convinced he’s gay.
IIRC, the Felix Unger character in “The Odd Couple” TV series was played with a lot of effeminate characteristics but was attracted to girls. He’s the only one I can think of at the moment.
Just curious but what’s your objection to the message that intelligence/education enables success? Obviously it’s never the only thing, but it seems like a better ‘moral’ than some others they use a lot on TV.
surely *someone* has watched enough of Ugly Betty (a hugely popular show) in the US to expand on whether this kid is played as possibly gay, rather than just fashion obsessed…?
Tapetum> That was actually an old Saturday Night Live sketch and Lenny was played by Dana Carvey. They did this one scene where his son (Mike Myers) was having girl troubles and didn’t want to talk to his father because he thought he was gay. Lenny was so incensed and offended that he grounded him. :)
acm: I **love** Ugly Betty and they recently aired a marathon in the States. They haven’t explored the boy’s sexuality, but he’s definitely effeminate: On Halloween, he dressed up as Gene Kelly from the famous “New York, New York” scene. He went to work with Betty and immediately spotted her coworker’s 2 yr. old Blahniks. There was a cute scene were he tells one character (Wilhemina’s assistant) that the other kids at school “just don’t get him”. The guy says, “Be yourself. Wear what you want to wear. And learn how to run really fast.”
This gets back to a major difference between feminine males and masculine females. As one woman I know put it, “Tomboys are cute until they get tits.” Sissies, on the other hand, are never cute.
I remember the SNL “Lyle the Effeminate Heterosexual” skits. I thought there were more than these two episodes, but apparently that’s all there were. Such is the way SNL gets rerun.
Similar, only different, is It’s Pat, which very likely only worked as long as it did because it was played by a female, which makes it an acceptable form of humour. Men who pretend to be women on television are required to either be buffoonish (“Mrs. Doubtfire”, “Tootsie”), or to be obviously male (“Different for Girls”, “TransAmerica” even though the transsexual character was played by a female, she was actually coached on how not to appear female). It’s okay if a woman fools a man as being a man, since the man isn’t going to be at risk of sleeping with the supposed-guy, but for a man to fool a woman into thinking he’s really a she is to risk emasculating the poor innocent victim. One analysis of this might be that female sexuality isn’t as important as male sexuality since a woman has no right to meaningful sex anyway — what does it matter if she gets “fooled” (ignoring “Boys Don’t Cry”, but recalling that it was the men who murdered the main character, thereby protecting everyones virtue).
I agree with your complaints. Today, any man who doesn’t conform properly had called gay.
Back when gays were more in the closet, men, ironically, had more freedom to pursue unconventional interests.
The Felix Unger character mentioned by the commenter above is an interesting observation. That’s a pretty old TV show. Back then, there were not gay characters on any sitcoms. Back then, a guy could like Broaday musicals and still be straight.
Correct me if I’m wrong — but don’t practically all of Anne Rice’s vampires fit that description?
Looking for a heterosexual male character with effeminate vibes? What about Niles from Fraser, or even Fraser himself? And the guys from Brokeback Mountain were pretty he-men closeted homosexuals.
I missed the show, but caught several episodes in the marathon. I like it, but it is very formula TV. (Sure, they subvert one thing, but that just makes the rest of the conformity clearer.)
As far as I saw, the cousin isn’t gay, just very clothing/fashion obsessed. Of course, that’s probably as far as any US TV show is going to push a ten year old’s sexuality anyway…
I actually really like the Justin character–he’s a sweet, nice, smart kid who gets a surprising amount of support from his family for his gender non-conformity and seems pretty comfortable with himself. In my recollection, the only characters who have strongly disapproved (several have expressed mild consternation with it, but anything else would be completely unrealistic) of his penchant for fashion and Gene Kelly are painted in a negative light for it.
I agree that he’s probably supposed to be read as gay. But he’s 10, so the only way the show is coding that is his femininity–and if male femininity in the absence of any information about who he finds attractive is automatically read as gay, how could they possibly code for a straight, feminine, 10 year old boy?
There does need to be more of a place in pop culture (and society in general) for gender non-conformity in and of itself, not as a signifier of sexual orientation. I also think it’s important not to erase representations of gender non-conforming queer people in the name of refuting stereotypes, either.
how could they possibly code for a straight, feminine, 10 year old boy?
They could have him moon over a girl in his school or neighborhood. (That would be pretty amusing, actually, as they could then play with supportive-but-consternated people being confused…”but I thought he was…”)
They could have him moon over a girl in his school or neighborhood.
Yeah, I thought of that… but to introduce a storyline just to disambiguate his sexuality? That seems like it misses the point entirely. There’s no compelling reason to make him straight. There’s no compelling reason for that storyline to exist, period. Not to mention that no matter how girl-crazy he went, the portion of the audience that’s wedded to the idea that gender-nonconformity = gay would just figure he was confused and would really turn out gay in the end.
Kid’s like Justin exist. Some of them are queer, some of them are straight. Why sweep the non-straight ones under the rug? It’s not like we’ve got an overwhelming abundance of queer characters on network TV.
I LOVE Justin! I was a very very effeminate young boy just like Justin, and it is so refreshing to see a character on tv who transcends society’s gender norms, and is still accepted and loved. Most boys who defy gender norms are told to butch it up. If people make assumptions based upon his gender express, as you have, that is your deal because we all know that straight males can be effeminate too.
Kid’s like Justin exist.
Err, “Kids.” Oops. Misplaced apostrophe fairy, begone!
Anacas writes:
In the make-believe world of TeeVee, they could do as someone suggested — have him crush on some 10 year old girl, then write into the script where all the adults are super-relieved that at least he’s not gay. In real life it’s impossible because femininity in boys not much older than him requires constant explaining and sooner or later people stop believing the explanations. He’d be tagged as gay, even if he knocked up every single last blond bombshell middle school cheerleader in a 50 mile radius.
Hmm. I think society as a whole views women who are butch and of uncertain sexual orientation as threatening rather than pathetic. I mean, the outward posturing aimed at butch women LOOKS like “you’re pathetic”, but I strongly suspect that the reason people are doing the posturing in the first place is because they feel threatened. I think a woman who is outwardly choosing not to conform to gender expectations makes people feel a lot more threatened than a man doing the same. At least in my experience that’s true. Then again I’ve lived my entire adult life in major metropolitan areas where pretty much everyone gets that it’s not OK to be sneering towards openly gay men, but women can still be targets because the sneering can be disguised as a critique of their “beauty”, even if it’s actually homophobia.
Look at all the crap directed at feminists. There’s a reason the anti’s keep throwing the “ugly dyke” stereotype at us. It’s about to what extent women do or do not appear to be submitting to patriarchy.
I agree with your point about the fact that a lot of TV seems determined to present “effeminate” men as being like children and as somehow asexual (providing anyone who actually knows any gay men with the opportunity to laugh and laugh…). Again, I think it’s an attempt to make them less threatening to the system. The same trick was tried with “baby dykes” a while back, making them seem cute and kiddy and therefore unthreatening.
And a possibly irrelevant but possibly not side note about this part of the post that may interest some people.
“I would actually like to see a male character who gave off all sorts of effeminate vibes was sexually attracted to women, or reveal that a character who behaved in typically masculine ways was in fact in the closet.”
I’m pretty deeply steeped in Japanese pop culture (my SO is Asian, best friend in college was from Osaka) and there’s an entire part of their music industry in which most of the male performers are extremely “effeminate” and there is frequest crossdressing, and yet it’s assumed that most of them are straight (several of the biggest stars are married and have kids) and the whole thing is mostly marketed at girls and women, who find the effeminacy sexy. I can only think of one person involved who’s ever openly identified himself as gay. So if you really do want to see what that looks like as a mass phenomenon (ie men in entertainment who most people would read as effeminate but who are actually assumed to be straight ) that doesn’t really seem to cause any significant cultural consternation, it does exist, just not in the West.
Also, about the Felix Unger character…I actually ended up in a conversation about this at a party a few years ago and everyone seemed to have assumed that the character was actually explicitely written to be gay but in the closet. Everyone assumed that the women he was mooning over were beards.
My interpretation was that Felix was a genuine bisexual. He could go either way. He was also very intelligent, and he saw that in his society, heterosexuality was the approved option. So he took that route, and having endorsed his masculinity to the dominant paradigm, felt (and apparently was) free to express his creative and nuanced side without (much) social penalty. I seem to recall a few mild negative reactions to his presentations, but he was mostly accepted by the other monkeys, so to speak.
Sage beat me to Frasier; lots of people thought Niles was gay for a couple of seasons, IIRC.
If you are going to discuss effeminate hetero males, then lets tackle the pressure from women that force men into these roles. Most women do not want an effeminate male as a sexual partner, they will be like a girlfriend.
This acts to eliminate these behaviours in straight men. If you wish to counter this please provide examples to the contrary, I would be interested.
I was thinking of Tobias Bean – but you’re right my description of reasons wasn’t particularly accurate. I think his oddness is part of it, but it you’re right his activities and general weirdness around sex with women is a more important part. That was what I meant. When I wrote the post I coudln’t remember the specifics of what had coded Tobias as gay, and don’t have DVDs so I couldn’t check. I’ve always dislike the fact that they thought that being closeted was a humourous trait, and that they coded that he was gay through stereotypical behaviours (as well as some individualised oddness – we were supposed to think that there was a connection between his phobia around nudity and his feelings about his sexuality).
I would completely agree about any of the individual characters (except maybe Andrew). It’s the fact that this is a stock comedy character that annoys me.
Steve, please don’t take this thread on a ridiculous divergence. Not all heterosexual women act the same, or are attracted to the same characteristics in men.
“My interpretation was that Felix was a genuine bisexual. He could go either way.”
There was absolutely no indication in the TV series that Felix had any sexual attraction for men, which is the only thing that would make him bisexual.
Why do people think that just because Felix didn’t like to watch sports, liked to keep the apartment neat, and was interested in cutural stuff, that somehow MUST mean he got an erection from looking at men?
O.K. This may not be directly applicable to the topic here, but here goes:
There’s a web cartoon called “Penny and Aggie that deals with the trials and tribulations of high school kids; their relationships, dealing with the school administration, etc., etc. Penny is the blonde/popular/attractive/expensively dressed/sometimes bitchy/alpha female around the school. Aggie is a little smarter and less worried about her social position, with a widower father. Aggie doesn’t think much of Penny’s self-absorption about her appearance and social position, and the two have a somewhat adversarial relationship.
Lately the story line has come around to how the two have on occasion torpedoed each other’s romantic relationships, with one such process about to happen again (this time it’s Penny who apparently is about to sabotage Aggie). Their friends are starting to verbalize that maybe the reason why they keep doing this is because there’s an underlying mutual attraction that neither one wishes to admit/confront. I have no idea where this story line is going. The environment in the strip is such that homosexual relationships, while not explicitly shown, are known and are not controversial. I don’t know if any of you are interested in this, but I thought I’d bring it to your attention.
BINGO!
Felix and Oscar were polar opposites, but they were both portrayed as being exclusively attracted to women. Both were divorced, and both dated women after their divorce.
The humour in “The Odd Couple” is that they were so totally opposite, not that one was straight and the other had dubious sexual attractions.
Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar — Felix was a neat-freak, hypocondraic, and general whiner. Oscar was none of those things.
Watch out for that Nyquil. It almost makes getting bad cold worth it.
I don’t watch Ugly Betty, but I know my Buffy!
Isn’t Andrew always paired with Jonathan? And aren’t they equally effeminate (except for Andrew’s higher voice)? And J. is straight while A. is gay.
Deborah – I think after Jonathan died they played Andrew even more effeminate. Although I don’t know about Angel since I haven’t seen it.
Bean – Bear in mind I’ve only seen one episode – I found the ending of the pilot a little too pat. I don’t know what htis says about the general tenor of the show, becuase they haven’t aired any of it yet.
Just to throw a little spanner in the works, is anyone here familiar with the character of Hayley on Coronation St?
She had a sex change and is now married to a man on the show and has been a firm character for several years now – I’ve been watching Coro for about five years and at few points has it been controversial or raised as an issue, although I understand that it was when the character was first introduced. She is played by a woman.
Remember Meshach Taylor’s character on Designing Women? Very effeminate guy working in design, dating women all the time. And that character was also an African-American ex-con. Conflicting media types ahoy!
The little boy is Betty’s nephew.
HE IS NOT ANYTHING. The show doesn’t “go there” on purpose.
Oddly enough, -you- are assuming he is gay and then getting into a tizzy about how his personality = gay. Hmm…
Reba McEntire’s show had a character on just one or two shows who was very effeminate but proved to be also very hetero and married.
The setup was that Reba’s son-in-law was going to teach this guy about sports or something because his “partner” and partner’s son were so into sports.
They all assumed for awhile that he meant his life partner but it turns out it was actually his business partner.
I do not know the actor’s name but I’m sure you would recognize him if you saw him. I’ve seen him on tons of shows and he was on Will and Grace. Little vertically challenged guy (short, like me). He’s always a hoot.
Isn’t Andrew always paired with Jonathan? And aren’t they equally effeminate (except for Andrew’s higher voice)? And J. is straight while A. is gay.
I believe that before we ever met Andrew, we already knew that Jonathan was attracted to women (there was the episode when they were still in high school when he made himself the god of the town or something, and if I recall correctly, part of that involved his getting all the women). Andrew was always played as much more effeminate than Jonathan, though I actually thought he came off as more asexual and childish than gay most of the time after we got to know him. (He was definitely played completely gay at first, in that annoying way, but I thought it got more complex with time.) Later on in Angel I do think it was made pretty clear that Andrew was straight… like he showed up with two women on his arm in one episode, I believe. I could be misremembering, and I guess even what I do remember doesn’t necessarily have to mean they were presenting him as straight, but that’s what I got from it.
There’s also an episode of Sex and the City in which Charlotte ends up dating a guy who she initially thought was gay but who turns out to be straight and just very “in touch with his feminine side” or whatever. She ends up dumping him because she decides she wants a manly man. I didn’t like the storyline because of that, but it actually did fit with Charlotte’s character, and at least it did present an effeminate man who turned out to be unambiguously straight.
I still think that you’ve missed the point about Tobias Funke on Arrested Development. He’s not closeted, he is totally lacking in self awareness, which is the joke since he’s a trained psychiatrist. Most of the family on the show is oblivious, he’s just a particularly odd case. He is a therapist who is incapable of having a conversation with anyone, an aspiring actor who is completely incapable of acting, he considers himself the smartest person in his family when he clearly isn’t, and he considers himself heterosexual although he has no sexual attraction to women and is constantly inserting homosexual innuendo into conversation and ending up in situations that with half-naked men. I don’t think it would be at all funny if he were closeted, and it’s not making fun of homosexuality–it’s making fun of self-delusion.
hydropsyche – none of the characters I mentioned are portrayed as closted. Andrew was also portrayed as being in denial, and Justin it’s obviously too soon to tell.
You’re right that the humour is because they’re in denial, but that humour comes partly from the idea that no straight man would be effeminate in this way, and partly from the a culture that sees femininity as less worth than masculinity.
But I just don’t see anything feminine about Tobias. He’s not traditionally macho masculine, but he’s really not feminine in any way I can think.
Just to throw a little spanner in the works, is anyone here familiar with the character of Hayley on Coronation St?
She had a sex change and is now married to a man on the show and has been a firm character for several years now – I’ve been watching Coro for about five years and at few points has it been controversial or raised as an issue, although I understand that it was when the character was first introduced. She is played by a woman.
Hayley is a great character. She doesn’t fit into mainstream stereotypes of transgendered women and the fact that she’s trans is never her defining characteristic. She and her (rather eccentric) husband Roy have been shown to be loving parents when they’ve fostered children in the past, and she’s seen by her co-workers as a sweet, nice person (if sometimes a little bit naive and too nice for her own good).
Alright, this is probably barely on topic, but someone shared a link to a video on YouTube that I think is apropos this discussion — VH1 I Love the 70’s 1972.
The comment at the very end shows how far TeeVee has come with the entire concept of “lesbians and gays on television”.
See, I always thought Andrew was ambiguously bisexual, not ambiguously gay, though the whole “maybe he’s attracted to women” part mostly happens later. He does have the whole childish admiration thing going on – Spike is *so* cool, Warren never really loved… hanging out with us, but he does similar things to women – Anya’s the perfect woman, Buffy’s sexy shampoo commercial girl. And then there’s all the other fun stuff – like filming Xander and Anya, then watching the tape lots and repeating Anya’s lines as if Xander is speaking to him, not her, and admiring Xander’s construction work while ignoring Willow and Kennedy making out, and of course having two girls on his arm at the end of that godawful episode, which though it may well have been an attempt to affirm of his heterosexuality, just seemed… off somehow.
But who knows.
I saw a show around Thanksgiving that was hilarious. Don’t ask me the name, it’s not one I watch regularly. It involved a Thanksgiving dinner with six people, a gay couple, and two heterosexual couples. The two married men were totally campy, took forever to fix the centerpiece on the table, and each implied to the gay couple that he thought the other was gay. The gay couple was as “straight” as a string. I thought it was funny because my brother and his partner are also pretty straight-looking, although if you mention doing something with power tools, they’ll fall back on the ” we’re fags, we have throw pillows, not tools.” Not true, my brother is perfectly capable with tools.