Annotated Bibliography and Working Thesis
For this assignment, you will be writing out a prospective annotated bibliography for your final paper and crafting a working thesis or
central research question(s). Your process will differ slightly depending on whether you are researching a camp-themed text or conducting
an oral history, so please be cognizant of the below guidelines.
PART 1: ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY
For a research paper on a camp-oriented program, your bibliography should include:
•
A minimum of two scholarly articles from class
•
A minimum of three outside scholarly sources
•
A minimum of four popular/trade press articles, fan fiction entries, social media forums, or other archival sources
•
The specific episodes of the programs you intend to analyze
For an oral history, your bibliography should include:
•
A minimum of two scholarly articles from class that pertain broadly to your topic/approach
•
2-3 prospective outside sources that you feel relate to the types of questions/inquiries you will be posing
•
Brief background on your subject (3-4 sentences) and a minimum of ten detailed and specific research questions that you
intend to ask each of your interlocutors (I have attached a couple pages from Jane Stokes' book How to Do Media and Cultural
Studies that may offer ideas about phrasing questions Link:file:///C:/Users/YangYang/Desktop/Stokes_Oral%20Hsitory%20(1).pdf)
Each entry should be listed alphabetically and adhere to MLA formatting guidelines (Links to an external site.), for instance:
•
Dyer, Richard. “It’s Being So Camp as Keeps Us Going.” Camp – Queer Aesthetics and the
Performing Subject: A Reader. Ed. Fabio Cleto. Ann Arbor, MI: The University of
Michigan Press, 1999. 110-116.
•
Sontag, Susan. “Notes on Camp.” Camp – Queer Aesthetics and the Performing Subject: A Reader. Ed. Fabio Cleto. Ann
Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press, 1999. 53-65.
Underneath each entry (with the EXCEPTION of the oral history questions) please provide a 2-4 sentence description of the source and
its relevance to your paper.
PART 2: WORKING THESIS
For a research paper on a camp-oriented program, please write out a complex and specific working thesis (this can be two or so
sentences long) that clearly articulates the argument/intervention at the heart of your analysis - this should be a unique contribution
rather than the reiteration of another scholar's claim.
For an oral history, what is/are the key research question(s) that constitute your approach/analysis - what do you want to learn from your
interlocutor(s) about their television viewing experiences/preferences and or social orientations?
Professor’s feedback for Topic Proposal:
You are off to a solid start in scoping out your paper topic. I would encourage you, though, to move beyond Owens' article
in your assessment of Dante's Cove - what about this show do you find compelling and worthy of further analysis? What
methodology or approach do you plan to use - genre (horror or soap opera), network (Here! TV and pay cable channels), stardom,
reception, etc.? Keep in mind that this was only a commercially successful program by the standards of a niche platform - it did
not achieve popularity as a "mainstream" show.
Either way, I would encourage you to look at Anthony Freitas's chapter "Gay
Programming, Gay Publics" from the anthology Cable Visions: Television Beyond Broadcasting and perhaps some articles on
queerness and the horror genre such as Owens' "Coming Out of the Coffin" and Allison McCracken's "At Stake: Angel's Body"
from the anthology Undead TV.
Video Feedback:
Link:https://pan.baidu.com/s/1zKRGKkp2tqaWvwsjFnyWog
password:6rrp
Make sure you read and watch the feedbacks for the topic proposal you write for me last time.
There may be some changes to the later final paper.
Please follow the guideline very carefully and write correctly
If you have any question please ask me
Thank you!
Class readings for: Week 1:
Sontag_notes on Camp:file:///C:/Users/YangYang/Desktop/139w/139w%20week%201/Sontag_Notes%20on%20Camp.pdf
Dyer_It’s Being so camp as kepps us going:
file:///C:/Users/YangYang/Desktop/139w/139w%20week%201/Dyer_It's%20Being%20So%20Camp%20as%20Keeps%20Us%20Going.pdf
Britton_For interpretation:Notes Against camp:
file:///C:/Users/YangYang/Desktop/139w/139w%20week%201/Britton_For%20Interpretation%20Notes%20Against%20Camp.pdf
Class readings for: Week 2
Miller_Marriage Schmarriage: file:///C:/Users/YangYang/Desktop/139w/139%20week%202/Miller_Marriage%20Schmarriage.pdf
White_Supporting Charater: file:///C:/Users/YangYang/Desktop/139w/139%20week%202/White_Supporting%20Character.pdf
Class readings for: Week 3:
Torres_The Caped Crusader of Camp:
file:///C:/Users/YangYang/Desktop/139w/139w%20week%203/Torres_The%20Caped%20Crusader%20of%20Camp.pdf
Villarejo_Tevevision Ate my Family(Excerpt PDF): file:///C:/Users/YangYang/Desktop/Villarejo_Television%20Ate%20My%20Family%20(2).pdf
Class readings for: Week 4
Benshoff_Dark Shadows:Fans and Fandoms:
file:///C:/Users/YangYang/Desktop/139w/139w%20week%204/Benshoff_Fans%20and%20Fandoms.pdf
Owen_Hold me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill me:
file:///C:/Users/YangYang/Desktop/139w/139w%20week%204/Owens_Hold%20Me%20Thrill%20Me%20Kiss%20Me%20Kill%20Me.pdf
Link:Dante's Cove, "The Beginning"
https://www.55cc.cc/dianshiju/24655/player-1-1.html
Topic Proposal
Topic: An analysis of how Owen situates and contextualizes the fandoms of Dante
Cove?
The research paper is going to focus on Dante cove, a commercially successful
show. The paper will explore the queer engagement in the show as well as the
television industry deregulation. One of Dante's things in Dante is queer engagement
and the impact that had on the show and society. Queer engagement is one of the key
things that contributed to the success of the show. According to Owen, there are two
critical queer interventions that are brought by queerness. That is the use of
conventions of supernatural and destabilizing hegemonic articulations of quality. The
research will also explore the aspect of quality programming in the television industry
and the impact it has on the program while paying close attention to Dante Cove.
Some of the questions that will guide the research include;
What is the political/social purpose of queer engagement in Dante Cove?
What role does queer engagement play in the program?
What fandoms does Owen point out?
Topic Proposal
Please write a 1-2 paragraph paper proposal that presents the topic of the essay
and describes specific shows/episodes you wish to analyze or clearly identifies the
person/people you intend to interview for an oral history. This proposal should
indicate the text(s) to be analyzed as well as the analytical framework to be used in
the final essay (genre/stardom, reception, production, etc.). In addition, the topic
proposal should suggest why this topic is important and what you hope to learn, what
questions you hope to answer, or what ideas you plan to pursue in conducting this
research.
This time we only need to do Topic proposals and Thesis, I also will invite you to do the
Annotated Bibliography, Research Paper First Draft, and Final Draft in future.
Before you writing, please make sure you can login in to UCI’s library databases!!!
If you have any problem let me know.
Please follow the guideline very carefully and write correctly Thank you so much!!!
Course Description and Objectives:
The term “camp” has developed complex connotations in relation to
contemporary media, often used in popular press both as a derogatory synonym for
“unserious” and as an ill-defined superlative to elevate “subversive” queer-themed
content. This course, however, will trace the evolutions of camp coding in American
television through a variety of aesthetic, narrative, and ideological iterations, and will
critically assess its valuation and affective significance for numerous lesbian, gay,
bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ+) audiences. Through a diverse selection of
exercises, students will grapple with the slippery nature of camp iconography,
identification, and authorship via television studies methodological approaches
including formal, press discourse, genre, production, and reception analyses. The
writing intensive seminar will be centered around workshopping and revision
processes, culminating with either an oral history about camp television’s queer
influence or a primary-source based research paper on a camp-oriented text.
Pu bl icness an d the Institutionalization
Copyright © 2014. Duke University Press. All rights reserved.
of Pu blic Tel evision
By launching the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967 (which established
the Corporation for Public Broadcasting), Johnson explicitly opposed
commercial interests to the goals of public television in America: “[The
Act] announces to the world that our Nation wants more than just material wealth; our Nation wants more than a ‘chicken in every pot.’ We
in America have an appetite for excellence, too. While we work every
day to produce new goods and to create new wealth, we want most of
all to enrich man’s spirit. That is the purpose of this act.”15 Referencing a
campaign ad from 1928 for Herbert Hoover by the Republican National
Committee, which said that he would put “a chicken in every pot and a
car in every garage,”16 Johnson importantly looked backward (though in
a different direction than Archie Bunker’s savior, Hoover!) to those two
key institutions of the twentieth century that form the basis of public television in the United States: land-grant-university cooperative-
extension efforts (formalized in 1914 as a national network) and college
and university broadcasting efforts, begun in the early part of the century and formalized as early as 1930 with the first annual conference of
the Institute for Educational Radio/Television.
Unlike public broadcasters elsewhere, such as in Britain and Canada,
where the institutions for both public radio and public television were
at least initially highly centralized (in the bbc and the cbc , respectively,
both of which remain key today), the United States has seen a radically
decentralized network of broadcasting entities and initiatives emerge
over the course of the past hundred or so years. But public television’s
history is firmly rooted in education and educational outreach along the
university extension model developed to reach farmers and rural populations with the innovations in agriculture, veterinary sciences, nutrition, and so on that were advanced at the great land-grant universities.
Johnson makes the analogy explicit, again in the Public Broadcasting
Act of 1967: “In 1862, the Morrill Act set aside lands in every State—
lands which belonged to the people—and it set them aside in order to
build the land-grant colleges of the Nation. So today we rededicate a
part of the airwaves—which belong to all the people—and we dedicate
them for the enlightenment of all the people.” Thinking about the airLance Loud on TV :::
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93
waves as the campus of land-grant enlightenment helps to place emphasis on the pedagogical remit of public television, of course, but it
does something further. The model of cooperative extension cleaves the
population into two precisely to unite it into one, “the people,” through
populist rhetoric; in dividing, extension creates a center (the campus,
the urban, the educators and the educated) and a periphery (farmers,
rural people, those lacking formal education or degrees), and the land-
grant university seeks to unite the center and periphery through the
dissemination of enlightened research. The knowing and the unknowing are united through the diffusion and dissemination of something
clearly constituting knowledge. This is a spirit I like to call pragmatic
pedagogy, and it is central to the early efforts to unite “public television”
in the late 1960s and early 1970s (here exemplified by Johnson’s rhetoric about the creation of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, but
it is also linked to the creation of a national network for distribution in
the Public Broadcasting Service [pbs ] in 1969 and that entity’s merging
with the Educational Television Stations in 1973).17
An American Family (1973) emerged within this spirit of entrepreneurial station-driven pragmatic pedagogy (funded, it should be said,
by the Ford Foundation). Drawing on the comprehensive resource represented by Jeffrey Ruoff’s monograph on the series (the sole and authoritative academic work on An American Family), I cite a longish summary of the particular moment in which the series emerged:
Copyright © 2014. Duke University Press. All rights reserved.
To understand An American Family is, in part, to understand the history of public broadcasting, for the series was produced by net [National Educational Television], at a cost of $1.2 million, and distributed by the new Public Broadcasting Service to member stations in
1973. An American Family would never have been produced by the
commercial networks abc , nbc , or cbs , which, by the early 1970s,
had scaled back documentary production in the race for audience
ratings. Unlike the commercial networks in the 1970s, public television was not driven to seek the largest possible audience of potential consumers for advertisers. As a result, producers could explore
innovative styles and subject matter. Some critics, including James
Day, former president of net , doubt that an innovative series such
as An American Family could have been made at any other time in the
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history of public tv , given the administrative structure of pbs and
the turn to corporate underwriting for individual programs after
President Nixon vetoed the 1972 Corporation for Public Broadcasting
budget. After 1973, staff producers at member stations were bound,
through ties to corporate funding, to conventional styles and non-
controversial subject matter.18
If “quality” and “relevant” television such as The Mary Tyler Moore Show
and All in the Family emerged at a moment, the beginning of the 1970s,
when it became possible to fulfill the representational agenda of venturing into the sociopolitical realm, ostensibly beyond tv, for sitcom
fodder while at the same time attracting desirable demographics, then
An American Family emerged with its own audience successes from the
matrix of public and educational television at the very moment before
pbs swerved toward a more commercial model. Both the profitable
model of mtm and Tandem/tat and the noncommercial alternative
that was pbs , if only for a moment, entangled definitions and borders
of the family (along with the gender and sexual norms that sustain it)
in this time of extraordinary televisual innovation.
But what of queer time in 1970 or thereabouts? Why is it that by the
1970s, gay men and lesbians had generated a whole new procedure of
disclosure and a foundation for “gay liberation” called “coming out”?
What accounts for a lag or delay of almost one hundred years between
Karl Heinrich Ulrichs’s passionate exhortations to tell queer stories (in
the 1860s) and the mid-twentieth century’s founding of an inner gay
truth to be visibly, publicly, monumentally, melodramatically revealed
within a complex social web? I think the answer has to be tv . And while
I’m willing to qualify by saying “in part,” my guess is that it’s a massive
determination on the reshaping of gayness in these years. Television’s
mode of existence, the systemic implantation of social time, has to have
been one of the most significant reorganizations of precisely this string
of visibility, publicness, melodrama, and monumentality—in short, real
life—in the American midcentury (and here, retroactively as it were,
one must mark the specificity of these speculations to that restricted
grid that fed the Loud family’s televisions in Santa Barbara and, more
important still, imagined that family as its ideal viewer). And I think
we can begin to draw the contours of the impact of these new forms of
Lance Loud on TV :::
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95
publicness—the prehistory of reality tv —through Lance Loud and the
formal possibilities of observational television. I begin in the next section to detail this operation of coming out (which Lance most certainly
does not do on An American Family) through the controversies spawned
by this innovative series. Although I mention it only briefly in the coda,
the series was remade in 2011 as a Showtime made-for-tv movie, called
Cinema Verite. Real life indeed.
Coming Ou t: Lance E xcee d s TV
The deadly elasticity of heterosexist presumption means that, like Wendy in Peter Pan,
people find new walls springing up around them, even as they drowse: every encounter
with a new classful of students, to say nothing of a new boss, social worker, loan officer,
landlord, doctor, erects new closets whose fraught and characteristic law of optics and
physics extract from at least gay people new surveys, new calculations, new draughts, and
requisitions of secrecy or disclosure.
—Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, The Epistemology of the Closet
If Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick carefully specifies the repetitive and exhausting temporality of the procedure of coming out (one must calculate, decide, and utter anew and again, each time and forever), it is nonetheless
difficult to pinpoint historically the emergence of the metaphor or idea
of the closet in relation to lesbians and gay men.19 Michael Brown’s cultural geography puts it near 1968, the eve of public television:
Copyright © 2014. Duke University Press. All rights reserved.
The subsequent origins of a sexualised metaphor based on domestic architecture remain unclear, however. [George] Chauncey’s historiography of gay New York up to the 1940s [Gay New York] notes
that the term “closet” did not seem to be used to describe hidden
sexuality. He argues that a closet emerged later in that city, and submits that the term itself was coined only in the mid- to late 1960s.
Confirming this general history, Banhardt suggests closet came to
mean hidden, covert, or secret somewhere around 1968. Interestingly, however, Beale documents the use of the term in Canada during the 1950s. And speculation abounds as to whether the metaphor
emerged from the British “water closet” to connote cottaging or the
expression “skeletons in the closet.”20
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By conjoining covert sexual practices (cottaging, or public sex in concealed spaces such as toilets and parks) with sexual secrets (the idea of
the interior truth of one’s being as located in one’s hidden homosexuality), the metaphor of the closet, like television, transcodes the public and private, stringing together a calculus of what-can-be-said-when
with the ongoing melodrama of its revelation and the apparent access
to inner truths. Sedgwick emphasizes these procedures of knowledge
as epistemology. Insofar as An American Family prompted a public discourse around the revelation of homosexuality and the impact of such
revelation not only on a family but The Family, indeed on imperiled
civilization more generally, the show provides among other things a way
of understanding the circulation of public queerness around the early
1970s.
Recall yet another version of the dominant claim about queer representation (this one drawn from a much-taught and well-respected anthology in television studies):
Until the late 1980s, explicit representations of lesbians and gay
men were rare in television programmes. Where they did occur, they
usually repeated the same old stereotypes: limp-wristed sissies like
Mr. Humphries in the British situation comedy Are You Being Served?
(1972–84); confused and unhappy young men like Steven Carrington
in the American soap opera Dynasty (1981–89); or aggressive butch
lesbians like Frankie in the Australian prison drama Prisoner: Cell
Block H (1979–86). Lesbians and gay men were represented as deviant, tragic, predatory, and/or comic figures. Their presence on the
small screen was intended to elicit horror, laughter, pity or disgust
from a mainstream heterosexual audience.21
As previous chapters have sought to argue, not so. And certainly not
so Lance. He is popularly, but wrongly, known to most as the first person to come out on television, or the first gay person on television. (The
former reductively mischaracterizes what I will argue was in fact a sustained queer appearance rather than a moment or repetition of revelation, and the latter just isn’t so if we believe, from Our Miss Brooks to
All in the Family, that those limp wrists as well as some other wonderful
characters were capable of signifying “gay.”) These two myths of Lance
derive largely from his absence. An American Family was broadcast first
Lance Loud on TV :::
Villarejo, Amy. Ethereal Queer : Television, Historicity, Desire, Duke University Press, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central,
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97
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in January of 1973, and was rebroadcast only once in its entirety, for the
tenth anniversary in 1983 (before pbs screened a follow-up program,
An American Family Revisited ). Subsequently, it has only been available
through archives and personal copies of videocassettes (and pirated
dvd s). By the time I first saw him, again thanks to Ruoff’s loaning me
his videotapes of the series, Lance was dead and his memory compromised by neglect.
Two qualifications are necessary before performing some closer
analysis of An American Family. First, strictly speaking, the series was
shot on film, not on videotape. It might be better referenced, therefore, as a broadcast serial film, indebted to its producer’s training in
nonfiction television and its filmmakers’ experience in observational
cinema (particularly with the Maysles brothers, a connection to which
I return in this chapter’s closing). Innovations in lightweight cameras
and portable sound-recording equipment had transformed the field of
observational cinema and cinema verité, and videotape had not entirely
replaced film in the television industry, particularly its nonfiction divisions.22 (All in the Family, incidentally, was shot on tape.) Alan Raymond,
the principal cameraman, shot with an Éclair npr 16 mm camera with a
12/120 mm Angenieux zoom lens. Susan Raymond, Alan’s partner and
wife, recorded sound with a Nagra tape recorder with Sennheiser 805
shotgun and 404 omnidirectional microphones, and she installed Sony
ecm -16 mikes throughout the Louds’ home and recorded particularly
intimate conversations (including many of those of Bill and Pat at restaurants) with Vega wireless lavalier microphones.23 Some way through
the series, she tapped the telephones. If the medium (material substrate, apparatus) was in some sense film for this early version of reality
television (for it was structured and broadcast for and on television),
the medium for my own viewing of television straddled the recording
formats that have intervened in television’s broadcast temporality. I
saw An American Family first on videotape and, later, transferred (or,
rather, depended on a graduate student to transfer) the twelve hours
of another source videotape to dvd . If anything, my phenomenological experience of viewing An American Family returned it to cinema and
my time; rather than tuning in once a week when I was ten years old, I
watched almost continuously when I was forty-four, in order to return
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and later to capture a notoriously evanescent physical object, the vhs
tape. Such detail is certainly meant not simply as personal disclosure
but rather to capture how multiple media and multiple times inhere in
a text that we might take to be situated in or relegated to the past of
broadcast television.
Second, as Ruoff nicely phrases it, in the reception of An American
Family, “newspaper and magazine reviewers asserted that the Louds had
‘lived their lives on television,’ thereby perverting boundaries between
tv and everyday life.” I hope to have made it clear throughout this book
that such “perversion” is indeed central to television’s own operations,
its “reality effect,” as Ruoff puts it elsewhere in regard to the series.24
To cleave the televisual from its reality effect requires a greater deal of
contortion than perversion; a few details of the producer Craig Gilbert’s
process of developing the series testify to the extent to which television
in fact structured the everyday life that An American Family sought to
record and broadcast. In the crucial process of selecting a family, Gilbert
wanted, in effect, a sitcom family: “In all these shows [such as Father
Knows Best (1954–60) and The Donna Reed Show (1958–66)], the family
was middle-class, attractive, and lived in a house.”25 Ideal nuclear families with their origins in the culture not of the 1970s but of the 1950s
thus provide the model of the good, or at least affluent, life on which An
American Family drew. And in the process of creating a title sequence—
in which each member of the family is highlighted for purposes of individuation while a snappy theme song plays—Gilbert sets the stage for
what is in effect a multiple-character, narrative television show with a
number of different foci possible for each episode. In a reading that is
spot on, Ruoff compares the title sequence to those of the contemporaneous situation comedies The Brady Bunch (1969–74) and The Partridge
Family (1970–74), both of which, like the later Eight Is Enough (1977–
81), enlarge the idea of family.26 Families, in other words, can expand to
encompass the extrafamilial, to include maids (like Alice in The Brady
Bunch) or managers (like Reuben in The Partridge Family), but they must
involve lots and lots of kids: all those kids! How do they do it? One “kid”
stands out, however, in An American Family: oldest son Lance.
The Louds consist of: mother Pat; father Bill (“William C. Loud” on
the patriarchal publicity); sons Lance, Grant, and Kevin; and daughters
Lance Loud on TV :::
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99
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Delilah and Michele (see figure 3.3). For most of the twelve-hour, twelve-
part initial series, the family lives sans Lance at 35 Wooddale Lane in
Santa Barbara, California; later, after the parents separate, Bill moves
into an apartment. While the domestic interior of the Louds’ home (a
ranch house, the largely Eastern reviewers can’t help but noticing) provides the central mise-en-scène, the Raymonds follow the Louds wherever they go: whether simply to the garage where the brothers play in a
band, or outside to the pool, or to Bill’s office, to restaurants, Delilah’s
dance performances, Michele’s horse riding and tending, Grant’s job
sites, the airport, the beach, and so forth. An entire crew followed
Lance, who begins his sustained time in the series living at the Chelsea
Hotel, notorious for its underground scene, in New York; he then travels
with companion Kristian to Europe and returns, broke, to California.
Opening on New Year’s Eve of 1972, the first episode of the series begins with an appearance by the producer, Gilbert, to lay out the terms
of the cooperative venture between the makers and the Louds. (Gilbert
was subsequently parodied in Albert Brooks’s film that pokes fun at the
series, Real Life, from 1979.) The stipulations were as follows: that the
filmmakers shoot for seven months, until January 1, 1972, and that
the family had an effect on the filmmakers and vice versa. Gilbert gives
some history of the family (Bill and Pat’s origins in Eugene, Oregon,
and their subsequent move south to Santa Barbara) and wryly sets the
stage that is apparently nirvana: Santa Barbara (population then about
72,000; on the Pacific coast ninety miles north of Los Angeles; average
temperature seventy-five degrees Fahrenheit in the summer, sixty-five
in the winter). This first episode also gives away the ghost suggested by
the animated shattering of the word family in the title sequence: as the
family prepares for their New Year’s Eve party, Gilbert informs us in
voice-over that this is the first time that the family will not be together
for the holiday, as Bill and Pat separated four months earlier (three
months, we calculate, into the filming process). Cut to Bill in his office
in downtown Santa Barbara, having just returned from spending the
Christmas holiday in Honolulu, and cut to a photograph on Bill’s desk
of Lance, who we learn is living in New York. Although Lance phones in
from the Village on New Year’s Eve, our introduction to him essentially
comes in the second episode, which marked the filming of the series
proper, as Ruoff documents:
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3.3. An American Family (pbs, tv series, 1973), directed by Alan Raymond and
Susan Raymond. Shown standing, from left: Grant Loud, Kevin Loud, Delilah
Loud, and Lance Loud; shown seated, from left: Michelle Loud, Pat Loud, and
Bill Loud. © pbs ; courtesy Photofest.
Villarejo, Amy. Ethereal Queer : Television, Historicity, Desire, Duke University Press, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central,
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The shooting of An American Family began when Pat Loud arrived in
New York City in late May 1971 to visit Lance at the Chelsea Hotel.
Gilbert and the Raymonds knew the milieu of the Chelsea better
than Pat did. During this visit, the producer discovered that Lance
was gay, “a ready-made point of tension,” in Gilbert’s words. The Raymonds started filming Mrs. Loud at the hotel before they had even
been introduced. Pat’s self-consciousness did not let up for weeks
and probably contributed to her reserved character in the series. She
held back her emotions in reaction to the camera, “that eye of half-
truth. It scared me at first. I didn’t know what to do with it.”27
The second episode of the official series, chronicling Lance in New York,
has lived longer than the serial as a whole; it alone was rebroadcast in
anticipation of the “final episode” (discussed at length later), and it is
one of only two episodes of the original serial taken up largely with a
single member of the Loud family (in the other, Pat returns to Oregon
to visit her mother). I am interested in how queerness and television
collide in this episode as An American Family enunciates its pedagogical
remit while at the same time attempts to contain this complicated and
sustained queer appearance on American television.
As Ruoff begins to detail, and as I hope to explore more deeply in departing from his work, the series elaborates what I call a pragmatic pedagogy of queer life. It chronicles, and depends on, an insistent insider-
outsider tension, between the straight world and all that was associated
with Lance and his milieu, that is, bohemianism, the underground, Warhol’s Factory, and, of course, homosexuality.28 This tension animates
later episodes that involve Lance (in Europe, back in Santa Barbara), but
it is most evident in the second episode of the series, which is devoted
to his New York stay. Pat’s visit to the city, beginning with her entering
the Chelsea Hotel, confirms that she has entered a world that failed to
conform to her expectations, as she later (with gentle humor) verifies
in the final episode: Lance introduces Pat in the hallway to Warhol Factory transvestite superstar Holly Woodlawn, who later rejoins Lance
and a collection of friends in Lance’s small room. Holly would later replace Candy Darling in the performance at the La Mama Experimental
Theatre Club of Vain Victory, the Jackie Curtis play to which Lance and
“roommate” Soren subsequently take Pat in the second episode, and
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she had also been immortalized the year before the series aired in Lou
Reed’s terse lyrics for “Walk on the Wild Side.”29
The camp spectacle of La Mama’s Vain Victory performance provides
a key intertext for An American Family, which opposes the artifice, marginality, and apparent frivolity of a chain that includes homosexuality,
New York, the underground, bohemianism, and trans and queerness
in favor of the claims to reality, seriousness, and critical commentary
staked by bourgeois family, Santa Barbara, television, and straightness.
If Pat’s dis-ease in the presence of the camera and sound operators was
not already palpable in the New York footage in general terms, it intensifies and becomes thematized in her response to the Vain Victory performance. “I just don’t like things that make me feel uncomfortable,”
she says at a café following the show, trying at the same time maternally
to indulge Lance’s and Soren’s gushing enthusiasm for the “transvestite
variety show.” (What is more, she seeks to tolerate the presence of the
camera and microphone.) Before the show, Lance lists the roster of stars
in what he calls the “ultimate of the underground,” to which Pat replies,
“All these people I’ve never heard of.” Lance, not missing a beat, quips,
“Oh you’ve dreamed of them.” But after the show, Pat still doesn’t quite
understand: “Was there a message that I didn’t get?”
The centerpiece of the second episode is an extremely long conversation between Pat and Lance as they walk on a beautiful spring day
through Central Park. Lance seeks to explain, and Pat seeks to get,
“it.” I’ve transcribed this as faithfully as I could and apologize for its
duration, but I think every bit is necessary in order to experience the
stunning temporal complexity of queer adolescence and the process of
coming out, which can be a very different matter from the utterance
“I’m gay.” Subsequent citations of this sequence in An American Family
Revisited and in the final episode, moreover, edit it significantly to eliminate the stumbling, inarticulate, stunted nature of Lance’s disclosure
and Pat’s encouraging yet uncomfortable response (elements that were
importantly preserved in the re-creation of this sequence in Cecelia
Dougherty’s experimental video about Lance, Gone, from 2001).30 Insofar as Pat and Lance interrupt and work together in this conversation,
it feels more like a pas de deux than a monologue, with the camera initially following their walk in the park, arms around each other:
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103
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Pat : Well I kinda wanted to . . .
Lance : Yes?
Pat : Talk to you and find out, this is maybe the only time we’re alone
together . . .
Lance : I know.
Pat : Find out, um, oh, when you think you’ll be moving out of the
Chelsea and um . . .
Lance : Oh!
Pat : What, you know, just a few little plans so that Daddy and I
know . . .
Lance : I want to live there forever.
Pat : That you have . . .
Lance : I love it there. There are all these individual little cells of
people, and they’re all famous and all exciting, and they all know
what to do, and . . . I don’t know, they’re just terribly interesting.
Pat : Well, I truly believe that that’s the place for you. I mean New
York is, and I think that you have found an area that . . .
[The camera has now swirled to record the conversation from the
front.]
Lance : I know. Do you know what is so weird? That now that I look
back in my life, as far as I’ve gotten, I keep thinking: god, I sure
did some things that if I had been a grown-up and known about
the things that I do, or I did then . . .
Pat : That you have done? Well you know . . .
Lance : There seemed to me like there was so much room for, um,
you know . . .
Pat : Improvement? [laughs]
Lance : No, no, no, no, no. You’re getting the wrong idea.
Pat : I’m sorry.
Lance : Um, there was so much, I mean, I stood apart from so . . .
everybody I could imagine, I stood apart from.
Pat : Yeah.
Lance : Like, you know, when I was thirteen I dyed my hair silver and
did all that jazz.
Pat : Yeah.
Lance : And just think, it was energy that was being wasted because
. . . [sigh] I don’t know, it was like being a little mouse and trapped
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in a box or something in a little white room. I’m not saying that
we were . . . led such a super average ordinary life but . . .
Pat : But you went into your room one year, and you didn’t come out
for about two more years . . .
Lance : I know.
Pat : Except at night when you lurched out the window.
Lance : I know, but it was all frustration. I felt so frustrated at being
. . . I don’t know, there’s always been something in me that I
could never understand, like I couldn’t judge anything that I did
or thought. I couldn’t judge it on the standards that were given
to me, because, um, I mean they just didn’t fit. It was like . . .
Pat : I know that.
Lance : Two different pieces of a puzzle. But then again I didn’t have
anything else to judge anything on, you know, and didn’t understand the standards in the first place.
Pat : [small laugh] But um . . . well, you were pretty hard to understand yourself.
Lance : Um, well anyway, I feel, I think if I had kids, you know, um,
there was so much that you guys could have done with me . . .
Pat : Like what, hon?
Lance : If you’d known. I don’t know. It just all, I really do feel that
I’ll be telling someone about my life or what I did when I was
younger . . .
Pat : Uh huh.
Lance : And even though it might sound boring to them, all of a sudden as I’m talking I’ll realize, well, oh Lord! I was much more
interesting than anybody I ever knew. I was much more exciting
than all those dull people.
Pat : Well.
Lance : If I was me today and I met me when I was, oh you know, any
younger age, I’m sure I’d much rather talk to that person than
any of his boring friends.
Pat : You mean that automatically you’d choose you for fascinating
conversation?
[They become distracted by the curb, as well as the horseshit in the
street and the descending steps. Lance propels himself down the steps
ahead of Pat.]
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105
Pat : Do you want to go on and tell me what you were telling me about
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what you thought that . . . Come back
[She commands the adolescent now flinging himself away, and she
follows him to the lower side of the stone banister on which he is,
childishly, balancing.]
Pat : We could have done or didn’t do and all that jazz? That fascinates me.
Let me pause over a few moments of this conversation for emphasis,
noting more generally how stunning it is to discover that it—in all of its
length, banality, poignancy, and adolescent awkwardness—appeared
on American broadcast television in 1973.31 While I will return to, and
emphasize further, the swirling recursivity and conditionality of the
temporal structure of Lance’s closet (“now that I look back,” “if I was me
today,” “there was so much you could have done with me . . . if you had
known”), I want to begin with the little cells of people who “all know
what to do.”
Lance’s screen image becomes increasingly flamboyant and queeny
as An American Family progresses, a tendency that he retrospectively
notices, if not laments. In the tenth-anniversary program, he contends
that in his appearances throughout Europe and on return to Santa
Barbara he truly believed that he was fabulous, au courant, and sartorially with it, rather than staging extravagant homosexuality for the
Raymonds’ recording and American television viewing. “I really didn’t
do those things to be like a woman or to be femme,” he says. “I really
thought,” he continued, “that I was doing things that were terribly
avant-garde and very different, and they were lined up in a way that
there I was, a big fag.” In his enthusiasm for those who “all know what to
do,” Lance gives the audience a preliminary indication of what it means
to become enfolded into queer culture as an effect of homo-hetero division. In the world of Santa Barbara and the Loud family, Lance is epistemologically and affectively at sea. Judgments and standards and houses
and bedrooms and friends and family and even speech and time themselves: none of these work for him. But in the moment when he ventures
to New York and finds the Chelsea and its denizens (many of them, like
Lance, young gay men who have just arrived, such as the buff boy in
overalls featured in Lance’s room just before his walk in the park with
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Pat), there is certainty and, even more, knowingness. As with Beverly
La Salle’s character importing queer subcultures from the performance
scene in San Francisco into the Bunker bunker in All in the Family, An
American Family brings the Chelsea Hotel, and all that Gilbert and the
Raymonds know it to mean, to their documentation of the Louds.
What the series therefore must struggle with is the representation of
epistemological division. The show is enormously interested in Lance’s
appeal as a character: he attracts viewers who delight in his outrageous
energy (wit, self-indulgence, self-reflexive campiness, and sheer movement that exceeds the televisual frame). But in following Lance as a
character, the series must ultimately attribute to him a perspective, a
way and path of knowing in relation to what others in his family (and,
by extension, the straight world) can and do know. What is most remarkable to me about An American Family is its reversal of the dominant order, at least in this episode: that the series ultimately privileges
Lance’s queer epistemology, and it seeks to center that epistemology for
presumably straight viewers, themselves requiring pragmatic pedagogy
in the ways of the queer world of the 1970s.
In the long sequence between mother and son, Lance obviously
struggles to name a whole ensemble of social effects (isolation, alienation, longing, boredom, desire, style, at-home-ness) associated with
queer adolescence. These effects are knowable, intimately, and palpable
to the many gay suburban kids who thanked Lance in their letters to
him following the broadcast. While Lance walks with his mother, he enacts a familial bond that serves as the possibility, the very ground, of
his social recognition: see me in this moment for who and what I have
been and have now become. But in the telling, the present and the past
become harder to distinguish. To paraphrase a lines from Gilles Deleuze
in Bergsonism, the past is not behind, and the present is not;32 in fact,
Lance is already retrospective in the present, looking back on his life (at
the “present” tender age of twenty) to try to understand what someone
(who could be him or another) might make of what he did, had done,
was. He seems to me most interested in becoming. He is wondrous: he
wonders about how he comes to be and to know. In seeking to return
to speak to the childhood version of Lance (in his fantasy all the more
interesting than the dullards who surrounded him), Lance seems less
concerned with what might be said to be his homosexuality that is reLance Loud on TV :::
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107
vealed to his mother (as the definitive act of coming out that has been
attributed to this episode) than with how queerness becomes, how and
what grown-ups know (for shouldn’t they know what a thirteen-year-
old’s fascination with Andy Warhol means?) and what they do to nurture or to thwart queer becoming. Such retrospection takes on ominous and melodramatic overtones when Lance later remarks that at
age nineteen, he already felt dead. In a later episode, while applying
lipstick and mascara with sister Delilah (of whose 1970s-style blue eye
shadow Lance camps, “it looked like part of the kitchen had bit you”),
Lance paints himself a death mask: “There, see, I look dead.” With death
haunting his image even in his youth, the becoming that is thus investigated in the long walk with Pat seems all the more urgent, if only articulated in the gaps and interstices of adolescent speech.
Taking the time on television to give this halting utterance its due,
centering queer becoming and queer knowing in such an overt and
sustained way, seems to have been a crime for which the series had to
atone, at least according to its most severe critics. Before turning to the
final installment of the series, Lance Loud! Death in An American Family,
I sketch some of the terms of the critique of An American Family, arguing that the homophobic fear of the dissolution of family is likewise at
the center of what the show’s perhaps most famous critic, Jean Baudrillard, calls “simulation.”
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“Be I t E ver S o H ollow, There’s N o Plac e Like Home”
Anne Roiphe’s long article in the New York Times Magazine that was
contemporaneous with An American Family’s broadcast, begins with a
promising will to thoughtfulness:
I felt despair and fascination watching the Loud family, and this
could only have been caused by vibrations ricocheting down through
my own experiences. The Louds are enough like me and mine to create havoc in my head, and I had to fight a constant strong desire to
push away those Louds, dismiss them as unique, empty, shallow, unlike others, and yet on serious reflection, we can all learn from them,
perhaps just enough to begin understanding that saddest of mysteries, the American family.33
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A few paragraphs later, the dismissals nonetheless come, and they focus
essentially on how Lance, the family’s “evil flower” (8), renders the very
institution of the family, indeed American civilization itself, hollow,
wounded, and in need of a return to culture, values, and life as we knew
it. (These are perversely, to mind, signified through handicrafts.) In the
process of this reading of the eleven episodes that Roiphe saw in a press
screening, framed by comments from the producer, Gilbert, her homophobia can barely be contained and indeed emerges in a string of name-
calling that responds precisely to the show’s willingness to align itself
with Lance’s queer epistemology.
In New York, according to Roiphe, Pat is confronted, “brutally and
without preparation, with the transvestite, perverse world of hustlers,
drug addicts, pushers, etc., and watches her son prance through a society that can hardly be comprehensible to a 45-year-old woman from
Santa Barbara” (8). This is familiar stuff: in Pat’s name, Roiphe the New
York journalist (whom we might expect to seek to educate her readers)
refuses to make this perverse “society” intelligible, instead collapsing
the underground, the counterculture, queer culture, and youth more
generally into an exasperated “etc.” Next, through further identification
with Pat, Roiphe distorts the text: “As Pat calmly watched a transvestite
performance, I felt her straining to accept all the variety of choices in
life, to act and be a worldly woman” (9). Never do we have a countershot of Pat watching the performance of Vain Victory from which to read
either calm or straining toward acceptance. Why? Because the footage
was shot on a different evening; there was no camera present to record
Pat’s response at the theater.34 Here a generalized feminism overtakes
journalistic responsibility, again pressing the distinction between the
insider and outsider into the service of homophobic fear: worldly in this
case is a synonym for calmness in the face of perversity. At another
point, Roiphe turns her scorn toward forms of life that are neither productive nor reproductive, symptoms of families without compasses, into
high venom: “[Lance] is so busy playing in his world of backward genders” (9). And summarizing Lance’s return to Santa Barbara, in tour de
force display of linguistic nastiness, Roiphe says that the camera “shows
him visiting his father in his office, lying about going to school to study
journalism, camping and queening about like a pathetic court jester, a
Goyaesque emotional dwarf” (9). As if this were not enough, finally, the
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109
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gay son just becomes poisonous slime: “But I suspect getting close to
Lance must have always been like swimming next to an electric eel” (41).
Lance, among other members of the family, managed to shrug off what
was hurtful in Roiphe’s long article, but I reproduce some of her comments here because they have rarely been understood as symptomatic
of a larger question, to which I now turn: the sociopolitical function of
the television family as an anchor for representational certainty. Roiphe
loses her ground when An American Family turns out not to look like The
Partridge Family, My Three Sons, or The Brady Bunch: “Reality turns out
to bear no resemblance to a typical tv comedy” (8).
In its initial reception, as I have mentioned, it was the dissolution
of Pat and Bill Loud’s marriage that signified the death of the family
form, the death of an American family. The ethical question that loomed
largest then (meaning, in the text’s reception when broadcast) involved
the role of the cameras in provoking their divorce: would it have happened if the cameras hadn’t been there? Although Gilbert’s voice-over
that introduces the first episode recognizes that there is no question
that the cameras’ presence had an impact on the couple, the press evidenced panic around the relationship between the fact of the Louds’
participation in this television experiment and Pat and Bill’s separation and eventual divorce; that panic derives from a worldview in which
authentic relationality, that is, marriage, exists apart from its representation on television.
Baudrillard, I would now like you to recall, puts the Louds at the center of his inquiry into representation, likeness, authenticity, and media
(the question of simulation and the hyperreal) in Simulations. It is fitting that Simulations is a simulated book, one that did not exist before
it became translated into English from two different source materials:
the first essay, “The Precession of Simulacra,” came from Simulacre et
simulations (Editions Galilee 1981), and it is this essay that features the
Louds. It panics over the “dissolution of tv into life, the dissolution of
life into tv ” through An American Family (which Baudrillard may or, I
rather suspect, may not have in fact seen, much less in its entirety, during his travels to the United States).35 The second part of Simulations,
“The Order of Simulacra,” comes from L’echange symbolique et la mort
(Gallimard, 1976), which was not published in English until 1993 as Sym-
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bolic Exchange and Death.36 Containing some of his most stunning and
complicated writing, Symbolic Exchange and Death also contains essays
on fashion and the body, which would provide, in a longer analysis of
Simulations beyond the purview of the present chapter, crucial intertexts for the investigations in “The Precession of Simulacra” into the
invaginated logic of simulacra (in which in summary, in his speculative
responses to advertising and consumer culture, Baudrillard finds a society where signs—the currency of the semiotic order—no longer refer
to anything but themselves but are generated by, ruled by, the code or
the matrix).
Many readers of Simulations predominantly reference Baudrillard’s
discussion of Disneyland in the first essay, which has a kind of pop-
culture authority in its endurance and continued culture presence that
the Louds simply cannot claim. As the Semiotext(e) editors put it: “In
his celebrated analysis of Disneyland, Baudrillard demonstrates that its
childish imaginary is neither true nor false, it is there to make us believe
that the rest of America is real, when in fact America is a Disneyland.”
But, like Disneyland, television comes under scrutiny as belonging to
the order of the hyperreal or the simulacrum, that is, a “‘deterrence machine,’ just like Disneyland, meant to reveal the fact that the real is no
longer real and illusion no longer possible. But the more impossible the
illusion of reality becomes, the more impossible it is to separate true
from false and the real from its artificial resurrection, the more panic-
stricken the production of the real is.”37
Here is a representative paragraph (Baudrillard actually devotes nine
pages to An American Family), in which he poses this very question:
It is again to this ideology of the lived experience of exhumation,
of the real in its fundamental banality, in its radical authenticity,
that the American tv -verite experiment on the Loud family in 1971
refers: 7 months of uninterrupted shooting, 300 hours of direct
non-stop broadcasting, without script or scenario, the odyssey of a
family, its dramas, its joys, ups and downs—in brief, a “raw” historical document, and the “best thing ever on television, comparable,
at the level of our daily existence, to the film of the lunar landing.”
Things are complicated by the fact that this family came apart during
the shooting: a crisis flared up, the Louds went their separate ways,
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111
etc. Whence that insoluble controversy: was tv responsible? What
would have happened if tv hadn’t been there.38
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Note that broadcast is an odd term, since the audience saw only twelve
of those three hundred hours, over a period of several weeks rather than
the seven months of filming. In the midst of these multiple temporalities, Baudrillard here makes the time of reception equivalent to the time
of recording, when in fact it is the ideological valence of “live” television
overwhelming its miniaturization to which Baudrillard is responding.
Like Roiphe, his rhetoric requires him to depart from the phenomenon
at hand in order to drive home the point. In any case, however, he ultimately suggests that the question about television’s responsibility, insoluble as it is, is in fact posed with the wrong emphasis. Under the ruse
of claiming to film as if “tv hadn’t been there,” television presents the
Louds, in Baudrillard’s view, “as if you were there.” Thus quite a different problem, one represented by the aesthetics of the hyperreal. Baudrillard again:
It is this utopia, this paradox that fascinated 20 million viewers,
much more than the “perverse” pleasure of prying. In this “truth”
experiment, it is neither a question of secrecy nor of perversion, but
of a kind of thrill of the real, or of an aesthetics of the hyperreal, a
thrill of vertiginous and phony exactitude, a thrill of alienation and
of magnification, of distortion in scale, of excessive transparency all
at the same time. The joy in an excess of meaning, when the bar of the
sign slips below the regular water line of meaning: the non-signifier
is elevated by the camera angle. Here the real can be seen to have
never existed (but “as if you were there”), without the distance which
produces perspective space and our depth vision (but “more true
than nature). Joy in the microscopic simulation which transforms
the real into the hyperreal. (This is also a little like what happens in
porno, where fascination is more metaphysical than sexual.)39
I don’t think he’s got it right about the metaphysics of pornography,
but even if we let that slide, the hyperreal is tricked out in familiar
metaphorics of post-Marxist regret coupled with a strong disinterest
in perversion. Perspective and depth yield to the elation of simulation, produced through the particular apparatus of filming (not, sig112
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nificantly, of broadcasting). For Baudrillard, the camera angle, itself a
stand-in for cinematic signification, operates this emergent aesthetics
of hyperreality. We, the viewers, become the problem, as our pleasure
drives the motor converting the real into the simulation, the hyperreal.
But Baudrillard’s very next paragraph contradictorily suggests that the
very “content” of the Loud family, not their signification through or as
cinema or television, is somehow already hyperreal:
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This family was in any case already somewhat hyperreal by its very
selection: a typical, California-housed, 3-garage, 5-children, well-to-
do professional upper middle class ideal American family with an
ornamental housewife. In a way, it is this statistical perfection which
dooms it to death. This ideal heroine of the American way of life is
chosen, as in sacrificial rites, to be glorified and to die under the fiery
glare of the studio lights, a modern fatum. For the heavenly fire no
longer strikes depraved cities, it is rather the lens which cuts through
ordinary reality like a laser, putting it to death. “The Louds: simply
a family who agreed to deliver themselves into the hands of television, and to die from it,” said the producer. So it is really a question
of a sacrificial process, of a sacrificial spectacle offered to 20 million
Americans. The liturgical drama of a mass society.40
The Louds are, in other words, a television family (both too ideal, too
perfect, and too normal, “simply a family”), with Pat as the “fated”
character cast into some sort of mixed-metaphor death machine that
is television (a hand, a lens, a laser, and, for Lance, a mouth that ate his
family). But why is Baudrillard committed to a reading in which Pat figures as the sacrificial character?
I think it’s fair to conclude that he neither actually watched An American Family (otherwise he would have understood the impossibility of
broadcasting three hundred hours of footage on public television) nor
followed the fate of which he’s fond to its conclusions. Such lack of attention contributes to one’s impatience with cultural theory that rests
on breezy associations and fleeting analyses. (I have a similar response
to Fredric Jameson being lost in the Los Angeles Bonaventure Hotel
as the basis for a full-on theory of postmodernism, but that’s another
book.) If my interest thus far in the interpenetration of life and television has not uttered the word simulation, it has nonetheless been
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113
interested, more than Baudrillard, in how heteronormative ideals sustain this fiction of the real on which late capitalist, informatic, and neoliberal regimes depend. But I have not wanted to sacrifice any of the
members of the Loud family in so doing. Pat is, at this writing, alive and
well. She reunited with Bill late in life after living through the death of
their son, Lance. The reunion of his parents was his last wish. That final
episode of Lance’s life and this series concludes my own chapter here.
Copyright © 2014. Duke University Press. All rights reserved.
Death in An A merican Family
The final installment, Lance Loud! A Death in An American Family, was
shot by Susan and Alan Raymond (the original documentarians who
shot and recorded the initial series) in 2001 and 2002, mainly in the
months before Lance’s death, of hepatitis C and hiv co-infection, at the
age of fifty. (In marking the transition into the digital era, they titled
their production company Video Verité.) The Raymonds and the Louds
remained friends for the thirty years between the original broadcast
and Lance’s death, which he himself requested that they document and
air as closure to and for the Louds’ drama. In previous sections I looked
closely at how the ostensible moment of Lance’s coming out is structured by complicated temporalities of retrospection and becoming.
Here I want to argue that coming out is later constructed as a retrospective fiction, driven by the changing discourses of gay liberation, human
rights, and queerness over the three decades of the 1970s, 1980s, and
1990s, respectively, as it is circulated in new contexts and situations. In
seeing how Gilbert and his editorial team shaped the first twelve hours
of television from more than three hundred hours of footage, we see
how in the 1970s new forms of queer reality and new forms of family
emerged by virtue of the new horizon that was public broadcasting, that
is to say, in the possibilities for serial form opened in the early 1970s by
the conjunctions of funding and opportunity that I describe in the foregoing discussion. Broadcast three decades later, in 2003, however, this
final episode in the story of the Louds introduced an even more complicated structure. Through a voice-over by Susan Raymond, the makers
look back to the televisual experiment that was An American Family,
condensing, contracting, and editing it for a new moment (of its broadcast in 2003). If parents Bill and Pat Loud’s marriage woes and eventual
114 :::
Chapter Three
Villarejo, Amy. Ethereal Queer : Television, Historicity, Desire, Duke University Press, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central,
http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uci/detail.action?docID=1603752.
Created from uci on 2020-10-15 10:39:28.
New Review of Film and Television Studies
ISSN: 1740-0309 (Print) 1740-7923 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rfts20
Hold me, thrill me, kiss me, kill me: the ambivalent
queer of post-network television
Andrew J. Owens
To cite this article: Andrew J. Owens (2019): Hold me, thrill me, kiss me, kill me: the
ambivalent queer of post-network television, New Review of Film and Television Studies, DOI:
10.1080/17400309.2019.1602981
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/17400309.2019.1602981
Published online: 15 Apr 2019.
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NEW REVIEW OF FILM AND TELEVISION STUDIES
https://doi.org/10.1080/17400309.2019.1602981
Hold me, thrill me, kiss me, kill me: the ambivalent
queer of post-network television
Andrew J. Owens
University of Iowa, Department of Cinematic Arts, Iowa City, USA
ABSTRACT
This essay reassesses the deregulation of the American television industry and
the rise of identitarian premium cable channels in the context of a new screen
presence that has, since the early-2000s, advanced more provocative representations of sexual non-normativity than those found on network programming. This figure, the ambivalent queer of post-network TV, is a libidinous and
morally suspect individual often found on premium GLBTQ cable outlets like
Here! and on its series such as Dante’s Cove (2005–2007). Such channels target
niche audiences interested in ‘quality’ programming and, as a result, are able
to offer showrunners and writers a comparatively broad range of creative
control, leading to series that break social, cultural, and televisual taboos.
And nowhere has this boundary-breaking potential of the ambivalent cable
queer been more industrially conspicuous than in television horror.
KEYWORDS Television; sexuality; gender; GLBTQ; media industries
Following its momentum in airing modestly queer programming throughout
the 1990s and early-2000s, U.S. cable juggernaut Showtime announced in
January 2002 that it was planning to partner with fellow Viacom subsidiary
MTV on a new project: a cable channel aimed exclusively at GLBTQ audiences.
‘This isn’t a very big departure for Viacom,’ Robert Knight of the conservative
Culture & Family Institute noted, ‘because they’ve been promoting the homosexual agenda on MTV and other outlets for a long time. What makes this new
is that a whole network is devoted to it’ (Cited in Moss 2004b). Developers of
this new channel, the aptly named Outlet, anticipated capitalizing upon both
the niche demographic development expertise that MTV had established since
the mid-1980s and the queer-friendly reputation cultivated by Showtime. Like
PrideVision, a similar GLBTQ channel launched in the top four Canadian
cable markets in September 2001, revenue for Outlet was originally intended to
come from both subscription fees and advertising. Yet by 2004, a struggling
U.S. economy and aggressive ad market had postponed Outlet’s premiere.
CONTACT Andrew J. Owens
andrew-owens-1@uiowa.edu
© 2019 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
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In February of that same year, MTV announced that Showtime had
absented itself as a partner on the project and that the vision for Outlet was
transforming into ‘an entirely ad-supported channel as part of a package that
includes MTV, MTV2, VH1, Nickelodeon, and other channels. Changing the
launch plan for the planned gay channel from a partial pay-for-service to
a fully ad-supported and bundled channel meant that the channel would be
available to all subscribers at a particular tier, not just those who opt in’ (Freitas
2007, p. 220). Historically, this strategy has been characteristic of most major
media conglomerates in addressing issues of representational diversity: ‘rather
than dispersing taste niches and community viewpoints across competing
channels, the new conglomerates have mastered the ability to include this
diverse pantheon of tastes and perspectives within components or “tiers” of the
very same conglomerate’ (Caldwell 2004, p. 68). In the case of Outlet and other
intra-conglomerate GLBTQ channels, however, this strategy ultimately proved
fatal. Indeed, MSOs (multiple-system operators) such as Cox, Comcast, and
Time Warner were disinclined to take on programming bundles that included
a demonstrably queer network for fear of alienating subscribers who had no
wish to view such content. A different approach to programming specifically
for GLBTQ audiences was in order.
This essay reassesses the deregulation of the American television industry and
the consequent rise of identitarian premium cable channels in the context of
a new ‘quality’ presence that has, since the early-2000s, advanced more provocative representations of gender and sexual non-normativity than those concurrently found on network programming. This figure, one I term the ambivalent
queer of post-network programming, is a libidinous, enigmatic, and morally
suspect individual found most often on premium GLBTQ cable channels like
Here! and on its series such as Dante’s Cove (2005–2007). Given that these
channels are not bound by the same regulations that govern broadcast networks,
as viewers must subscribe à la carte through cable providers, they do not rely
upon mass demographic appeal. Instead, channels like Here! target niche audiences interested in ‘quality’ programming and, as a result, are able to offer
showrunners and writers a comparatively greater deal of ‘autonomy and creative
control, leading to series. . .being praised as stylistically, generically and narratively provocative and transgressive, often breaking social, cultural and televisual
taboos’ (Jowett and Abbott 2013, p. 11). And nowhere has this boundarybreaking potential of the ambivalent cable queer been more conspicuous than
in the genre of TV horror.
As Lorna Jowett and Abbott (2013) maintain, horror on contemporary
television must do more than be gory in order to be provocative. While
series like Dante’s Cove do not forsake the generic conventions of physical
violence, I position their more significant interventions within a milieu of
post-network queerness via two primary arenas: 1) destabilizing hegemonic
articulations of quality television as overwhelmingly straight, masculinist
NEW REVIEW OF FILM AND TELEVISION STUDIES
3
exercises in social realism and 2) employing conventions of supernatural
horror to circulate morally and ethically ambivalent characters and relationships that broaden the horizons of contemporary televised queerness
beyond a politics of positivist representation.
American television’s positioning within and between imaginative,
conflicting spaces of social and psychic life has historically saturated its
representations of gender and sexuality with a decided ambivalence. It’s
thus no surprise that the ‘tension between the fictional and the real. . .is
particularly noteworthy in television’s treatment of queer subjects’
(Joyrich 2009, p. 24). Indeed, this queer ambivalence has the particular
potential to be exacerbated through horror as there is no ‘straight connection between representation and reality when it comes to the construction and reception of television fiction and fantasy [emphasis mine]’
(Wheatley 2006, p. 154). Ultimately, then, this essay’s proposition of the
ambivalent queer of post-network cable productively illustrates the risky
assumptions recently cited by Amy Villarejo that have stymied challenging representations of GLBTQ lives across American media culture: that
television mimetically reflects its viewers; that it ought to do so; that it
has an obligation toward a positivist and diverse spectrum of representations; and that such representations inevitably lead to progressive political change (Villarejo 2014, p. 3).
You can’t do/say/show that on television: queerness, quality, and
American cable
Within the industrial context of U.S. television, described by Jane Feuer as
a community of ‘profit-minded capitalists interested in “delivering” audiences,’ ‘quality’ was initially used to describe the demographics of a targeted
audience: ‘delivering a quality audience means delivering whatever demographic advertisers seek, or in the case of premium cable, attracting an
audience with enough disposable income to pay extra for TV’ (Feuer 2007,
p. 147). Indeed, since its earliest articulations across network boardrooms
during the late-1970s, the discursive construction of televisual quality has
taken on significant resonance in the arenas of race, ethnicity, class, and
especially gender and sexuality. To wit, the development of American
television’s quality identity has relied upon reiterative rhetorical flourishes
of uplift and change, embracing what Michael Z. Newman and Elana Levine
term a progressive narrative that naturalizes classed and gendered hierarchies, assuming that moving forward means a shift away from a feminized
past toward a more masculinized future in terms of both genre and
characterization (Newman and Levine 2012, p. 10–11).
And yet, this masculinization and presumptive heteronormitivizing of quality
television has also been built upon a set of decidedly queer paradoxes. In the
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increasingly competitive era of 1990s niche market advertising and programming, network executives began to incorporate gay-themed material into their
prime-time lineups in anticipation of attracting what Ron Becker terms
a SLUMPY (socially-liberal, urban-minded, professional yuppie) audience
from across both the heterosexual and GLBTQ spectrums (Becker 2006,
p. 81). Indeed, for as much as conversations about televisual quality had always
been about the targeting of certain audience demographics, the term has also
become progressively entwined with demarcating certain types of programming
that are variously considered edgy, risqué, groundbreaking, controversial, and
taboo, especially as a continuing legacy of American television’s deregulation
under Mark Fowler’s reign as Chairman of the FCC (1981–1987). Including gaythemed material in prime-time programming thus became one prominent
maneuver intended to up the quality ante.
Nevertheless, still beholden to content restriction standards of the FCC and
NAB, American network television has been historically defined more by what
it cannot show than what it can. In the 1990s and beyond, networked queerness
continued to be filtered mainly through a set of ‘safe’ generic conventions,
including a sustained reliance upon the situation comedy. As Anna McCarthy
remarks of Ellen DeGeneres’ infamous coming-out in both her personal and
ABC on-screen life during the early months of 1997, the comedienne’s selffashioning as a gay Rosa Parks ‘affirmed such visions of what might be called
the liberal progressive narrative of TV history. A key element in popular and
professional understandings of the history of the sitcom’s “evolution,” this is
the idea of the genre as a mirror of broader currents of social change. This
narrative often consists of whiggish tales in which the sitcom form became
[ever] more socially responsible’ (McCarthy 2003, p. 90). Echoing McCarthy’s
findings on televising queerness, Ellis Hanson has similarly argued that reception of the horror genre, specifically the lesbian vampire film, often runs up
against similar critical imperatives. Consequently, one of the preeminent
difficulties for many viewers in digesting most mainstream GLBTQ representations on network television has been its ‘cold shower of political correctness –
its preoccupation with a narrow politics of representation and its search for socalled positive or accurate images, which, when they finally do appear, are often
dull anyway’ (Hanson 1999, p. 191), leaving little latitude for the fact that, as
Hollis Griffin observes, ‘queer feelings involve the potential for bodies to
inhabit norms differently – to desire differently, to love differently, or simply
to feel different’ (Griffin 2017, p. 3). Where, then, could viewers seeking
depictions of a more complex and challenging queerness tune their dials?
Over the past three decades, the courting of risqué, groundbreaking,
controversial, and/or taboo narratives and characters has become intentionally institutionalized by American premium cable channels,
embedded within their original programming, and is a distinctive feature
of both their cultural caché and quality brand labels. Contentious subject
NEW REVIEW OF FILM AND TELEVISION STUDIES
5
matter and edgy scripts containing adult themes are predicated, Janet
McCabe and Kim Akass maintain, on a bravado that ‘strains broadcasting limits. . .pushing the limits of respectability, of daring to say/do what
cannot be said/done elsewhere on the networks, is entwined with being
esoteric, groundbreaking and risk-taking’ (McCabe and Akass 2007,
p. 67). Even still, it’s not enough to simply observe that certain segments
of the American television landscape have become progressively more
sexually explicit, more violent, or even more queer. Instead, greater
attention needs to be paid to the kinds of programming in which these
trends are most palpable, what types of narratives audiences have become
invested in, and what genres serve as privileged sites for the risk-taking
with which cable television has become so well-known. As the following
examination of Here! demonstrates, non-normative sexualities and supernatural horror have become entwined to create what some viewers can
embrace as enticingly ambivalent queer characters and perverse gothic
story worlds that would simply be unthinkable under the remaining
regulatory auspices of network programming.
Hedonistic horror on here!
In the summer of 2003, direct-broadcast satellite (DBS) provider DirecTV
became the first U.S. distributor to ink a deal to carry Here!, a new pay-perview channel directed specifically at the interests of GLBTQ audiences.
Created by Paul Colichman and Stephen P. Jarchow, Here! is a division
of their Regent Entertainment Group, which had previously seen success
among GLBTQ audiences as a producer of films such as the Academy
Award-winning Gods and Monsters (1998). In a 8 July 2003 article for
Daily Variety, John Dempsey reported that Colichman’s goal for Here!
was ultimately to turn it into a ‘24-hour-a-day cable network targeted to
gays and lesbians. He [Colichman] deliberately decided against beginning
with a 24-hour channel because of the barriers that prevented two proposed
24-hour nets [Outlet and an American version of PrideVision] from being
launched last year despite elaborate pitches by their owners to cable operators and satellite distributors’ (Dempsey 2003). Charging $3.99 apiece for
a catalog of independently produced feature films that rotated each month,
executives at Here! aimed to capitalize upon the lucrative marketplace of
GLBTQ U.S. consumers, an ‘affluent, underserved niche group with lots of
buying power, an estimated $450 million to $600 million in annual disposable income, who have been starving for TV programming relevant to
their lives’ (Moss 2004b).
This pay-per-view model finally did prove profitable enough that Here!
expanded from an exclusively video-on-demand satellite service offered by
DirecTV and Dish Network into a 24-hour premium cable channel on
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1 October 2004. According to Karen Flischel, executive vice president and
general manager, Here!’s combination of video-on-demand, subscription
video-on-demand, and continuous programming attempted to make the
network available in a variety of ways that would accommodate a variety of
cable operators: ‘for some that meant a linear channel, for others that meant
transactional [video-on-demand]’ (Cited in Clark 2006). In its linear iteration, as reported by Multichannel News’ Linda Moss, Here! took up an
industrial model popularized by the Playboy Channel: ‘subscribers can buy
a program block or upgrade to the 24-hour linear feed for a monthly
subscription fee’ (Moss 2004a).
Here!’s resolution to include a 24-hour linear feed as part of its service
signaled an internal recognition that the company’s success could no longer
rest solely in the hands of independently produced feature films. The channel
simply needed more and different types of content. Mirroring the trajectories
of other premium cable networks, Colichman noted that ‘what we are focusing
on is original, exclusive, story-form programming. . .we view our world as the
world of Showtime and HBO’ (Cited in Moss 2004b). If much of the trade press
coverage of Here!’s launch as a fully-fledged GLBTQ cable network banged the
drum of belatedness, the question still remained as to what kinds of queer
representation the network would opt to program. In the words of Jeffrey
Garber, president of the GLTBQ-allied advertising agency OpusComm Group,
‘every minority is happy at first just to see itself portrayed [on television]. . .it’s
only after time that they get impatient with one-dimensional portrayals and
start looking for more realistic depictions’ (Cited in Christon 2005). Echoing
this sentiment, as reported by Daily Variety’s Stuart Levine, Colichman was
adamant that the mission of Here!’s original programming would be to ‘ensure
that the gay characters seen throughout the channel are realistic, not the
glossed-over or patronized versions often depicted in broadcast television.
“Our battle everyday is to make sure we are showing an authentic look at the
lives of our viewers. . .we are the gay HBO. We set our sights very high”’
(Levine 2006).
Here!’s rhetorical trade-press flourishes on the eve of its 24-hour launch
smacked repeatedly of realism, community relevance, and appeals to verisimilitude. ‘What does it mean to be queer in the twenty-first century?’ was the
predominant question the channel seemed to pose. Given these concerns, it’s
curious that Here!’s first original scripted series was billed, in the words of cast
member Zara Taylor, as a ‘sexy, horror, gay and lesbian soap opera’ (Taylor n.
d.). Premiering on 7 October 2005, Dante’s Cove began as a two-part miniseries, a blend of ‘Sex and the City meets Dark Shadows meets The O.C. meets
Buffy the Vampire Slayer with a little bit of Melrose Place thrown in there’
(Scoggins, David, and Berresford n.d.). Shot in stark sepia tones to visually
portend the series’ opening in 1840, Grace Neville (Tracy Scoggins) anxiously
awaits her marriage to local entrepreneur Ambrosius Vallin (William Gregory
NEW REVIEW OF FILM AND TELEVISION STUDIES
7
Lee), yet becomes increasingly restless and uncertain of her fiancée’s fidelity.
Although eager to lose her virginity to the man she loves, Ambrosius reminds
Grace that they mustn’t spoil their wedding night and assures her that he has
absolutely no interest in other women. The irony of this promise is quickly
addressed as, upon Grace’s exit, Ambrosius’ valet Raymond (Dylan Jordan)
enters the drawing room, disrobes, and begins to receive oral service from his
employer. Recalling that she left her gloves on top of Ambrosius’ drawing
room piano, Grace returns just in time to witness Raymond bending
Ambrosius over an armchair while penetrating him from behind. Grace’s
anger directed toward this queer mise-en-scène is matched only by her indignation that her fiancée would engage in such ostensibly emasculating behavior.
As Ambrosius scrambles for a quick explanation, Grace’s eyes turn bright red
and the fully nude, semi-erect Raymond beings to convulse uncontrollably on
the floor.
Unbeknownst to Ambrosius, Grace is one of a long line of local witches that
practice an ancient magickal art known as Tresum. Chaining up her fiancée in
the basement of her mother’s estate, Grace gives Ambrosius one final chance:
recant his queer ways or forever be doomed to rot in his own personal Hell on
Earth. Swearing that he would rather suffer an eternity alone than live a lie with
her, Grace places a curse on her beloved: only the kiss of a young man will set
him free. As Tracy Scoggins notes of the series’ inspiration, Dante’s Cove ‘pays
a certain homage to shows that have come before,’ its thematic material and
melodramatic conventions culled most conspicuously from Dan Curtis’ countercultural soap opera Dark Shadows (ABC; 1966–1971) (Scoggins n.d.).
Indeed, Grace and Ambrosius are plainly framed as the twenty-first century
incarnations of Dark Shadows’ own uniquely queer central couple: Angelique
Bouchard and Barnabas Collins. Yet while Dark Shadows reveled in its own
brand of queerness vis-à-vis narrative ellipses and aphoristic misdirection,
Dante’s Cove favors the route of non-normative identity politics, underscoring
Ambrosius’ and other characters’ struggles to come to terms with navigating
the world as openly gay.1
In a recent study of American television’s spectrum of masculine representations, Amanda Lotz (2014, p. 49) asserts that the transformation of the
medium’s norms regarding the representation of gay men, ‘from absence to
occasional pathologized or mocked characters to a context where gay
identity is banal and being closeted is pathologized. . .marks a trajectory of
amazing speed and indicates a clear contestation of heteronormativity
unquestionably relevant to the analysis of televised masculinities.’ Indeed,
if queer horror programming like Dante’s Cove renders moot any attempt
at subtextual queer reference, the question then becomes: ‘when monstrousness as a metaphor for the threat that homosexuality poses to heteronormativity ceases to be coded and instead becomes open, what does it mean?’
(Elliott-Smith 2014, p. 99). One prominent meaning, I argue, is found in
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the ways that series such as Dante’s Cove shore up non-normative sexualities through conventions of supernatural horror in order to televise the
more ambivalent horizons of contemporary queer masculinities and relationships between men.
From Ambrosius’ subterranean imprisonment, Dante’s Cove fastforwards over one-hundred-and-fifty years to present day Venice Beach,
California, where Toby Moraitis (Charlie David) and Kevin Archer
(Gregory Michael) are enjoying a final lovemaking session to conclude
a passionate summer fling. Encouraging Kevin to run away from his mother
and homophobic stepfather, Toby doesn’t understand why his young lover
can’t simply be honest with everyone about his sexuality. For Toby, the
series’ genuine gentleman with a heart of gold, being a man means being
open and true to oneself, an outlook the teenage Kevin simply isn’t ready or
indeed willing to embrace. However, when tensions flare later that evening
and his stepfather smacks him across the face with an appalled ‘faggot’ slur,
Kevin resolves to catch the next bus out of town and join Toby, who has left
for his winter job on the island of Dante’s Cove.
Kevin’s arrival at the Hotel Dante, a queer male reframing of the
gothic ingénue’s entrance into a mysterious new world, is presaged by
supernatural visions of Ambrosius and an enchanted tome known as the
Book of Tresum. These dreams are provisionally overlooked, however, as
Kevin is welcomed into the local fold by Toby’s friends: Van (Nadine
Nicole Heimann), a local lesbian artist with her own soon-to-bediscovered magickal abilities; Cory (Josh Berresford), the Hotel Dante’s
‘resident slut’; and Adam (Stephen Amell), would-be straight man whose
own repressed love for his high-school best friend Toby eventually
bubbles to the surface. Considering the history of minority sexual representation on television, one of the most remarkable elements about
Dante’s Cove and a channel like Here! is what might be called their
queer ubiquity. ‘If gays on TV (and in mainstream film) have too often
been relegated to the token roles of sidekick, accessory, neighbor, on
view for heterosexuals within a largely heterosexual world,’ Suzanna
Danuta Walters (2001, p. 121) maintains, ‘here gays are the only show
in town.’ In fact, the only straight character with a speaking part
throughout the entire series run of Dante’s Cove is Grace, and nightly
parties at the Hotel Dante, featuring little else than same-sex couples
involved in various levels of erotic behavior set against racing strobe
lights and bass-pumping trance music from series composer Eric
Allaman, are only one instance of how this series emphatically reverses
the typically de-sexed plight of the televised queer.
As Jowett and Abbott claim of horror on contemporary television, it’s no
mistake that the genre’s locales are often set in isolated communities, where
normative codes of realism, morality, and plausibility are replaced by logics
NEW REVIEW OF FILM AND TELEVISION STUDIES
9
(or perhaps illogics) of the supernatural (Jowett and Abbott 2013, p. 46–47).
Indeed, as cast member Charlie David puts it, the narrative outlook of
Dante’s Cove can best be described as one of supernatural rationalization:
‘Ok, this is where we live. We’re in Dante’s Cove. It’s a little nuts around
here. There’s ghost children and warlocks and witches. . .and it’s more
coming to terms with what the reality of living here is like’ (David n.d.).
In the context of queer horror on Here!, sexuality itself should certainly be
added to the list of normative codes that are disrupted, as Dante’s Cove
never questions the fact that nearly every resident of this island presents
somewhere on the GLBTQ spectrum. As director Sam Irvin explains, the
‘overall theme of our series is that there’s just a complete acceptance’ of the
verisimilitude of these alternative lifestyles, both sexual and supernatural
(Irvin n.d.-b).
Indeed, since his arrival at the Hotel Dante, Kevin has been presented
not only with a plethora of new queer friends, but also with innumerable
legends of the island’s haunting by a horde of supernatural forces. One
evening, following an ethereal voice down into the basement of the hotel,
Kevin finds a usually padlocked door inexplicably ajar. What he discovers
below is the aging body of Ambrosius Vallin, magickally brought back to
youthful vitality after stealing a kiss from Kevin in what becomes
a prescient milieu of queer gothic bondage and S&M. Ambrosius’ release
from his subterranean prison is the catalyst that propels the remainder of
Dante’s Cove’s supernatural narrative over a three-year, twelve episode arc,
including subplots ranging from Toby and Kevin’s struggle to keep their
relationship together in the face of Ambrosius’ unrelenting advances to woo
Kevin at any cost, Grace’s own resurrection and plans to enact continued
revenge on Ambrosius, and the arrival of a thought-to-be-imprisoned
menacing magickal force that threatens to annihilate every resident of the
island.
By the time Dante’s Cove premiered in October 2005, Regent Entertainment
was no stranger to backing queer horror. Indeed, the company had previously
produced the first installment, and then distributed the second installment, of
the direct-to-video occult franchise The Brotherhood, directed by Roger
Corman protégé David DeCoteau. So when asked in an interview why Here!
decided to make its first original series a ‘sexy show with elements of magick’
(Romero n.d.), Paul Colichman provided a revealing response:
The horror genre has always been an important part of the gay and lesbian
community. The reason horror and gay people have always gone hand in
hand is that the gay community felt like they were monsters among everyone
else. There was a sense of alienation. And really horror deals with alienation.
So what we did was take a very traditional genre, the horror soap, and
populated that world with out gay and lesbian characters so that we could
combine a genre that was comfortable to people who had been feeling
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alienated with people who were not alienated from themselves, people who
had a strong sense of who they were, and a community that was all about
being gay and lesbian (Colichman, n.d.).
Of the many queer endeavors that supernatural media since the 1960s have
engaged in, one of the most significant is destabilizing the dichotomy
between realism and fantasy. There is, as Helen Wheatley reminds us, no
‘straight connection between representation and reality when it comes to
the construction and reception of television fiction and fantasy.’ As such,
Colichman’s reflections are a fitting illustration of the ways in which this
genre has historically intersected with non-normative sexual politics in
order to turn the alienation of the sexual Other into a potential rallying
point for both queer media production and community formation. Yet
trade press coverage of Here!’s launch and the eventual success of Dante’s
Cove provides an instructive industrial and sociocultural paradox vis-à-vis
what types of representation have carved out the viable contours of televising queerness on cable.
From coverage in Daily Variety, Multichannel News, and other industry
trades, representatives from Here! made one thing abundantly clear about the
channel’s launch: Here! would eschew sexually explicit media. ‘“We want
mainstream, middle-of-the-road programming for gays and lesbians from
the age of 16 on up”,’ Colichman said: ‘“if people want porno, let them take it
off the Internet”’ (Cited in Dempsey 2003). As previously noted, Here! built
its video-on-demand, subscription video-on-demand, and 24-hour linear
feed platforms around the Playboy Channel model of allowing subscribers
access to a variety of programming options, several of whose ephemeral
natures made the connotation of masturbatory gratification almost too
obvious. As such, attempting to curtail stereotypical imaginings of gay men
in particular as sexually insatiable, representatives from Here! may have been
protesting too much, especially in light of the fact that full-frontal male
nudity appears within the first five minutes of Dante’s Cove’s premiere
episode. ‘“It’s not adult content, it’s not erotica”,’ Colichman affirmed:
‘“but it is designed for a mature audience that pays for it and wants it”’
(Cited in Moss 2004a).
But how then did Here! intend to negotiate this balance, consciously
avoiding the ominous spectre of pornography while still assuring viewers
that they would be receiving their mature money’s worth? In a dismissive
yet apropos question posed by Andrea Lafferty, the executive director of the
Traditional Values Coalition asked, ‘“What are they going to do, have
homosexuals knitting?”’ (Cited in Moss 2004b). As elegantly identified by
Thomas Waugh, sexually explicit visual culture has always served not only
as ‘stroke materials’ for GLBTQ people, but also as ‘our family snapshots
and wedding albums, as our cultural history and political validation’
NEW REVIEW OF FILM AND TELEVISION STUDIES
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(Waugh 1996, p. 5). In turn, after the first season success of Dante’s Cove,
Colichman and Here! began to change their representational tune: ‘We had
to uncensor ourselves to some extent. To allow us to have the same level of
sexuality that other premium cable channels like Showtime and HBO have.
And we had to allow that same level for our own community’ (Colichman,
n.d.). This struggle to uncensor Here! and Dante’s Cove was particularly
compounded, I suggest, by three interrelated factors: 1) the long-standing
double standard of representing nudity in popular culture (i.e. that female
nudity is somehow less transgressive than male, easier to program, etc.); 2)
that so much ambivalence directed toward queer culture has been inspired
precisely because sex and sexuality, let alone non-normative sexual practices, are things supposedly best kept private; and 3) that representing queer
sexuality as promiscuous, polyamorous, and even pleasurably dangerous
could be construed as irresponsible, trafficking in stereotype, and politically
counterproductive.
Nevertheless, as McCabe and Akass remind us, discourses of the illicit,
whether sexual or otherwise, have become integral to the contemporary
quality television landscape vis-à-vis ‘compelling story-telling, key to
creating complex and morally ambivalent protagonists, [and] vital to
dramatic verisimilitude’ (McCabe and Akass 2007, p. 75). My primary
aim in centering analysis on the supernatural sexualities of Dante’s Cove
is neither to argue how sexually explicit the series is nor to demonstrate
how it represents a de facto example of liberatory queer representation
on television. Instead, I maintain that the show’s post-network latitude in
representing male nudity and sex between men works in tandem with
both its supernatural milieu and deregulatory industrial context to paint
a potential...
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