In conclusion, we’ve found a broad gulf between representations of queerness in predominantly white-produced media and representations of queerness of media produced by people of color. Many of the most predominant differences that we identified in our analysis include a substantial difference in the way marriage is portrayed and talked about, representations of class and socioeconomic status, and the types of “acceptable” queerness that are depicted throughout our primary sources. For some clarification as to why this is, we look, again, to the scholarship of Farrow and Spade and Willse.

Marriage, as these scholars depict it is not only a tool of capitalist social oppression that exists primarily to enforce subordinance to the state and compulsory cisheterosexuality (Spade & Willse), but it is also a highly radicalized mechanism, having enforced the economy of racism for centuries prior to the American Civil War and, more recently, having further marginalized black people in the structure and execution of the marriage equality movement (Farrow). Though these analyses are particularly useful when considering different conceptualizations and valuations of marriage across communities, there are still some essential questions to be asked. Namely, what are the options for making popularized gay liberation movements more inclusive and less dependent on assimilation into hegemonic systems of power that have historically served to exclude the non-white and non-wealthy?

In regards to the role that socioeconomic status plays in the representations of queerness, we find it pertinent, again, to consider marriage. Though, in many instances, marriage might expand the socioeconomic opportunity of partners, it is also often an economically inviable option to poorer couples in a way that we view to be socially significant. As Essig points out in her unpublished chapter “Marry Me?” averages in proposal planning along run “between $5000 and $50,000” USD (Essig 11). The culture of marriage and proposal itself, as we reviewed briefly in our introduction, traces its lineage to corporate marketing ploys, as in the case DeBeers, which created the ritual of proposal as a marketing tactic to sell diamonds (Essig 5). Keeping these cultural histories in mind, we must ask how poor queer people of color can exist and participate in these systems in any way that preserves their personhood.

We agree, furthermore, with Essig, Spade and Willse’s analysis of marriage as a tool for reproducing performances of gender. Indeed, with the exception of a small handful of characters depicted in “Faking It,” most queer characters depicted in the white-produced media we viewed pass as clearly male or female. Ambiguity is not represented. Though this may not initially seem to be a violent depiction of queerness, when one takes into account the degree to which marriage in these sources is idealized, it becomes clear that a byproduct of these depictions is the erasure of people who do not pass as a determinate or “acceptable” gender even when they are depicted as gender fluid or intersex gender.

These conclusions beg for more than a change in the way queer, trans, and intersex people are depicted in popular media – as, indeed, representations in Moonlight and RENT seem far more inclusive and less dependent on mechanisms of hegemonic power and assimilationist practices – and seek to establish a more vigorous practical discourse on how queer liberation and the representations of queerness can seek to refute and deconstruct the systems that create “otherness” to begin with.