In his 2004 essay “Is Gay Marriage Anti-Black?” Kenyon Farrow asks the provocative, yet necessarily critical question – “is gay marriage a Black/White issue?” (Farrow). Farrow poses this question not in order to denounce same-sex marriage as an institution, but to insight a particularly timely frame of critique. How does marriage as in institution and symbol of status gain and lose relevance across communities, temporalities, and culture? Furthermore how are conceptualizations of progress deeply determined by the context of one’s lived experience and positionality to a community? By working through some of the questions generated by Farrow’s critique, we seek to identify, at least preliminarily, how answers to these questions might be synthesized through a carefully studied critique of queer representations in media.

Observing contemporary trends in media can often create windows that allow researchers to better understand conceptualizations of culture, class, race, sexuality, and gender as they are reproduced and performed in a given society.  Furthermore, analyzing media that highlights themes of sexuality and gender through the lens of race and class can provide us with concrete information as to exactly how these categories are reproduced and, in many cases (certainly ours), marketed in the context of a capitalist matrix of domination. Through our analysis on this site, we hope to unpack some of the implications of trends and interrogate a number of sources that depict queerness and queer characters of different backgrounds in a variety of settings.

In order to better understand some aspects how queer people have been represented in media over the beginning of the 21st Century, we will examine visual media – particularly popular film, television, and Broadway performance – for the sake of identifying certain trends and archetypes that we find prevalent and, ultimately, to draw concrete distinctions regarding how queer white people and queer people of color are depicted differently across media. In this review, we have considered 4 sources that depict queer protagonists: GBF (2013), Faking It (2014 – 2016), Moonlight (2016), and RENT (1996). We hope to consider these sources primarily in terms of how they value marriage, socioeconomic status, and performance of gender.

In order to provide additional context to the discourse we are hoping to develop, we have fount pertinent in examine Dan Savage’s “It Gets Better” campaign in the context of our inquiry. We believe “It Gets Better” helps to establish aspects of popular depictions of white queerness that we hope to examine and question.

It Gets Better (2010)

Launched in 2010 and now an international organization, Dan Savage’s “It Gets Better” project was launched as an inspirational message to queer teens who face bullying, discrimination, and feelings of helplessness. Savage recounts that he started the project after learning of the suicide of Tyler Clementi and other gay kids (Puar). As the project picked up steam, celebrities, politicians, and everyday queer adults added their voices and their stories to the growing online collection; even President Obama created an “It Gets Better” video condemning bullying. Yet the campaign leaves a lot to be desired; “critics note that queer people of colour, trans, genderqueer and gender nonconforming youth, and lesbians have not been inspirationally hailed by [the project] in the same way as white gay male liberals” (Puar).

One predominant critique revolves around Savage’s own subject position as an abled, monied, white, cis man who is also gay– a subject position whose experiences preclude those of trans, poor, POC, disabled, and non-man embodiments and is “a mandate to fold into urban, neoliberal gay enclaves” which already privileges bodies like Savages’ (Puar). The assimilationist politics of the videos and the use of gay kids’ suicides “highlighting an exceptional class of aspirational gay citizens at the expense of others” that Savage employs further discourages dissent and diversity in order to paint the gay community (and queer futurity) as a monolith of white acceptability and a sense of achieving some mythic normalcy.

This is not to say that the employment of digital medias in the creation of uplifting and supportive communities is useless, and indeed such medias can be used to create support networks, not saying that it gets better but recognizing that for many, it doesn’t get better. There is more power, we argue, in the elimination of such “narrow versions of what it means to be gay, and what it means to be bullied, that for those who cannot identify with it but are nevertheless still targeted” as are depicted in the It Gets Better Campaign (Puar).