After Aquarius Dawned by Judy Kutulas

Author:Judy Kutulas
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
Published: 2017-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

5 : Obviously Queer

Gay-Themed Television, the Remaking of Sexual Identity, and the Family-Values Backlash

One evening in 1971, President Richard Nixon settled in to watch television and stumbled upon a new program airing its fifth episode, All in the Family, a detail that survives thanks to the White House tapes. On this evening, the show’s plot featured a case of mistaken sexual identity, one where, Nixon complained to soon-to-be-infamous aides John Ehrlichman and H. R. Haldeman, an “obviously queer” character turned out not to be, while a “virile, strong” football player was. “I don’t mind homosexuality,” he insisted, “[but] . . . I don’t think you glorify it on public television. . . . What do you think that does to kids?” What Nixon saw on that February evening was a milestone moment in the history of television for Americans with minority sexual identities. All in the Family was the first situation comedy to depict an out gay man, specifically on the “polariz[ing]” genre of what was becoming known as relevancy TV. The sudden frankness about subjects heretofore absent from the sitcom entertained some Americans and disturbed others, including Nixon, who equated the episode’s message with “immorality” and other “enemies of strong societies.” Homosexuality, he contended—and he was not the first person to so assert—had led to the fall of ancient Greece and was likely to weaken American society and, particularly, the family.1

What singer-songwriter music and more expressive clothing did for straight men and women television helped to do for gays, lesbians, bisexual, and transgender individuals, that is, provide them with a public space to try out new identities. But while many Americans celebrated the sexual liberation of straight men and women, others considered the liberation of sexual minorities as a threat. Experts’ understandings of sexual identity shifted rapidly during the 1970s. They did so while another sort of debate occurred: what was and was not an appropriate topic for television, a medium nearly everybody watched. Concern about family decline focused on the nature of sexual identity, but also on the content of television. Social conservatives feared many of the sexual and gendered outcomes of the sixties, but none scared them more than did the emergence of a public gay community supported by a new media establishment. They could muster no live-and-let-live tolerance for a kind of diversity that they believed was neither benign nor natural. Nixon was not the only TV viewer worried about America’s children and what they might see and learn from networks increasingly willing to tackle controversial issues. Television became one of the primary fronts in conservatives’ war against the sexual and gender changes sparked by the sixties, and public discourse about gays was perhaps the most pitched battle of all.

Television that placed some version of modern life before the public provided a social vehicle for informing citizens about changing mores; but such educating ran contrary to the family-friendly programming of the medium’s traditions. Burglaries, impotence, unemployment, and miscarriages did not happen to 1950s TV families, but they did to the Bunkers, the multigenerational family featured in All in the Family.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.