It was while reading writer and activist Sarah Schulman’s 1998 book, Stage Struck: Theatre, AIDS and the Marketing of Gay America, in anticipation of her upcoming lecture that kicks off the Inside OUT lecture series, that I began to see how we as a society still suffer from homophobia and heterosexism.
Schulman’s book starts off retelling her experience of trying to receive acknowledgement that her book People in Trouble, published in 1990, was used without permission (along with Puccini’s La Bohème) by Jonathan Larson to write the hit Broadway musical Rent that debuted in 1996 (along the way removing anything interesting and progressive from Schulman’s original book).
Stage Struck quickly becomes a steady, page-turning text that illuminates the inquiring mind on the confines of being queer in modern society. Through the recounting of her own experience, Schulman illustrates how American and Americanized popular culture reappropriates the experience of the minority, deconstructs it to a shallow shell only to fill it up with white, heterosexist, middle-class filler aimed at pacifying the masses and assuaging the guilt and ignorance of the majority. Along the way, due to tokenism and the politics of oppression, we as minorities applaud and support it. Reading her book gave me concrete reasons to dislike Rent beyond the pit in my stomach that told me that it was crap. For me, Schulman’s most powerful statement in the book that illuminates the predicament we find ourselves in is, “It is very seductive for gay people to confuse the presence of limited gay images in advertising with some kind of social equity.”
In a chapter entitled “The Creation of a Fake Public Homosexuality” Schulman shares with the reader the parameters that regulate how and who from the LGBT community gets represented in modern popular culture: 1) Gay and lesbian celebrities are allowed to emerge as along as they become famous while they are in the closet and then they come out. 2) Gay content is permissible if it focuses on romance. 3) Mild homoerotism in heterosexual paradigms is permissible. 4) Homophobia is unmentionable. 5) Gay people are rarely allowed to be the heroes unless they are tragic heroes rescued by straight people.
Nothing illustrates Schulman’s assertions more than the tale of Matthew Mitcham and his quest of Olympic gold. I first heard about Mitcham on Perez Hilton. There was a picture of a handsome man in a Speedo and for once this summer it wasn’t Michael Phelps—it was Mitcham, and the story was about how in the quest to receive a grant so his boyfriend could cheer him on in Beijing, where he would be competing for gold, he ended up coming out of the closet to the Sydney Morning Herald. In doing so he became the first openly gay Australian to represent the country at the Olympics.
When his performance seemed less than stellar at the beginning of the Olympics, the gay media attributed it to the pressure of coming out. NBC sports, the official American network of the Olympics, attributed it only to personal problems. Maybe it could be argued that NBC not mentioning his sexuality was a sign of success, of queer integration. Perhaps in the minds of the sportscasters being gay was so accepted that it could go without mention. Or maybe gay was still perceived as off-putting by sportscasters and producers so they didn’t mention it because they didn’t want people at home to switch the channel.
Their failure to not talk about his sexual orientation came to a head when Mitcham came from behind to win Olympic gold in the men’s 10-metre platform dive, achieving the highest scores ever in the sport. And still the sportscasters didn’t mention that he was gay. By not celebrating the historic feat of being an out gay Olympic winner, NBC missed the chance to tell a story of diversity and adversity—a human story that hopefully anybody could relate to. Instead they reinforced ignorance and sold the lie of a “normal” boy making good.
Within hours of Mitcham’s win and NBC’s silence, posts and stories began appearing all over the web. Outsports wrote, “If he had had cancer, if his parents had been killed in a car crash when he was two, or if he had just proposed to his girlfriend, they would have mentioned it.”
The day after Mitcham’s win, NBC Olympics President Gary Zenkel issued in an apology, “We regret that we missed the opportunity to tell Matthew Mitcham’s story. We apologize for this unintentional omission.”
One of the most upsetting things about NBC’s failure to fully celebrate Mitcham is that they are the network that has brought us Will and Grace, made us suffer through Queer Eye for the Straight Guy and they’re responsible for countless gay and gayish characters from Kenneth on 30 Rock to Pat on Saturday Night Live. One has to ask NBC: are gays only good for laughs? To drive up ad dollars? To use as publicity stunts disguised as progressive programming choices?
Through Mitcham’s story we can clearly see that the parameters that Schulman writes about in her book are still in effect: 1) Mitcham came out before he was well known. 2) His story is about competition, not love. 3) He competed in an all-male, nearly-nude group activity, thus blowing any heterosexual paradigm out of the water. 4) Because of him we are mentioning homophobia. 5) He won the medal, making him the hero.
Mitcham and his story do not follow the rules, so at this point in our Americanized existence his tale does not get told to the masses. Schulman refused to let her story go unheard, so she told it herself, and along the way she has helped us recognize our own stories, making room for true heroes to emerge. V
Sarah Schulman will be giving a free public lecture entitled, United in Anger: A History of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power at the Telus Centre on the U of A campus on Tue, Sep 16 (7 pm). Visit www.ismss.ualberta.ca for details.
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