The controversy following journalist Ramin Setoodeh’s recent Newsweek essay suggesting that straight actors can play gay while gays can’t play straight is fascinating. I find it interesting from two standpoints.
First, it illustrates how mainstream the discussion of gay issues has now become. Debates that used to occur behind the walls of the “alternative” media are now taking place in the mainstream media and online, where bloggers correct and heckle the media constantly. And that seems good, both for the gay community and the culture at large.
First, it illustrates how mainstream the discussion of gay issues has now become. Debates that used to occur behind the walls of the “alternative” media are now taking place in the mainstream media and online, where bloggers correct and heckle the media constantly. And that seems good, both for the gay community and the culture at large.
And second, the Setoodeh piece and the controversy it has elicited demonstrate how far gay men still have to go in becoming fully acceptable, fully equal, in mainstream American society. The gatekeepers are firmly in place, and their gestures of admission and exclusion will only become more pronounced as gay folks enter the mainstream in increasing numbers. The enhanced gatekeeping represents simultaneously how far we’ve come and how far we still have to go.
And, as with any minority community, some of the fiercest of those gatekeepers are members of the gay community itself. As anyone following comments on blogs like this that push against mainstream religious or cultural images of gay human beings and gay lives will soon recognize, no one can be more pitiless and underhanded in attempts to subvert careful, critical discourse about gay issues than gay folks who promote a different agenda than the gay agenda they happen to be attacking.
The controversy itself: towards the end of April, Ramin Setoodeh, a culture critic who occasionally writes for Newsweek (and other journals), published an essay entitled “Straight Jacket” in which he argues that “[w]hile it’s OK for straight actors to play gay (as Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger did in Brokeback Mountain), it’s rare for someone to pull off the trick in reverse.”
Got that? Straight men play gay men, and we ought not be perturbed. But when gay men try to play straight, our gaydar should perk up and we ought to be amused/dismayed/unconvinced. At “the trick.”
Because gay men just can’t play straight with a straight face.
Or, to be precise, it’s the straight face that’s the problem. Setoodeh sees a “big pink elephant in the room” when Sean Hayes plays Kristin Chenoweth’s love interest in “Promises, Promises” because Hayes is “wooden” as he makes love to Chenoweth. It’s frankly “weird” watching him try to get it up for a girl. He lacks the “macho swagger” we expect from a real man.
And when Jonathan Groff plays a straight man wooing a young woman on the television series “Glee,” he “scowls” distractingly—when he’s not smiling or giggling like “your average theater queen,” that is.
Just can’t perform the trick. Can’t convince us they’re real men.
And, as with any minority community, some of the fiercest of those gatekeepers are members of the gay community itself. As anyone following comments on blogs like this that push against mainstream religious or cultural images of gay human beings and gay lives will soon recognize, no one can be more pitiless and underhanded in attempts to subvert careful, critical discourse about gay issues than gay folks who promote a different agenda than the gay agenda they happen to be attacking.
The controversy itself: towards the end of April, Ramin Setoodeh, a culture critic who occasionally writes for Newsweek (and other journals), published an essay entitled “Straight Jacket” in which he argues that “[w]hile it’s OK for straight actors to play gay (as Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger did in Brokeback Mountain), it’s rare for someone to pull off the trick in reverse.”
Got that? Straight men play gay men, and we ought not be perturbed. But when gay men try to play straight, our gaydar should perk up and we ought to be amused/dismayed/unconvinced. At “the trick.”
Because gay men just can’t play straight with a straight face.
Or, to be precise, it’s the straight face that’s the problem. Setoodeh sees a “big pink elephant in the room” when Sean Hayes plays Kristin Chenoweth’s love interest in “Promises, Promises” because Hayes is “wooden” as he makes love to Chenoweth. It’s frankly “weird” watching him try to get it up for a girl. He lacks the “macho swagger” we expect from a real man.
And when Jonathan Groff plays a straight man wooing a young woman on the television series “Glee,” he “scowls” distractingly—when he’s not smiling or giggling like “your average theater queen,” that is.
Just can’t perform the trick. Can’t convince us they’re real men.
Sir, a woman’s preaching is like a dog’s walking on his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all.
When Hayes and Groff try macho swagger, they end up being just garden-variety theater queens in brawny drag. We wait in suspense for the girly giggles and soft smiles that give away their true nature—something we would never dream of doing when a garden-variety straight actor plays gay.
Is something wrong with this picture—coming from a man who is openly gay, as Setoodeh is? Lots of folks think so. No one has been more incisive about what’s afoot in Setoodeh’s ongoing crusade against queeny gay men than Michael Jensen at AfterElton.com. In Jensen’s view, Setoodeh’s latest screed against femme gay men is “predictable contrarianism” that “seems to reflect a gay constituency of one,” if, indeed, it doesn’t in fact reflect “the tired gay-obsessions of the far right.”
Setoodeh comes to this self-made controversy (a term to which I’ll return in a moment) with certain credentials in hand. And Jensen and his AfterElton team have tracked those credentials carefully for some time now, so that anyone reading Setoodeh’s new claims about tricks gay men can’t perform without knowing the backstory of these claims would be well advised to follow AfterElton’s thorough reporting of the Setoodeh story for a number of years now.
Back in November 2009, Setoodeh published a Newsweek article entitled “Kings of Queens” making the outrageous assertion that gay actors like Chris Colfer, who plays an out and proud gay teen on “Glee,” are actually hurting the gay cause. Because Colfer is, you see, “that oldest of clichés: the sensitive gay boy who really wants to be a girl.”
What red-meat middle America wants is men, not girls: real men, gay men who pass for real men, who don’t force us to ask uncomfortable questions about gender roles and male dominance and whether these are set in stone.
And Colfer/Kurt is out of step even with his own generation, which prefers cool, ironic, and understated to expressive and engaged:
Is something wrong with this picture—coming from a man who is openly gay, as Setoodeh is? Lots of folks think so. No one has been more incisive about what’s afoot in Setoodeh’s ongoing crusade against queeny gay men than Michael Jensen at AfterElton.com. In Jensen’s view, Setoodeh’s latest screed against femme gay men is “predictable contrarianism” that “seems to reflect a gay constituency of one,” if, indeed, it doesn’t in fact reflect “the tired gay-obsessions of the far right.”
Setoodeh comes to this self-made controversy (a term to which I’ll return in a moment) with certain credentials in hand. And Jensen and his AfterElton team have tracked those credentials carefully for some time now, so that anyone reading Setoodeh’s new claims about tricks gay men can’t perform without knowing the backstory of these claims would be well advised to follow AfterElton’s thorough reporting of the Setoodeh story for a number of years now.
Back in November 2009, Setoodeh published a Newsweek article entitled “Kings of Queens” making the outrageous assertion that gay actors like Chris Colfer, who plays an out and proud gay teen on “Glee,” are actually hurting the gay cause. Because Colfer is, you see, “that oldest of clichés: the sensitive gay boy who really wants to be a girl.”
What red-meat middle America wants is men, not girls: real men, gay men who pass for real men, who don’t force us to ask uncomfortable questions about gender roles and male dominance and whether these are set in stone.
And Colfer/Kurt is out of step even with his own generation, which prefers cool, ironic, and understated to expressive and engaged:
The problem with the Glee club is that Kurt and the rest are loud and proud, but their generation has turned down the volume. All this at a time when standing apart seems particularly counterproductive. Marriage (and the military) are sacred institutions, so it’s not surprising that some heterosexuals will defend them against what they see as a radical alteration. But if you want to be invited to someone else’s party, sometimes you have to dress the part.
As Michael Jensen notes in response, the gist of Setoodeh’s argument is that femme gays are hurting the gay cause, and may even have been responsible—an astonishing hypothesis that Setoodeh advances without a blush—for the rollback of gay marriage in Maine and California! The problem is girls. And the seemingly deliberate need of people like Chris Colfer (or Sean Hayes or Jonathan Groff) to remind us of girls.
To put girls in our faces.
Setoodeh and his discomfort with “feminine” gay men popped onto the radar screen of many gay folks—and began to attract critical attention—in 2008, when Newsweek published an abysmal article of his (it was their cover story) about the “real” story of Brandon McInerny’s murder of 15-year old Larry King in Oxnard, California, in February of that year. The real problem, and real story, in Setoodeh’s view—the one that the rest of the media failed to tell us?
It was this: since California has laws prohibiting gender discrimination, Larry King’s school couldn’t stop him from wearing “girls’ clothes.” (There seems to be no problem at all when girls arrive at school in “boys’ clothes”—in slacks and t-shirts, kick-ass boots as big as Setoodeh’s home state of Texas. The problem is “girls’ clothes”—and males who choose to wear them.)
And so Setoodeh wants us to know that “despite all the attention and outrage, the reason Larry died isn’t as clear-cut as many people think.” In the view of many observers, Setoodeh suggests, Larry King was shot in the head by classmate Brandon McInerny because “he was allowed to push the boundaries so far that he put himself and others in danger.”
Larry put himself in danger. And he endangered others. It was those “girls’ clothes” that did it, you understand.
If we want to be invited to the party, we have to dress the part: girls, boots and jeans allowed; boys, ditch the makeup and sequins. DON’T PUSH THE BOUNDARIES.
As Dennis Ayers notes at AfterElton in response to Setoodeh’s Larry King article, the theme running through everything Setoodeh writes is this: “Effeminate gay guys need to butch it up.” And as Ayers also points out, Setoodeh’s King argument is classic blame-the-victim rhetoric:
To put girls in our faces.
Setoodeh and his discomfort with “feminine” gay men popped onto the radar screen of many gay folks—and began to attract critical attention—in 2008, when Newsweek published an abysmal article of his (it was their cover story) about the “real” story of Brandon McInerny’s murder of 15-year old Larry King in Oxnard, California, in February of that year. The real problem, and real story, in Setoodeh’s view—the one that the rest of the media failed to tell us?
It was this: since California has laws prohibiting gender discrimination, Larry King’s school couldn’t stop him from wearing “girls’ clothes.” (There seems to be no problem at all when girls arrive at school in “boys’ clothes”—in slacks and t-shirts, kick-ass boots as big as Setoodeh’s home state of Texas. The problem is “girls’ clothes”—and males who choose to wear them.)
And so Setoodeh wants us to know that “despite all the attention and outrage, the reason Larry died isn’t as clear-cut as many people think.” In the view of many observers, Setoodeh suggests, Larry King was shot in the head by classmate Brandon McInerny because “he was allowed to push the boundaries so far that he put himself and others in danger.”
Larry put himself in danger. And he endangered others. It was those “girls’ clothes” that did it, you understand.
If we want to be invited to the party, we have to dress the part: girls, boots and jeans allowed; boys, ditch the makeup and sequins. DON’T PUSH THE BOUNDARIES.
As Dennis Ayers notes at AfterElton in response to Setoodeh’s Larry King article, the theme running through everything Setoodeh writes is this: “Effeminate gay guys need to butch it up.” And as Ayers also points out, Setoodeh’s King argument is classic blame-the-victim rhetoric:
Setoodeh’s piece on King seemed to blame the victim, strongly conveying the idea that he would still be alive if only he hadn't been so in everybody's face about his orientation. If you traipse around school in women’s heels and give out valentines to male classmates, you can expect bad things to happen.
Why did Newsweek choose to give such a high-profile assignment to an inexperienced young reporter who had previously written only fluff celebrity pieces and movie reviews? As Ayers says, “Only they know for sure.”
If the magazine’s objective was to stir controversy and gain attention, Newsweek’s wager seems to have paid off. The latest controversy has gone mainstream, with commentary all over the place, including CNN. One of the first to speak out was Sean Hayes’s current co-star Kristin Chenoweth, who left a lengthy comment at the online version of Setoodeh’s article stating,
If the magazine’s objective was to stir controversy and gain attention, Newsweek’s wager seems to have paid off. The latest controversy has gone mainstream, with commentary all over the place, including CNN. One of the first to speak out was Sean Hayes’s current co-star Kristin Chenoweth, who left a lengthy comment at the online version of Setoodeh’s article stating,
This article offends me because I am a human being, a woman and a Christian. For example, there was a time when Jewish actors had to change their names because anti-Semites thought no Jew could convincingly play Gentile. Setoodeh even goes so far as to justify his knee-jerk homophobic reaction to gay actors by accepting and endorsing that “as viewers, we are molded by a society obsessed with dissecting sexuality, starting with the locker room torture in junior high school.” Really? We want to maintain and proliferate the same kind of bullying that makes children cry and in some recent cases have even taken their own lives? That’s so sad, Newsweek!
Cheyenne Jackson and Michael Urie also ripped Setoodeh’s analysis. As Urie notes, it’s about acting, stupid! (The “stupid” is my embellishment). Gay playing straight, straight playing gay, Jew as goy, gentile miming Jew: it’s acting.
Urie concludes,
Urie concludes,
We're all actors, and the audiences get it.
Setoodeh also has his defenders. In a recent HuffPo piece, Aaron Sorkin promises us that Ramin Setoodeh is one of the good guys, and we can count on him to come down on the correct side when gay rights are put to the test in political battles.
But Steve Clemons is less sanguine. In his view, Setoodeh should turn the latest controversy into a “learning moment.” He should recognize, first of all, that gay actors and the roles they play run the gamut. Television, the theater, films are full of gay actors—both open and hidden—playing roles ranging from butch to femme and straight to gay. To focus with laser-beam obsessiveness on gay men stereotyped as feminine is to miss the point—everyone is acting: “He [Setoodeh] would be wise to acknowledge that everyone is performing . . . .”
In Clemons’ view, Setoodeh’s “own homosexual issues filter” obscures his vision of the “empirical realities” of what is really taking place all the time around him—gay folks everywhere don costumes in almost every social transaction in which we engage, because the parties to which we’re invited are frequently given by those who don’t welcome us, who have written party rules demanding that we come as anyone but ourselves:
But Steve Clemons is less sanguine. In his view, Setoodeh should turn the latest controversy into a “learning moment.” He should recognize, first of all, that gay actors and the roles they play run the gamut. Television, the theater, films are full of gay actors—both open and hidden—playing roles ranging from butch to femme and straight to gay. To focus with laser-beam obsessiveness on gay men stereotyped as feminine is to miss the point—everyone is acting: “He [Setoodeh] would be wise to acknowledge that everyone is performing . . . .”
In Clemons’ view, Setoodeh’s “own homosexual issues filter” obscures his vision of the “empirical realities” of what is really taking place all the time around him—gay folks everywhere don costumes in almost every social transaction in which we engage, because the parties to which we’re invited are frequently given by those who don’t welcome us, who have written party rules demanding that we come as anyone but ourselves:
Setoodeh may not have meant to convey insensitivity and ignorance -- ignorance in that there are numerous gay actors performing in straight roles in the entertainment industry and insensitivity in the sense that throughout American society, there are men and women who adequately “perform” each day in the straight roles ascribed to them while shifting to their real gay identities when they can afford to.
Setoodeh has answered the mounting charges against his attack on Hayes and Groff disingenuously. In a response to Kristin Chenoweth a few days ago, he states that he only meant “to open a debate,” and that he and his positions are being unfairly caricatured and vilified. He’s the victim.
Unfortunately, Setoodeh’s claim that he only wants to open a debate about the strictures gay actors face in American culture is undercut by his refusal to do precisely that—to debate the issues. In a response to Setoodeh’s self-defense, Michael Jensen notes,
Unfortunately, Setoodeh’s claim that he only wants to open a debate about the strictures gay actors face in American culture is undercut by his refusal to do precisely that—to debate the issues. In a response to Setoodeh’s self-defense, Michael Jensen notes,
Heck, I even tried to get Setoodeh to talk with me about his articles, but no dice. Ditto Newsweek editor Jon Meacham. . . . If his goal was to start a “debate,” and he says it was, it’s telling how uninterested he seems to be in actually having that debate (and see here).
Setoodeh’s (and Newsweek’s) refusal to accept invitations to debate the issues they claim to be putting before us precisely for debate suggests to me that debate is not what Setoodeh and Newsweek are about. Hence my phrase (above), “self-made controversy.” I suspect that what we’re encountering in this “debate” is not at all an invitation to consider carefully issues like gender roles or the challenges faced by out gay actors.
Instead, I think what’s at work in Newsweek’s choice to put Mr. Setoodeh and his views in the limelight is something far less savory. I think that this deliberately manufactured controversy is all about showy gate-keeping and not discussion. It’s about reminding Americans in general and the gay community in particular of the price to be paid when we transgress the boundaries of “sacred institutions” (Setoodeh’s astonishing phrase, not mine) like marriage and the military.
Like the masculine. Setoodeh’s analysis is, at heart, Newsweek’s reminder to us, as a powerful centrist arbiter of public taste, about where the unassailable lines lie in our current cultural debates about gender and sexual orientation. About what is not to be touched. Not without peril.
Girls may arrive at the party in as much male drag as they’re capable of donning. Boys who want to act like girls still have their place, however.
And that place is and should remain outside looking in.
Because boys who act like girls remind us that “real” masculinity may not be a sacred institution at all. The comfort level that Sean Hayes, Jonathan Groff, or Chris Colfer display with their feminine side suggests to our discomfit that what we define as a real man may be an arbitrary social decision, a social construction not set in stone. The God who has hurled those sacred institutions like the military and masculinity down from the skies may not be who we imagine Him to be at all. She may, for all we know, take far more delight in the girly giggles of Groff than the macho swagger of former President George W. Bush.
Gay men comfortable with their femininity remind us, in other words, that masculinity itself, as a social construct, is up for negotiation.
And when social renegotiation of any sort takes place—but particularly when monumental renegotiation such as the renegotiation of gender roles occurs—those who most benefit from the way things are currently arranged commonly react immediately. Defensively. And strongly.
They are apt to act immediately, defensively, and strongly to keep in place what Cornel West (echoing Edward Said) calls the “normative gaze” of the social order they have established. They are apt to insist that anyone who poses a threat to the optic that they, the guardians of the present order, have imposed on the rest of us as normative should be placed in isolation.
Or should expect to be punished. As Larry King was punished. As Adam Lambert and Johnny Weir have been punished. And as Ramin Setoodeh wants to punish Hayes, Groff, and Colfer. Gay men who, unlike him, have chosen to live comfortably with the feminine side that all men carry inside ourselves, whether we like to admit this or not.
As Frantz Fanon recognized a half-century ago in his monumental work The Wretched of the Earth, no one is a more effective gatekeeper of the oppressed than a member of an oppressed community—one who has successfully internalized the normative gaze of the oppressor. No one works more vigorously to keep members of an oppressed group in control—to keep them locked inside the normative gaze of their gatekeepers—than a member of that group who has internalized the self-image imposed on that group by its keepers.
This is why those seeking to maintain an increasingly fragile normative gaze in rapidly changing societies invariably turn to members of the community they are trying to keep in its place, to do their gatekeeping work. In using Ramin Setoodeh to bear its message that gay men who push the boundaries endanger themselves and others, and that marriage and the military are sacred institutions, Newsweek is engaging in classic gatekeeping, as an oppressed community pushes against the gates. And the manufactured controversy this journal has created to assure that we get the message is part and parcel of the message itself.
Instead, I think what’s at work in Newsweek’s choice to put Mr. Setoodeh and his views in the limelight is something far less savory. I think that this deliberately manufactured controversy is all about showy gate-keeping and not discussion. It’s about reminding Americans in general and the gay community in particular of the price to be paid when we transgress the boundaries of “sacred institutions” (Setoodeh’s astonishing phrase, not mine) like marriage and the military.
Like the masculine. Setoodeh’s analysis is, at heart, Newsweek’s reminder to us, as a powerful centrist arbiter of public taste, about where the unassailable lines lie in our current cultural debates about gender and sexual orientation. About what is not to be touched. Not without peril.
Girls may arrive at the party in as much male drag as they’re capable of donning. Boys who want to act like girls still have their place, however.
And that place is and should remain outside looking in.
Because boys who act like girls remind us that “real” masculinity may not be a sacred institution at all. The comfort level that Sean Hayes, Jonathan Groff, or Chris Colfer display with their feminine side suggests to our discomfit that what we define as a real man may be an arbitrary social decision, a social construction not set in stone. The God who has hurled those sacred institutions like the military and masculinity down from the skies may not be who we imagine Him to be at all. She may, for all we know, take far more delight in the girly giggles of Groff than the macho swagger of former President George W. Bush.
Gay men comfortable with their femininity remind us, in other words, that masculinity itself, as a social construct, is up for negotiation.
And when social renegotiation of any sort takes place—but particularly when monumental renegotiation such as the renegotiation of gender roles occurs—those who most benefit from the way things are currently arranged commonly react immediately. Defensively. And strongly.
They are apt to act immediately, defensively, and strongly to keep in place what Cornel West (echoing Edward Said) calls the “normative gaze” of the social order they have established. They are apt to insist that anyone who poses a threat to the optic that they, the guardians of the present order, have imposed on the rest of us as normative should be placed in isolation.
Or should expect to be punished. As Larry King was punished. As Adam Lambert and Johnny Weir have been punished. And as Ramin Setoodeh wants to punish Hayes, Groff, and Colfer. Gay men who, unlike him, have chosen to live comfortably with the feminine side that all men carry inside ourselves, whether we like to admit this or not.
As Frantz Fanon recognized a half-century ago in his monumental work The Wretched of the Earth, no one is a more effective gatekeeper of the oppressed than a member of an oppressed community—one who has successfully internalized the normative gaze of the oppressor. No one works more vigorously to keep members of an oppressed group in control—to keep them locked inside the normative gaze of their gatekeepers—than a member of that group who has internalized the self-image imposed on that group by its keepers.
This is why those seeking to maintain an increasingly fragile normative gaze in rapidly changing societies invariably turn to members of the community they are trying to keep in its place, to do their gatekeeping work. In using Ramin Setoodeh to bear its message that gay men who push the boundaries endanger themselves and others, and that marriage and the military are sacred institutions, Newsweek is engaging in classic gatekeeping, as an oppressed community pushes against the gates. And the manufactured controversy this journal has created to assure that we get the message is part and parcel of the message itself.
