The title of Richard Greenberg’s play, Take Me Out, winner of multiple Tony awards, works on multiple levels. In its most obvious sense, the title refers to the subject of the play: baseball. Next, as an imperative, the title functions as the main character’s demand that he be taken out of sexuality’s notorious closet; the play begins with its leading character, Darren Lemming, a baseball superstar, announcing matter-of-factly at a press conference that he is gay. Finally, and most ambiguously, the title reverses the direction of the phrase "take you out," and suggests (inadvertently?) that Lemming, in coming out, is simultaneously asking to be taken out, to be murdered.
writes Thomas Peele.
I first met Peele two years ago during faculty collaborations and discussions regarding the teaching of basic writing at Boise State University. The experience was as rich in depth and engaging -- as it was broad in its scope.
The variety of topics thoroughly addressed, the colleagues I met, and the integrity of the entire process rank among the best experiences in my 25 years in education.
But right about that time, the birth of our third daughter and the rigors of balancing a community college teaching load in addition to duties special education , left me unfortunately detached from this intellectual cohort.
So I am delighted to be able to use one of Peele's books, along with Daily Kos in order to re-ignite dialogue and exchange of ideas. In his introduction to Queer Popular Culture, Peele writes:
The tension in Take Me Out results from deception. In an act of multicultural acceptance (with social class as the marker of cultural difference), Kippy Sunderstrom, Darren Lemming’s best friend and teammate, tells a lie. Sunderstrom writes a letter of apology to Lemming and attributes that letter to another teammate, Shane Mungitt. The reason for the apology is that Mungitt, at a press conference, refers to Lemming as a "faggot." Sunderstrom writes the letter, and says that Mungitt did, because he can’t believe that Mungitt actually feels that way. Sunderstrom believes that Mungitt only used the word as a result of his cultural difference, a cultural difference that Sunderstrom attributes to a lack of exposure to more contemporary ideas. The lie that Sunderstrom tells, though, backfires; rather than working to change Mungitt’s views about faggots and others whom he perceives as different from himself, it only puts Mungitt in a position to accomplish much greater violence.
Sunderstrom relies on the assumption that Mungitt’s hatred of faggots and others is, to paraphrase Stanley Fish, a simple hatred, easily overcome through explanation. What Mungitt demonstrates is that his hatred is deep-rooted and complex, not at all responsive to Sunderstrom’s persuasion. Queer representations in popular culture often rely on this formula; narratives are frequently constructed around the assumption that once people know better, they will change their views; it’s important to consider this representation in popular culture since popular culture both reflects current values and teaches them to us.
Queer Popular Culture brings together work from several disciplines that address queer representation in multiple contexts. The articles cover many aspects of contemporary U.S. and international queer culture, including the rise of the queer cowboy, the emergence of lesbian chic, and the expansion of representations of blackness, and work on queer, Taiwanese, online communities.
As Jennifer Reed argues in her essay in this collection on Ellen DeGeneres’s movement from queer, to gay, to post-gay, television teaches us about identity. Among other things, television, movies, the Internet, music and fashion provide various normative discourses that simultaneously teach us and reinforce the division between the acceptable and the unacceptable. And, as Michael Warner points out, "educational practices that rely on the tolerant—in this case, the heterosexual—to accept what might be to them intolerable—in this case, the queer—necessarily overlook the desirability of queer culture."
Peele writes that such representations are reductive because they can’t think of queer culture as desirable but only as acceptable.
And he adds:
Representations that ask for acceptance only make the claim that there is nothing really wrong with queer culture, but have nothing to say about the ways in which queer culture might offer powerful models of community.
Other essays address queer representations from soap operas to gangster films. The book also includes a pedagogical section that addresses the use of queer concepts in the classroom.
As Deborah Britzman writes, "curricula that purport to be inclusive may actually work to produce new forms of exclusivity if the only subject positions offered are the tolerant normal and the tolerated subaltern." Peele argues that because the texts of popular culture frequently represent lesbian and gay people as in need of acceptance by straight people, just as Kippy Sunderstrom represents Darren Lemming, these texts construct a heterosexual audience that is in a position to be tolerant. The construction of this subject position, in turn, reproduces the very marginalization of lesbians and gay men that the text might be trying to undermine, since this construction more or less permanently isolates queer culture. And, as Britzman suggests, a model of acceptance that relies on tolerance might require some subjectivities to remain intolerable.
As college instructors we see scores of students who are finding out who they really are - developing their identities away from their parents for the first time. Queer Popular Culture is a particularly valuable contribution to the dialogue regarding how meaning is made - how the massage of media and popular culture influence, when left unexamined, can shape attitudes for better or worse.
Such lives have always been complex, and with the dawn of their college experience, a hurricane of ideas, values, social cues, and interconnected phenomena sends this reality crashing onto their psyches.
What does it all mean?
In part of his brilliant exploration, Peele discusses gay identity as a source of comedy. For example the "Phoebe’s Husband" episode of Friends participates in mainstream culture’s more or less constant derogation of gay men.
In an unusual move, however, this episode of Friends is also antiheteronormative in that its plot line revolves around Phoebe’s husband, Duncan, coming out as heterosexual; Phoebe did not know that Duncan was actually heterosexual. She assumed, as did he, that Duncan was gay. A situation in which a straight man, who has always performed as gay, discovers himself to be straight and reveals that knowledge to his friends obviously trivializes the traumatic experience of sexual self-revelation that many queers experience. While this episode is heteronormative, that is, it operates from the assumption that heterosexuality is a normal state and that other sexualities are derivative, it also satirizes that heteronormativity by reversing the disciplinary apparatus that is normally invoked to control gay men.
Links to capitalism, free market ideology, and business are also examined:
The actor who plays the character on The Sopranos, Joseph Gannascoli, explicitly requested that the producers of the show make his character gay so that he could expand the character’s presence: "I thought that was a way of separating myself from the other actors, because I would have been in the background most of the time. You know, line here, line there, and nothing really substantial" (Rowe). Queer identity, then, is now specifically appropriated to exploit market forces.
Another contributor speaks of the need for authenticity:
As Suzanna Walters writes, "The complexity and diversity of the gay and lesbian community needs to be represented, not promoted as simply heterosexuality with a twist."
In this work, Halperin notes that "queer culture is likely to suffer, on a larger political scale, the normalizing vicissitudes already undergone by so-called queer theory." Yet his analysis holds out the possibility that queer representation in popular culture, Peele concludes, might to some extent function to reshape hegemonic cultural narratives about non-normative sexuality.
Since identity is the product of a relation of power, queer identity and queer culture must necessarily change as the unacceptable becomes acceptable, however transitory that acceptability might be.
According to Peele, the essays in this text aren’t radical; none of them claim that hegemonic narratives about non-normative sexuality have been completely undermined. Instead, the essays examine the ways that popular culture destabilizes and decenters queer subjectivity.
Extended quotes have been used with permission of the author.