By Jason Schwalm
Mainstream America has a volatile history with the enduring traditions of the minstrel show. In the mid-19th century, white actors in blackface would perform musical revues interspersed with comedic vignettes that were intended to approximate the life of a typical plantation slave. Their portrayal of this life was inevitably glossed over with silly jokes, dance numbers, and the image of the Happy Negro.
Though many would now call this a long-dead bastion of prejudicial culture, given its lengthy but expired tenure, minstrelsy is much more present in contemporary culture than such an attitude would indicate. The institutions of the minstrel show – however removed from their original politics – still function in many performances that greatly exaggerate the behavior of some African-Americans, stripping them of dignity for comic effect. Rent the Method Man and Redman movie, “How High” or watch a rerun of “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air” for an example of how difficult stereotypes are to eliminate once they are internalized in a culture.
Similarly, mainstream pop culture’s depiction of the “gay lifestyle” is essentially just more minstrelsy. Inevitably involving only the most juvenile stereotypes, the homosexual man must be a “queen” or a “queer” and the homosexual woman a “dyke” if they want to be on television. But however limiting and heartless our political agenda, the ironic result is that the mainstream can simultaneously claim cursory open-mindedness because “the wife loves that ‘Queer Eye’ show.”
All the while, the only portrayal offered of homosexuals – who are no more a monolithic, universally synonymous group than African-Americans ever were – is of a cheerful, simple-yet-sophisticated people who are constantly ready with a joke and an impression of a female movie star. The message is simple: homosexuals don’t want social parity – their rights don’t interest them at all; they are happy just being gay.
We permit homosexuality to be the subject of burlesque or folly, but forget that familiarity is not the same thing as acceptance. An excellent rubric for judging what a culture deems appropriate is cataloguing the entertainment people allow their children to view. According to James Dobson, SpongeBob is a covert operative for gay America; apparently even shows designed for children are unacceptable if they are suspected of containing elements that can be construed as homosexual. (For that matter, when have you ever seen a cartoon character that wasn’t sexually ambiguous?)
And so, culturally, we occupy a place in which Smackdown is appropriate for children, but chummy cartoon sea creatures are insidous, gay pied pipers. If we, as a society, fundamentally agree that huge hairy men grappling and tossing each other around a wrestling ring is more acceptable and less “gay” than the image of two men allowing their lips to touch for a period of three to five seconds, then I think our TV privileges should be revoked. At the exact moment that a social group is attempting to assert claims of personal dignity, mainstream culture has robbed them of that possibility, making them instead into non-threatening caricatures – and done it with a smile.
Jason Schwalm is a junior majoring in English and a columnist for The Cardinal. E-mail him at: jschwalm@louisvillecardinal.com
