The Problem with Queer Representation

We in danger girl! The girlies are slaying and we are all eating it up! She boots the house down on that billboard chile and it’s giving cash-realness baby! Yas!!! Oh? You’re from Florida? Too bad hunty! We say “gay” here and yes mama do we say it! If you don’t get it, you’re giving homophobe. I don’t make the rules bitch!

Imagine if I wrote this whole essay in that voice. Would it alienate you? Would it entertain you? Did you understand a single sentence? I love using this particular queer lexicon. My friends can move me to tears with their non-sequitur use of the word “Slay”. However, things are amiss. The trend of queer representation is giving capitalist co-option, dahling.

Working in the industries of advertising and film has made me uncomfortably privy to this co-option. I’ve seen straight men who play with scarfs and copywriters write tag-lines like, “If you don’t see it, you’re a homophobe” for a romcom about gay men. At first, I liked this line. My selective dyslexia originally read it as, “See it if you’re a homophobe.” This would be a revolution! Advertising that invites its audience to cross the aisle into a queer space. However, the commercial world is not a place for true catharsis. It’s a fun house of mirrors that reflects society’s desires. I’m afraid we look inhuman in these mirrors. The world of advertising is host to the morally and aesthetically bankrupt. These people chase the reflection of an influencer’s Instagram Story or an idpol-conscious way of writing the perfect tagline. Too often does the fun house lead us to the wrong place, especially in the depiction of queer identities.

The problem I have with these depictions is not a resentment for my own kind, but a concern for those who hate us already. Imagine disliking queer people and being served a Pride ad for Burger King that makes a pun about anal sex positions. The suggestion of sodomy paired with a whopper would only make me more homophobic. In fact: I’ve lost my appetite. This winking ad (and many other Pride Campaigns) reduce LGTBQ subcultures to sex. It draws lines: a four square game of faggotry. A sodomy check list. While I have no problem with allusions to the realm of the bedroom, the coastal-elite brains of advertising forget that most Americans are primarily devout Christians. Can we please skip to a different chapter of the bible than Sodom and Gomorrah? These marketing strategies reveal complete disregard for the same Middle-America that elected Trump in 2016. Flyover indeed. It’s easy for metropolitan-types to forget that most God-fearing Americans still hold conservative values. I can’t forget this. As a queer man from the south, I never will. I still viscerally remember the feeling of walking into a gas station in North Carolina, host to a certain judgmental gaze. I know that reality is not as accepting as the warm commercial world glaring through our screens.

My criticism doesn’t absolve me of my own sins though. After all, I do trade in the dark magic of advertising. I wouldn’t recommend the industry. This only became more apparent to me when I helped a friend “get in the door” as a copywriter. To prepare for his interview, I helped him make a spec portfolio, fake ads to show his writing could work with design. He mostly wrote for brands he liked and I, in turn, would mock it up as an ad. As impish as I am, I encouraged him to expand the portfolio to include an Absolut Vodka™ Pride Month campaign. My own cynicism allowed me to design a color-by-numbers rendition of these ads. I saw this exercise as a veiled criticism on my part. This is how the ads turned out:

My friend got that job. This was no surprise to me. These spec ads are “successful” because the typical ingredients are there. Thus, the dough rises. There’s the rainbow, lesbians of color, and copywriting that implies that vodka will liberate you from oppression. That last point disturbs me, considering the LGBTQ community hosts a high concentration of addicts. That’s the rub: this is not satire — it’s almost 1:1 with real life advertisements of this nature. “Visibility” in America means that you are a potential customer. Aesthetically, these ads play in a narrow field that we see all too often.

That narrow aestheticization is ever more present in Taylor Swift’s music video for “You Need To Calm Down”. This over-saturated, star-studded production is tokenism of only one kind of gay. A crack-laced cupcake of a music video, it has a certain dangerous quality to its imagery: a burning trailer, archery, a food fight, and token-moron Katy Perry in a hamburger costume. I’m not surprised by this aesthetic calculation, considering Swift’s decision to become “political” had to be press-released to death. This video was received just the same. Swift suddenly aligned as a gay ally. I’m bothered to think of Swift’s straight audience using this video as a rubric of what a queer person is. The fact is, most LGBTQ people don’t “slay” everyday, they come in all shapes, sizes and flavors. Swift’s profiling disservices that. This kind of commercial line-drawing could make it difficult for anyone Kinsey Scale left-of-center to come to terms with their own sexuality. This music video offers a SVU-criminal-sketch of what a gay person should be, leaving out others. Well, I’m not that! I don’t wear dresses! These sketches create assumptions. I’m reminded of my RA in college who randomly asked me in the dorm laundry room if I could, “Sew up the hole she ripped in her dress.” Homegirl assumed I was Alexander McQueen simply for my limp-wristed nature when, in reality, I haven’t sewn a stitch in my entire goddamn life.

We also have the ongoing debate of representation in casting. From the recent casting of James Franco as Fidel Castro to the uproar over straight actors playing queer. I can’t excuse the first; actors actually shouldn’t be able to play any person, tree, or animal. However, slipping into a gay role is an easier channel to swim than playing a different ethnicity. There is an icebergian quality to queer identities that any actor can truly explore. I think of Brokeback Mountain or Beach Rats where straight men beautifully portray murky queer identities. These subsurface portrayals nail down the “Q” of the LGBTQ of yesteryear; when, “Q” stood for a more ambiguous identity: Questioning. This word is best read with a question mark. It stands in opposition to the current, period-followed “Queer” of LGBTQ. I like the word “Questioning” because it opens the Closet door and lets any curious soul pick out a scarf. Identity politics of the time erases the question mark and places value on full-stop, face-value statements about one’s own identity: whether that be race, gender, sexuality, creed or class. There’s no toe-dipping, no mystery, no question mark. We only have a cultural desire for actors to play roles two stops removed from themselves. Puh-lease! Let the girlies play dress up!

With the rise of altruistic idpol values, I’m surprised that the media portrays the LGBTQ without a crumb of dimension. Let us eat! The queer representation I’ve seen of late is flat as Stanley. I recently watched Not Okay, a film that lives up to its name. It’s a satire of social media with cancellations, terrorist attacks, and a Caroline Calloway cameo to boot. It was infuriatingly predictable and canned. Satire is one of the hardest genres to pull off. These filmmakers forget that their criticism needs humor (Not Okay features mimicry of a Parkland Shooting victim). There’s a secondary character in this film that is obviously queer in their presentation (they look exactly like JoJo Siwa). They play a crucial role in the film by exposing the lie of the protagonist, a woman who has faked surviving a terrorist attack for social clout. I’m exhausted already. The Jojo-Siwa-by-way-of-Tegan-and-Sara character holds the cards to expose the protagonist as a fraud and is a complete righteous bitch about it. This character functions solely as the moral harbinger-of-doom to serve the hetero star her comeuppance. Yawn. I hate myself for picturing this same side character shaming me for misusing their pronouns but the script suggests just that. I imagine watching this film on a family movie night in Kentucky. If I hate this portrayal, what does that do for someone who wants a “return to family values”? Or perhaps a gender-non-conforming adolescent is watching Not Okay and it’s teaching them to wield their identity as a shiv of resentment. This is regression masquerading as progress.

True representation would frame this queer character as a morally-flawed opportunist. I’m reminded of Lars Von Trier, who has been criticized for misogynistic depictions of women in his films. Melancholia actress Kirsten Dunst came to his defense, “He’s the only one giving [women] an opportunity to be crazy and do things that are real but nobody writes about.” While Von Trier’s films are extremely non-commercial, there is a radical feminism in letting women portray the ugly side of humanity. It plucks them out of the stereotypes we know all too well. I pray for an equally truthful representation of the LGBTQ. I want to see the girlies acting bad– warts and all! In truth, queer people can be incredibly vile. There’s a common trend of misogyny among many gay men. Especially the ones who desire the classical attributes of “masculinity” in a partner. I can’t say I’m above this “toxic” preference. I used to send voice notes on the hookup app Grindr, hoping the virtual strangers would return with their own voice message. In truth, I was trying to hear if a potential trade’s voice was “masculine enough”. This fact is something I am not proud of. It illustrates my own self-hatred. I was seeking out the opposite of what I hate about my own feminine voice. I reveal this to illustrate that gay people are, in fact, human– and flawed at that. For example, I once accidentally shit my pants in the company of friends. I immediately confessed this bodily transgression out loud and excused myself to “freshen up”. It was disgusting, it was unsexy, it was human. Exposing these embarrassing details illustrate what I want. Bring us into the light, however ugly it may be.

There’s also this newly released They/Them ( a clever horror pun to be read as “They Slash Them”). It’s a direct-to-streaming film that boasts a cast of queer-identifying actors attending a conversion therapy camp to correct them of their non-conforming ways. It’s an abortion of queer film. While I haven’t had the specific misery of viewing it, I can confidently skewer They/Them because my company had a part in creating the poster for it. Part of our design process is that art directors meet with account executives who then give us plot summaries of the films we work on. So, I literally know everything that happens, from the reveal of the killer, to the random musical number in the second act. The AE who gave me a rundown of the film was shy about messing up the actors’ pronouns, “Sorry guys, I’m not good at these kinda things.” That was cute. I was truly endeared to her honesty! What’s not so cute is the myriad of client notes pushing the agenda to make sure it’s known that these are visibly queer actors. Apparently a title like They/Them isn’t enough? We received client notes down to the minutiae of, “Make sure we can read this actor’s red hair, so we know they’re QUEER.” This obsession with red hair stood out to me as a face-value judgment of LGBTQ; a window display of funky otherness for the public to ogle from the street. If we can’t see their kool-aid-dyed hair, we’ll never know how weird they are! The pedestrian nature of this client’s desires is something I see a lot in my business. Marketing is ugly: it works on the basest of human desires. People believe that the diverse commercial representation we see is the future. It’s not. Current marketing tactics work on the in-vogue societal trend of performative altruism. Oh, Yes! I will buy this DTC toothpaste because a gap-toothed black woman seems to be happy. I’m so happy to help her win in this unfair world!

I know the cynicism of this sentiment is nuclear-weapons-grade. There is so much to be grateful for about this movement: There’s the excellent campaigns of Fenty, Calvin Klein, and the-like centering folks seldom seen in the spotlight. However, the ad-biz will poison your well, and the water I’m drinking tells me that this pendulum will swing back hard. I think about the commercialized aesthetics of the 90’s in contrast with post 9/11 America. We went from club kids in thongs to camisole-clad women listening to Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros. That pendulum is heavy, baby! In New York, you can feel its swing as it shifts the air. There’s talk of trad-catholics, Peter Theil seed money, and the fight to use slurs. I would enlighten you on the details but it’s honestly a tedious bourgeois class war. I’ll give it two sentences.

So if the clock swings back: will queerness disappear? I don’t think so. The truth is: people will always secretly hate those unlike themselves. It’s a fact of human psychology that we don’t trust people who don’t look or act like us. That’s okay. The human part is recognizing this and doing discreet internal cartwheels to fix it. I myself have always been queer as a three dollar bill. People told me I was gay before I even knew which way my own wind blew. I would be a fraud if I didn’t admit that this is in the DNA of my resentment. When you grow up having “faggot” yelled at you, it’s hard not to have a certain thorniness. It’s also very hard to see people like Charlie Puth and Harry Styles slip on some nail polish and be called revolutionary. These men will almost certainly marry women. There’s also Harry Styles committing gay-blasphemy by dressing up as Judy Garland. This is drag in more ways than one. Styles can’t truly fathom the weight of bearing that queer cross in reality. Celebrity has commercial function and thus is free from the realities of life. I think of when I was in second grade and desperately wanted to wear red hair dye to school. My dad shut that whole situation down, merely stating, “I don’t think you should… the other kids would be too jealous.” Only recently did I realize what he really meant. That’s true allyship: quiet, unassuming, and not on a poster for all to see.