Hi Honey, I’m Homo! Sitcoms, Specials, and the Queering of American Culture by Matt Baume

I read this book over the summer but didn’t get around to writing it up until today. Coincidentally, this is also the day that news of Norman Lear’s death appeared in the papers.

Like The Martyrs, which I read after this, Hi Honey, I’m Homo! is the history of a civil rights movement told from an oblique angle. The Martyrs is a history of the black civil rights movement of the 1950s and 60s where the politics progresses in the background, while the foreground tells the stories of sixteen persons murdered in the struggle. Hi Honey, I’m Homo! is a history of the gay rights movement from pre-Stonewall to today, told through twelve television sitcoms.

Baume begins with Bewitched, a very queer show in which homosexuality never explicitly appears. But in the show’s camp, characters, and actors, homosexuality is everywhere. Baume points out that the theme of the show, a kind of people, different from others, persecuted for their difference, who seek acceptance in normal social institutions (e.g. marriage, family), is a vision statement for the gay rights movement.

All in the Family, Alice, and Barney Miller are next. Each of them present stories about gay characters with the general gay rights struggle viewed as one with the other social change struggles of the day. The main character’s reactions to the gay story lines present the culture’s general feelings: ignorance, revulsion, then growing acceptance through recognition of the underlying humanity of the gay characters. I remember some of these story lines and episodes specifically. In particular I remember the gay couple on Barney Miller who returned in several episodes and gradually evolved from being swishy characters of fun to being a respectable couple raising a child that one of them had from a previous relationship.

Unlike the sympathetic occasional characters on shows like Barney Miller, the first gay character as a part of the regular cast, Jodie on Soap, disturbed me. I didn’t watch the show after the first year because it upset me so. While appreciating the representation of a gay character, Jodie was in no way a model for the gay man I wanted to be. In later episodes that character considered a sex change in order to be with his closeted boyfriend, attempts suicide, sleeps with a woman, becomes a single father. As a teen (I was 15 when Soap premiered in 1977) I didn’t need a confused, soap opera gay role model, played for laughs; I wanted a secure, proud, gay man. I found the character of Jodie to be confused and contradictory, glancing off of stereotypes and misinformation about gay life rather than charting the confidant course I sought for myself.

Cheers is next. Then The Golden Girls. Again we’re back to shows with occasional characters and plot lines. The Golden Girls covers 1980s issues of AIDS, growing acceptance, and feeling our way toward marriage equality.

Baume includes a chapter on the Jim Henson sitcom, Dinosaurs, which I didn’t remember having a gay story line. But the show did tackle social issues and Baume focuses on a particular episode where a friend of the teen boy dinosaur comes out as a vegetarian and then the dinosaur father worries that his son might be, too. I suspect Baume might have included this only superficially gay series just to keep a continuous chronology through this period of the early mid-1990s.

On Friends, being gay was a punch line again. Ellen saw the main character and Ellen deGeneres herself come out, then the show went off the rails with the now gay Ellen becoming a completely different character with completely different stories. The show was soon canceled not because it was gay television, in my opinion, but because it was bad television.

The penultimate chapter is Will and Grace, featuring gay characters I actually enjoyed and popular with the broader television audience, too. The final chapter, Modern Family, the only show in the book I’ve never seen an episode of, ends with a gay couple who are regular cast members getting legally married, bringing the gay history up to date.

The gay rights story through television sitcoms isn’t a story of activism. Television is a mass media that reflects culture rather than pushing it. An occasional “very special episode” needs to be quickly followed by a very mundane episode. So a gay television history is a lens to see what’s happening elsewhere: invisibility for the first few decades of the media; winks, nods, and coded references in the pre-Stonewall era; a marginalized identity struggling for liberation in the 1970s with a lot of squeamishness and nervous laughter. We are talking about sex after all, on a very conservative medium (Baume reminds us of the “Family Viewing Hour”). In the 1980s, television reflected gays as increasingly a part of regular society and deserving of sympathy in the era of AIDS and ugly conservative condemnation. Ellen reflects the beginning of a more pointed political focus, with the first push toward marriage equality and a backlash to the same. But attitudes continued to change and television reflected that, too. Baume quotes Biden in a 2010 Meet the Press interview, “I think Will & Grace probably did more to educate the American public than almost anything anybody has done so far. People fear that which is different. Now they’re beginning to understand.” (p. 226). By the time the larger culture is ready to support marriage equality and gay couples raising children we want to see it on TV, too, and Modern Family obliged.