I tend, as a general rule, to be a rather modest person, erring on the side of underrating myself rather than the opposite. But truth be told, there has always been one area in which I had considered myself superior to the masses: my disdain for soap operas. From my mother with her General Hospital, to Kathy’s early love of All My Children and her sister and sister-in-law’s addiction to Melrose Place, I have always scoffed at the far-fetched plots, the melodrama, the gaudier-than-life characters. I would affectionately tease my loved ones about the lowbrow caliber of their entertainment …a risky tack on my part, since they could easily have thrown Mr. Belvedere or America’s Funniest Home Videos back in my face.
More recently, the “real-life” soap opera of the first Survivor series, by which nearly everyone I knew had become mesmerized, caused not simple bemusement on my part, as the more traditional soaps had, but downright orneriness. When Kathy became hooked …as with many drug experiences, her addiction started from “just wanting to see what it was like” …I would engage myself with something else when that damned stupid approximation of tribal music would start bleating. If I stayed in the same room while pursuing my alternate entertainment, I couldn’t contain myself from making exasperated comments upon overhearing the scintillating dialogue. Although Kathy will tell you that she caught me watching the final episode while I was doing the dishes, I will swear that I was only looking that way to make sure that I hadn’t forgotten anything on the table: my contempt for the soap opera, real life or otherwise, continued unimpaired.
Like anyone with any kind of superiority complex, however, it was inevitable that I would one day be knocked down a peg. My soap-operatic undoing? Queer as Folk. Every bit as schmaltzy and exaggerated as its noncable counterparts, it has inexplicably reeled me in like a greedy fish flopping on the deck, helpless to alter my fate. Inexplicably, because I despise Brian and find his “popularity” totally implausible; Michael is cloyingly innocent, with that dopey grin and fluttering eyelashes; Justin is plausibly self-centered, for someone of that age, but irritating regardless; and the lesbians are simultaneously shrill and dull most of the time. Yet I impatiently wait every week for my Queer fix. Granted, I am utterly charmed by Emmet’s sweet zaniness and Ted’s self-deprecating humor, but it’s not like I can’t find all of that on Will & Grace every week. Yes, I am transfixed by Sharon Gless’s heartwarming and hearty portrayal of Michael’s mother, but if I wanted to see a former Cagney and Lacey star gone slightly to seed, I could watch Judging Amy. And sure, the sex scenes are more graphic than anything you’ll find on regular TV, but if that was all I was after, I could ask my friend at the Bijou Theater, here in Chicago, for some porn recommendations. And queer images in general are so common on TV these days that most of us have gotten blasé about it and don’t even know who every queer character is on every network …not like the old days, when each one-episode-long gay character (because someone being gay longer than 30 minutes was unthinkable) would result in phone trees spontaneously springing up.
So what is it about Queer as Folk that has sucked me in? I suspect it has to do with the fact that its characters do more than crack jokes or fight crime or whatever else occupies the time of other gay characters on TV besides living an actual life. A few important relationships with straight people could be added to the show …friends, family members, coworkers …(not to mention more lesbians!) in order to represent a more realistic balance of what I suspect most of our lives are more like, but overall, it’s compelling to see characters with fully fleshed lives. (Some more fully fleshed than others, of course!) Although I can’t ever see myself being friends, for instance, with someone as self-centered and oversexed as Brian, I nevertheless enjoy seeing him at home, at work, at the bars, at friends’ homes, horny, thoughtful, needy, horny, manipulative: in other words, his complexity makes him seem real. He may not get my vote as the person I most want to represent the queer community, but if that isn’t like real life, too, I don’t know what is. What makes this soap appealing is that it’s not like watching a make-believe world, where everyone is always witty: it’s like gossip. Which makes watching Queer as Folk like eavesdropping on our own lives.
yz@press.uchicago.edu.
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