Abstract
Julia Himberg’s impressive television industry analysis, The New Gay for Pay: The Sexual Politics of American Television Production, offers gender and sexuality scholars a methodological tool in what the author refers to as “studying up,” an anthropology-based practice of “[investigating] individuals and institutions in power precisely because of the cultural influence they wield” (p. 6). Arguing in her introduction that “the television industry participates—in complex and multifaceted ways—in the very production of sexuality, sexual identities and communities, and sexual politics” (p. 14), Himberg posits that engaging above-the-line media personnel on their own terms remains crucial to revealing nuances, conflicts, and spaces for generative discourse in purportedly “homonormative” television environments. She suggests, without minimizing critiques of gay TV’s often neoliberal address, that strategic inroads amongst key industry players have resulted in complicated modes of activism. Her persuasive case studies include thoroughly researched considerations of television network branding, program-based advocacy, celebrity negotiations of sexual identity, and political advertising.
One of the book’s great strengths lies in Himberg’s ability to grant her interlocutors agency without acceding to their public relations rhetoric. In the first chapter, for example, she grapples with how formidable gay executives such as Robert Greenblatt of Showtime and Andy Cohen of Bravo cultivated audiences by “[extolling] the virtues of post-gay representations, [highlighting] how removed they are from the realities of most sexual minorities” (p. 46). This critique implicates both of these cisgender, white men in a corporate ethos of shaping lesbian images for the “gay market” by “making them identifiable and sellable to advertisers” (p. 43). Along with this critique of commoditized gay media, however, Himberg provides for an industry vantage point that shapes the rest of her monograph, writing that, “interviewees [including Greenblatt and Cohen] gave glimpses of systems of knowledge about the industry that in fact underscore the significance of measurement and market research to the production of programs, brands, and audiences” (pp. 48–49). Her decidedly ambivalent position opens vital spaces for understanding counter-homonormative subjectivities in television culture.
To this effect, Himberg’s next chapter, “Advocacy: Hitching Activism to Modern Family’s Gay Wedding” analyzes the Human Rights Campaign’s (HRC) and American Civil Liberty Union’s (ACLU) strategic use of actors Jesse Tyler Ferguson and Eric Stonestreet, who play a same-sex couple on ABC’s hit sitcom Modern Family, to promote their 2012 gay marriage efforts. The stars participated largely due to a “happy accident,” Himberg determines, and the HRC took advantage of their surprise response/agreement to “[draw] on the popularity of the show and on the data showing increased support for marriage equality … [to reach] potentially new supporters and donors” (p. 70) in advance of Supreme Court decisions on California’s Proposition 8 and the federal Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). She also identifies conflicts within the ranks, such as the ACLU’s denouncing the Modern Family frame as frivolous. In the end, that organization’s criticisms of Tyler Ferguson’s and Stonestreet’s participation, her sources suggest, deflated the campaign’s activist energy. Himberg, therefore, indicates that pushing aside the cross-coalitional appeal of popular television can fracture strategic coalitions.
This thesis also shapes following chapters on covert advocacy and tactical advertising. In “Diversity: Under the Radar Activism and the Crafting of Sexual Identities,” Himberg interviews publicist Howard Bragman to shed light on how celebrities manage coming out. She details “a form of activism in some of Bragman’s choices … [that reveal] subtle and diverse articulations of sexual and gender identity as well as the complex meanings of coming out today” (p. 91). Bragman, the author illustrates, recognizes many nuances of celebrities’ sexual personas and has clashed with the gay community by publicly negotiating “queer” identified media figures’ later relationships with opposite-sex partners. These managerial tactics, she notes, defy a discursively smooth transition from presumed heterosexuality to “true” sexual identity but also incite ruptures amongst LGBTQ contingents. Himberg’s final chapter on the unsuccessful “No on Proposition 8” campaign in 2008 underscores this point. It employs the perspectives of Steve Smith, the effort’s lead consultant, and other principal strategists to lay out the irony that LGBTQ organizations’ demand for direct gay and lesbian visibility in “No on 8” ads crippled the campaign’s appeal to tolerance amongst undecided straight voters. In detailing how advertising went “off message,” Himberg cogently “moves away from the critique that the mainstream media operates solely in the service of normalizing—even commoditizing—LGBT media campaigns” (p. 108). In fact, she invokes earlier television spots, which many in the community deemed too exclusive of sexual minorities, that actually validated internal dissonance and political ambiguity.
Himberg’s evocative conclusions suggest how “post-gay” rhetoric becomes more difficult to sustain following the 2016 presidential election. At the same time, she highlights how its inherent paradoxes and tensions, rather than its coherence, have inflected 21st-century media all along. The pleasures of Himberg’s book unfold in her exploration of and participation in these messy contradictions of the television industry.