Funny farm: Sexuality,neoliberalism and the refashioning of American rural life

Neoliberalism has many distinctive effects, but one of the most important is surely the way it positions the individual, and therefore the individual body, as the measure of all things. For critics of neoliberalism like Lisa Duggan, this tendency is lamentable because it fundamentally impairs people’s capacity to relate ethically to one another. It is also problematic, Duggan (2004) argues, because it undermines our ability to detect in one another’s life circumstances the operation of anything like broader social or historical forces. In essence, living under neoliberalism means living in a world where every person is very much in it by and for themselves. At the same time, living with neoliberalism also means living in a world where people are necessarily taught to believe that it is within their control as individuals to determine where they will eventually end up – through careful investment and the taking of calculated risk, through wise decision-making and most of all through good old-fashioned hard work.

This is obviously complete and utter nonsense. Indeed, it was Marx (1963) who arguably offered the first and most compelling rejoinder to neoliberalism, even before there was such a thing as neoliberalism, when he wrote in 1852, ‘Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past’ (p.15). For Marx especially, these inherited circumstances included when one was born (i.e. at what stage in human technological development) and where (i.e. in the industrialized city or the still predominantly agricultural countryside). Needless to say, Marx did not anticipate modern agribusiness or high-end organic farming, both of which are practices of late capitalist production that arguably collapse the urban/rural and industrial/agricultural distinctions. Nor could he have anticipated The Fabulous Beekman Boys (2010), a reality television show that uses space and sexuality in order to preach the gospel of contemporary neoliberal ideology.

Over the past several decades, scholars of film and television have grown increasingly sensitive to the conspicuously spatial dynamics of neoliberalism, particularly its tendency to try to resolve late capitalism’s various internal contradictions through what geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore (2007) usefully refers to as ‘spatial fixes’ (pp. 87–180). Some of these scholars emphasize the way that spatializing discourses serve to erase difference and particularity. For instance, Victoria E. Johnson (2008) has shown how the deracinated myth of a particular geographical region – the Midwest – was intentionally developed and then deployed by corporate media executives during the second half of the 20th century in an effort to reassure skeptical American viewers that nationally syndicated television programming was genuinely at home in their living rooms, regardless of where those living rooms were actually located in the United States. But as other scholars note, locatedness sometimes also plays an important role in the narrative production of difference and particularity, especially forms of difference and particularity that serve to distinguish the individual from the masses by marking them as exceptional, exceptionally deserving, or just exceptionally lucky. For example, Brenda Weber (2009) has pointed out the crucially important role that Los Angeles plays in the context of much makeover television – the way it adds an aura of glamor and dream-come-true-ness to narratives of self-reinvention that are otherwise styled as stories about courage and personal initiative. And along similar lines, Katherine Sender (2006) has written incisively about the way that Bravo’s popular makeover show Queer Eye for the Straight Guy melded a discourse of metropolitan exceptionalism with a not very veiled endorsement of unbridled consumerism in order to redeem heterosexual men from their own outmodedness in the increasingly competitive realms of romantic love and wage labor.

In this essay, I mean to build on the existing literature dealing with media representation in neoliberal times by engaging with The Fabulous Beekman Boys, a reality show about two gay men from Manhattan who attempt to make a go of it as organic farmers in a small town in upstate New York. Ultimately, I contend that The Fabulous Beekman Boys should be read as something like the most recent episode in a long representational tradition that involves the use of bodies that are very overtly marked as being somehow at odds with their spatial surroundings in order to comment on the unrealized potential of the lone individual. Crucially, though, I also intend to join scholars like Weber, Sender and, to some extent, Johnson in insisting upon the relevance of the gendered and sexual specificity of those bodies. For as it turns out, gender and sexuality play a notably important role in the representational tradition under consideration here. Specifically, they lend narrative coherence to the story this representational tradition seems to want to tell about the agentive subject and her or his ability or inability to ‘make it’ in a world that has grown increasingly indifferent to the plight of at least some of the same individuals whose boundless potential neoliberals are so fond of celebrating, most often in the future perfect tense.

The tradition of using individual bodies to characterize space and, reciprocally, using particular spaces to comment on the qualities and capacity of individual bodies, is a very old one indeed. It has been played out for centuries in heraldic iconography, in the pages of novels, on the stage, in musical lyrics, and on screens large and small. I want to begin my discussion of this phenomenon with a very particular example from the 1970s – the opening sequence of The Mary Tyler Moore Show – both because it so well-known and because it is so often pointed to by feminist scholars of various disciplinary stripes as a watershed moment in the history of women’s liberation and representation in the United States. It was that, surely. But as Victoria Johnson (2008: 112–146) has suggested, the show’s opening sequence was also about a lot of other things as well, including the character of American cities themselves.

When Mary Richards (Mary Tyler Moore) does conspicuously urbane things in the opening sequence of the Mary Tyler Moore Show – like riding an escalator, jaywalking, carrying a bag of groceries down a busy sidewalk while staring contentedly up at the high-rise buildings that surround her, or stopping suddenly in the middle of a bustling crowd to toss her hat triumphantly in the air – we immediately understand that she is a modern woman. ¹ Richards may be someone who is new to urban life, and therefore still in awe of it to some extent, but she is obviously also someone who has started to make herself quite thoroughly at home in the city. At the same time, and precisely because Richards is figured so intentionally as unaccompanied and happily on the move, we also get the impression that Minneapolis is a municipality whose streets and public spaces are not only safe for modern career women like her, but positively energizing, even liberating.

So far, so good – for Mary Richards, for the Minneapolis Convention and Visitors Association, and surely for the millions of Americans who tuned in regularly to watch The Mary Tyler Moore Show between 1970 and 1977 hoping for a laugh and some feminist inspiration. There is a catch, however: as the show’s theme song famously asserts, Mary Richards is a woman destined to ‘make it after all’, meaning despite the significant challenges she faces. Within the diegesis of the show itself, these challenges include sexism, male chauvinism and various forms of harassment in the workplace, all of which are themes the show took up at one point or another over the course of its 7-year run. But they surely also include at least some of the challenges associated with city life itself – challenges like finding a decent grocery store with affordable prices, having to schlep things all over the place on foot because it is too difficult to find convenient parking and trying not to get run over by oncoming traffic, or joggers for that matter.

Inevitably, viewers watching the opening sequence of The Mary Tyler Moore Show in the early 1970s surely also would have had it in the back of their minds that navigating the city entailed navigating some of its much-discussed social problems, such as poverty, crime and strained race relations. But like so many nationally syndicated television shows that were set in the Midwest during this period, The Mary Tyler Moore Show went out of its way to avoid acknowledging these aspects of metropolitan life precisely because it had an ostensibly progressive lesson to teach about the (White) individual’s ability to overcome whatever obstacles stood in her way. Thus, even as the opening sequence of The Mary Tyler Moore Show reveled in its leading character’s performance of embodied optimism about the future, it necessarily also reaffirmed the idea that cities themselves are often challenging places to live and work, places where only the strong survive. If the show had not done this to at least some extent, even if only by way of subtle implication, Mary Richards’ hat-toss-worthy triumph would not really have seemed like much of a triumph at all. ²

Of course, as an embodied individual, Mary Richards had a major advantage: she was the woman who could ‘turn the world on with her smile’. Many other characters whose bodies have been pressed into service to teach us something about space and place haven’t been nearly so lucky. For them, both the face and the body have been made to serve as sites of metaphorical inscription – surfaces upon which otherwise inchoate narrative propositions regarding the character of space and place could be draped or carved. For example, where representation of urban spaces is concerned, we often have to look at what the characters who inhabit them are wearing on their bodies in order to determine whether the monumental skyscrapers in the background signal social harmony or social repression. If the characters who inhabit such landscapes are depicted as smiling and dressed in a variety of styles and colors, as they are in the opening sequence of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, we know that tall buildings represent the collective achievement of a vibrant, creative and fundamentally free society. If they are gray and affectless and dressed identically, as they are in almost every dystopian science film ever produced, we know that the soaring buildings on the horizon have probably been erected at considerable cost to a free society, quite possibly even at its expense. ³

Similarly embodied cues are used in the representations of nonmetropolitan spaces as well. In fact, we may rely even more heavily on the additional information that indexical bodies provide when making sense of rural spaces than we do when making sense of the urban ones. This is partly because urban life is actually more familiar to most people these days than rural life, which means they tend to have more preexisting knowledge about what urban life is like than they do about rural life. But it is also because the entire representational tradition that surrounds rural space is quite thoroughly split between figurations that are nauseatingly pastoralist, on one hand, and disquietingly apocalyptic on the other. These two extremes can sometimes be difficult to tell apart unless there is a human body somewhere in the mix to indicate whether we are looking at the dawn of a new world, or the demise of an old one.

Indeed, since the end of the 19th century at least, representations of rural life in the United States have tended to take shape within two modes of popular representation, both of which depend for their coherence upon certain generic understandings about the nature of farming specifically, probably because it is such an emphatically embodied form of labor. In the first of these representational modes, the enterprise of farming and rural life generally are typically imagined as exercises in cyclical renewal achieved through the purposeful cultivation of life by means of carefully managed, often excessively bountiful reproduction (Johnson, 2013). Think ubiquitous aerial shots of long, well-ordered rows of corn; or, better yet for my purposes here, think of Melissa Gilbert, Melissa Sue Anderson and Lindsay Greenbush hurtling gleefully down the side of a grassy, sun-drenched hillside as their sod-busting TV parents, Michael Landon and Karen Grassle, look on adoringly from the front bench of their covered wagon during the opening sequence of Little House on the Prairie. This is American pastoralism at its finest. It is also American pastoralism at its most egregiously heterosexual, not only in the sense that Charles and Caroline Ingalls are themselves so obviously heterosexual (it was a family show, after all) but also in the sense that the Ingalls’ spectacular fecundity essentially obligates the viewer to see the prairie from an optimistic perspective. Despite everything, we know from the very beginning of every episode of Little House on Prairie that the Ingalls will endure on the land because Carrie Ingalls manages to stand right back up and keep on running after she trips and falls face first into it, surely a metaphor for something. We also know of their fortitude because Pa and Ma Ingalls have three giggling mouths to feed, and two more on the way. And that is even before we get to the three additional children whom Charles and Caroline Ingalls eventually adopt by the end of season 9.

In the second, more dystopian variant of the traditional way of representing rural space that I am describing, farming and rural life generally are represented as the social and economic context for life’s disfigurement or demise, often as a result of the gradual wearing away of its human practitioners through the ceaseless grind of physically demanding, economically unrewarding labor. Predictably, the individual body serves an important metaphorical function here as well. Just consider the opening pages of L. Frank Baum’s much-beloved children’s classic from 1900, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Writes Baum, in terms that would later inspire Victor Fleming’s decision to use black and white footage at the beginning and end of his otherwise gratuitously colorful 1939 cinematic adaptation of the story,

When Dorothy stood in the doorway and looked around, she could see nothing but the great gray prairie on every side. Not a tree nor a house broke the broad sweep of flat country that reached to the edge of the sky in all directions. The sun had baked the plowed land into a gray mass, with little cracks running through it. Even the grass was not green, for the sun had burned the tops of the long blades until they were the same gray color to be seen everywhere. Once the house had been painted, but the sun blistered the paint and the rains washed it away, and now the house was as dull and gray as everything else.

When Aunt Em came there to live she was a young, pretty wife. The sun and wind had changed her, too. They had taken the sparkle from her eyes and left them a sober gray; they had taken the red from her cheeks and lips, and they were gray also. She was thin and gaunt, and never smiled now. When Dorothy, who was an orphan, first came to her, Aunt Em had been so startled by the child’s laughter that she would scream and press her hand upon her heart whenever Dorothy’s merry voice reached her ears; and she still looked at the little girl with wonder that she could find anything to laugh at. (Baum, 2003: 5)

Baum’s intended message here could not be much plainer: at least as far as he was concerned, life on an American farm during late-19th and early-20th centuries was not just difficult; it was soul crushing, and it was certainly no laughing matter. Given the conspicuously gendered character of the passage quoted above, one might easily assume that Baum’s primary aim here was to communicate how farming and farm life are especially damaging to women and girls, and there is probably some truth to such a claim. But what matters more for my purposes is how effectively Baum is able to use Aunt Em’s body as a metaphor for the land, rather than the other way around. ⁴ What that metaphor teaches us is that rural space is not only desiccated, a point Baum might just as easily have made through simple description, but also desiccating, a veritable drain on human life. Indeed, without a heterosexually reproductive family unit such as the Ingalls situated squarely at the center of his narrative to reassure the reader that all will be well in the end (recall that Dorothy is an orphan), Baum’s outlook for American farming, and rural life generally, is indisputably grim, at least in the beginning.

Authors, artists and filmmakers use metaphor all the time, so it is important that I not overstate the case for the uniqueness of the individual body’s significance as a metaphorical device in the context of the representational tradition I am attempting to describe here. It seems important to note, however, that if American authors, artists and filmmakers have occasionally chosen to use the barren and withered bodies of individuals as metaphors for the withering effects of farming and rural life, they have arguably had uniquely good reasons for doing so. After all, and very much in contrast to what executive producer, writer, director and actor Michael Landon might have wanted viewers to believe, farming in the United States has never been a particularly optimism-inspiring or smile-inducing vocation. ⁵ It has not always been the complete nightmare that Baum portrays at the beginning of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, either. But farming is certainly a realm of individual enterprise in which there have been at least as many losers as winners over time, a dynamic neoliberal ideologues are often inclined to blithely dismiss as an ultimately desirable consequence of the market’s preference for ‘efficiency’, by which they actually mean maximal profitability. This was especially true during the Dust Bowl era, another famously depressing period in the history of American rural life, and then again the 1980s, when Reagan-era farm policies effectively sank a majority of small- to medium-sized farmers into so much debt that foreclosure became a virtual inevitability for many of them. But even those American farmers who managed to survive the disastrous 1980s were forced to make fundamental changes in the way they do business. In many cases, these changes involved forming what some consider to be unholy alliances with corporate agribusiness giants such as Cargill, ConAgra, Monsanto and Archer Daniels Midland.

This, then, is the brave new world of American farming and, to a certain extent, American rural life. Neither Baum’s Kansas nor Michael Landon’s Walnut Grove, it is a world where agriculture is essentially corporate in nature and industrial in scale, where exhortations to ‘buy local’ are sometimes perceived as affronts to local communities, particularly when ‘buying local’ undermines the sustainability of whatever large-scale agricultural production actually remains in a region, and where people who adamantly claim to love the land (farmers) nevertheless resent environmentalists when the latter insist that we need do something radically different than what we have been doing in order to protect the land in the longer term. Crucially, it is also a world that continues to reel from the economically devastating effects of globalization and neoliberalism in many other ways as well.

How, we might therefore ask, has rural America’s changed reality been taken up within the representational tradition I have been describing here? Furthermore, how have changes in how we understand embodiment played out in this context of this tradition? To begin to answer these questions, we must do what all good scholars do when faced with pressing concern about the relation between life and representation. We must attend carefully to the representational media that inform people’s lives and shape their understanding of those lives; and to do that, we have to turn on the TV.

In 2010, a reality show entitled The Fabulous Beekman Boys premiered on Planet Green, a now-defunct environmentally themed cable channel that itself became a victim of corporate capitalism in 2012 when its parent company, Discovery Communications, decided to terminate the network after just 4 years in operation. Like many reality shows, The Fabulous Beekman Boys follows the everyday trials and tribulations of putatively ordinary people as they strive to achieve a better version of the good life in the context of contemporary American society. In this case, those people are Brent Ridge and Josh Kilmer-Purcell, two self-professed ‘Manhattanites’ who decide to purchase a farm in upstate New York and in the process acquire both a renewed sense of optimism about the possibility of making an honest living in dishonest times and a gigantic, potentially ruinous second mortgage. While the former theme serves as the moralizing context for the show’s occasional lapses into heartwarming scenes of earnestness, it is the latter theme that really propels the show’s plot forward by generating episodes of interpersonal conflict between the show’s main ‘characters’ – scenes which typically entail a great deal of complaining by Kilmer-Purcell about the fact that he has been forced to maintain his wage-paying job in the city in order to help subsidize the farm. Historically speaking, then, Ridge and Kilmer-Purcell resemble many small-scale American agriculturalists, at least in the sense that their ability to make a go of farming depends on a carefully balanced mixture of income derived from multiple sources, including income earned from wage labor performed off the farm (Osterud, 2012).

This is arguably the only way that Ridge and Kilmer-Purcell resemble other small-scale American farmers, however. Ridge, for example, holds a medical degree with a specialization in gerontology, as well as an MBA. In fact, as we learn in the show’s first episode, he has several years’ worth of professional experience serving as media titan Martha Stewart’s resident expert on healthy living, the position he held immediately prior to giving it all up to go live the supposedly simple life in the wilds of upstate New York. For his part, Kilmer-Purcell’s day job is actually a partnership at a Madison Avenue advertising firm where he earns a six-figure salary. Kilmer-Purcell is also a successful author with several best-selling novels to his credit. And crucially, both Ridge and Kilmer-Purcell are gay; indeed they are a couple. More than a gay couple, in fact, they might very well be characterized as a super gay couple, at least in the sense that part of what the term ‘gay’ has come to imply in the early 21st century is a relation to wealth, and whiteness, and the superlatively tasteful conventions of decidedly metropolitan living.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, it is precisely this set of associations between modern gay male identity writ stereotypical and a very particular variety of decidedly bourgeois urban affluence that necessarily underpins the show’s overriding narrative logic. Indeed, one might argue that Ridge and Kilmer-Purcell’s sexual identity actually constitutes that logic insofar as it is only because the men are so stereotypically gay that the show is able to present the couple’s entrepreneurial foray into the world of small-scale farming as a laudable, if sometimes laughable, gamble, rather than a tragically misguided effort to exhume a way of life that that American Secretaries of Agriculture have been characterizing as ‘Dead on Arrival’ since the 1950s. ⁶

Essentially, The Fabulous Beekman Boys is a comedy of errors. Intra-diegetically these errors include all sorts of isolated mishaps stemming from Ridge and Kilmer-Purcell’s profound ignorance of farming and rural life generally. Some are hilariously ribald, like when Ridge is left to oversee the farm’s herd of amorous goats during breeding season. Others are quite heart-wrenching, like when Ridge and Kilmer-Purcell deal with the emotional fallout from having two of their pigs, whom they have chosen to name in complete and utter violation of every rule of animal husbandry, slaughtered for meat. But really, the couple’s first and most important mishap – the one that hovers over the entire series like a running joke – is the apparent mishap of their lack of judgment in thinking a couple of gay ‘city boys’ with little more than ‘some goats, a llama, and whole lot of drama’, to quote the show’s tagline, might be able to make it in farming where so many others before them have failed.

Beyond the question of whether Ridge and Kilmer-Purcell’s farm will succeed or fail – a question that basically remains internal to the show’s diegesis – there is obviously also the question of how the show itself will fare. After all, in an era when television viewing audiences have the option of watching real people do an increasing number of things naked, including date and survive in the jungle, why would anybody want to watch a reality television show whose ‘plot’ revolves primarily around the cultivation of heirloom vegetables and the milking of goats? The show certainly tries to offer a compelling answer to that question: to quote its opening credit sequence, ‘Farming ain’t easy, but [Ridge and Kilmer-Purcell] make farming fabulous’. Still, it seems relatively clear from the show’s outset that both men are quietly aware that one of the realities this particular reality television show will have to confront is the reality of Americans’ waning interest in farming and rural life generally.

This is not a challenge that The Fabulous Beekman Boys is unprepared to meet, however. In fact, it is precisely the challenge that the show seems to have been devised to address, and in a way that draws directly, if unintentionally, upon the same tradition of representation that I have described above. In much the same way that Baum deploys Aunt Em’s desiccated femininity in order to draw the reader’s attention toward the harshness and hopelessness of early-20th century farm life in the opening pages of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, The Fabulous Beekman Boys uses Ridge and Kilmer-Purcell’s sexuality in order to try to refashion farming and American rural life as something new and modern, sort of like gay pride itself. Crucially, however, and very much because of rural America’s changed social and economic circumstances under conditions of late capitalism, the show necessarily does this in a way that actively obscures both the structural realities of American farming and, to some degree, the history of rural life.

When I say that The Fabulous Beekman Boys obscures the structural realities of American farming, I do not mean that the show denies that farming is difficult. On the contrary, it absolutely insists upon this fact for many of the same reasons that The Mary Tyler Moore Show subtly insisted during the 1970s that urban living entailed certain challenges: if you want viewers to cheer the victories of your lead characters, those characters have to face obstacles that are worth overcoming. For Ridge and Kilmer-Purcell, these quotidian challenges include interacting with kind but somewhat skeptical neighbors, negotiating with contractors and various service providers, caring for animals, including their ornery pet llama, Polka Spot, managing the difficulties of being separated from one another during the week due to Josh’s day job in the city, and even exorcising ghosts from their house. All the while, the two constantly (and quite verbally) worry about their crushing second mortgage, often in ways that create visible onscreen tension in their relationship. These are not exactly the kinds of challenges that Mary Richards faced navigating the 1970s workplace as a modern woman, or even the streets of Minneapolis, but they are in the same quotidian ballpark.

Where The Fabulous Beekman Boys differs from The Mary Tyler Moore Show, however, is the way it theorizes individual agency and the relation individuals have to structural inequality. In the context of the 1970s, a period when women’s liberation was in full swing across the United States, Mary Richards’ light-hearted battle against everyday sexism was clearly meant to represent all women’s struggle against sexism. As such, her achievements were all women’s achievements. Ridge and Kilmer-Purcell’s struggles, on the other hand, are presented as being entirely their own, as are the personal qualities that differentiate them from everybody else who has tried their hand at small-scale farming – qualities that seem to have everything in the world to do with the fact that they are homosexual rather than heterosexual. After all, who else but two gay men would name livestock they intend to slaughter, or endure the seemingly capricious whims of an ornery pet llama? Indeed, who else but two gay men would even have a pet llama, especially one named Polka Spot? Similarly, who else but two gay men would think to try to make small-scale farming profitable by turning to goat’s milk as their primary agricultural product, which is what Ridge and Kilmer-Purcell eventually decide to do? The show’s implicit answer in every case is nobody; nobody else could or would do these things. It may take a village to raise a child, but only two gay men would think to try to revive a farm, at least according to The Fabulous Beekman Boys.

Indeed, if The Fabulous Beekman Boys has a moral lesson to share with a general viewership, it simply must be that whatever challenges small-scale agriculturalists currently face might be overcome if only American farmers were more sentimental, more courageous, more creative and more fun to watch – in other words, more like stereotypical White gay men. At least initially the show’s apparent celebration of gay male stereotypicality may sound like a positive development for gay men where the politics of popular representation are concerned, and surely it is in certain respects. In other ways, however, it also represents a case of ‘pinkwashing’, a process by which sexual liberalism is recruited into the service of neoliberalism, often at the expense of sex itself. Where The Fabulous Beekman Boys is concerned, for example, one might argue that the show works not so much because Ridge and Kilmer-Purcell are men who presumably have sex with each other on occasion, something one is actually hard pressed to discern given the way the show represents their relationship, but rather because their sexuality, which is explicitly marked in a way that heterosexuality is not, makes virtually everything about them seem private and therefore personal. This includes the structural challenges the couple faces trying to run a heavy-mortgaged goat farm, their occasional successes in doing so and, not least importantly, the highly likely but by no means inevitable possibility that they might fail.

In fact, the Beekman farm’s impending failure as an economically sustainable business enterprise is the all-but-foregone conclusion the show toys with actively in order to raise narrative tension. The show can do this without seeming to side with or against Ridge and Kilmer-Purcell in part because the men’s sexuality will function prolepticly as the explanation for whatever eventually happens anyway. In effect, the show lays out this logic: if the Beekman farm does fail, it will not be because small-scale farming as such has become virtually untenable as a business proposition under conditions of late capitalism. Rather, it will be a result of the fact that it was two gay Manhattanites who naively bought the farm (so to speak) and then drove it even further into the ground after everyone else had (wisely) given up on it. Alternatively, if the Beekman farm eventually succeeds, it will inevitably also be a result of the fact that it was two gay Manhattanites specifically who managed to bring it back to life after everyone else had prematurely given up on it. Either way, the farm’s fate as a farm inexorably hangs on them. And not just them; it hangs on Ridge and Kilmer-Purcell’s sexuality, that most individuating of all attributes of the modern embodied self. In this respect at least, then, the fabulous Beekman boys are not just surprisingly viable representatives of small-scale farming in neoliberal times; they are actually ideal representatives of it in much the same way that Mary Richards was arguably the ideal representation of modern American womanhood during the era of women’s liberation.

Ridge and Kilmer-Purcell are also ideal neoliberal subjects in the sense that much of what makes their vision for the Beekman farm different from the vision of other would-be farmers boils down to the question of taste, a sensibility that gay White men supposedly possess in abundance, almost by nature. ⁷ And not just the men’s taste, but rather Ridge and Kilmer-Purcell’s ability (or inability) to sell their super gay, super style-conscious version of American country life to consumers worldwide in the form of their omni-media-esque ‘lifestyle brand’, Beekman 1802. Because Ridge and Kilmer-Purcell raise goats, the ‘lifestyle’ that the Beekman 1802 brand supposedly represents is necessarily one that involves the consumption of a lot of high-end products made from goat’s milk, including artisanal cheeses and soap, which sell for between US$10.00 and US$15.00 a bar. But it also includes a full range of skin care products, gourmet foods, ‘home-wares’, gardening supplies and signature clothing, all of which bear the mark of Ridge and Kilmer-Purcell’s uniquely cosmopolitan take on the pleasures of provincial living. What differentiates Beekman 1802 products from comparable consumer goods, however, is precisely the thing modern capitalism strips away from most commodities: namely, knowledge of the history of their production – knowledge that the program itself serves to provide in the form of extended scenes in which Ridge is shown dutifully wrapping bars of soap by hand while the couple chats on the phone. At the same time, The Fabulous Beekman Boys also manages to differentiate the farm-fresh products that comprise the Beekman 1802 brand from their competitors by accrediting them with an aura of borrowed sophistication that only a gay man (or Martha Stewart herself) can bestow upon a thing. In other words, one of the show’s main purposes is to make the products that comprise the Beekman 1802 line worth their prohibitively expensive price, and it does this with a degree of discursive efficiency that I suspect probably surpasses significantly anything any heterosexually identified organic farming outfit could achieve even if it did have its own reality television show.

Beyond soap and cheese, the show also aids the ideological cause of neoliberalism by marketing the idea of opportunity itself, particularly the fragile and yet largely underdeveloped economic opportunity of American rural life when placed in the hands of lesbians and gay men who are shrewd enough, and courageous enough, to bring their queer eyes to bear on village life generally. For instance, during the first season of The Fabulous Beekman Boys, one episode revolves around Ridge’s efforts to establish the Sharon Springs Harvest Festival. Intended to be a mutually beneficial community event that will showcase the works of local artisans and organic farmers, Ridge is quite explicit regarding the fact that he also intends for the Harvest Festival to serve as a marketing platform for the Beekman 1802 brand.

Similarly, in season 2, the show follows Ridge’s efforts to establish the first Beekman 1802 retail store in Sharon Springs, something he eventually succeeds in doing. Season 2 also includes a harrowing episode in which two lesbians attempt to lure Ridge away from the stressful and inherently unstable world of small-scale farming and retail startups by offering him a safely salaried position as the resident gerontologist at the high-end retirement community they are opening at an abandoned summer lodge not far away from Sharon Springs. He turns the offer down, of course, because the show’s entire moral economy is organized around the neoliberal conceit that entrepreneurialism is the royal road to personal freedom, regardless of where one lives, a point that Doug and Garth, the prosperous gay proprietors of Sharon Springs’ tastefully restored American Hotel, help to illustrate. But even without this arguably heavy-handed allegory about the temptations of economic dependency (or entrepreneurial lesbians), the show’s overarching point is remarkably clear: despite its troubled economic past, small-town America remains wide-open and rife with economic potential for would-be entrepreneurs, particularly male entrepreneurs who happen to occasionally engage in sexual relations with other men. Indeed, even the dopey, goat-obsessed Farmer John, who also turns out to be gay, begins to develop an entrepreneurial itch by the end of season 2.

To Ridge and Kilmer-Purcell’s credit, The Fabulous Beekman Boys makes absolutely no effort whatsoever to hide the fact that product placement-based marketing is the show’s real gay agenda; even its tagline virtually screams this entirely obvious truth. And in a way, Ridge and Kilmer-Purcell probably deserve high praise for having effectively swindled a total of 32 episodes’ worth of free advertising so far out of not one, but two cable networks (following Planet Green’s demise in 2012, The Fabulous Beekman Boys was picked up by programming executives at The Cooking Channel for a third season).

Still, there are some important lessons to be learned from this aspect of the show regarding the current state of Americans’ thinking about the relation between rural life and homosexuality under conditions of neoliberalism. Or, at the very least, there are some important lessons to be learned about the way reality television producers think about the current state of Americans’ thinking about the relation between homosexuality and rural life. First, the show seems to bank on the idea that such a relation continues to register in the minds of many people as a fundamentally improbable one – improbable enough, in any event, that the show actively works to communicate the supposedly startling news that not all small towns in the United States are inherently homophobic and therefore self-evidently backward to what it seems to regard as a underexploited market segment. The Fabulous Beekman Boys does this, in part, by discovering village-dwelling gay men and their artsy female gal pals all over the place, including behind the registration desk at the local high-end bed and breakfast, and even out back in the barn, which is where gay Farmer John spends the bulk of his time. But the show also attempts to increase the perceived value of rural America by suppressing any hint of homophobia among the members of the local community. Since any mention of anti-gay bias would disturb the pastoralizing work the show aims to do, The Fabulous Beekman Boys focuses instead on the over-abundance of neighborliness that seems to pervade Sharon Springs. Figured most often as assistance happily rendered (in one episode a large number of local residents turn out to help Ridge and Kilmer-Purcell ‘raise a barn’, although in this particular instance the barn raising basically involves applying a much-needed coat of paint to an already existing and mostly functional structure), it sometimes also takes the form of softly lit closing shots in which Ridge and Kilmer-Purcell are shown playing host to dozens of friends at large communal suppers served al fresco, and family-style, on a long farm table in their estate’s sprawling and decidedly picturesque front yard. Perhaps cynically, one does begin to wonder how many of Ridge and Kilmer-Purcell’s helpful neighbors might have opted to stay home if there wasn’t a camera crew positioned just outside the frame of the shot. But the spread is invariably immense. And everything always looks delicious. So perhaps people really do show up just for the good food and company. Free lunches are notoriously hard to come by, after all, especially in neoliberal times.

The second thing The Fabulous Beekman Boys teaches us about the relation between homosexuality and rural life really has to do with the newly emerging representational capacity of the gay male body as such. As I have argued throughout this essay, bodies have long been used to index certain qualities of the spaces they inhabit. Women’s bodies in particular have been used to metaphorize everything from dirt to the nation itself, and they have been metaphorized as everything from dirt to the nation itself in return. New times inevitably call for new metaphors, though, and in neoliberal times the gay male body clearly has a role to play. Precisely because gay men’s sexuality has been so stereo-typified as a unique disposition toward tastefulness, creativity and individual resourcefulness under challenging circumstances – precisely because it has been reduced to a queer eye, as it were – gay men actually serve as particularly serviceable representatives for some of neoliberalism’s most pernicious conceits. This is certainly true in contexts where gay men’s supposedly inherent capacity to paint the town metrosexual is what’s on offer. But it is arguably also the case out in the countryside where neoliberalism’s most common effect has tended to be foreclosure – on individual farms and their owners, but also of our ability to imagine what queer life might look like beyond metronormativity’s ever-expanding reach.