Mitch and Cam, Stanford Blatch, Lloyd Lee, Kurt and Blaine, Will Truman. Who are these people, and what relevance do they share to each other?
These seven characters, among a recent many more, are popular culture’s depiction of homosexuality through television.
Why is this significant?
Since TV is unfortunately where most people get their day-to-day education, I often wonder just how accurate of a depiction this may be and what affect these fallacies may have.
Personally, I have met several gay men in my life thus far, many without even realizing it at the time.
Rarely do they fit the cookie-cutter stereotype that pop culture likes to depict them as.
Such incorrect portrayals illustrate gay men as extremely feminine, often in appearance and behavior.
They are exemplified as the exact opposite of what American society has warped little boys to aspire to be: strong, violent, tough.
In my experience, I cannot name a single television program that casts a tall, muscular, deep-voiced, dirty-handed male to play the gay character.
Another perfect exemplification of this stereotype can be seen on YouTube in the video “Gay Men Will Marry Your Girlfriends.”
This CollegeHumor video, a calculated and alternative reasoning as to why people should approve gay marriage, threatens that gay men are better suited to girls than their own boyfriends, illustrating them all in a single way.
Every spoken sentence begins with “we,” as if all gay men are identical to each other in likes and dislikes, attitude and behavior.
Take the following sentences from the video for example: “We dress better than you” and “You don’t want to go dancing? We teach a dance class.”
In these cases, gay men are not only grouped into a single misrepresentation, but it is a representation of all things feminine.
It is this categorization of all gay men I find disheartening.
Most of the homosexual men I know do not fit this unmanly stereotype, and the fact that each of the aforementioned male television characters enjoy theater and shopping and speaking in high-toned voices misrepresents all of the gay men that exist outside of our televisions.
That is not to say some do behave in these ways; it most certainly does not mean they all do.
If we are led through pop culture to think the sum of all gay men behave in the same way, should we also expect the behavior of straight men to be uniform in all of their likes and dislikes, as well?
We know very well that straight men — and literally all people in general — have very different personalities and interests.
To categorize a group of people as identical because of their sexuality, the way we have “the gay man,” is unfair and untrue.
Collectively perpetuating gays as feminine has negative influences on how they in turn get treated.
Rather than be shown the respect typically expected as a male, homosexual men are instead treated like a woman would be, as sensitive and weak.
These misrepresentations of all gays as feminine supplies straight men with reason to “other” them and treat them as such.
In recent television history, gay and lesbian characters have appeared almost out of thin air, suddenly included in the plots of shows on every major network.
Ultimately, it is no real enigma that gay rights have simultaneously entered political agendas and debates.
But is what we interpret from this fictional realm of our 36-inch television, whether consciously or unconsciously, at all parallel to what we might discover from meeting them in person? You can make your own conclusions, but unfortunately, I don’t think so.
Chloe Briscoe is an international studies major at UF.
