The (Not So) Good Old Days
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familiar and acceptable to heterosexuals, and a large part of this acceptability is
related to gender. In the episode on lipstick lesbians, the audience is much less
hostile toward the lesbians who are traditionally feminine. On talk shows, as in
everyday life, lesbians are most acceptable when they are properly gendered—
the more lipstick, the better.
This is in fact one significant difference between old- and new-style shows:
the importance of propriety to the former. In the rash of newer-style shows that
were in circulation by the mid-1990s, the genre drifted away from its more
informational aspects, as its more performative ones came into the foreground.
As a result, two recurring motifs on new-style shows were the inscrutability and
the spectacularity of their sexually, racially, and economically marginalized
guests. The less propriety the better, as an emphasis on blurring and crossing
boundaries developed across many episodes, especially those on favorite newstyle subjects: interracial relationships; the intersections of queer and straight
relationships via the closet and late-life conversions and seductions; and the
many episodes that ask the audience to guess who among a panel of guests is
really gay, or who is the “real” woman vs. who is transgendered. Yet the earlierstyle shows and the later ones both contained the twin drives toward information
and entertainment. There is no doubt that the later style shows were even more
performative and irrational in style than earlier ones, but the central dynamic
remained: of exploring the intersections of the cultural center and its margins
through the lens of liberal, therapeutic discourse.
For example, a common topic on old-style shows is the origin of
homosexuality. The emphasis on therapeutic understandings of cultural
difference often leads to a biologizing of homosexuality that tends to obscure
lesbian experience. Lesbian guests who seemed more acceptable to studio
audiences were those who presented accounts of lesbianism that were devoid of
any structural analysis of the institutionalization of heterosexuality and who
stated that they were bom lesbian. The origin story was almost exclusively told
through the narrative of coming out. The closet has become a metaphor for all
kinds of secrets, but as Eve Sedgwick has noted, the gay and lesbian closet is the
quintessential closet. A central component of gay and lesbian representation on
these old-style talk shows was the motif of coming out. Coming-out is typically
based around a therapeutic narrative exemplified in Richard Troiden’s “The
Formation of Homosexual Identities,” which describes gay and lesbian identity
development as beginning in pre-puberty, with gender nonconformity and a
vague sense of feeling different; at puberty, one fVV