Popular Culture Review Vol. 19, No. 2, Summer 2008 | Page 49

The (Not So) Good Old Days 45 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