Queer TV: A Comment

On The L Word, Bette Porter (Jennifer Beals) is intermittently overcome by art. As director of the fictional California Arts Center (CAC) in Los Angeles, Bette travels to New York in the third episode to pull an exhibition out from under another museum. She does so by securing the support of wealthy art patron Peggy Peabody (Holland Taylor) through a combination of chutzpah and vulnerability. The tears that overwhelm Bette when she is shown a particularly moving work in Peabody's collection win the older woman over. Bette's aggressive, even unscrupulous careerism is redeemed by her refined sensibility. In the spectacle of her aesthetic rapture, the twenty-first-century career woman is eclipsed by the eighteenth-
century "man of feeling."¹ It is the way that art moves and wounds Bette that drives her to her outrageous and ultimately successful grandstanding. As a storm of controversy gathers around the very show she has fought so hard to win, the theme of victimization by art becomes Bette's leitmotif for the rest of the season. In an allusion to two famous art controversies—the Robert Mapplethorpe exhibition at the Contemporary Arts Center (note the shared acronym) in Cincinnati, Ohio, and the more recent Sensation show at the Brooklyn Museum of Art—right-wing activists mobilize to picket and harass the CAC and Bette for promoting "homosexual pornography."²

The CAC story line serves as a diegetic meditation on the show's own location in the cultural marketplace. Like the U.S. version of Queer as Folk (and unlike the British version), The L Word is shown on restricted "premium" cable, which permits a degree of sexual explicitness forbidden to lesbian and gay images on broadcast television (e.g., Ellen) and basic cable (e.g., Queer Eye for the Straight Guy). The predictable right-wing accusations of homosexual recruitment leveled at queer TV mask an even more pervasive fear that the sex on these shows destabilizes the homo/hetero dyad—that, to put it succinctly, chicks dig the gay sex on Queer as Folk, and guys might also relish the girl-on-girl action on The L Word. The hyperbolic outrage that an awkward idea like "homosexual pornography" condenses and instrumentalizes thus depends on a frenzy of incoherences. Extending into the visual the logical incoherence of the word homosexual, which conflates women's desires for women with men's desires for men, it is not easy to say what homosexual pornography would look like. Even if we decide that we know it when we see it, it is not readily apparent that we do see it on this show. Although The L Word has yet to match Queer as Folk for skin quotient, there is certainly enough lesbian action on the show to offend the straitlaced (sadly, pornography is typically defined by those who dislike it). But there is hardly enough to satiate aficionados of dyke porn. In the typical pornographic video, long bouts of sex are interspersed with half-assed efforts at plot continuity. This situation is reversed in The L Word and Queer as Folk, in which long bouts of plot continuity are interspersed with half-assed sex that lacks even the mild frisson that the "lace and bodypaint" erotica available on the same cable channels arouses. To call either show homosexual pornography is an insult to homosexual pornographers, who are surely better at their craft than this.

What the right-wing opponents of the CAC are talking about when they talk about homosexual pornography, however, is not a lesbian or gay TV show but a video installation featured in Bette's art exhibition that portrays the artist naked and on her knees, having intercourse with Jesus, who is standing behind her flanked by his disciples. The oppositional irony of this piece, titled Jesus Is in Me, divides its audience into those who experience it as sacrilege and those, like Bette, who are thrown by it into aesthetic rapture. That this divisive effect should be named as an effect of homosexual pornography construes Bette's aesthetic sensibility as part and parcel of a perverse...