All in My Family dir. by Hao Wu (review)

Netflix is one of the most popular streaming services around the world, and a quick browse through what is offered on its platform confirms that the company, as David Opie puts it, "is leading the way when it comes to LGBTQ+ representation on TV."¹ With popular Netflix Originals, including TV shows such as Chilling Adventures of Sabrina (2018–present), Dear White People (2017–present), Orange is the New Black (2013–19), Santa Clarita Diet (2017–19), Sex Education (2019–present), Special (2019), and The Haunting of Hill House (2018), as well as movies such as Alex Strangelove (2018), the company indeed demonstrates that it is not just a great source for representation of LGTBQ+ characters but also features in its programming LGTBQ+ characters with disabilities, who are racially diverse and three-dimensional. Unsurprisingly, then, GLAAD's (Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation) report, Where We Are on TV 2018–2019 (a report that is focused solely on North American TV programming) notes that "since GLAAD began gathering data on streaming original series three years ago, Netflix has consistently counted the highest number of LGBTQ characters."²

While there is much to celebrate about the growing visibility and representation of LGTBQ+ characters on Netflix and elsewhere, many of these productions inform, and are informed by, a particular understanding of LGTBQ+ experiences that is firmly situated in a Euro-American context. Hao Wu's All in My Family (Netflix, 2019), in contrast, documents how the filmmaker's Chinese family grapples with his American family that consists of Eric, Wu's Chinese-American husband, and their two children whom they had via surrogacy. This short documentary is thus a welcome addition to Netflix's growing list of LGTBQ+ themed material not least because it brings into view how a male same-sex relationship is experienced and lived in the specific context of a Chinese family. Of course, I do not wish to suggest that Wu's documentary is representative of the whole of China. Neither do I, as someone who grew up in Western Europe, wish to speak for or about this context in any definitive way. I do want to suggest, however, that Wu's personal and heartfelt short documentary film (unknowingly perhaps) problematizes, as well as prompts us to question the dominance of, a Western sociocultural politics of (homo)sexuality that is often uncritically performatively reiterated.

Such politics is evident, for instance, in Alex Strangelove, which centers around a high-school student who is slowly coming to terms with his sexuality and who, once he has determined that he is "gay," comes out as such (and, of course, gets to kiss the guy at prom). What we see at work in this movie, then, is a very particular, situated politics of (homo)sexuality that at once constitutes and reproduces a variety of Western idea(l)s, most notably the implicitly celebrated confessional act of coming out. My point here is not to argue that coming out is (or is not) the "right" thing to do but, instead, that we should question its often-unquestioned celebrated status in the West, as well as what "coming out" might mean in other geopolitical contexts. If we do not critically engage with the rhetoric in which coming out is often framed and understood in Western media, as well as the larger political context in which this rhetoric is embedded, then we run the risk of universalizing a Western sociocultural politics of (homo)sexuality in which the non-Western Other is too easily relegated to a position that is at best perceived as not as tolerant, free, and forward-thinking as its Western counterpart and, at worst, as heterosexist and/or homophobic.

The information about National Coming Out Day that can be found on The (North American) Human Rights Campaign's website provides an apposite example of such universalizing practices. The HRC writes, and this appears in bold on the website presumably to give it extra weight, that "in honor of National Coming Out Day, HRC honors...