(This paper was written in early 2010. I love it madly, but decided not to try to publish it because of my own feelings on outing. Now that everyone discussed is out of the closet, I thought I'd share it. Forgive the footnotes if they're wonky!)

Blogging the Glass Closet:
Celebrity, New Media, and the Assumption of Unasserted Gay Identity

In March 2010, on the day that Ricky Martin announced that he is gay, celebrity/media blog Gawker.com ran an article entitled "10 People Who Need to Finally Come Out of the Closet."¹ The article makes light of Martin's announcement, making the assertion that his sexual identity was so well known as to be understood by the majority of the public, rendering his announcement overdue. It goes on to state that "he's not the only public figure still hiding -- unsuccessfully -- in the glass closet."² The position that Gawker asserts is that gay identity is a static truth that needs to be revealed, and that refusing to publicly acknowledge that identity in the face of the "general public"'s understanding of one's sexuality is disingenuous. "These people really need to come out because it is so painfully obvious to the world that they are gay," Gawker argues, "and if they finally announce it, we're probably going to be laughing at them." The article also discusses the reasons that these public figures owe their audiences an admission of homosexuality, citing the need for successful gay action heroes, gay journalists, and gay media moguls. Gawker simultaneously argues that the public figures are deluding themselves by not acknowledging that the public has "figured them out" and places the onus on them to perform a public duty, making the assertion of gay identity a political responsibility for these figures, most of whom are not active in the realm of politics. Gay identity in this discourse functions as an easily recognized inherent quality, a political stance, and a component of a mature and integrated persona.

This project is an attempt to synthesize a theory of the way in which new media, particularly gossip media, both reflect and construct notions of gay identity in their coverage of celebrities, and hold celebrities accountable for not conforming to the particular medium's standards of the presentation of a public identity.

In Epistemology of the Closet, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick notes that:

Foucault among other historians locates in about the nineteenth century a shift in European thought from viewing same-sex sexuality as a matter of prohibited and isolated genital acts (acts to which, in that view, anyone might be liable who did not have their appetites in general under close control) to viewing it as a function of stable definitions of identity (so that one's personality structure might mark one as a homosexual, even, perhaps, in the absence of an genital activity at all. (Sedgwick 83)

A fundamental assumption of all the texts that are discussed in this paper is one that Sedgwick articulates, that homosexuality is what one is which can often be proven by outsiders observing what one does and how one acts. In this discourse, gay identity is real whether or not it is publicly asserted, but the lack of public assertion functions as a troubling factor, allowing the media to create a conversation on the way in which it feels it is silenced by the celebrities' refusal to articulate what the media sees as inherent and understood. Gay identity becomes the most important part of the way that the medium interacts with the public figure, with the implication that this is due to the frustration that the medium feels at the inability to categorize.

I will look at the specific ways in which this is argued in reference to three public figures primarily on three specific blogs. This discussion sometimes moves from an internet space to more mainstream media, but the freedom of the internet³ and the way in which blogs function allows for more pointed commentary than that in which traditional media can engage. First, I will look at CNN journalist Anderson Cooper's coverage on Gawker, then Olympic figure skater Johnny Weir's coverage on sports blog Deadspin.com (also owned by Gawker Media), and finally White Collar actor Matthew Bomer's coverage on gay news/media blog Queerty.com. The different venues offer different takes on the way in which they assert a gay identity for the subject, but all of them discuss homosexuality as a salient, if not the most salient, aspect of the way in which the celebrity interacts with the public and crafts his persona.

In this paper, I do not seek to make claims as to the truth of the assertions of any of the media outlets but rather to call attention to the ways in which the discussion itself can be read as function of a "colonizing" discourse, to use Judith Butler's terms (Butler 308). The ways in which homosexuality is read in these texts rely on a sense of homosexuality as something that can always be delineated and understood and have an underlying assumption that the taxonomic categorization of people into identity categories is both liberatory and desirable. Butler argues that "identity categories tend to be instruments of regulatory regimes, whether as the normalizing categories of oppressive structures or as the rallying points for a liberatory contestation of the very oppression." She continues, "to propose that the invocation of identity is always a risk does not imply that resistance to it is always or only symptomatic of a self-inflicted homophobia" (308). In discussing how gay identity is framed in these texts, this paper's standpoint is that the resistance of the label of "gay" may have multiple personal and wider political rationales, but the personal choice to avoid a sexual identity label, as all three of these subjects do, is, I would argue, not the choice that needs to be investigated. Rather, it is the media's resistance to their refusal to identify that needs to be interrogated.

I also want to draw a distinction between the interaction of the media and public figures that I am discussing here and what is generally discussed in discourses of outing queer people for political purposes. In Queer in America, Michelangelo Signorile articulates his thought processes when deciding whether or not to out public figures:

Here were gay [media figures] faced with the most devastating crisis ever to affect their community, who rarely reported on the government's negligent response to AIDS. Of course, this helped preserve their closets... At the same time they gave space to homophobic entertainers... Doesn't that relationship imply collusion and hypocrisy, and aren't collusion and hypocrisy newsworthy? (Signorile 72).

Signorile's outing of public figures, both media and political, took place in the context of political urgency due to the AIDS epidemic. Similarly, Kirby Dick's 2009 film Outrage, which outed political figures, specifically targeted only politicians that regularly campaigned against gay rights, and detailed the anti-gay voting records of all of its subjects onscreen, although Signorile argues that "to out only for [reasons of political hypocrisy] is to make the revelation of homosexuality into a punishment" (77).
By contrast, none of the three public figures covered in this paper present themselves as heterosexual or campaign for anti-gay causes, and often align themselves with queer people or events (Anderson Cooper anchored CNN's New Year's Eve broadcast with Kathy Griffin and Lance Bass, both of whom have a connection to queerness in the public discourse⁴ ; Johnny Weir is frequently seen at gay rights fundraisers and gay-themed events⁵ .) The urgency that the media feels for them to assert a gay identity is not due to clear political harm they are causing to gay people, but rather to a sense that their ambiguity does a disservice to the community and makes people uncomfortable.

The problem with starting a new blog, or a new phase of an old blog, is that sudden feeling of, "what the hell do I talk about?" Especially if one generally has little to say. There's the issue of performance, and presenting oneself accurately (or inaccurately, but appealingly), and in all of the many blogs I have had over the years, rarely have I felt that I struck that balance of vapid/pretentious that truly reflects who I am as a person. I think I'm planning to lean towards vapid in this blog.

Not that it'll be all cat macros, but I make no other promises.

This blog is being slightly repurposed for a new class. The updates will be a lot more frequent and, consequently, probably a little less thoughtful overall. (Not that they were brilliant in the past.)

There will still be a lot about TV, though.

To new readers, welcome! And my preemptive apologies.

As an addendum to my “final post”, I was thinking about issues of how and why it’s difficult to communicate in different media. I‘m a pretty good fiction writer, an average academic writer, and I have no visual creativity. Which wasn’t a revelation to me this semester, but putting together my thoughts on how I function as someone who creates academic work has crystallized a lot of this for me.

I write fanfiction. I’d been writing for a few years when I realized that what I was writing in that context was making many of the same arguments as what I was writing academically (which sometimes led to repurposing story ideas for papers). Looking at that in the context of my struggles to create visual media, and text that incorporates the visual in an integral way, I’m wondering about the efficacy of the way I use different types of communication and I’m more convinced than ever that academic arguments can be made in almost any medium. Just possibly not by me.

I have been following fat fashion blogs for a few years now, first through the politically oriented blogs that referenced the fat acceptance community and then through the more mainstream-seeming blogs that were linked from non-plus-size independent fashion blogs. The personal social justice blogs that I read often incorporated academic theory with personal stories and activism, which led me to position this paper in that tradition: blogging as a way to comment on the social underpinnings of performance of identity, while positioning the argument in my own space to reinforce its importance as my experience.

One of the trends that I have noticed is the rise of more blogs that feature fashion editorial styling, partnerships with fashion retailers, and the decline of an emphasis on the problems of finding attractive, well-fitting clothing with an attendant rise in discussions of following mainstream fashion trends. In this paper I will be looking primarily at the fat fashion bloggers whose work is in conversation with the logic of the fashion industry, with an overview of the bloggers who reject those standards, and how both approaches are successful attempts to create an agentive self.

One of the starting points for finding blog networks that I will be using is the Young, Fat and Fabulous conference website. Gabi, the blogger who runs Young, Fat and Fabulous, has risen from being a completely independent blogger who posts outfits of the day to one of the central hubs of what I term the "glamour" contingent of the fat fashion blogger community. This is the particular portion of the community I will be exploring in this paper, despite the existence of many plus-size bloggers who post outfits of the day in much the same manner as the bloggers profiled in this paper do. The reason I focus on this subset of the community is that it is more clearly in conversation with the conventions of the mainstream fashion industry, and the visual presentation of the bloggers themselves, in addition to the jobs that they hold in many cases, has more in common with Vogue and Marie Claire than many of the other bloggers do. This paper covers bloggers working in a variety of countries, with a particular emphasis on French and US bloggers.

Blogging for this class has been difficult and frankly frustrating for me, as someone who has long kept a blog that discusses a lot of the issues and topics that we cover in the class. I know how to make jokes and link things I like and speak informally, but the process of making sound arguments that I actually back up with references is not something I’m used to doing in this venue. One of the hardest parts has definitely been my inability to find an academic voice that is casual enough for a blog setting. I often have things to say about the texts I consume, but I’m used to having a definite line between the academic voice and the casual voice, even if I’m saying substantially the same thing.

And I wish I had done more video essays with the blog, because I think the process of working with texts has fundamentally changed how I academically engage with them.

The most interesting aspect of this process is that I have a constant internal voice that says, “This isn’t important enough for a blog post,” even when it’s something I would write a full academic paper about. Partially I think this is the perception of audience. I am constantly aware that someone might actually take the time to read this stuff, which makes every post a performance. I am the opposite of shy and retiring, so experiencing the tension between playing to the audience and using the venue as a workspace was often stymying.

As it pertains to the topics of the class, this is actually a really interesting issue to work through, because so much of what we’ve discussed has to do with creation and presentation of the self. I had no idea that there was any venue in my life in which I would feel uncomfortable exposing my every thought, but the knowledge that a change in context can change how comfortable I am with presenting myself, even though I am used to working in this medium, taught me a really valuable lesson about perceptions of control of persona.

I plan on keeping this blog and continuing to learn to meld my academic voice with my interests. If for no other reason than the fact that having to actually articulate academically what I find interesting about various texts helps me to see which topics are viable research interests.

What to say about making a B-movie?

I’m the kind of academic writer who theorizes on the fly; I never have any clue what I’m going to write until I start writing it. I was really shocked to find that this was true with making this mockumentary, too. What we set out to do was make a movie that commented on the nature of documentaries, and then a movie that commented on the nature of zombie movies. There was a lot of conversation about what we were saying with the project in the script revision process (and here I need to thank Tim for an amazing script that he happily adapted, Saralyn for coming up with concrete additions, and Eric for raising a lot of questions that sparked more nuanced thinking for me), and up until the day we were continually discussing how we were going to communicate our theoretical viewpoint within the framework of the film.

This did not prepare me for the actual filming. I’ve only been involved in two student film projects (in 1998 and 2002) and never in any sort of creative capacity, so I had no idea what I was getting into. There were two aspects I found particularly surprising when we filmed: 1) the unexpected thematic shift, and 2) the seeming reality of the experience.

For some unknown reason, I had not considered that filming a group of men talking about a world that is devoid of women (except for the one filming them) would bring up really interesting gender dynamics. Luckily, we ran with it. A lot of the boys’ fantasy vibe that the finished product has is, I think, a product of editing. There is something in the repetition of seeing men on screen talking to a woman and about women, but never actually seeing a woman, that we really didn’t anticipate but which added a dimension of commentary on the genre.

The other effect of letting the camera run and having the “actors” speak for themselves was how authentic the story started to feel to me, as a filmmaker. I always hesitate to use the word “authentic,” but the juxtaposition of real events from our actors’ lives with this completely fabricated but apocalyptic situation made me very hesitant to do a project that would involve me asking questions like this of real people. The process of provoking emotionally heavy or volatile reactions from subjects is one that I found too manipulative. I’ve never had a problem watching documentaries that tackle difficult subjects, but I don’t know that I could participate in one.

Overall, the project accomplished more than we anticipated. And there were only a few injuries.

video essay from Cristen B on Vimeo.

In trying to figure out how to approach doing a video essay, I found myself drawn to Shooting Down Pictures. The videos there, text analysis that acknowledged that the video itself is a text to be manipulated and referenced, used a style I found very approachable. My biggest problem in creating the essay was finding a subject with which I could actually work.

What I discovered was that my normal standards for subjects to do academic work on apparently apply in this new medium as well: something I love enough to know it well, and know well enough to see its problems. I chose Glee because, despite what I argue in the essay, I think it does a better job than most media (and high art) at showing that the world is not made up of straight, white, able-bodied, Christian people. I expected to find what I did find, that the show shortchanges many of its characters, but I also found that it does it in a consistent patterned way, which I doubt I would have noticed if I hadn’t been looking for visual cues. I had no idea the show had such a consistent style until I picked up patterns and realized that scenes were blocked in certain ways to communicate certain things across episodes, and that the breaks from that style meant the show was saying something different.

For example, I had not realized until I began pulling together clips across episodes that the show uses its minority characters as a Greek chorus to comment on the lives of the main characters, and only when separating those characters off by themselves does it allow them to comment on their own lives. The style changes, putting certain characters in different positions in the group, and having consistent choreography to communicate relationships, and I would not have noticed that without having to look for patterns. I actually felt hampered by the time constraints, because there was so much footage and it was hard to make a general argument about the show within a short amount of time. I wish I had another ten minutes to cover just the leitmotifs in choreography, because that’s something that can only be communicated visually.

The ability to use video to communicate my argument was also useful in studying this particular text because it is as much musical as it is visual, and I’m not sure that the text can be fully understood without being able to both see and hear it.