Alfred L. Martin, Jr.

On November 5, 2008, newspapers, websites, and blogs reported the historic election of Barack Obama as the first Black president of the United States. On November 4, Californians also went to the ballot box to decide on Proposition 8, a ballot measure that would define marriage as a relationship between one man and one woman. The proposition was approved, nullifying the right to marriage that California’s lesbian and gay couples had been granted in a California Supreme Court decision in May 2008. The Washington Post reported that 70 percent of Black California voters supported the ban on same-sex marriage, and 94 percent of these same voters supported Obama’s candidacy.¹ The discourse engendered by these polling data was summed up by Jesse M. Unruh of the Institute of Politics at the University of Southern California: “You can make the argument that Barack Obama passed Proposition 8. . . . Had turnout among African-American voters been along more traditional lines, Proposition 8 probably would have failed.”² In other words, the mantra went something like, “Black folks showed up to support Obama but did not support gay rights—homophobes!” When think tanks and investigative reporters really crunched the numbers, they found that some of these conclusions were overblown. As Ta-Nehisi Coates detailed, for example, 58 percent of California’s Black voters—not 70 percent—supported Proposition 8, a figure comparable to the 59 percent of Latinx California voters who also supported passage of the proposition.³ This is not to suggest that support for the proposition’s passage was not high among California’s Black voters or that Latinx voters should have shared the “blame” for its passage. Rather, it suggests that mythologies about Blackness get taken up and reported, and those fallacies are taken as factual. At the same time, the efficacy of the quick conclusions around Proposition 8 were useful because they fell into a familiar trope: “Black folks,” as a monolithic group, were unquestionably and quantitatively antigay.

It may seem odd that a book on Black-cast sitcoms and Black gayness begins by discussing the 2008 US presidential election, but that event is useful to illuminate and unpack the central concerns of this book. First, and perhaps most important, this lens shows that Black people are not necessarily more antigay than white people but rather that they are imagined as such. And the linkages between Blackness and antigayness are activated across a number of political, social, cultural, and entertainment discourses. Todd Gitlin’s theorizations about audiences are apt here. He suggests that network executives are really just educated guessers

trying to read popular sentiment and tailoring their schedules toward what they think the cardboard people they’ve conjured up want to see and hear. . . . These sentiments themselves are already heavily shaped . . . by the immense weight of mass culture’s formulas as they have accumulated over the years. . . . The trick is not only to read the restless public mood, but somehow to anticipate it and figure out how to encapsulate it in a show. No one comes to such arcane work innocent of ideas about what the market will bear, ideas that circulate constantly through the standardized channels of executive culture. The executive “instinct,” much praised in the industry, is a schooled instinct, formed in experience and concentrated by that common culture.⁴

Gitlin brings into focus how an event as seemingly dissociated from the world of entertainment television as the passage of Proposition 8 in California feeds and bleeds into imaginations about who Black viewers are and what kind of content they will consume. In other words, if the epistemology of Blackness equals antigayness, then network executives feel content greenlighting programming that would conform to such “knowledge.”

The audience for Black-cast sitcoms is often constructed and imagined as “traditional” Black families—father, mother, and children. Most Black-cast sitcoms discussed in this book aired during the “family viewing hour.” Established by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in the 1970s as a way to police (vaguely defined) decency and decorum in television content, the family viewing hour suggested that children and families might be watching television between 8:00 p.m. and 9:00 p.m. Eastern time (ET) and that content should reflect “family values.” Moesha (UPN, 1996–2001) debuted on Tuesdays at 8:00 p.m. ET, at the start of the family viewing hour. Although the series briefly moved to 8:30 p.m. and then to Monday nights, it remained within the family hour for the entirety of its run, thus Moesha was imagined as a “family” series. All of Us (UPN, 2003–2006; CW, 2006–2007), like Moesha, aired at 8:00 p.m. ET and then moved to 8:30 p.m. for the season after its premiere before moving from Sundays to Mondays, but it remained at 8:30 p.m. ET. Although Good News (UPN, 1997–1998) aired at 9:00 p.m. ET, it was sandwiched between broad-based series like Malcolm & Eddie (UPN, 1996–2000) and its parent series Sparks (UPN, 1996–1998); thus, I argue, Good News continued to be imagined as a family series, particularly because of its depiction of Black family and religiosity. Because of the nature of syndication, Are We There Yet? (TBS, 2010–2013) does not air at a specific time, but given its urtextual history as a family-friendly film and its need to be as inoffensive as possible for syndicators, it also clearly fits this imagined family audience. Televisual flow, thus, imagines the Black viewer as a “family viewer” alongside an imagined Black antigay viewer.

The outlier is Let’s Stay Together (BET, 2011–2014). The series aired outside of the family viewing hour (it premiered at 11:00 p.m. ET), which suggests the inclusion of racier content. On the one hand, Let’s Stay Together created a story arc for Black gay character Darkanian that spanned far more episodes than any similar story lines in the other series discussed within The Generic Closet; perhaps this suggests the imagination of a different audience segment than the traditional family. On the other hand, as a late-night series, it remains bound by the narrative constraints of the Black-cast sitcom, unlike a Black-cast primetime soaps such as The Haves and the Have Nots (OWN, 2013–present), Being Mary Jane (BET, 2013–2019), and Empire (FOX, 2015–2020), which are mostly targeted at Black women.

Conversely, white viewers are segmented and can, and often do, have content created for their specific niche tastes. Networks typically court the segment of white viewers Ron Becker terms “socially liberal, upwardly mobile professional” viewers—the SLUMPY demographic.⁵ This group is imagined to be far more tolerant of LGBT people and thus “worthy” of and receptive to LGBT programming, such as Will & Grace (NBC, 1998–2006; 2017–present), Tales of the City (PBS, 1994; Showtime, 1998, 2001; Netflix, 2019), Modern Family (ABC, 2009–2020), and Sex Education (Netflix, 2019–present). As the discursive understanding of Proposition 8 makes clear, Black folks are rarely imagined in such ways because Blackness is understood as monolithic.

The Black-cast sitcom is similarly bound to such discursive imaginings of Blackness and Black audiences. Black gayness’s movement within the Black-cast sitcom is a specific industrial construct rooted in an “understanding” of Black folks’ intolerance of homosexuality, often thought to derive from their (again, monolithically construed) religiosity. Thus, the Black-cast sitcom functions unlike any other contemporary genre with respect to Black gayness. As this book’s title suggests, the Black-cast sitcom erects a “generic closet” around Black gayness. The generic closet, as I have argued elsewhere, “refers to the ways the Black-cast sitcom functions as an industrial representation of an imagined, monolithic Black audience, and, as such, contains Black gayness into specific coming-out episodes/story arcs before discarding these characters for other ‘mainstream’ stories.”⁶ I will return to a deeper theoretical discussion of the generic closet later. For now, I want to reiterate that the generic closet is an industrial construction of imagined Black audiences and their relationship to Black gayness.

The generic closet is found within channels’, platforms’, and networks’ engagement with Blackness. It shapes practices in writers’ rooms, spurs deployment of the laugh track, and can be observed within the reception practices of Black gay men. The Generic Closet is concerned with the discursive circulation of Black gay maleness within the Black-cast sitcom and the knowledge Black gay bodies are called on to produce within it. Foucault asserts that “power produces knowledge . . . that power and knowledge directly imply one another, that there is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations.”⁷ In The Generic Closet, I seek to understand the systems of power that produce ideologies about Black gayness and the relationship of knowledge production to Black gay audience reception, production, comedy, and Black masculinity.

With these cultural, social, and industrial issues in mind, The Generic Closet undertakes a circuit of media study approach to examine the various sites where Blackness, broadly—and Black gayness, specifically—are produced. Julie D’Acci notes, “Some analyses [tend to] overlook the conditions and specific shaping forces of production; the conditions and intricacies of reception; and . . . the specificities of the televisual form (from narrative structure to genre to the operations of televisual techniques),” which results in analyses that do not fully consider the multiple spaces where meaning can be made.⁸ In The Generic Closet, I attempt to heed D’Acci’s warning by examining aspects of sociocultural and industrial contexts, production, postproduction, and audience reception. In particular, I study the production of episodes of Black-cast sitcoms with Black gay characters to more fully understand the ways Black gayness is created and “lives” in Black-cast sitcom worlds. In so doing, I build on John T. Caldwell’s approach by incorporating interviews with industry personnel to centralize Blackness (both the Blackness of industrial workers and the Blackness of their subjects and imagined audiences).⁹ In addition, The Generic Closet builds on Roderick A. Ferguson’s suggestion that a queer of color analysis investigates “how intersecting racial, gender, and sexual practices antagonize or conspire with the normative investments of nation-states and capital.”¹⁰ The book is dually concerned with how the intersections of Blackness, maleness, and homosexuality function within the confines of hegemonic culture and how those intersections are deployed within a capitalist media culture. In particular, this book investigates the history of how Black-cast sitcoms make and circumscribe spaces for Black gayness within the genre’s normative ranks.

I want to take a moment to step back to assert the importance of this area of study. When laypeople and scholars talk about gayness on television, they tend to mean white gayness. This flattening of gayness is constitutive, for as Melanie E. S. Kohnen argues, “queer visibility in the mainstream media depends on discourses of whiteness.”¹¹ When gayness is conflated with whiteness, the discussion loses the specificity inherent in the different trajectories of Black gayness and white gayness within television discourse. That Black and white gayness in Black-cast and white- and multicultural-cast sitcoms have developed differently should come as no surprise. However, when media scholars turn their attention to gayness on television, they often exnominate whiteness.¹²

Suzanna Danuta Walters claims, for example, “In this era of liberal gay visibility, contemporary culture has other motifs to choose from, and the coming-out story no longer represents both the beginning and the end of how gay identity is imagined in popular media.”¹³ Walters’s assertion appears to be valid for white-cast sitcoms when they feature Black gay characters. White- and multicultural-cast sitcoms tend to subscribe to post-racial and post-gay ideologies. These ideologies suggest that both race and gayness no longer matter as axes of difference and that we are all simply human. These presumptions manifest in the rare instance that Black gay characters appear in white- and multicultural-cast sitcoms, by engaging in little, if any, discussion of their Blackness and focusing primarily on their gayness. Examples include Spin City (ABC, 1996–2002), Brooklyn Nine Nine (FOX, 2013–2018; NBC, 2019–present), and Sirens (USA, 2014–2015), which fit within the respectable gay model. The respectable gay model follows Amber B. Raley and Jennifer L. Lucas’s theorization that respectable LGBT characters would be seen in “diverse roles that go beyond the socially acceptable stereotypes” and are seen “interact[ing] with children and hav[ing] romantic relationships.”¹⁴ Conversely, the sissy regular model can be observed in series like Don’t Trust the B**** in Apartment 23 (ABC, 2012–2013). This model, according to Stephen Tropiano, is represented by a sitcom with a costarring or series regular male character that embodies stereotypically feminine behaviors.¹⁵ As I demonstrate throughout this book, whereas gay men in white- and multicultural-cast sitcoms have become post-gay (implicitly gesturing toward a post–coming-out state of being), that presentation has not been extended to Black gay men in Black-cast sitcoms, who are not even granted regular or recurring status within the Black-cast sitcom.

When examining the representational landscape of Black gay characters in Black-cast sitcoms, a very different history appears. Only twenty-five episodes of Black-cast sitcoms have aired since 1977’s Sanford Arms (NBC, 1977) that included such characters (see app. A). Although Black gay characters have appeared in a plethora of series and broadcast eras, they have remained narratively and industrially trapped in what I call the pedagogical gay model. These Black gay characters are called on to educate the (presumably Black) audience about homosexuality while reifying the boundaries of hegemonic Black masculinity. The short-lived Sanford Arms, a spinoff of Sanford and Son (NBC, 1972–1977), featured a pedagogical Black gay character, Travis. He drew on a broader move to decouple femininity as a stereotypical marker of gayness for one-off characters in television—a strategy seen in other “relevance” programming of the 1970s. Travis was a civil rights attorney fighting for the rights of gay communities and, by all outward appearances, looked “normal”—or in other words, his gayness could not be read onto his body via costume or a “swish act.” Travis was pedagogical in that he challenged viewers to think differently about what a Black gay man could be within the context of a Black-cast sitcom.

Because Black audiences are imagined as less liberal or more antigay than SLUMPY audiences, the television industry appears to suggest that Black-cast sitcom audiences are not ready for a recurring Black gay character. This industry lore about the Black viewer shapes “what gets produced as well as how, where, and when productions get watched.”¹⁶ In an effort to parse the industry lore around Black-cast sitcoms, I not only examine what and how Black gayness is produced but also explore how Black gay men—the very bodies these Black-cast sitcoms claim to episodically represent—watch and make meaning from these representations.

The Primacy of the Black-Cast Sitcom

Throughout this book (and in its subtitle), I employ the term Black-cast sitcom. Because of the difficulty in pinning down some defining criteria with respect to Black-cast sitcoms, I want to discuss what I mean when I use the term. This book is about Black-cast sitcoms, not Black-cast comedies. I distinguish the Black-cast sitcom from the Black-cast comedy by its use of a laugh track—whether that laugh track is “real” or created in postproduction. Thus, Insecure (HBO, 2016–present), which has a recurring Black gay male character, is not considered within this book because it does not employ a laugh track.

When asked, some of the Black gay men I interviewed for The Generic Closet understood the Black-cast sitcom in three broad ways: (1) the primary racial background of the cast, (2) the racial background of the majority of the actual (versus imagined) audience, and (3) the show’s interest in engaging issues related to Black American experiences. Charles, who will be introduced in greater detail in chapter 4, where I center Black gay men’s reception practices, articulated these three main criteria. He said that a Black-cast sitcom is one that has “members of the cast who identify, or the audience identifies, as being black or African American . . . [and] speaks about issues specific to the black community.”¹⁷ Charles begins with a discussion of the cast composition, revealing that the visual recognition of the cast as Black folks signals a Black-cast sitcom to him. He went on to discuss the idea that the audience is African American. In this sense, Charles signals the importance of reception practices. To Charles, a series like The Cosby Show (NBC, 1985–1992) is less of a Black-cast sitcom because although it had a primarily Black cast, it did not have a primarily Black audience. In fact, Janet Staiger argues that The Cosby Show’s comedic style “paralleled its white middle-class ambiance.”¹⁸ Such ambivalence ultimately meant that a series like The Cosby Show, unlike Moesha, Good News, All of Us, Are We There Yet?, and Let’s Stay Together, did not mediate Black communities’ specific issues.

In The Generic Closet, I use a definition similar to Robin R. Means Coleman’s and Charlton D. McIlwain’s: “Black situation comedy describes programming that employs a core cast of African American characters and focuses on those characters’ sociocultural, political and economic experiences.”¹⁹ Instead of deploying “black situation comedy,” as Coleman and McIlwain do, I use the term Black-cast sitcom to denote my focus on the racial makeup of the primary cast. In addition, I follow the tradition of scholars who call musicals with Black casts not Black musicals but Black-cast musicals to focus on the racial makeup of the cast and not necessarily the race of those involved in production.²⁰ At the same time, when examining the Black-cast sitcom, I want to heed Tricia Rose’s call to “foreground . . . the historical context for the creation, dissemination, and reception of Black popular forms.”²¹ Thus, in The Generic Closet, I am not only principally concerned with the Black-cast sitcom as image production but also interested in exploring the histories of networks, startup networks (netlets), channels, and series; the negotiations within the writers’ rooms; the production of the laugh track; and audience reception practices.

Kristal Brent Zook details the unprecedented ways Black writers and producers were utilized in the creation of Black-cast television series in the 1990s, such as In Living Color (FOX, 1990–1994) and Living Single (FOX, 1993–1998).²² Zook explains that Black writers and producers often exercised a significant degree of agency with respect to the series and scripts they created. However, as actor, writer, and producer Tim Reid noted, there is “always somebody else you’ve got to answer to in network television. . . . There’s this guy and this guy’s boss. Then that division and that division’s boss. Then the network.”²³ As Reid underscores, the television production buck does not stop at the level of series production. And the higher one climbs from the series level, the less likely it becomes that an executive greenlighting a series will be Black. In this way, many Black-cast sitcoms that make it to air represent an idea of the Black image and a commodification of Blackness, a standpoint that undergirds this book. Put more eloquently by James Baldwin, “This country’s image of the Negro, which hasn’t very much to do with the Negro, has never failed to reflect with a frightening accuracy the state of mind of the country.”²⁴ What I point to here is that the Black-cast sitcom is undergirded by the ideologies of the largely white television industry from which the Black-cast sitcom is granted existence on the airwaves. This white hegemonic (mis)understanding of Blackness often results in Black-cast sitcom humor that is “based on race and is a parody of Blackness.”²⁵

When Black gay bodies are used in the Black-cast sitcom form, they are filtered through existing (il)logics of white media industry executives. Given the imagined inextricable linkage of antigay sentiment among Black cultures and the monolithic industrial imagining of Blackness, these antigay ideologies come to represent Black people and thus come to function as a kind of Black public sphere. Catherine Squires posits that a Black public sphere consists of “mediated spaces where people can gather and share information . . . [in an attempt to convey] that dominant publics should reject pejorative definitions of a marginal group’s identity, cultural practices, rights, and privileges.”²⁶ To be sure, the Black-cast sitcom is often greenlit by and filtered through white network executives’ minds. However, because of the bodies on screen and often because of the racial makeup of its writing and production staff, the form is imagined as a Black public sphere that can be taken to task for the ways it mediates Black bodies. The Black-cast sitcom not only rejects “pejorative definitions” of Blackness but also is imagined as a discursive housing for Black ideologies about race, gender, class, sexuality, and cultural politics.

The primacy of the Black-cast sitcom is rooted in the intersectional linkages of ethnicity, sexuality, and humor. In defining “representational intersectionality,” Kimberlee Crenshaw details the interconnected ways “images are produced through a confluence of prevalent narratives of race and gender, as well as a recognition of how contemporary critiques of racist and sexist representation marginalize women of color.”²⁷ In adopting a Black feminist stance, Crenshaw acknowledges that she is particularly interested in Black women. The Generic Closet adopts representational intersectionality to examine how the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality—namely, Blackness, maleness, and gayness—interlink to marginalize Black gay men in the Black-cast sitcom.

The sitcom broadly—and the Black-cast sitcom, specifically—seeks to find humor in situations that often include marking one character as “comic.” Understanding the theories of humor, explored in chapter 3, helps to explain how, why, and when the comic is marked within a Black-cast sitcom. I propose that the Black-cast sitcom uses humor as a means to reify “the status quo either by denigrating a certain sector of society . . . or by laughing at the alleged stupidity of a social outsider”—in this case, the Black gay man.²⁸ Even as the Black-cast sitcom hails Black gayness in an episodic fashion, the genre can use humor not only to position Black gayness as an outsider but also to reify its deviation from Black normativity. The centrality of this kind of humor is particularly important and illuminating when discussing the inclusion of new characters, especially Black gay characters, into the Black-cast sitcom structure.

Stereotyping, Controlling Images, and the Black Gay Image

As much as I loathe scholarly discussions of stereotype, particularly the positive/negative binary, I would be remiss if I did not engage with them briefly. In particular, I argue that the mediation of Black gayness is tied to the specific boundaries of Black masculinity and its own mediation. Stuart Hall theorizes the primacy of the stereotype as fixing, essentializing, reducing, and naturalizing differences.²⁹ In the process, the stereotype engenders a binary system for drawing boundaries around what is inside and what is outside.

Ronald L. Jackson and Celnisha L. Dangerfield assert that Black men’s bodies are stereotyped in one of three ways: as “(1) violent, (2) sexual, and (3) incompetent.”³⁰ Such stereotyping of heterosexual Black men was activated to demonstrate their difference from their white heterosexual male counterparts. Historically, these scripts have become a permanent fixture in the representational landscape and have helped determine Black masculinity’s coherence and legibility. The virile and violent Black man initially appeared as a necessity for white Americans in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries to justify slavery. The presumption was that if Black men were made free, they would rape white women (and, perhaps more horrifically in these minds, produce mixed-race children). Kobena Mercer asserts that a history of oppression rooted in colonialism and slavery has led Black men to adopt “certain patriarchal values such as physical strength, sexual prowess and being in control as a means of survival against the repressive and violent system of subordination to which they have been subjected.”³¹ In 1970s blaxploitation films and in contemporary rap music, Black heterosexual men attempted to reclaim imagery of Black men as virile and violent by refashioning those terms as a source of pride among Black heterosexual people generally and Black heterosexual men specifically.

In the process of this reclamation, this “new” Black masculinity was also rearticulated through its binary opposite. Steve Estes argues that because manhood was systematically denied to Black men by white men, Black men had to find an abject object to stereotype in order to refute their own stereotyping.³² Achieving political power and social status for Black men involved adhering to particular scripts for Black masculinity—and these scripts did not include masculinities that deviated from heterosexuality. Predictably, the oppositional boogeyman was the Black gay man. Marlon Riggs asserts,

What lies at the heart . . . of black America’s pervasive cultural homophobia is the desperate need for a convenient Other within the community, yet not truly of the community, an Other onto which blame for the chronic identity crises afflicting the black male psyche can be readily displaced, an indispensable Other that functions as the lowest common denominator of the abject, the base line of transgression beyond which a black man is no longer a man, no longer black, an essential Other against which black men and boys maturing, struggling with self-doubt, anxiety, feelings of political, economic, social, and sexual inadequacy—even impotence—can always measure themselves and by comparison seem strong, adept, empowered, superior.³³

Heterosexual Black masculinity is preserved because to not conform is to be constructed as “gay.” The ultramasculine performances of Black masculinity “claim visibility for their hardness only at the expense of the vulnerability of black women and the feminization of gay black men.”³⁴ By staking claim to heterosexual sexual prowess and making femininity abject in both women and gay men, the very notion of a Black masculinity is reified. E. Patrick Johnson asserts that “much of the rhetoric of Black Nationalism disavows the black homosexual as antiblack in order to maintain the fiction of a coherent black male heterosexuality and to assuage the specter of the homosexual Other within.”³⁵ The performance of a hegemonically approved Black masculinity works within a psychoanalytic framework wherein desire and fear exist in tension with one another. Although these prescriptions of “failed” Black masculinity certainly can function discursively within white gayness, Black gayness is understood as both failed masculinity and failed Blackness, making the Black gay man neither “manly” enough nor “Black” enough.

Words like fag(got), punk, soft, and fruity are associated with homosexuality, whereas strength and sexual prowess become generally conflated with heterosexual masculinity, specifically heterosexual Black masculinity. The terms associated with homosexuality serve as the hegemonic force to shore up the imaginary and porous boundaries of Black masculinity.

To understand the Black gay image means that Black masculinity must also be understood as a monolithic conceptualization. The imagination of all Black heterosexual masculinities as antigay dances just at the edges of The Generic Closet. Black gayness within the Black-cast sitcom occupies a subject position as the abject other that works to discipline Black heterosexual masculinity. Thus, Black gayness works as a controlling image that, as Jasmine Cobb and Robin R. Means Coleman theorize, functions “as justifications for various oppressions by distorting reality through reducing the stereotyped subject to a controlled object.”³⁶ In The Generic Closet, I extend Coleman and Cobb’s controlling images to suggest that Black masculinity, and the protection of its porous boundaries, is part of the function of controlling images of Black gayness and its mediation within the Black-cast sitcom.

Studying Black Gayness on TV

The Generic Closet is a book about Black gayness. I deliberately use the phraseology Black gay versus gay Black throughout this book. This move is feminist in its marrying of the political and the personal. It is political in its attempt to center Blackness as a major axis of identity for Black gay men in Black-cast sitcoms. I understand the scholarly tension between Black gay and gay Black identities. Gregory Conerly elucidates that this hierarchy of identities is a “central conflict many African American lesbians, bisexuals and gays experience in dealing with two identities that are often at odds with each other.”³⁷ The difference between these two identities, according to Darieck Scott, is that gay Black men have “political, social and cultural allegiances . . . to ‘white’ gay politics, to ‘white’ gay men and to ‘white’ cultural forms,” whereas a Black gay man’s identity is rooted in Blackness, including Black culture, Black politics, and presumably a romantic preference for other Black gay men.³⁸ This debate between Black gay and gay Black is reductive in “real life.” However, for the purposes of The Generic Closet, I deploy the term Black gay.

It is personal in my own belief that I could presumably conceal my gayness (how well I am able to do that is debatable). For example, in any situation into which I walk, my Blackness and maleness are the clues someone encountering me for the first time uses to read my body. My gayness might not be detectable until I speak or stand a certain way or perform a certain act. Therefore, within this book, I lead with the Blackness of the characters and real-life men I study. In so doing, I stake Black gay men’s (and my own) position as an integral component of intersectional Blackness.

The Generic Closet contributes to the little existing research that specifically addresses Black gay televisual representation. Other studies have focused on a single representation of Black gay men within a single media text, whereas this project puts these representations in conversation with one another. The inquiries into images of Black gay men in television are often sections within book chapters: Walters briefly discusses Spin City in All the Rage, as does Steven Capsuto in Alternative Channels.³⁹ In addition, Herman Gray devotes a section of a chapter in Watching Race to In Living Color, and E. Patrick Johnson does the same in Appropriating Blackness.⁴⁰ Moreover, Samuel Chambers analyzes Six Feet Under (HBO, 2001–2005).⁴¹ All of these authors use textual analysis as their primary methodology. While each author gestures toward sociocultural contexts, each is primarily interested in the image rather than production and audience reception.

Even when scholars turn to lengthier examinations of Black gayness, they typically retain a focus on examining the image alone. Guy Mark Foster explicitly discusses matters of race and how they can become conflated with desire in his examination of Six Feet Under.⁴² Johnson (re)turns to In Living Color and Eddie Murphy to examine “negro faggotry.”⁴³ Gust A. Yep and John P. Elia examine notions of “authentic blackness” on Noah’s Arc (Logo, 2005–2006).⁴⁴ These authors are largely bringing specific theoretical approaches to bear on texts without examining other forces that shape the ways Black gay images are created, distributed, understood, and consumed—an undertaking attempted in The Generic Closet.

Closets, Generic and Otherwise

This project hinges on a theorization of the “generic closet.” To do that work, it is necessary to work backward, beginning with the concept of “the closet.” The closet is principally related to queer knowledge production in a heteronormative culture. Foucault contends that in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, “the sexuality of those who did not like the opposite sex” came under scrutiny and marked a time when “these figures, scarcely noticed in the past” were called on to “step forward and speak [and] make the difficult confession of who they were.”⁴⁵ Foucault’s mention of “stepping forward” became the root of the theoretical understanding of the closet as an organizing principle for gay men and lesbians. But Eve Sedgwick locates the predominance of “the closet” within a public/private binarism that emerged and was made possible by “the post-Stonewall gay politics oriented around coming out of the closet.”⁴⁶ Such a configuration presupposes that being “in” the closet is cloaked within darkness, seclusion and, often, deceit. Conversely, coming out of the closet represents—and within a post-Stonewall gay politic, represented—liberation from the confines of secrecy and darkness, and such liberation is typically achieved via a speech act. Being “out of” or “in” the closet is determined by speech acts—either the utterance of “I’m gay” (or some such declaration) or what Sedgwick calls “the speech act of silence,” which separate the out from the in.⁴⁷ More importantly, the closet is understood as an important organizing logic for the lives of gay folk. Jeffrey McCune summarizes that “the closet has become a universal apparatus that describes an oppressive space where individuals dwell” and where “the given solution for finding freedom” is “within the process of ‘coming out.’”⁴⁸

The “freedom” associated with coming out is not just applicable within the lives of “real” people. It shapes and is shaped by television’s engagement with gayness. The speech act of saying “I’m gay” is generative in a way that Sedgwick’s speech act of silence is not. “I’m gay” engenders drama and knowledge production that can be deployed within a series. Lynne Joyrich stresses that the closet has become “an implicit TV form—a logic governing not only the ways in which gays and lesbians are represented but also the generation of narratives and positions on and for TV.”⁴⁹ Furthermore, as Walters argues, “Because ‘coming out’ does present a before and after, it presents a problem for those coming out, for their friends, for their family, for the plot itself.”⁵⁰ Thus, as Joyrich and Walters forward, coming out not only is useful as a televisual means of knowledge production but also generates drama—whether in series categorized generically as dramas or sitcoms. The overarching import of the closet (and, more importantly, coming out of it) remains a useful industrial framework through which gay representation can be examined.

However, the closet, as many scholars of color have observed, is a decidedly white concept. Marlon B. Ross forcefully asserts that such a white configuration of the closet “rests on the banishment of the problem of racial-class difference, which would unravel [the] fantasy of a homosexual identity consolidated into a total community solely through its subject’s identical experiences of coming out.”⁵¹ In attempting to universalize the closet and its import, as Ross points out, the particularities of deviations from the ways whiteness is believed to navigate the closet become illegible. However, Dorie Gilbert Martinez and Stonie C. Sullivan suggest that “race, African American culture, a continuum of gay cultures, gender, and individual characteristics distinguish the gay identity experience of African American gays from that proposed by existing gay identity models, particularly related to the integration of one’s gay identity and the coming out process.”⁵² Mirroring Martinez and Sullivan, William G. Hawkeswood found in his 156 interviews with Black gay men in Harlem that “coming out was not a major concern, because their homosexuality, and later their gay identity, had always been assumed by family and friends. There was no need to ‘come out.’ Folks in their social networks had gradually taken for granted their sexual orientation.”⁵³ Sedgewick states that “for many gay people [the closet] is still the fundamental feature of social life; and there can be few gay people, however courageous and forthright by habit, however fortunate in the support of their immediate communities, in whose lives the closet is not still a shaping presence”; however, Martinez, Sullivan, and Hawkeswood suggest that the significance of the closet for white gay men is not always as important for Black gay men.⁵⁴ The differences in the universal import of the closet (or more aptly, coming out of the closet) across race are important when set alongside television’s engagement with gayness. In The Generic Closet, I argue that these differences become particularly pronounced when discussing the Black-cast sitcom.

The generic in the term generic closet is rooted in the word genre. Genre is an organizational system based on similarities, not unlike the Sesame Street song “One of These Things Is Not Like the Other.” Foucault suggests that schematic categorizations are culturally constructed and arbitrary while, importantly, allowing for a communal reading of resemblances.⁵⁵ These shared readings of similarities help to shape expectations.

When discussing genre and television, Jason Mittell advises that genre is not located solely within the text but “within the complex interrelations between texts, industries, audiences and historical contexts. Genres transect the boundaries between text and context, with production, distribution, promotion, exhibition, criticism, and reception practices all working to categorize media texts into genres.”⁵⁶ For Mittell, and for my purposes within this book, the generic is a discursive formation that threads through texts generally but the Black-cast sitcom specifically. It is visible in its functions as an industrial repository for ideologies related to an imagined monolithic Black audience. This ideological repository is conjured by network executives and discursively reverberates throughout the various stages of and workers within production, including showrunners and writers, who are principally concerned with keeping their series on air and the ratings stable. It is also located within industrial practices that structure the style in which series are filmed. For example, Black-cast sitcoms, excepting series like Frank’s Place (CBS, 1987–1988), Belle’s (TVOne, 2012), Black-ish (ABC, 2014–present), and Insecure (HBO, 2016–present) are shot with a three-camera setup on a soundstage with an in-studio audience or a laugh track. This industrial practice, as I will discuss in chapter 1, is rooted in cost savings.

The generic is evident in Black-cast sitcoms’ placement on particular networks, streaming platforms, netlets, and stations over others. For example, within the late 1990s, it is no coincidence that the lion’s share of Black-cast sitcoms were broadcast on UPN or that historically new networks and channels turn to Blackness when they are entering the television landscape. It is observed in Black-cast sitcoms’ pairing with particular programs on particular evenings at particular times (what Raymond Williams theorized as “flow,” or “planned flow”).⁵⁷ As I discuss in greater detail in chapter 1, CBS did not pick up Moesha because it could not find a show to pair it with. And the generic dictates the ways Black audiences are imagined and how advertising promoting Black-cast sitcoms is developed. I argue throughout this book that understanding these industrial machinations—technically “outside” a particular Black-cast sitcom or a corpus of Black-cast sitcoms—is central to understanding genre and, thus, the generic of the generic closet.

The generic closet is thus concerned first and foremost with the industrial imagination of Black audiences; I argue that this perspective structures Black gay narrative development within the Black-cast sitcom. It functions within what I am calling, building on an extending Lynne Joyrich’s work, the “three Ds”: (1) detection, (2) discovery/declaration, and (3) discarding. Joyrich theorizes her classificatory system as an epistemology of television’s engagement with white gayness. I extend her useful scheme to both nuance it and make it specific to Black gayness but also to reflect the industrial focus of how the generic closet functions within the Black-cast sitcom. Joyrich suggests that detection offers up “hints of sexuality” that function as “clues to be traced.”⁵⁸ These clues compose the first act of the three-act structure of the Black-cast sitcom’s “gay episode.” Detection becomes what Linda Seger calls the act 1 “set-up,” in which the main goal “is to tell us all the vital information we need to get the story started.”⁵⁹ Within the detection act, the central question of a character’s (homo)sexuality is raised. Act 1 raises those questions not directly but by presenting something as slightly “off” with a character within the gay episode. This “offness” can range from a character being too polite or perfect (Moesha, Good News, All of Us and Let’s Stay Together) or wearing colors out of step with approved scripts of Black masculine sartorial choices (Are We There Yet?). These characters are somehow out of sync with Black-cast sitcoms’ mediation of Black masculinity, which lays the foundation for the detective work the Black-cast sitcom must do to ferret out Black gayness.

The detective work is important because it leads to the second act of the three Ds: discovery/declaration. Seger suggests that within the second act of a “good script,” six things happen, three of which are useful to my theorization of the discovery/detection phase. First, the narrative action turns to a new direction. Second, central questions are raised anew. Third, a character has a moment of decision or makes a commitment to something.⁶⁰ If the central question in act 1 is “Is he gay?” then act 2 rephrases and reframes the question as, “Are you gay?” The shift in the subject and verb in the central question moves the question from speculative to inquisitive. As such, within the discovery/declaration phase, the questions the cast has raised about a Black gay character’s sexuality are affirmatively answered, typically in a speech act (also known as the declaration), because it has been asked directly of the character.

Discovery also reveals that, as C. Riley Snorton notes, “in the context of blackness, the closet is not a space of concealment, but a site for observation and display.”⁶¹ Put another way, the relationship of Black gayness to the closet is about external knowledge production. The discovery of gayness is made possible because Black gayness was never centralized within publicity around what are ostensibly the “gay episodes,” a topic I will discuss in chapter 1. Nor is Black gayness a chief narrative concern within the writers’ room, as I discuss in chapter 2. The discovery/declaration of gayness within the Black-cast sitcom is only a narrative catalyst: it brings heterosexual friendships or relationships back together and demonstrates the coolness of the core (heterosexual) cast. Thus, for the generic closet, the relationship of discovery/declaration to the closet is paramount for the visibility of Black gayness. Importantly, discovery/declaration requires the speech act that accompanies coming out, particularly in its televisual form, because it is difficult (but not impossible) without it for act 1 to move to act 2, which in turn makes the third act possible.

Act 3, discarding, resolves the narrative problems and answers central questions; most importantly, “the tension lets up, and we know that everything is all right.”⁶² As this book demonstrates (particularly in chap. 2), detection in act 1 situates Black gayness as a narrative problem that must be solved. The immediacy of the narrative problem and the question “Is he gay?” sets the narrative rules for Black gay inclusion in the series. Once the Black gay character, through the central question, has been discovered to be gay, his narrative utility is exhausted. In other words, the simplicity of the central question reduces Black gayness to a binary answer, “yes” or “no,” rather than a more open-ended one. Seger’s gesture toward knowing “everything is all right” is also important to discarding and the generic closet. Because the sitcom generally, and the Black-cast sitcom specifically, must return to stasis at the end of each episode, the “all rightness” of act 3 is in its discarding of the Black gay other so that the series can continue on its merry heterosexual or heterosexist way.

The three Ds, as a representational strategy, doggedly adhere to a three-act structure that industrially shapes narrative development of Black gay characters within the Black-cast sitcom. They are also an epistemological strategy that contains, constrains, and controls the parameters within which Black gayness is granted tenure within the Black-cast sitcom. That does not mean industry workers (chap. 2) and Black gay men (chap. 4) do not use tactics to try to escape the three Ds and the generic closet’s hegemonic pull. But it does mean that the generic closet exposes the politics of the Black-cast sitcom, a distinct genre that is bound within ideologies and mythologies about Black heterosexual audiences. The Black-cast sitcom creates specific narrative conditions under which Black gayness is permissible. The deployment of Black gayness, once those narrative conditions have been met, must be discarded from and forgotten within the heteronormative Black-cast sitcom universe they disrupted for an episode or so.

The Episodes

Methodologically, the texts chosen for The Generic Closet were selected in three ways. First, building on research by Ron Becker, Steven Capsuto, and Stephen Tropiano, I used their books and indexes to select episodes of shows that featured Black gay characters on Black-cast sitcoms. Second, I searched episode guides to see which texts these authors may have missed because they were not focused specifically on Black gay men or the Black-cast sitcom or because their research was conducted before certain series or episodes aired. Third, I pared the list of fifteen series based on those episodes of each series that featured Black gay characters in a role that served a narrative function. For instance, an episode of the series Martin (FOX, 1992–1997), “DMV Blues,” was excluded because the Black gay character is primarily in the background and delivers one line that is ultimately of little consequence to the central plotlines. In addition, the Cosby (CBS, 1996–2000) episode “Older and Out” was excluded because the Black gay character does not provide any of the narrative thrust for the episode (rather a white gay character does so). In addition, I excluded series that featured episodes concerning characters thinking a character is gay or those episodes that feature a character pretending to be gay. When applying that criterion, two episodes of Tyler Perry’s For Better or For Worse (hereafter For Better or Worse; TBS, 2011–2013; OWN, 2013–2017) were excluded because one episode, “The Will and the Grace,” dealt with a character who alleged he was gay to get romantically closer to the series’ female protagonist. The episode “Tommy” was also excluded because it did not feature a gay character but rather the suspicion that a character might be gay because his mother caught him wearing her makeup. The Guys Like Us (UN, 1998–1999) episode “In and Out” and the For Your Love (NBC, 1998; The WB, 1998–2002) episode “House of Cards” were removed because characters were pretending to be gay. Based on this set of criteria, my sample included ten possible series: Sanford Arms (NBC, 1977), Roc (FOX, 1991–1994). Moesha (UPN, 1996–2001), Good News (UPN, 1997–1998), The Parkers (UPN, 1999–2004), Girlfriends (UPN, 2000–2006; The CW 2006–2008), All of Us (UPN, 2003–2007), The Game (The CW, 2006–2009; BET 2011–2015), Are We There Yet? (TBS, 2010–2012), and Let’s Stay Together (BET, 2011–2014).

Because I wanted to study the production of these series, the sample was further limited by the death of either episode writers and showrunners and, more importantly, the willingness of writers and showrunners to speak with me for this project. With these criteria in place, The Generic Closet studies five series: Moesha, Good News, All of Us, Are We There Yet?, and Let’s Stay Together. Below are synopses of each episode within The Generic Closet.

• Moesha (UPN): The “Labels” episode, which aired on October 1, 1996, concerns Moesha meeting and briefly dating Hakeem’s cousin Omar. After meeting Omar’s flamboyant friend, Moesha begins to spread the rumor that Omar is gay.

• Good News (UPN): On the pilot episode of the series, which broadly concerns the trials and tribulations of a church attempting to rebuild its membership after the departure of a beloved pastor, the new pastor is confronted with a parishioner who seeks help in coming out to his mother. The episode originally aired August 25, 1997.

• All of Us (UPN): In this two-part episode of All of Us, series star Robert discovers that his biological father is gay. The episodes, “Like Father, Like Son, Like Hell” and “My Two Dads,” aired November 13 and 20, 2006.

• Are We There Yet? (TBS): ”The Boy Has Style” aired January 19, 2011. The episode concerned Lindsey Kingston’s high school crush and her parents’ suspicion (and ultimate confirmation) that he is gay. The Black gay character Cedric is a player on the high school football team.

• Let’s Stay Together (BET): The first episode in which Darkanian appears is “Leave Me Alone.” The episode aired April 24, 2012, and featured Darkanian, a closeted Black gay man and professional football player. In the episode, Darkanian begins to woo Crystal. The Darkanian story line continues in the May 22, 2012, episode, “No Wedding and a Funeral,” which finds Crystal moving into one of Darkanian’s “extra” apartments in downtown Atlanta. In the season 2 finale, “Wait . . . What?” Crystal discovers that Darkanian is gay when his long-term boyfriend visits the apartment in which Crystal lives. The episode aired June 5, 2012. In the March 26, 2013, season 3 premiere, “See, What Had Happened Was . . .” Darkanian asks Crystal to be his “beard”—an offer she accepts. In the episode “Buyer Beware,” Darkanian and Crystal continue their public relationship, although Crystal begins to have sexual needs that Darkanian cannot fulfill. The episode aired May 14, 2013. In the season 3 finale, “Babies, Blindness and Bling,” Crystal is caught kissing a man who is not Darkanian, leading to a media brouhaha. She is required to hold a press conference where she apologizes for her adulterous relationship. At the press conference, Darkanian proposes marriage. The last episode in which Darkanian appears is “Game Over,” in which Darkanian comes out as gay. The episode aired April 1, 2014.

Overview of Chapters

In The Generic Closet, I use various methodologies to explore the sites that illuminate the ways meaning about Black gayness is made within the Black-cast sitcom. Chapter 1 engages with broadcast and cultural history to illuminate the ways UPN, TBS, and BET emerged and how network leadership decided to mediate Blackness on the respective networks. Ultimately, this chapter demonstrates the ways the mainstreaming of hip-hop and Black culture and industrial jockeying for audiences converged to give rise to the series under examination within this book.

In chapter 2, I use production studies to examine the ways Black gay characters are written for Black-cast sitcoms. The interviews with writers and showrunners that form the basis of this chapter show the ways cultural and industrial forces operate within episodes of Black-cast sitcoms featuring Black gay characters. In this chapter, I pay particular attention to the ways controlling images of Black gay men in television shapes the way writers craft their episodes and the level of agency they are afforded as they write. This chapter is concerned with the reification of particular ideologies via the cultural norms of commercial network television narratives and encoded when writers are writing Black gay characters.

Chapter 3 draws from and builds on sitcom genre theory, television sound studies, and humor theory to examine how the Black-cast sitcom marks Black gay bodies as comic. Chapter 3 contends that the laugh track, as an electronic substitute for the audience, instructs at-home audiences about how they should view homosexuality, regardless of the message conveyed by the script itself. The laugh track works to create a heterosexual “us” versus a homosexual “them,” particularly with respect to the “proper” performance of Black masculinity. Within this analysis, I consider the laugh track as part of the postproduction process because although some series were filmed in front of a live studio audience, laughter and the laugh track can be moved around in postproduction, and some series create their soundtracks entirely in postproduction. An examination of these series provides a clear ideological link between what the producers of each series believe to be humorous.

Chapter 4 employs a reception study of Black gay men’s understanding of Black gay characters. Specifically, the Black gay men’s meaning-making of Black gay images is the star of this final chapter. This chapter illuminates their difficult and negotiated relationship to historical stereotypes of Black gay men and acknowledges these viewers as postmodern subjects who are not only interested in the text but also are aware of the ways series can gesture toward preferred meanings via the use of the laugh track. There is merit in gauging the reception of other viewers, perhaps heterosexual Black men or gay white men, and comparing and contrasting the ways these groups make meaning vis-à-vis Black gay male representation. However, this chapter is predicated on letting the voices of Black gay men be heard without having to draw differences or similarities in their meaning-making process with other viewers to validate the “realness” of their reception processes. I used in-depth interviews with twenty self-identified Black gay men for this chapter.

Finally, I conclude by drawing linkages among the various sites where meaning is made and speculate on how my findings illuminate the conditions under which Black gay representation in Black-cast sitcom exists in this cultural moment. Specifically, I ask, does the generic closet still exist within the Black-cast sitcom, and if so, why does it still exist?

Taken together, the chapters within The Generic Closet illuminate how Black gayness has been (and continues to be) mediated within the Black-cast sitcom by undertaking historical, industrial, discursive, and reception analyses. Through its pages, The Generic Closet engages not only how Black gayness has been mediated but also why it has been mediated in the ways it has.

Notes