Category: acafen

While I feel like discussions about Glee often focus on what was missing, it’s unusual for that focus to actually be about something that was originally meant to be there. In the case of episode 3.09, which had a delightfully weird send-up of classic B&W Christmas specials, the big discussion on Tumblr, Twitter and LiveJournal has largely been about what’s in the box?

Except the scene where Blaine gives Kurt what looks like a ring box got cut (along with some other, unrelated scenes) from the final show. Rumor on Tumblr that seems to be coming from someone with a friend who works on the show is that the box contained a ring made out of gum wrappers, to serve as counterpoint to the Rachel and Finn narrative involving expensive gift-giving and proof of love. It may or may not have also been meant to be a promise ring. (Since the initial writing of this piece, the gum-wrapper ring has been confirmed by TV Line, but context speculation remains. The scene will, however, be included on the season 3 DVDs).

Narratively, the cut makes sense. The broad middle of the episode and the decisions that set it up are extremely focused on Kurt and Blaine imagining an adult future together and their friends presuming one. Therefore, we didn’t actually need further narrative development around their commitment, and really, the Finn and Rachel storyline was completely resolvable without it (and filled with its own bucket of problems that I’ll perhaps address in another post).

Other than the rumored possibility that it was a promise ring used in its original sense, not as a placeholder amongst children with grownup dreams, but as a placeholder from someone who doesn’t yet have the means to purchase an engagement ring (there’s more than one story in my own family about gum wrappers and paper bands from cigars, including my parents), what’s been super interesting to me has been one of the key phrases going around Tumblr about the whole affair: My OTP doesn’t need a box or a ring. (OTP, for those not in the know, means “one true pairing” and is what fans refer to their favorite couples, on-screen or fantasy only, as).

I don’t think it was said with the queer culture discussion it evokes in mind, but it’s a powerful and confusing statement at a time when queer identity and the public reception of queer identities is deeply in flux.

Because right now, so much of queer identity is a discussion about equal marriage rights, and equal marriage rights are complicated, not just because of the obvious stuff like queer families needing equal protection under the law and keeping other people’s religious beliefs out of our lives. But because marriage equality is having, and will continue to have, a huge impact on queer culture.

Because suddenly, we have to talk about, in far more practical ways than in the past (the past on display in the black and white portion of tonight’s episode) about marriage, and if it’s for us, and what its impact on queer culture is. Do we need and want rings and rituals that to many of us feel are borrowed from a straight culture we don’t get? And if we do need or want those things are we allowed to talk about how incredibly conflicted we do or do not feel about them?

I’m such a fierce proponent of marriage equality, and am very happy for friends who have or will be marrying same-sex partners. I’m also a huge romantic, and, unfortunately, am also someone who was raised to believe that marriage is the only possible marker of success and adulthood I could ever have (oh, being a girl in the world I was a girl in).

But I also love — loved — the perhaps vanishing queer culture that raised me as a queer person, and it was a land of not needing boxes or rings. It was a land of massive pride in keeping it together day after day after day, because it was a choice every day, because there was no glue that was easy to show off or receive approval for. There was no paperwork.

In the land of Glee, we know, at least somewhat, where Kurt and Blaine stand on marriage. Kurt’s already told us about his fantasy life in New York, “married by 30, legally” (3.01), and Blaine may have given him a promise ring made of gum wrappers for Christmas. (For the record, I remember making those in summer camp on rainy days as all of us girls — all presumed straight — sat around wearing them and imaging futures full of shiny bragging).

That the Kurt and Blaine gifting scene got cut tonight was pure narrative common-sense; the most important part of storytelling is always editing, and what we needed to know about them got told elsewhere in the episode.

But I have to say I love that the fannish discourse, which has gone from outraged to trying to get comfortable with the cut, brings up this issue and the idea that commitment doesn’t need a ring, or, perhaps more importantly any public display or approval. This is especially critical considering the frequent concerns many fans express about the level of physical contact between Kurt and Blaine on screen, often with little awareness of safety concerns gay teens in their environment would face.

While I can’t wait to get a look at the cut scene because I am endlessly charmed by Kurt and Blaine, I am also thankful for the cut, because it really reminds me of why I love fan culture. Because fan culture always promotes, explicitly or implicitly, the idea that stories continue and live full lives, whether we’re looking at them or not.

Last night, in what was essentially a successful attempt to make it very clear that gay stories are just like straight stories, Glee became the very passing narrative it’s been attempting to elucidate since the start of season 3 around Kurt and Blaine’s disparate gender and sexuality presentations. And, just as that narrative has not mentioned that for someone like Blaine passing can hurt as much as not passing does for Kurt, “The First Time” was, for this queer viewer, uncomfortably silent on all the ways that gay stories aren’t like straight ones.

This isn’t a political judgement. It’s not really any sort of judgement at all. I thought, frankly, that the episode was gorgeous (always, always let editors direct, because nearly every shot and transition will be visually astounding), and despite the tone of a lot of the advance marketing (“a very special episode” indeed), not actually an after school special.

I also thought it got a lot of things right about virginity: how you can’t ever really know what ready means and how terrifying it all is, sometimes, even moreso, when it is right, because you just want to do right by the other person. I also thought it gave us some great character moments and a bucket of interesting when it comes to your favorite preoccupation and mine — Dalton as faerieland (that’ll be a separate post).

But what the episode didn’t give us was the idea that virginity is, actually, not a cut and dried issue, especially for queer teens who, until last night on Glee don’t, for better or for worse, particularly have pop-culture narratives that tell them what their virginity is. And, despite the lovely, “The First Time” didn’t really do anything to solve that problem.

This is where I could tell you about the Great Condom Wrapper Debate on Tumblr (Is it, or is it not empty? Are there one or are there two?). Or the fact that not even the actors can apparently place the scenes cut in with the performance of “One Hand, One Heart” in time (before, after or during sex? Chris Colfer gave a big “I don’t know!” in at least one interview).

I could also mention that it strains my credulity that two boys who had, for a year, refused to touch each other below the waist, decided that their first time was going to be all about penetration, managed said act, and then got dressed for the post-coital snuggles (although the Internet is working hard to make that make sense, and will probably succeed by the end of the day. The Glee writers should thank us all).

But the fact remains that no matter how inappropriate and unfair I think it is, even for straight people, penis-in-vagina or as close as you can get to same, remains the standard for virginity loss in American culture and pop media. This is generally without discussion or challenge unless we’re talking about good girls staying “virgins” by having anal sex on some mediocre b-level cable network movie of the week. And, in making absolutely sure the Kurt/Blaine and Rachel/Finn narratives ran in tight parallel, this is where “The First Time” went, even without explicitly saying so (or, you know, actually making a lot of sense).

This erasure of a part of queer experience (“What is my rite of passage?”) in an effort to show that the two couples are equally as beautiful, in love, and facing the same challenges, is a case of a queer narrative passing as if the world is not different for us, just as Blaine experiences passing because of the style of his performance of masculinity; no matter what people take him to be, the world is still different for him than for a straight boy.

Here, the Glee narrative is able to pass because it’s 8pm on Fox, where we don’t look too closely at certain things on US TV, and where the powers that be worked hard to make sure they would submit nothing in the final cut of the episode that would force later cuts that might un-equalize the focus on the two couples.

But the fact is Rachel wearing a slip to bed to lose her penetrative virginity is just plain logistically different than boys in their trousers. And Rachel deciding that penis-in-vagina sex is what her virginity is about is also logistically different than Kurt and Blaine deciding that their virginities are also about penetration; Rachel probably came to her conclusion in under an hour, possibly in under five minutes. Did Kurt and Blaine?

This what-is-virginity? gap is also mirrored by the fact that we know Brittany and Santana have sex, but yet, this just gets blurred away in the show’s long-term narrative, not, I don’t think because they are still a b-plot or because their virginities are long gone, but because Glee doesn’t know how to say, “these two girls are fucking” without the penetrative assumption, and you really can’t talk about the nitty-gritty of lesbian sex (which is perhaps, sadly, the biggest mystery of all to the American mind) on Fox at 8pm. You can’t particularly de-essentialize the penis. People just don’t get it.

Back when we first found out “The First Time” was coming, I made a lot of dismayed noises about the prurient “Who tops?” conversation around Kurt and Blaine. In fact, I was probably kind of an asshole about it. And, while I remain chagrined by the casual and snarky nature of a lot of that conversation by people outside of the queer experience, I have to sort of eat my words here and apologize.

Because a huge piece of the analysis I want to do about this episode involves Kurt and Blaine’s gender positioning — Kurt, for the first time in this season, is back in his “fashion has no gender” and “I’ve never met a sweater dress I didn’t like” attire; while Blaine gets serenaded by Sebastian as the naive “Uptown Girl.”

This, combined with the Rachel/Finn parallels, and the degree to which teen gay sex became about Glee trying to make a queer experience pass for a straight one, makes who topped (again, if penetration happened, see: the Tumblr condom debate) a somewhat salient question if we’re trying to figure out what Glee’s agenda is around masculinity, femininity and queerness. But because we’re in this cultural moment of normalizing gay, often aggressively, I’m left with what feels like a lot of peculiar and specific road signs pointing, well, nowhere.

This is, perhaps, as it should be. Maybe, we all just need to make up our own minds, and tell the stories we need to have told. But I find myself a little frustrated for gay teens and for passing gay teens, that this narrative was so aggressively about normalization and spoke so little to queer experience, even if it was kind of a great thing to show our straight parents.

On the other hand, when Patty went to bed last night, she said the episode had made me mushy. “But I’m always like this,” I said, brushing my nose against hers. And it’s true, we always are. So I suppose this is one of those things I’m just going have to let go, because this is what fiction always is for each of us, stories that are, and aren’t, our own.

That said, don’t worry, that gender/sexuality positioning post is totally coming, even if it’s going to drive off into a vortex of passing vagueness thanks to the construction of this episode. Like whatever is next for Kurt and Blaine and Finn and Rachel, I think it’s safe to assume: Detours Ahead.

While I not-so-secretly suspect that large portions of last night’s viewing audience were only there to see the trailers for 3.05 (called “The First Time,” for anyone who might not know the basis for my suspicions) and to see if Fox would let a bunch of supposed teenagers sing about being drunk and having a menage a trois in the 8pm time slot, one of Glee‘s best recurring themes was also on display, and that was the rules for boys.

It’s most overt when Finn explains to Rory that “dudes don’t ask dudes to be their friends.” But that remark isn’t just about explaining America’s social habits to the over-eager, adorably scamming foreign-exchange student. Nope, it’s about defining the masculinity that all our male characters have to navigate. Without it as background noise — even if it’s arguably background noise we all know — the passing plotlines around Kurt, Blaine, Dave Karofsky, and the soon-to-be-introduced Sebastian don’t mean anything, not to gay audiences, but to the straight ones who don’t necessarily have a reflex to think about the world as they create it for us.

Finn’s speech to Rory, in fact, goes a long way to explain the friction between him and Blaine in the choir room, because that is not just about Finn’s insecurity and his desire to remain the glee club’s vocal leader and captain-type dude. It’s about Finn’s homophobia, which, no, is not gone, despite the fact that he loves Kurt and does truly see him as his brother.

Because Finn and Kurt’s drama didn’t entirely neutralize because Finn got over his generalized homophobia, it neutralized because Kurt became his brother and the incest taboo made Finn forget about his still existent homophobia as it applied to Kurt. He no longer felt fear of Kurt’s sexuality, because Kurt as sibling became more important to him — and more gross in a sexual context — than Kurt’s being gay.

Blaine, to a given extent, was probably shielded from Finn’s homophobia by that. We see them being friendly around the prom episode, and we have to assume that dealt with each other a lot over the summer. However, Blaine’s transfer removes the incest taboo shield when it comes to Finn’s ability to deal with homosexuality amongst his male peers. Blaine goes from just being his brother’s boyfriend to the dude Finn goes to school with, basically moving him out of the protection accorded to him by his pseudo-family status. And so, aside from the leadership/solo issue and Finn’s insecurity, what does Blaine do that upsets Finn so much? He spends all his time effectively asking everyone, INCLUDING OTHER DUDES, to be his friend.

That breaks the masculine (read: heterosexual) code Finn describes to Rory, and also amplifies the level of competitive threat Finn feels from Blaine, because part of the non-verbalized homophobia in play here, and in the passing plotline around West Side Story, is that gay dudes aren’t leaders, despite the way Blaine was first introduced to us at Dalton (but remember, Dalton was faerie land — not real, and only being reintroduced to provide us with more faeries gay boys).

So here’s a place where Blaine’s ability to pass makes him more threatening to someone like Finn, rather than less, not just as competition, but in the context of Glee’s constant reminder of the fear of “the predatory gay.”

I expect this link between dude friendship rules, predation, and homosexuality are going to get an even bigger focus when Sebastian joins the narrative next episode. How will Blaine, who is so needy, respond to a gay man who works the passing and masculinity thing differently than he does, breaking the guy friendship rules that Blaine is often oblivious to himself?

How will Kurt (who is very aware of those rules, schooled in them as he was by Finn regarding not just himself, but Sam) respond to witnessing that? And, most importantly, how will their straight male friends interpret it?

Will it be about breaking the dude code? Will there be concern for friends who might be facing relationship drama? Or will they back away from what they will perceive as threatening predatory gay culture stereotypes they are not sufficiently insulated from by Kurt’s kinship with Finn because there are just too many other players involved?