Discrimination Among Glee Audiences

Members of LGBTQ communities face oppression in many aspects of their lives, and the workforce is not an exception.  Although most would presume professional environments like that of a job would be a safe place for them, these assumptions are often far from the truth.  Even in regard to shows as popular as Glee, many scrutinize the cast and audience due to a lack of purely heterosexual actors.  In this blog post, I would like to consider gay bullying in the media and discuss basic LGBTQ rights and liberties by referencing and analyzing Michael Jones’s “The Religious Right Targets Glee for Making Heterosexuality Normal” as well as “Chicano Men:  A Cartography of Homosexual Identity and Behavior” by Tomas Almaguer and “Gay bashing – a rite of passage” by Theo Van Der Meer. 

Millions of people can easily identify with the issues brought up in shows like Glee, but not everybody responds well to some of the controversy that emerges.  For instance, Brent Bozell, “a conservative blogger over at Townhall,” spends hours watching television “and then determines which shows will earn you a direct flight ticket right into the underworld” (Religious).  He writes that the show presents homosexuality as a normal sexual orientation, and he takes a religious approach when he argues that Glee expresses to society that “the abnormal people are the ones who adhere to apparently outdated Christian morality” (Religious).  Everyone is entitled to their own opinions; however, with an ever-increasing need for unity and acceptance, it is hopeful that some hearts and minds in America will soon change. 

Bozell’s comments on Glee present yet another instance of ignorance.  He may not be aware how much more likely LGBT youth are to attempt suicide from being bullied.  Unfortunately, he along with several others have never considered the possibility that “gay or lesbian identity can readily become a primary basis of self-identity” (Almaguer 545).  But homosexuality can be viewed in many different ways.  In the United States, for example, it usually only takes one adult homosexual act, thought, or desire to threaten a man’s gender identity.  Interestingly enough, it is typical for men that strongly identify as heterosexual to better relate to other males.  This issue is brought up in “Gay bashing – a rite of passage” in which the author writes about individuals who had been caught in the act of gay discrimination.  It was seen that even “they could talk about their problems only with members of their own sex, and only with them were they capable of intimacy,” which was defined as “an indulgence in problems and self-pity” (157).  These are the people that chose to protest public acts of homosexuality, but were in no way concerned about their own sexual identity. 

The journey that certain characters from Glee go through can easily be seen as a representation of the epiphany that many members of the LGBTQ community have yet to achieve.  And the reason it is so challenging for many of these individuals to reach a level of self-acceptance is due to people like Bozell who criticize the very existence of a homosexual actor on a popular television series.  Many of the respondents from a study done in “Gay bashing – a rite of passage” actually “considered themselves to have acted on behalf of, or with the approval of, society” (156).  The little education schools offer on gay rights is also to be blamed for this sort of ignorance.  Discrimination occurs at all ages, and could best be stopped among today’s youth, where the violence and bullying often begins.  Van der Meer also describes gay bashing as “a phenomenon such as bullying [that] is often organized around notions of ‘strong’ and ‘weak’ and of attaining power (163).  With this mindset, bullying may never stop.  And if it ever lessens among the LGBTQ community, it is very likely that it will spread to another group that does not have the strength to defend itself against society.  Therefore, now is the time to recognize that there are people like Bozell that do not choose to be accepting of others who are different from what society deems to be ideal, so we can educate our youth for a better tomorrow. 

Links

 http://news.change.org/stories/the-religious-right-targets-glee-for-making-homosexuality-normal

Bibliography

Almaguer, Tomas.  “Chicano Men:  A Cartography of Homosexual Identity and Behavior” from

differences:  A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 3:  2 (1991), pp. 537-545

Jones, Michael.  News.change.org  “The Religious Right Targets Glee For Making

Homosexuality Normal”. 4 June 2010. Web. http://news.change.org/stories/the-religious-

right-targets-glee-for-making-homosexuality-normal

Van Der Meer, Theo. "Gay Bashing A Rite of Passage?" in Culture, Health and Sexuality, Vol. 5

No. 2, pp 153-165