Opinion
It’s easy to forget how recently television was a straights-only domain
Modern Family, ABC’s sitcom juggernaut, is adept at capturing the zeitgeist without ruffling too many feathers. Unashamedly conservative in its family-sitcom structure, it also excels at moments of quiet radicalism as it pursues its project of redefining (or perhaps simply reflecting) what families in America look like today. Now, with Proposition 8 and the Defense of Marriage Act DOMA defeated, the series is about to cement the public image of a happy gay nuclear family with the wedding of long-term boyfriends, Mitchell and Cameron.
Although the representation of gay and lesbian characters on American screens is becoming increasingly common, it is easy to forget how recently US television was a straights-only domain. In the 1960s and 1970s, homosexuality on television was treated like a social problem, or an exotic disease.
The low point of this sort of programming was CBS’s 1967 hour-long investigation The Homosexuals. It opened with a poll stating that Americans saw homosexuality as “more harmful to society than adultery, abortion or prostitution”, and did little to dispel those fears. While there were also more thoughtful treatments of homosexual characters, such as the ABC TV movie, That Certain Summer, even these tended to portray gayness as a personal misfortune.
Throughout the 1980s, a new pattern emerged. As gay rights groups grew more vocal, television grew braver in depicting gay characters. Shows like Hill Street Blues and LA Law featured gay characters, typically in one-off storylines or “special episodes”. Here homosexuality was still an issue, though it was more likely to be a personal or emotional one rather than the social problem of earlier times.
But notable exceptions like Soap’s Jodie Dallas aside, gay characters tended to have a limited shelf-life. Unwilling to show the development of gay relationships, networks only showed them coming out, and later, struggling with the implications of AIDS. Then they seemed to run out of ideas.
© 1996, 1997 Castle Rock Entertainment
By the 1990s gay and lesbian characters were almost de rigueur on prime-time sitcoms. With the exception of Ellen Morgan – after The Puppy Episode – they were rarely the leads. Though they might well become series regulars, especially when they provided comic relief.
Of course, this was very much a period of change. Ron Becker has argued that gay TV characters in the 1990s became a kind of status symbol for viewers who wanted to showcase their own progressive politics through the culture they consumed. This was also the age of what Becker calls “straight panic”. Male characters like Frasier Crane or Jerry Seinfeld were forced to confront their own ambiguous masculinity in light of the new cultural visibility of homosexuality.
After 2000, gay characters became an increasingly stable and regular part of the American television landscape. No longer just one-episode-wonders, they lived and loved as central characters in shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Brothers and Sisters.
But this was also a time of fragmenting television services and increasingly niche channels, with the result that even if the representations of gay and lesbian characters on shows like Queer as Folk and The L Word were unprecedentedly sustained and multi-layered. However, they were typically only watched by a relatively small audience.
TM and © 2013 Fox and its related entities.
Modern Family remains significant in the history of gay representation on television not because it is especially nuanced (it isn’t), or because it shows us something we’ve never seen before (it doesn’t). It is significant because it is a major network sitcom, and a popular one, even though it presents people whose lives are still anathema to a persistent and vocal minority of the American public.
The show uses two key strategies to avoid making waves, even as it continues to row ahead of the cultural tide. Firstly, it acknowledges and mocks its own use of stereotypes, allowing audiences to laugh either at the characters, with them, or at themselves, depending upon their own level of cultural sensitivity. The characters in Modern Family are never allowed to be smug, or comfortable with whom they are – at least never for long. Like the president’s views on their legal right to marry, they are always evolving. And this allows room for the audience, especially those whose attitude towards gay rights is still floating around in the primordial soup, to evolve along with them.
Modern Family’s other trick is to present social change as a series of faits accomplis. We don’t see Mitchell come out, or fall in love with Cam. Instead, we first meet the couple on their flight back from Vietnam, baby Lilly in their arms. While there might be many in the national audience who would question the suitability of two gay men to be parents, there are very few who could watch these two loving fathers with their daughter and see anything but a beautiful new family.
This non-confrontational approach has allowed Modern Family to enter mainstream American culture with a minimum of political backlash, but the wedding of Mitchell and Cameron signals a new strategy. Secure and powerful in the way that only a sitcom with more than 100 episodes under its belt can be, Modern Family is finally coming out. It’s a sign of how far we’ve come since the 60s that it’s bringing so much of America with it.
Martin Zeller-Jacques does not work for, consult to, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has no relevant affiliations.
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Thomas Piketty's big flaw? Capitalism isn't the same the world over
Everyone is talking about inequality and capitalism nowadays. That’s great, but before we all jump on the bandwagon to “fix” capitalism, let’s talk about which capitalism(s) we wish to fix and how we intend on doing that.
Thomas Piketty has recently written a timely and provocative analysis of capitalism in the 21st century, using primarily historical data to analyse economic trends in France, Britain, the United States and Sweden. He concludes that, with the possible exception of the period from 1914-1945, capitalism has always been inequitable in its distribution of capital and income within societies.
To “fix” this injustice, Piketty recommends investing in education, skills development, and nonpolluting technologies in order to grow the economy faster; while imposing a progressive global tax on capital through international banking regulation and cross-national cooperation between governments.
While the concentration of wealth at the top of society is a big issue and Piketty is to be commended for his creative data collection efforts and novel insights, his book is incomplete and potentially misleading. There is a better way to think about these issues.
In a recent research study published in the Journal of International Business Studies, we examined 48 developed and developing economies, representing 91% of the global economy, over a shorter period of time but in a fairly rigorous way using set theoretic methods. Here is our take on the issue.
Unlike Piketty, who focuses primarily on the distribution of wealth and income, we argue in our study that the proper role of an economy is to generate wealth equitably. Piketty ignores the wealth creation component of economic outcomes in his analysis. Due to understandable data constraints, he mainly focuses on four rich economies, so wealth generated was already given. But wealth generation aside, the institutional context matters if we want to fully understand an economy. Unfortunately, Piketty largely ignores institutional differences in the practice of capitalism.
Economic institutions are the formal and informal rules of the game within which firms and individuals function. In our analysis, we examined four classical sets of institutions – the role of the state, financial institutions, human capital institutions, and informal cultural norms. Previous research has repeatedly shown that institutions matter when thinking about economic analysis. Indeed, this is one of the unfortunate lessons learned by the Harvard economists who ignored institutional differences between Russia and the US after communism collapsed.
The point here is that “capitalism” is an over generalisation. There is a variety of capitalisms in the world today – and some are rich and relatively equal, even if some of these successful models are very slowly getting somewhat less equal, such as Sweden. In our analysis, we found six different types of capitalism. Three were strongly associated with equitable wealth creation, three were strongly associated with poor economic outcomes, and other economies we looked at were somewhere in the middle between these six types.
Unlike Piketty, we accept that inequality will always be a feature of every economic system. The key issue, as we see it, is whether the gap between the rich and the poor is too large. Piketty believes that the gap between rich and poor is bound to perpetually increase in any capitalist system simply because the return on capital is often larger than overall economic growth.
In our analysis, though, we found that “types” of capitalism vary considerably in their ability to generate wealth equitably. As a result, our policy prescriptions vary depending on the institutional context.
Relatively dysfunctional capitalist systems, such as that in Russia today, are almost always due to problems with the informal institutions dealing with the ability to challenge those in authority and the levels of trust operating within an economy. When authority cannot be challenged and trust is relatively low between strangers, corruption flourishes. And when corruption flourishes, political and economic elites do whatever they want, which prevents the movement towards a rich and relatively equal economy, as is the case with China. In contrast, the Czech Republic is slowly but steadily moving towards a more equitable wealth-creating economy.
Now let’s talk about taxes. Unfortunately, Piketty’s international capital tax prescription will not work unless the institutions within an economy are robust enough to assure transparency and accountability. Assuming we could get international cooperation to design and levy such a tax (a big assumption in our view), what will become of all this tax money?
We frankly doubt that this pool of funds will be directed in economically beneficial ways. Clearly, many developed economies, such as the US and the UK, have failed to adequately govern their financial institutions due to the financier’s ability to skew financial regulations (and their implementation) in their favour, but imposing a global tax will not solve this problem.
While we agree that our global economy does need more global oversight and governance, nation states must substantially improve their economic institutions in order to do so. The simple truth is the world is not yet ready for global governance. In the absence of robust national institutions, it is easy to predict that international agreements will not work – just look at the European Union’s attempts to deal with its dysfunctional member countries.
There are many different types of capitalism in practice today and to assume that there is one type of capitalism that generalises to all economies is misleading. The role of an economy is to generate wealth and distribute that wealth equitably; to ignore the first part to the exclusion of the second part will not get us far. Policy makers need to focus on strengthening their institutions in order to produce wealth equitably.
The task is not easy, as policy makers and political and economic elites often reinforce dysfunctional institutions. But it is impossible without considering the varieties of capitalism in play today. The right institutional makeup can in fact increase equitable wealth creation, but to ignore institutional differences is akin to putting an ill-fitting adult suit on a growing teenager – they either wear the suit awkwardly or take the suit off as soon as the adult isn’t looking. It is much better to tailor the clothing to the person wearing it.
The authors do not work for, consult to, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article. They also have no relevant affiliations.
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[Businessman with money magnet via Shutterstock]
Investigating Cervantes’s pages offers more than his bones ever will
After years spent securing funds and permissions, a team of forensic scientists and historians have launched an intensive search for the remains of Miguel de Cervantes, author of Don Quixote. Using the latest techniques of infrared imaging and ground-penetrating radar, the Spanish researchers are scanning the floors and walls of the Trinitarian Convent Church in Madrid, where Cervantes is most likely entombed.
The full investigation may last as long as a year. The first few weeks will involve meticulously mapping voids in the floors and niches in the walls to determine the most promising burial sites, while ensuring minimal disturbance to the cloistered nuns who still reside in the convent. Then, if the team can pinpoint likely remains, they will exhume the bones for identification and forensic analyses – a similar process to the Richard III extravaganza – just in time for the 400th anniversary of Cervantes’s death in 2016.
The precise location of the author’s final resting place is something of a mystery. This is due to the relative obscurity of his funeral itself, the vagaries of history and even the commemorative customs of the time. Apart from a notice of death in his parish registry, which specifies interment in the Trinitarian Convent, no formal documentation exists – his will is lost.
Possessing little wealth or social status, and having joined the Third Order of Saint Francis in his later years, Cervantes would have had an intentionally modest funeral. His tombstone might never have been marked as such. But if the author’s remains are more or less intact, and were not jumbled among other bones or destroyed in the reconstruction of the Convent in the late 17th century, they should bear distinguishing traits. In particular, the wounds he sustained as a soldier at the Battle of Lepanto in 1571 – a maimed left hand and gunshot wounds to his chest – should mark out the author’s skeleton among the others buried in the church.
But what is to be gained from exhuming Cervantes’ bones, if indeed they can be found? Unless the skeleton is clutching an unpublished manuscript, a post-mortem will add little to our knowledge of his life and letters.
Better to turn to his writing. As he composed the prologue to his final novel, Cervantes knew he was dying from the malady called, at the time, hydropesía or the “dropsy”. Today this is generally thought to have been diabetes. In what might be the last words he ever wrote, Spain’s greatest writer bids a playfully barbed farewell to his readers at the close of the prologue. He also expresses an irrepressible impulse to carry on writing:
Perhaps the time may come when I mend again this broken thread and say what words fail me here and what needed to be said. Farewell, waggish jokes; farewell, wittiness; farewell, merry friends, for I am dying and longing soon to see you, happy in the life to come.
Two of those merry friends (minor, forgotten poets, in this case) would contribute prefatory poems to that final, posthumously published novel, Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda (The Travails of Persiles and Sigismunda). Their poems, utterly conventional set pieces, take the form of brief epitaphs.
Instead of real inscriptions on the site of the author’s burial, these printed lines commemorated his death and they ultimately stand as the earliest accounts of his passing. Cervantes himself had, in fact, written such occasional poems on the deaths of celebrities throughout his career – and had parodied the genre at the close of both parts of Don Quixote.
The opening lines of the epitaph by Francisco de Urbina read:
Wayfarer, the wide-ranging, rare
Cervantes is herein confined:
the earth his body may inter,
but not his name, which is divine.
And the second epitaph, Luis Francisco Calderón’s sonnet on Cervantes’s tomb, begins:
In this, O traveller, narrow marble lair,
a sombre urn, if not a lofty pyre,
you see the sacred ashes of a mind
who dares to scorn oblivion and time.
There is a poignant irony here. The poems represent the author’s funeral and burial in terms of mortuary customs of the Classical Mediterranean world: a funeral pyre, ashes, an urn, wayside monuments in the Graeco-Roman fashion – none of which reflects how Cervantes was actually buried and memorialised. So even in the immediate aftermath of his death, Cervantes’s “reality” was already clouded by fictions, and, more specifically, by conventional, anachronistic fictions.
The mainspring of his greatest work was precisely this profound question: what happens when we impose conventional fictions onto everyday reality, and vice versa? Perhaps it is appropriate that the earliest representations of Cervantes’s tomb illustrate the very theme on which the best of his writing meditates. And these subtleties, these ironies, are not likely to be echoed by scooping his bones up from the ground.
As Spain continues to claw its way out of recession, the costly public project has attracted its share of criticism. Madrid’s City Council, which is financing the research to the tune of €100,000, has countered that the project will bring profits by stimulating tourism.
But in addition to literary pilgrimages, I hope that this quixotic quest will also encourage an equally meticulous probing of Cervantes’s pages. And reinvigorated reflections on his written legacy might well begin with the question of how these commemorative customs shape our perceptions.
Tyler Fisher does not work for, consult to, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has no relevant affiliations.
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How I found the lost desert camp of Lawrence of Arabia
A fantastic coincidence, coupled with research, led to my discovery of a wartime camp in the Jordan desert that was occupied in 1918. This was a camp used by T E Lawrence, or “Lawrence of Arabia”, and British mobile units and was somewhat evocatively called “Tooth Hill”.
Earlier, these ancient landscapes of Edom had been thrust into modernity with the arrival of the Hejaz Railway, built by the Ottoman Turks in 1904. Ostensibly a holy railway built to transport pilgrims to the cities of Medina and Mecca, its capacity to transport troops re-militarised the landscape. This threatened British interests in Egypt and the Suez Canal, Britain’s main artery to India.
In July 1917 a young British officer called T E Lawrence captured the key town of Aqaba on the Red Sea, surprising both the British and Turkish high commands, who had considered it impossible. This enabled the Northern Arab Army of Emir Faisal to move northwards and the British to establish a beach-head and mount raids against the Turkish defences along the railway.
The British base expanded. By October, a small flight of aircraft was operating from a desert landing strip. Mobile British forces with Rolls Royce armoured cars and Talbot trucks carrying ten-pounder Indian mountain guns were able to operate in the hinterland.
In April 1918 these forces gathered overnight at the Tooth Hill camp to begin a series of raids on the fortifications at Tel Shahm, Wadi Rutm and Mudawwara. Today these are just north of Jordan’s border with Saudi Arabia.
It was while reading T E Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom that the possibility of finding this camp first occurred to me. The opening lines of chapter 105 read: “Our old camp behind the toothed hill facing Tell Shahm station.” This always caught my imagination. Where was this toothed hill and why did Lawrence make reference to it?
Lawrence’s own elaboration provided the first clue:
It was a wonderful show, for the cars were parked geometrically here, and the armoured cars placed there…
Then other pieces of evidence began to surface. One was found in the war diary entries of X Flight RAF. It was a sketch map drawn after a reconnaissance flight made in early April 1918 in preparation for the raids on Tel Shahm. Flying without maps and with only a compass for navigation the pilots used familiar landmarks to guide them back to their airstrips. Without aerial cameras the pilots had to draw maps from memory. In this case, the pilot had noted the position of a significant landmark, and called it Tooth Hill.
The final clue, oddly, came in a coffee break at a conference. A Lawrence researcher I knew came across to me and asked: “I don’t suppose you know where this is, do you?” He showed me a photograph of several Rolls Royce armoured cars, parked in front of a distinctively shaped hill. My knowledge of the archives, Lawrence’s words and the landscape, combined with the photograph, lead to what can only be described as a eureka moment for me.
Six weeks later, walking across the desert to the site, we encountered broken glass, pot shards and spent cartridge cases lying around what appeared to be the site of a camp fire. The pottery looked like fragments of rum jars, a ubiquitous commodity in the British army on the Western Front, but not seen before in Jordan. Picking up the first piece of stoneware I turned it over and saw the initials SRD, the acronym for Service Ration Depot, a diagnostic inscription for these gallon jars.
Over the next two days a team of archaeologists, lead by my colleagues Nicholas J Saunders and Neil Faulkner, meticulously excavated the camp fire and recorded the many artefacts scattered around. Meanwhile metal detectors scanned the surrounding area and found shell cases and small items such as spark plugs that indicated vehicles had been maintained on this site.
Britain’s recent military deployments have seen its forces engaging insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan; fighting and defending fixed bases such as Camp Bastion against a highly mobile and fluid guerrilla force. But here in Jordan it was the British who were the insurgents in 1918.
Lawrence had given the concept of insurgency much thought. He realised that the small British contingent supporting regular and irregular Arab troops and armed Bedouin could defeat the Turks who outnumbered them significantly.
The forces camped at Tooth Hill with Lawrence were able to move freely. They could race across the desert on hit-and-run raids against the Turks, who were static, tied down to defending fixed locations along the railway. With mobile armour and field guns directed by aerial reconnaissance these raids were among the first combined actions seen in Arabia.
This site we discovered last year is significant because it is the only British campsite to be found in Jordan from the World War I era. Used for perhaps less than ten days its ephemerality and remoteness had concealed it for 94 years. It is fantastic to be able to connect such a place to Lawrence, and I like to think that here too, he was:
Happy with bully-beef and tea and biscuit, with English talk and laughter round the fire, golden with its shower of sparks from the fierce brushwood.
John B Winterburn does not work for, consult to, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article. He is the Landscape Archaeologist for The Great Arab Revolt Project.
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