The Case for Honesty in Homosexual Art

By Alejandro Villa Vásquez

Before shows like “Queer as Folk” and “The L Word” garnered infamy for their softcore-porn portrayals of gay and lesbian sex, no instance of homosexual film or television had successfully punctured the mainstream and (soon to be) unfashionably heterosexual conscious of the TV-watching American public. “Will & Grace,” with its gorgeously corporate cast of gay and straight Manhattanites, began to fascinate audiences when it premiered in 1998, so much so that it was resurrected after eleven years in the graveyard of primetime TV. But “Will & Grace” and its basic-cable virtues could never dive into the slutty depths like Queer as Folk” or the “The L Word.” The latter two were sometimes pornographic to the point of frightening. 

This wasn’t because the actual sex being had on screen was fetishistic, or in any way aggressive. In fact, the kind of sex the characters had was objectively vanilla (and not just because they were all white). When contextualized in the time “Queer as Folk” originally aired, 2000 to 2005, the depictions of sex were famously guiltless. The show’s fearlessly horny twink-and-twunk lovers Brian and Justin lived on a different planet than the one where Will and fruit-fly companion Jack McFarland had to forego actual examinations of their own sexual and romantic lives. 

In a system that, despite political pinkwashing (see: Mr. Peter Paul Montgomery Buttigieg) and the commercialization of the amorphousness known as “queerness” (see: “Queer Eye,” “Euphoria,” “Them,” the popularity of “Call Me By Your Name,” “The L Word: Generation Q,” Harry Styles’s sudden taste for high-waisted pants, this year’s Met Gala being Camp themed, “Pose,” 2020’s “Gossip Girl” reboot is rumored to have “queer content,” I could go on), gay men do not go about the world the same way that straight men do. The artistic traditions of much of the world’s television and film have, until the dawn of social justice as we know it today, been bleakly centered around a typical man-need-woman-and-she-need-him mythos. “Queer as Folk,” I admit with pleasure, provided solace to gay youth like myself. Searching high and wide for portraits of gay intimacy that weren’t dripping off Pornhub was (and probably still is) a defining characteristic of being gay.

My mom would chuck me into the car every weekend to drive to the other side of Suffolk County, where her boyfriend lived. Precious opportunities for weekend rest and Saturday playdates became a luxury as I had no choice but to pack up my Nintendo DS and sit in silence for half an hour while my mom drove and prayed the rosary (I would pray too, when I wasn’t busy pinching my eyes pretending to be asleep). I went through my elementary school years living in a converted garage and didn’t have access to cable TV or internet, whose roles in socialization should be obvious — my mom’s boyfriend, however, lived in a big apartment with a gloriously widescreen television, surround-sound and all. He also had a delicious variety of cable TV. 

The first time I tried this delicacy, I quickly stumbled upon channel 179. Logo: an upper-hundred channel that catered exclusively to gay and lesbian viewers (what many would now call a queer audience). I was jarred wide open. I soon discovered “Queer as Folk,” and suddenly the prospect of spending every weekend here seemed kind of awesome. The TV was in the middle of the room, right next to my mom’s boyfriend’s bedroom, and watching the infamous show became a challenge. But being gay means being resourceful. I watched the show as intermittently as a shooting star. I didn’t know if I would have enough alone time, I didn’t know when the show would be on until I got to his place and scrolled through the programming schedules, I didn’t know if they would go to bed on time for me to catch a late-night viewing. But when I did, it was sublime. Maybe I shouldn’t have been watching a show defined by analingus and lechers, but I don’t blame gay youth like myself for seeking representation. Representation isn’t the be-all, end-all of diversity and inclusion initiatives; that’s a cop-out. But it has the capacity to fix something within a viewer. I didn’t realize how pleasure-deprived — alienated — I had been until I discovered shows like “Queer as Folk.” I didn’t realize how being gay can dry out one’s hopes of maintaining passionate, fulfilling relationships, both romantic and familial.

But the glaring truth is that “Queer as Folk,” for all its super-fun sex and whirlwind drama, is not the peak of representation for anyone. Never mind the all-white cast, never mind the safety nets of money and family and friends and and upper(-middle)-class sensibilities. “The L Word” at least had Black women in leads without tokenizing their identities, although I find it at the very least remiss that a show taking place in Los Angeles could only muster two Latina (nonwhite, I may add) characters: one who gets left at the altar and promptly exits stage right after two seasons; and another one, named Papi, of course, whose dramatic engine was her illustrious sexual career and who was often criticized by fans for being a nymphomaniac caricature of Latina women. “Queer as Folk” was as shameless in its portrayals of sex as it was in its petite-bourgeois Saxon identity. And I think what allowed the show to pursue sexual pleasure without any inhibition was its Wonderland-like quality.

The men on the show had sex, like, all the time. The sex was as spontaneous as it was frequent. The problem is that in the real world, gay sex is anything but spontaneous. If society’s collective homophobia and sexism weren’t plenty incentive to hide oneself, the very nature of homosexual activity lends us even more to collective self-seclusion. Sex doesn’t determine gender, but for the purposes of this piece, I refer to sex between people with penises as gay sex. The point is that vaginal intercourse is not a possibility. Most gay men have anal sex. We are all witness and testament to the difficulty of anal sex. Unless one is living off Kombucha-Metamucil cocktails, planning and prepping are definitive characteristics of homosexuality. The stomach-grumbling that comes with fasting in the name of cleanliness, the dollars spent buying lubricant and enemas, the hours spent carpet-bombing (no pun intended) one’s own rectum with water to make sex even possible. All of these familiar, tedious experiences are absent from “Queer as Folk.” The characters are always ready for sex, whether it’s right after lunch in a corporate-office latrine, in a thumping club bathroom, on the conference-room table, behind a diner next to its dumpster. Am I expected to believe that the average gay person is having anal sex after inhaling a cheeseburger and milkshake? I am no fool. The creators of the show wanted viewers to live in this fantasyland of miraculously clean butts, where sex could be just as unprovoked and surprising as heterosexual sex. It was gratifying in a way.

But it all served to reassert the mindset that gay sex is cool outside of everything that made it possible in the first place. It is a self-abhorrence that eschews honesty for nonchalance when it comes to one’s own body. Depending on where one lands on the top-bottom spectrum, cleansing rituals like watching what one eats for up to twenty-four hours prior to sex or enema-induced diarrhea might be a very regular part of one’s sex life. “Queer as Folk“ will always be guilty of endorsing a harmful attitude toward, not gay sex itself, but the normal and healthy habits that make it enjoyable. Thankfully, I think gay men are, regardless of where they land on the spectrum, realizing that we can only fill our toilets with shit so many times before we accept that this is as integral to our lives as good pop music or strange interest in interior decorating. But people like Ocean Vuong aren’t just accepting of homosexuality. They value our way of life and elevate them through poetic narration. His novel, “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous,” has one of the most evolved sex scenes I have ever read in literature at large, and it deals head-on with the problematically avoidant attitudes we adopt toward our sexuality.

The quasi-autobiography is narrated by a Vietnamese-American man named Little Dog and chronicles his coming-of-age in the form of a letter to his painfully beloved mother. Early in the story Little Dog meets love interest Trevor while forced to work on a farm by the poverty that often befalls immigrants. They harvest tobacco and consummate their unspoken love over microwavable dinners and nights spent masturbating one another on the dirt floors of the barn where they work. That itself is touching — that itself is more true to life than anything “Queer as Folk” ever did. Until Little Dog says, “[o]ur clothes fell off us like bandages” and Trevor responds with “Let’s just do it,” I didn’t think the novel would actually go there. Despite the misery and destitution and racism, he’ll finally have what he wants without question. I was overcome by how happy I was for Little Dog. He is going to make love for the first time, I thought. I remember mentally prepping myself for more disappointingly spontaneous gay sex, but I still wanted him to lose his virginity. My need for an honest representation of homosexuality was being thwarted by my consumerist desire to read something smutty. And Vuong’s words are easy to consume; he writes delectably, he wants you to savor the “salted skin, then the bone underneath.”

Then, “about ten minutes in, as Trevor went faster, our skin sucking with humid sweat, something happened.” Perhaps I am revealing my own deep-seated self-abjection when I say that I was struck when I read this line. My jaw dropped like a cartoon anvil. I wondered how Vuong would represent one of the most natural yet stigmatized aspects of homosexuality, to which he immediately responded “[a] scent rose up to my head, strong and deep, like soil, but sharp with flaw. I knew right away what it was, and panicked. In the heat of it, I didn’t think, didn’t yet know how to prepare myself. The porn clips I had seen never showed what it took to arrive where we were. They just did it—quick, immediate, sure, and spotless.” Reading it again reignites the pleasure I felt the first time. It is a wildly, wonderfully different kind of pleasure. A pleasure that satisfies and affirms my humanity. It comforts and reminds me there is no need for shame. Apart from the accuracy with which he describes the realization, the way the scent always seems to waft and rise, the way it feels like a flaw within oneself, Vuong writes with refreshing and necessary candor. Why did he soil himself and his boyfriend? It is more than youth-induced naiveté. He says that himself. The porn clips lied to him. Society doesn’t give us any hints. “Queer as Folk” certainly was not doing us any favors in that aspect.

To make porn for a general audience, actors must prepare themselves. It’s their gig. The finished product, whether it is on Pornhub or in movies like “Tom of Finland,” “God’s Own Country,” “Desde Allá,” always reaches us squeaky clean and artificially free of anything that might offend our beliefs about what sex is supposed to look, taste and smell like. Vuong denounces decorum and rightfully so. It is a message to readers, especially gay ones, that nothing about our sexuality should be shamed, not even the stinkiest or dirtiest aspects. It is a step toward truly normalizing our sexuality. Because gay sex connotes anal sex and is often predicated on hygiene, the worst thing gay people have done is set the expectation that if one shuts his eyes and pinches his nostrils for long enough then the so-called evil will go away. Even if we see, hear, and speak no evil, we can still smell it; we might as well change our definition of evil.

Vuong shows there is nothing bad about bodies and the things they do. My raw shock when I first read his forthright sex scene is proof that art and media have conditioned us to pretend that anal sex is not what it is: sometimes smelly (and hot). My hope is that Vuong’s crucial honesty will stir more art — visual art that acknowledges and embraces all aspects of homosexuality, spotless or not.

Alejandro Villa Vásquez is a junior at NYU studying English and creative writing. He is currently finalizing a small poetry manuscript about Latino and immigrant mythologies. You can find him on Instagram and Twitter @lacrimariaolor.