Gilmore Girls gay jokes
I've been slightly distressed over one particular tiny aspect of Gilmore Girls as I've been watching the show on DVD:
They do a fair number of gay jokes (probably an average of one every couple of episodes), and most of those jokes in the first five seasons center around either the idea that being gay is bad in some way, or the idea that one of the more macho characters is put off by the idea of gayness or being gay.
Which in a gay-friendly show would be fine with me. But all through the first five seasons, there isn't (as far as I've noticed and remember) a single clearly gay character.
There's a metrosexual major character who looks, sounds, and acts stereotypically gay in many ways, but there've been explicit references to him being interested in women, and none to him being interested in men. But Googling suggests that a lot of viewers considered him to be gay, so maybe he partly counts.
There are two recurring minorish male characters who are occasionally a little femme, but one of them eventually gets a girlfriend, and I don't know that we've ever seen the other one express romantic interest in anyone.
And there's a female mechanic who I don't think has ever expressed interest in anyone.
So there are characters who could be read as gay-but-closeted or gay-but-we-never-see-their-partners, but in a show that's so heavily focused on relationships, I've been disappointed not to see any explicitly out gay characters.
And I've been feeling that the show was making too many kinda edgy jokes that veer a little too close to homophobic jokes for my tastes, without having the kind of gay cred that might make those jokes more palatable to me.
But now I'm in season six (almost done with season six, actually), and I've been really pleased that they seem to finally have learned how to do gay jokes right—that is, without suggesting that there's anything wrong with being gay.
There's even been a clearly gay character. He was an extremely minor character; he had only a couple of lines, and I'm not sure he had a name. And the way you could tell he was gay was that he had swishy intonation and a very very limp wrist. Still, I'd say that's at least slightly better than nothing.
And by halfway through season six, there started to be regular jokes in which straight characters briefly indicated that they were gay, for comic effect and without even a hint of denigration.
I was going to paste a transcript of one such joke here, but I suspect it wouldn't work as well without the context and delivery. Suffice it to say that it was genuinely funny, and didn't make me wince even a little bit, and that it involved two recurring minor male characters taking each other's hands and talking about getting married to each other. (This aired in 2006, so it was after Massachusetts started recognizing same-sex marriage, but before Connecticut (where the show is set) did.)
I should note that this aspect of the show has never really upset me. It's made me wince a little now and then (in earlier seasons), but I've been willing to give it a pass because there's so much else to like about the show. But I'm glad they finally did figure out how to do gay jokes right, even if only in the final couple years of the show.
PS: Unrelatedly, the writers also seem to have started embracing their inner geeks this season; in particular, there've been a couple of references to BSG, and one major character even said "frakking."
