Before you start hyperventilating, Mary, here’s why these other overtly gay moments didn’t make our list.
5) “Born This Way” (Season Two): More like Bored This Way (with the exception of Karofsky’s display of label lust, of course).
4) Big Gay Xmas (Season Three): Blaine and Kurt’s arch retro-closeting was as tedious as the rest of the episode.
3) Jêt-à-Jêt (Season Three): The boys’ duel over the role of Tony paralleled Ramin Setoodeh’s specious argument about gay actors playing straight.
2) Get Out! (Season Three): Finn’s outing of Santana was both out of character and narratively out there.
1) The Big Fuck (Season Three): We know a thing or two about gay sex, and cuddling while wearing a scoop-neck wife-beater does not count as losing your virginity.
This Vanity Fair writer makes me nuts. Because sometimes he is so spot on it hurts. And other times, I wonder what fucking planet he’s living on.
For the record, I thought it was genius the way Glee discussed casting gay-as-straight and turned it into an entirely different (and far more apt) discussion about passing and gender presentation.
Your thoughts on the two lists?
Deconstructing Glee 
I give him props for calling the First Time “The Big Fuck”, and I agree that TFT wasn’t as, well, heated as it probably should’ve been. However, a majority of this writer’s complaints consist of saying how boring Kurt and Blaine are. I don’t know that they need to be entertaining, per se; they simply exist on primetime television, which is less than they deserve but more than I could’ve hoped for. I have mixed feelings about this writer.
On the other hand, agreed about the gay-for-pay casting. I think it’s brilliant how they have gay playing gay, gay playing straight (Jon Groff/Jesse St. James) and straight playing gay. It’s now less about sexual orientation and more about the argument over who passes and who doesn’t, which I think is a very interesting discussion.
Love your blog, by the way.
I mean, I think he’s kind of an ass.
His commentary for the longer list was interesting. His commentary for the second was….honest, but his criticisms missed the mark (and really, Finn was OOC? Really?) so incredibly that it was hard to take them seriously as anything more than tired “I didn’t enjoy it, so it objectively sucked.” Whatever pays the bills, I guess.
//I thought it was genius the way Glee discussed casting gay-as-straight and turned it into an entirely different (and far more apt) discussion about passing and gender presentation.//
The issue of casting gay-as-straight was already essentially about passing, and on a certain level about perceptions of masculinity and effeminacy. And (probably unsurprisingly) I don’t think Glee dealt with it particularly well, so I can’t really blame Berk for seeing it purely as a replication of Setoodah’s argument rather than a commentary on it. It was kind of a big mess, to the point where every message I *think* they were trying to send is contradicted by another message in the episode. I mean, inasmuch as the message seemed to be that Kurt is just *inherently* a unicorn, and just cannot pass no matter what he does, it’s unremarked upon (but apparent to the viewer) that he had some measure of control over things like, say, his audition song.(And certainly a lot of commenters thought Kurt dug his own grave by auditioning with Streisand instead of, I don’t know, anything from West
Side Story?) Inasmuch as the point could have been that Kurt has no control over how others perceive him and will just have to take control of his own destiny, though writing his own roles, he still had to accept someone else’s (Brittany’s) definition of him as a pink sparkle unicorn as an inherent truth about his being, rather than his own self-definition (which was still fem and still queer, but just a different kind of fem queer that was much more genuinely Kurt). The final word on the subject was Burt, who’s basically been used as an accepting voice of reason when it comes to Kurt–he accepts him the way he is, but also lays down hard truths that Kurt wants to ignore–and his verdict was that Artie, Bieste, and Emma were right: Kurt is just “really gay”. Their opinions about Kurt go unchallenged, and imo are in fact confirmed by Burt–it might hurt Kurt’s feelings, but they’re not biased, they’re not close-minded, they just can’t help seeing his flaming gayness from space.
So it’s basically the same argument as Setoodah was making, just with shifted goalposts: it’s not that gay men can’t play straight, as proven by Blaine, it’s just the *flaming gay and feminine* gay men who can’t play straight. And since that is ultimately subjective (I think most people would consider Sean Hayes, the primary subject of Setoodah’s article, flamingly gay) it ends up just reiterating the message, especially with the meta-textual knowledge that Chris Colfer is gay-playing-gay and Darren Criss is straight-playing-gay(-playing-straight).
This guy’s clearly a Pirate, right? I don’t know him outside the context of this article, but as his best and worst was as Karofsky-heavy as mine would have been, I have to assume… Not to get that battle going here, again. (Hi Kate!)
Hi Shauna! Trust me, I’m an argumentative dick, but if the mere mention of Karofsky made me put on my fighting hat, I’d have to leave the internet. :p
Well, I agree with #4 and #5. The teehee-we’re-“roommates”-because-people-were(/are!)-homophobes just made me sad. I had actually forgotten about Satoodeh’s stupid article and Ryan Murphy’s condemnation thereof, but yeah, I thought that storyline was awful. Fine, they thought one gay boy was too fem to play Tony and another wasn’t, but fem-ness was equated with male gayness in a way I don’t feel Glee has ever challenged. See also: Burt’s “You’re gay, Kurt, and not Rock Hudson gay, REALLY gay” being taken, even by Kurt, as unquestionable truth. Non-fem guys can’t be “REALLY gay”?
Certainly, Glee has emphatically declared that there’s nothing wrong with being a fem queer man, and that’s great. But when Blaine is rewarded for seeming “straight enough,” and the only butch queer man is a confused mess like Karofsky…