Queer-Lens Lesson of the Day
Listen to this story.
“HOW ARE YOU?” Sienna Miller’s character asks in HBO’s new divorce drama, War. She’s having a fancy lunch with her son, Gabriel (no affiliation!), in the first few minutes of Episode 3. “Life? School?” she asks, as he tucks into two slices of cake. “Any girls you like?”
She raises her eyebrows. “Or boys.”
She’s already smirking. “I’m in a throuple,” he responds, as she nods and starts to smile. “With two guys”—now she’s laughing—“from the rugby team. It’s really serious.”
She laughs more.
“Be fine if you were,” she says.
Dear Reader: WOULD IT?
Because “laughable” and “fine” are not equally accepting notions.
Picture me standing in my kitchen, sautéing some mushrooms in butter and sesame oil, as this exchange takes place. “I’m in a throuple, with two guys,” this other Gabriel says, and I look up, thinking for a split second, Ooh! Yes! Non-hetero AND non-normative! Only to see that these actors are—the show is—making fun of the very concept of this other Gabriel being gay, too.
Maybe you didn’t notice, and that’s okay. This is what they call micro-aggressions, and they’re often only noticed by the members of their targeted groups. But imagine anyone responding like this to news that you had gotten straight-engaged: snorting, and laughing. Like your life was—like you were—absurd.
Gabriel Mac
Gabriel Mac
Contrast this supposedly edgy HBO drama with this season of the ever-edgeless Great British Baking Show. A contestant—named, incredibly, also Gabe—is shown baking at home, in one of those little get-to-know-them packages, and Noel Fielding says in his usual soft, posh voiceover that Gabe lives with his two partners, two male-presenting people shown holding small dogs.
Just like that. It was so refreshing, to see a less-usual queer life treated as legitimate. I am not in a gay throuple; I am one man with a cat. Still, the air is made to be stifling to queer creatures, and moments like this let more oxygen in for us.
Some people felt that way about Heated Rivalry. But cis gay men who go to the gym a lot and are ashamed of themselves hasn’t been an edgy construct for decades. That’s not to say that those characters’ oppressions aren’t extremely real. But that was a gay story. British, baking Gabe’s is a queer one. Even some cis gay men use “gay” versus “queer” to talk about certain kinds of fags: “He’s gay,” some have said to me, to delineate more normative politics or lifestyle in a homo I didn’t know. “Not queer.”
I was so excited for Sienna Miller’s son to be in a three-man relationship, for the moment that I thought he was. Partly for me, yes. But also for him, this dude I didn’t know at all, fictional and not even having won my interest yet. Because in that instant, standing at my stovetop, I celebrated that he’d found his queer.
