Popular Culture Review Vol. 13, No. 1, January 2002 | Page 27

“The Whole World’s Gone Gay!”

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and into a frank acknowledgment of gay identity and an alternative lifestyle. The
episode entitled “Lisa vs. Malibu Stacey” provides a fine example of how the
show allows gay life its own place and displays a refreshing tolerance for it. When
Lisa wishes to launch a campaign against the recently marketed talking doll and
presents the idea to her family, she is chastened for her continual activism. Bart,
for example, notes that Lisa made the family march in a local gay rights parade,
brandishing a copy of the local newspaper to emphasize his point. What interests
me here is the fact that it is the level of her activism they criticize (“You’ve been
doing that a little too much lately,” Marge reluctantly admonishes) and not the fact
that they were photographed alongside gay men in the parad e nor that this photo
wound up on the front page of the Springfield newspaper.
The camp sensibility of The Simpsons is perhaps best illustrated in a
seventh-season episode entitled “Radioactive Man.” In this episode, Hollywood
moguls are in Springfield to make a film version of the exploits of Radioactive
Man, comic-book superhero and one-time star of his own television series. As the
producers of the film say, they want to “stay as far away from the campy 70s
[television] version as possible.” We then see a flashback to a scene from Radioactive
Man, done as an obvious parody of the 1960s Batman television show. The Simpsons
knows full well that the original Batman was saturated with a gay sensibility, and
they highlight this fact by paralleling Batman with their stand-in for all “real world”
comic book superheroes. Radioactive Man. The Simpsons then takes the gay
sensibility one step further by having the villain be that weird combination of
pubescent effeminacy and adolescent masculinity: the boy scout. The effect is
additionally underscored in having the villain, a.k.a. the Scoutmaster, voiced by
Paul Linde, who encourages his henchmen: “Don’t be afraid to use your nails,
boys.” Of course, to create this effect, the show relies on some well-worn and less
than favorable stereotypes. As Larry Gross rightly notes “media characterizations
[typically] use popular stereotypes as a code which they know will be readily
understood by the audience” (“Out” 27). With regard to gay males. Gross has in
mind here such stereotypes as lisping speech, limp wristedness, and the effeminate
sashay. I concede the Batman parody utilizes these stereotypes; indeed. The
Simpsons utilizes many of these for peripheral gay characters on a regular basis.
But I think the show does so with an ulterior motive. Such representation here is
not at the expense of the gay community, but in support of it. By rehearsing the
patterns of the Batman series, it is in effect rearticulating the gayness of the show
for mainstream audiences, overtly enacting the same reading that gay men and
women have done covertly for years.