Bravo^s Gay W eddings
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In the context of hegemony, traditional documentary treatment would
have further demarcated these weddings as gay vs. straight. Throughout the
eight episodes, one does receive this message repeatedly, lest the viewer forget
these are indeed gay weddings: Gregg on the gay cruise, Sonja and Lupe being
turned away from potential wedding sites, drag queens performing at Scott and
Harley’s rehearsal dinner, and Dan and Scott’s emotional turmoil as they yearn
for their parents’ acceptance. Even Eve and Dale ask an employee (who may
have been the manager) at the site they choose if “commitment ceremonies”
have been held there (he says, “Yes, no problem,” and even adds, “You two look
perfect for each other”).
Thus, while Alter (2002) writes that a more educational, informational
background would help viewers appreciate the obstacles same-sex couples face,
those struggles are interwoven into their stories anyway. Gay Weddings as
entertainment programming, though it tells an edited story through its
producers’ eyes, manages to illustrate the hegemony surrounding the belief that
relationships needs to be formalized (through public ceremony) and a
counterhegemony that questions heterosexuality as a requisite for romantic love.
As of this writing, production for another season of Gay Weddings is
under way. The initial episodes’ ratings success among Bravo’s audience,
primarily sophisticated, affluent viewers (Downey 2003; Lafayette, 2002) led to
other gay-themed relationship programs. Whether future episodes continue to
“normalize” same-sex weddings by selecting couples who base their own
ceremonies on the heterosexual rubric serves as a research question for further
study. Additionally, examining how Gay Weddings situates itself within the
Bravo network itself (with its recent gay-themed offerings Queer Eye for the
Straight Guy and Boy Meets Boy) and the broader cable and network television
environment serves as another path for researchers to investigate if such
programming can find a way into the “mainstream” (as Queer Eye appeared on
Bravo’s owner network, NBC, in 2003) and how such programming evidences
hegemony even as it challenges media treatment of the assumed heterosexual
nature of romance.
University of Nevada, Las Vegas
Erika Engstrom
Works Cited
Alter, E. (2002, Aug. 29). “Gay weddings” a different reality. Media Life. Retrieved
March 20, 2003 from http://209.61.190.23/news2002/aug02/aug26/4_thurs/
news5thursday.html
Bravo fact sheet, (date unknown). URL: http://ncta.com/guidebook_pds/Bravo.pdf
Brown, M.E. (1989). Soap opera and women’s culture: Politics and the poplar. In K.
Carter & C. Spitzak (Eds.), Doing research in women's communication:
Perspectives on theory and method (pp. 161-190). Norwood, NJ: Ablex
Publishing.
Calvert, C. (2000). Voyeur nation: Media, privacy, and peering in modem culture.