The Closets of Queen Latifah and “So You Think You Can Dance”
I am indebted, as I often am, to Kenyon Farrow - this time for his recent breakdown of the should-she-or-shouldn’t-she discourse regarding Queen Latifah and coming out. His angle is that it’s not just about personal privacy - it’s about capitalist enterprise and the way that Queen Latifah and others make money off of an idea of heteronormativity and conventional femininity:
“Latifah has partly made a career off of promoted heteronormativity in some pretty conservative films–not just as an actress but as an executive producer. The extremely racist and sexist Bringin Down The House was a film where her character , a black “ghetto” ex-con at first causes havoc to the life and family of Steve Martin, but in the end assists him in correcting his white middle-class, heteronormative family. Latifah was executive producer.”
Watching this season of So You Think You Can Dance I was saddened, as I am every season, to see so much queerness kept under wraps. These beautiful talented gay-as-f*ck boys butching it up (and more than a few dykes femming it up), joking about having crushes on their opposite-sex partners, doing hot and steamy tangos and waltzes and Bollywood-Russian-folk-jazz routines with people they have zero sexual interest in… because most of the people who vote in competition shows like this are young women, presumably with the same fictional “middle American” mentality that causes politicians to head straight for the middle (or the right) of the road, and they don’t want to alienate potential voters, who might happen to be homophobic assholes, by being queer.
Which climaxed in THIS AMAZING DANCE, choreographed by past “Dance” competitor (and button-cute, definitely-gay) Travis Wall, in which two of these boys danced what was clearly an elegy for a gay break-up, with a lot of embracing and wrestling and stabbing in the back and fighting and emoting (the YouTube video will almost certainly get taken down by Fox’s roving band of copyright desperadoes, so if you follow the link and there’s nothing there, do a Google search for “how it ends travis neal kent” or something like that).
No queer person could watch it without reading it as a story of gay love and heartbreak and betrayal, which is a very different narrative (in some ways) from the heterosexual equivalent. And yet the judges and the dancers kept talking it up as something about “best friends” reaching “the end of their friendship,” or some other bullsh*t. Judge Mia Michaels, also certainly a dyke although there’s no authoritative record I could find online of her officially coming out - was so moved she had absolutely nothing to say:
“I think it’s the first time that I can’t find words. Can’t find the words. Sorry, it’s so real. And so uncomfortably awful and that is what true true genius and an artist is. ”
A queer judge; a queer choreographer; a show full of queer dancers - but nobody’s out, nobody’s able to be who they really are, everybody’s trying real hard to be good little Fox employees who won’t offend or rock the boat, everybody’s trying to please this alleged universe of slavering homophobes who can handle even the gayest sh*t as long as it doesn’t SAY it’s gay. (well, a couple of the other judges are out, but it’s almost always glossed over or ignored).
When public figures claim a “right to privacy” around their sexuality, we have to understand that it’s not actually about privacy. It’s about protecting their economic interests. Their brand. Their hustle. And of course they can’t admit it to us. They know that queer people know how to read between the lines, and most straight people don’t want to know that there ARE lines.
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