Freaks Talk Back: Tabloid Talk Shows and Sexual Nonconformity, by Joshua Gamson, (University of Chicago Press, 1998; 288 pages).
Sure, Ellen got all the media attention. But discerning viewers in search of authentic lesbian scandals and skirmishes know to turn their dials to The Jerry Springer Show. Jerry has made a name for himself as a sort of ringside announcer to some of the best might-just-be-real fights this side of professional wrestling. While Ellen agonized over every detail of her new life, from how to come out to what to wear, and coyly avoided so much as a kiss, Jerry's sexually ambiguous guests are quite literally shameless. They're at it the moment they hit the stage -- cuddling, smooching, bawling, screaming and slapping.
Nearly thirty years ago, a small contingent of drag queens at New York's Stonewall Inn sashayed to the front lines of the battle for gay and lesbian rights. Several decades of serious activism later, has the vanguard of the struggle shifted to the set of the Springer show? For better or worse, this is not far-fetched, or so I've come to conclude after reading Freaks Talk Back: Tabloid Talk Shows and Sexual Nonconformity by Joshua Gamson. With ACT-UP and Queer Nation little more than memories, the most conspicuous "sexual nonconformists" in this country may just be the fighting femmes on Jerry Springer, the transsexual beauty queens on Maury Povitch, the surprise gay crushes on Ricki Lake and Jenny Jones.
This makes for problematic politics, to be sure, but it also makes for some pretty compelling television. Gamson, a Yale sociologist, attempts to sort through the puzzling ramifications of the talk show phenomenon . As a gay man (or "gayman," as he puts it), Gamson recognizes that talk shows are little more than "wretched little place[s], emptied of so much wisdom and filled, thank God, with inadvertent camp." Gamson can't help loving these places -- in part because for many years they've been practically the only cultural space that allows sexual "freaks" of all kinds to shout themselves into the public arena. As an academic (a "scholarman"), Gamson assumes a more distanced view, describing the shows "rich and interesting, like . . . funny, slightly frightening room[s] in a museum."
Gamson has penetrated a world of discourse dominated, alas, by Bill Bennetts on the right and the left alike, who reflexively condemn "trash TV" as a cultural embarrassment as well as quasi-Marxian intellectuals who seek in these shows a kind of proletarian wisdom. ("On talk shows, whatever their drawbacks, the proles get to talk," Ellen Willis assured readers of the Nation in 1996. Today she might add: "And to rip out one another's hair.")
Still, I find it hard to imagine old Karl Marx cheering for Jerry and his kids -- and frankly, I have a hunch that neither Willis nor Bennett have done the hard work of plopping on the couch day after day in front of these shows.
For whatever it's worth, Freaks Talk Back is probably the most thoroughly researched book on talk shows we're ever likely to see. Gamson watched (or studied transcripts) of literally hundreds of talk shows featuring lesbians, gays, bisexuals and assorted gender-benders over two decades; he may be the only person ever to subject the (mercifully cancelled) Mo Gaffney Show to serious academic attention. He sat in studio audiences, interviewed dozens of staffers and former guests, and (he reports almost offhandedly) "facilitated thirteen group discussions with regular talk show viewers" -- an assortment of straights and gays, women and men, and a few who didn't fit quite so easily into any of these binary categories.
As is the case with everything from politics to sausages, the closer you look at the making of talk shows the queasier you begin to feel. Much of what we see on screen, Gamson submits, is fabricated: guests are lied to, manipulated, ambushed, dressed up like doofuses or sluts, railroaded into filling preconceived roles, prodded into conflict with one another, coached endlessly on what to say. One former Geraldo guest, transsexual Linda Phillips, reports that producers wouldn't give her a return plane ticket until she agreed to appear on the show alongside a weightlifter and the tallest man in the world.
Still, outright fakery -- hiring actors and scripting scripts -- is rarer than you might think, in part because so many enthusiastic amateurs are willing to play roles, to present caricatured versions of their real selves in exchange for fifteen minutes of (commercial interrupted) fame. "Treating the occasional hiring of actors as some aberrant threat to truth," Gamson writes, "is to miss the fact that talk shows are role-driven to begin with, that even when they are working with 'real people' (the vast majority of the guests), producers are casting and directing."
Oddly enough, as the shows have gotten wilder, more violent, and sleazier, they've also, arguably, grown more honest. After all, it is in the most extreme circumstances -- whether stranded on a desert island or on the set of Jenny Jones -- that our real characters show themselves. What emerges from the tabloid talk show crucible is often more emotionally true than the civilized talk on the "issues oriented" talk shows of a decade ago -- where clean-cut, middle-class gay activists debated freelance moralists on the "problem" of homosexuality.
Though today's free-for-alls are messier, meaner and more humiliating, they also give social pariahs a space to let it all hang out. "What seems like a simple opportunity, and a compromised one . . . is actually a large shift: a chance to break the monopoly on 'truth' held by those who would talk about us," Gamson writes. "Amidst all the hubbub and the coaching, there is a tremendous amount of testimony. We who have lived this life will tell you its truths."
What's striking is that, in the midst of all the shouting, gays and lesbians and transgendered folks often emerge as heroes of sorts. While gay couples quietly assert their love for one another, the bigots are reduced to red-faced tirades that win them only boos from the audience.
In the end, the main accomplishment of the trash talk shows (such as it is) may be to shift issues of sexuality from the center stage to the sideshow; instead of being the central issue of a talk show, pondered solemnly with a surfeit of expert opinion and much weeping and wailing, the tabloid talk shows make sexuality merely one issue among many. To the poor schmo sitting disconsolately on the Jerry Springer set, it doesn't much matter if his girlfriend is sleeping with Adam or Eve (or Adam and Steve); what matters is that it's someone other than him.
Gradually, even the lipstick-lesbian kisses on the Springer show are losing some of their illicit thrill. And this may be a form of progress. "Tolerance is the result not of enlightenment," Quentin Crisp once said, "but of boredom." Every day, in front of an audience of millions, tabloid TV ringleaders move one step closer to proving him right.
might-just-be-real fights this side of professional wrestling. While Ellen agonized over every detail of her new life, from how to come out to what to wear, and coyly avoided so much as a kiss, Jerry's sexually ambiguous guests are quite literally shameless. They're at it the moment they hit the stage -- cuddling, smooching, bawling, screaming and slapping.
this country may just be the fighting femmes on Jerry Springer, the transsexual beauty queens on Maury Povitch, the surprise gay crushes on Ricki Lake and Jenny Jones.
thoroughly researched book on talk shows we're ever likely to see. Gamson watched (or studied transcripts) of literally hundreds of talk shows featuring lesbians, gays, bisexuals and assorted gender-benders over two decades; he may be the only person ever to subject the (mercifully cancelled) Mo Gaffney Show to serious academic attention. He sat in studio audiences, interviewed dozens of staffers and former guests, and (he reports almost offhandedly) "facilitated thirteen group discussions with regular talk show viewers" -- an assortment of straights and gays, women and men, and a few who didn't fit quite so easily into any of these binary categories.
role-driven to begin with, that even when they are working with 'real people' (the vast majority of the guests), producers are casting and directing."
coaching, there is a tremendous amount of testimony. We who have lived this life will tell you its truths."
