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Award-winning author Gabriel Mac reads essays from his newsletter, The Faggot-Witch Whenever. Sign up, tip, and engage at fwwhenever.com.
This is your quick Queer Lens lesson of the day. That's the title of this piece, and it's also What's Happening. The subtitle is Fuck HBO. Seriously though, I'm so fucking tired of their supposedly woke prestige drama shit. Anyway, here we go.
Gabriel Mac: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 in the first few minutes of episode three. Life? School?
Gabriel Mac:She asks as he tucks into two slices of cake. Any girls you like? She raises her eyebrows. Or boys. She's already smirking.
Gabriel Mac: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 listener, would it?
Gabriel Mac:Because laughable and fine are not equally accepting notions. Picture me standing in my kitchen sauteing some mushrooms and 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, Oh 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.
Gabriel Mac:Maybe you didn't notice, and that's okay. This is what they call microaggressions, 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. 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.
Gabriel Mac: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.
Gabriel Mac: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 are extremely real, but that was a gay story. British Baking Gabes 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 lifestyles in a homo I didn't know.
Gabriel Mac: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.