Generic Closet

Even after a rise in gay and Black representation and production on TV in the 1990s, the sitcom became a "generic closet," restricting Black gay characters with narrative tropes.Drawing from 20 interviews with credited episode writers, key show-runners, and Black gay men, The Generic Closet situates Black-cast sitcoms as a unique genre that uses Black gay characters in service of the series' heterosexual main cast. Alfred L. Martin, Jr., argues that the Black community is considered to be antigay due to misrepresentation by shows that aired during the family viewing hour and that were written for the imagined, "traditional" Black family. Martin considers audience reception, industrial production practices, and authorship to unpack the claim that Black gay characters are written into Black-cast sitcoms such as Moesha, Good News, and Let's Stay Together in order to closet Black gayness.By exploring how systems of power produce ideologies about Black gayness, The Generic Closet deconstructs the concept of a monolithic Black audience and investigates whether this generic closet still exists.

In The Generic Closet: Black Gayness and the Black-Cast Sitcom, Alfred L. Martin Jr. embarks on a detailed case study of five U.S. shows that aired between 1996 and 2014 and outlines the circumscribed roles available to Black gay characters. Martin unpacks the television industry's imagination of Black audiences as monolithically intolerant of homosexuality, traces the implications of these industrial assumptions from the writers' room to the screen, and concludes with the voices of Black gay viewers themselves. . . . Martin's work is timely given the present climate of growing awareness of structural racism, especially in the United States. This book also underscores the need for intersectional analysis, highlighting the disparate conditions of representation for White gay characters and Black gay characters during the so-called Gay '90s and the problematic depiction of the "coming out" narrative as universal to the LGBTQ+ experience, despite studies showing that it is less salient to the Black LGBTQ+ experience., The Generic Closet gives readers a language to describe the pernicious industrial strategy as a structure for containing Black gayness–something that the television industry and audiences wtill cannout seem to escape., With The Generic Closet: Black Gayness and the Black-Cast Sitcom, Martin illustrates not only how Black gayness has been mediated on the Black-cast sitcom but also why it has been mediated in the ways it has. The use of his various research methods helps to make clear how systems of power produce and recycle ideologies that satisfy racial hegemony and heteronormativity. Deviation from these industrial modes is deemed risky in terms of capital gain and losing an established audience. The possible "good intentions" in producing and sustaining narratively important Black gay characters while diversifying televisual identity is unfortunately tertiary to network fears and the heterosexist American norm. To move forward from this banishment of Black gay men to the generic closet, the assumed monolithic Black audience must first be deconstructed to make way for new representational possibilities., In The Generic Closet: Black Gayness and the Black-Cast Sitcom, Alfred L. Martin Jr. constructs a rigorous, persuasive account of the historical inclusion of Black gay characters in Black-led sitcoms. Zeroing in on the period in the 1990s and 2000s when, in US television, a significant increase in on-screen Black and gay representation occurred, Martin uses interviews with audiences and industry professionals to produce nuanced understandings of the industrial moment itself, the programs created during it, and, most centrally to the monograph's arc, Black gayness as it appeared in Black-cast sitcoms. . . . Notably, throughout The Generic Closet, Martin holds space for the positive and productive aspects of representations of Black gay characters, even while highlighting areas worthy of critique. This tension is something many scholars studying media industries (while also attending to implications of race, sexual identity, and other minoritized identity categories within those industries) are required to balance: while there is willingness, and even desire, to acknowledge advancements around diversity, engaging with the potential of what could be can make it difficult to maintain a critical lens toward understanding which elements have limited or continue to limit possibilities around more authentic, dynamic representations of minoritized groups. Martin successfully strikes this balance through careful deployment of his multifaceted analytical approach, the facets of which are ultimately unified by his illumination of the previously obfuscated generic closet and the revelation of how it functions to uphold boundaries around Black gay inclusion in US television.

Alfred L. Martin Jr. is Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Iowa.