Yeah David, the author of the article, is a personal friend (I've known his husband since I was a kid) and I think is a great writer (his entire book about Maurice--novel and film is extremely insightful as are his books on Hitchcock and masculinity, etc.) So I'll defend him, but I do think this was cranked out pretty quickly and there are some awkwardly worded bits (and I agree with you on the one you mention.)
I actually do think when the show aired--maybe it met with indifference from most fans (although I was surprised how much my sister was a fan--something I didn't even know until it came out a year later when we were talking about tv shows.) However, in the gay bloggersphere it DID get a lot of hate. People were hate watching and picking on every little aspect. Why is a show set in San Francisco so white was a big one (and yes, there's some truth there.) Others were mad that it wasn't addressing gay politics. Wondering how Groff's character could be so naive about gay issues (and he was, but I still bought that that could be true of his character,) and just picking on every little subject.
I remember recently one of those blogger/critics actually said he returned to the show and he realized how unfair he was about it... Why SHOULD it address every hot gay political issue of the moment, etc? I think the issue was that when it ran it was the ONLY American TV show focused on gay men, and so people who watched it and felt it didn't reflect their reality got mad... If that makes sense--it had the burden of somehow, since there were no other gay shows, people thinking it should address everything.
As you say, we've seen how often that doesn't work... The QAF reboot was a disaster (while the US original QAF version was often an entertaining soap opera, I already thought it made a mistake when "Cow/Lip" the US creators said they wanted it to represent different aspects of the gay AND lesbian scene because there's no way it could do that--and I don't remember one major character being a person of colour--and one reason the RTD UK Queer as Folk worked was he was simply writing about three individuals, not the entire gay scene...) But that reboot... And one thing that irked me, and I know I should NOT bring this up, was the fact that to be truly diverse, they didn't have ONE cis gender, able bodied white gay guy except for a kinda villain of the piece, which was odd especially considering its showrunner is an able bodied, cis gendered white guy...
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EricMontreal22 ·
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