The "Modern" Family (or at least what we can see of it)

http://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2010/10/modern-family-and-gay-marriage-its-complicated/64397/

I felt compelled to discuss “male marriages”—seeing as we spent all last week covering “female marriages.” However, the male marriages I’ll be talking about are not from the Victorian Era, but from 2010.

I found this article by Alyssa Rosenberg which critiques the television show Modern Family’s portrayal of gay couples. While many television critics have praised Modern Family for transcending stereotypes in portraying the show’s gay characters as dynamic and complex human beings (and presenting their relationships as equal to the other heterosexual ones), Rosenberg believes there is still room for improvement. She focuses her criticism on the lack of visible (to the audience) physical affection or sex life in the gay couple’s relationship. The heterosexual couples frequently kiss and exchange other signs of physical affection, but the gay couple rarely does so. Rosenberg questions if the audience is “just too jumpy” to view signs of physical affection (or suggestions of a sex life) between two men.

The questions raised by Rosenberg reminded me of our class’s discussion of Victorian “female marriages.” In Between Women, Sharon Marcus states that “sexual relationships of all stripes were most acceptable when their sexual nature was least visible as such but was instead manifested in terms of marital acts such as cohabitation, fidelity, financial solidarity, and adherence to middle-class norms of respectability (49).”

How far have we as a society (or even just a television audience) progressed since the Victorian Era in our acceptance of “all stripes” of relationships (sexual or not)? Are television audiences so willing to accept Modern Family’s gay couple because they don’t have to witness the physical or sexual aspects of the relationship?

Marcus states that women who left records of their female marriages glossed over the sexual aspects of their relationship by claiming the “privilege of privacy accorded to opposite-sex couples.” Physical affection was “assumed” rather than “displayed” and couples presented their “sexual bond” as a “social one (49).”

Now of course the women in Victorian “female marriages” weren’t hiding from epithets like lesbian or gay (the terms had not been “invented” yet), but apposite to Rosenberg’s argument is the idea of glossing over the physical and sexual aspects of a relationship and focusing on the social aspects in order to make the relationship more palatable for society.

If the viewing public is to assume that the gay couple’s relationship contains a physical (or even sexual) aspect, then why is the physical and sexual component of the heterosexual couples’ so clearly displayed for the audience? Unlike the Victoria heterosexual couples, the heterosexual couples of Modern Family are not claiming a right to privacy. Why must the physical and sexual component of the gay couple’s relationship remain invisible to the audience? It seems we as a society—or at least a television audience—still have very “Victorian views” when it comes to physical affection and sex in any relationship other than a heterosexual one. We’d rather simply “assume” than face reality.