Do Ask, Do Tell

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Talk shows do indeed trade on voyeurism, and it is no secret that those who break with sex and gender norms and fight with each other on camera help the shows win higher ratings. But there is more to the picture: the place where 'freaks' talk back. It is a place where Conrad, born and living in a female body, can assert against Sally Jessy Raphael's claims that he 'used and betrayed' women in order to have sex with them that women fall in love with him as a man because he considers himself a man; where months later, in a program on 'our most outrageous former guests' (all gender crossers), Conrad can reappear, declare himself to have started hormone treatment, and report that the woman he allegedly 'used and betrayed' has stood by him. This is a narrow opening, but an opening nonetheless, for the second voice promoted by the talk show: the proud voice of the 'freak,' even if the freak refuses that term. The fact that talk shows are exploitative spectacles does not negate the fact that they are also opportunities; as Munson points out, they are both spectacle and conversation. They give voice to the systematically silenced, albeit under conditions out of the speaker's control, and in tones that come out tinny, scratched, distant.

These voices, even when they are discounted, sometimes do more than just assert themselves. Whatever their motivations, people sometimes wind up doing more than just pulling up a chair at a noisy, crowded table. Every so often they wind up messing with sexual categories in a way that goes beyond a simple expansion of them. In addition to affirming both homosexuality and heterosexuality as normal and natural, talk show producers often make entertainment by mining the in-between: finding guests who are interesting exactly because they don't fit existing notions of 'gay' and 'straight' and 'man' and 'woman,' raising the provocative suggestion that the categories are not quite working.

The last time I visited the Maury Povich Show, for instance, I found myself distracted by Jason and Tiffanie. Jason, a large 18-year-old from a small town in Ohio, was in love with Calvin. Calvin was having an affair with Jamie (Jason's twin sister, also the mother of a three-month-old), who was interested in Scott, who had sex with, as I recall, both Calvin and Tiffanie. Tiffanie, who walked on stage holding Jamie's hand, had pretty much had sex with everyone except Jamie. During group sex, Tiffanie explained, she and Jamie did not touch each other. 'We're not lesbians,' she loudly asserted, against the noisy protestations of some audience members.

The studio audience, in fact, was quick to condemn the kids, who were living together in a one-bedroom apartment with Jamie's baby. Their response was predictably accusatory: You are freaks, some people said; immoral, said others; pathetically bored and in need of a hobby, others asserted. Still other aspects of the 'discussion' assumed the validity and normality of homosexuality. Jason, who had recently attempted suicide, was told he needed therapy to help him come to terms with his sexuality, and the other boys were told they too needed to 'figure themselves out.' Yet much talk also struggled to attach sexual labels to an array of partnerships anarchic enough to throw all labels into disarray. 'If you are not lesbians, why were you holding hands?' one woman asked Tiffanie. 'If you are not gay,' another audience member asked Calvin, 'how is it you came to have oral sex with two young men?'

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