http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FomVNm8g8vE&feature=related
(you can view the scene here by skipping to 4:09)
I've recently fallen in deep lezza love with the Golden Girls. Four wise cracking, dirty talking, over forty, ladies sharing life and love together - what's not to love?
What's most amazing about the Golden Girls is it's validation of non-sexual and non-blood relationships, and the important role it gives to female friendships in general. In the episode "Home Again, Rose" the girls aren't allowed to visit Rose before her heart surgery on the grounds that they're not family. This scene parallels that tale of gay partners being unable to visit their lover trotted out by so many gay activists to make the case for gay marriage, but it differs in important ways. The girls' relationship to Rose isn't validated by the legal institution of marriage, or the strength of their love in coupledom, it's validated by the community of support the Girls' offer each other day in and day out as roomies and best friends.
Though it takes an economic sacrifice to convince Rose's daughter that the girls are family, the viewer is already on the side of the girls. As a weekly dinner guest over the past seven years, the viewer knows that the girls, despite their lack of blood ties, qualify as family and are the most important support system in eachother's lives. Thus, the viewer is implicitly sided with the queer nature of the Golden Girl's relationship from the start. The viewer recognizes and validates the multiple loving relationships that exist in the Golden Girls' life, and this reading queers both the Golden Girls narrative and the 'hospital visiting rights' stories of the homonormative gay agenda.
The Golden Girls, already fag icons, can serve as an argument against the couple-focused goal of gay marriage. The Girls' fight the isolation of old age and divorce by creating a roommate family and community, and marriage rights would still exclude and invalidate the platonic and multiple loving relationships of the GG's community. The show's pilot (which, interestingly, includes a gay male roommate whose only role it seems is to make tea and stay in the background) threatens the Golden Girls' family by Blanche accepting a marriage proposal. This proposal is unravelled by the revelation of the husband-to-be's bigamy. If we want to take this reading further (and why not? going the distance is always fun), the show's pilot episode symbolizes the threat the institution of marriage shows to these platonic, chosen family communities.
You are so on the ball with this, Kegels Bogue. I remember back in 2002-2004, when the Civil Union debate was going on in Québec, there were a few (very cute) academactivists who questioned the marital-erotic assumptions at the core of the same-sex marriage debacle. Civil Unions (a legal loophole created to dodge the religious right's attempt to quash gay marriage in Canada) are still possible between people like the Golder Girls, but clearly marriage is a saltier, bigger pickle for some of our southern cousins. In other words, perhaps the Broken States of Amerika needs a Golden Girls Law, allowing a separate legal connection status for friends who make good one-liners, wear shoulder pads, and who have your back no matter what!
ReplyDeleteThis is so beautiful. As an avid GG Fan/g, I know most of these episode plots just by their titles.
ReplyDeleteThat show had some major political subtext. Since they were old women, they were deemed as these de-sexualized songs of experience actually representing something so much greater, enabling them to slip so much more under the radar.
Desperate housewives can be buried alive for all I care, just bring on the horny widows on the Lanai!
(For a good cry, watch "A Piece of Cake", when Rose shares her first birthday alone after Mile's death!)