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Queer Broadcasts

Backstage Television, Insider Material, and Media Producers

Quinn Miller

In June 2011 Tina Fey, the creator of 30 Rock – a National Broadcasting Corporation (NBC, 2006–) sitcom about a fictional NBC sketch show – issued a public statement following press coverage of an allegedly homophobic stand-up routine that one of her actors performed in a comedy club. Taking a “we are everywhere” approach shared by radical queer activists and more moderate campaigners for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) rights, Fey, who also stars in the show, stated that, without their “gay and lesbian coworkers at 30 Rock,” she and her colleague, Tracy Morgan, “would not have lines to say, clothes to wear, sets to stand on, scene partners to act with, or a printed-out paycheck from accounting [. . .]” (Hibberd, 2011). This official acknowledgment of queer workers on a comedy series may be a first in the business. However, more informal shout-outs to queer labor behind the scenes of television productions have been part of satirical backstage comedies such as 30 Rock since programming began. These series, which are set in show business and populated by fictional industry personnel, suggest the importance of using queer methods to study media production. The term “queer” indicates a set of interpretative practices partially at odds with the dominant gender/sexual system – as well as with other ideological frameworks – and provides needed leverage for addressing many people's lived experiences.

Scholars often assume that media texts mask the production process, while they see the content of these texts as self-evident. A queer perspective on backstage TV points out that this relationship can be inverted. Comedy series that represent the television industry satirically carry evidence of actual production cultures. This evidence illuminates queer content that is seldom acknowledged. In this chapter I discuss some of the critical tools available for examining queer elements of production manifest in broadcast texts, and I do so without regard for the personal lives (that is, for the sexual identity or sexual history) of the people involved. While it can be useful to investigate the experiences and artistic expressions of the many self-identified LGBT people who have worked as television producers over the years, it is also important to consider the industrial, intertextual, and social dynamics that have contributed to the queer content evident in TV culture. Below, I build on the basics of queer theory and scholarship on camp to outline a set of methods for a queer analysis of the production details that appear in fictional television programs. With reference to relatively successful US series, I elaborate these methods through the terms “insider,” “camp,” and “queer.” I include a brief close reading of 30 Rock, one of the premier backstage satires of the 2000s, to demonstrate how scholars can extract historical evidence about the industry from fictional texts about television production. Backstage series represent queer work as an obvious aspect of the media industries as a whole, rather than as something specific to gender and sexual minorities. I argue that we can better understand the creation of queer media by analyzing texts about the production process than by attempting to pinpoint individual LGBT producers as proof of queer content.

There are no hard and fast rules for how onscreen comedy relates to people situated at social peripheries, or for how an “insider” view relates to the reality of the industry. However, in looking at backstage programs, we can see patterns in the way these texts mediate between representation, history, and the industry's heteronormative limits. In the case of television, queer content can be present when neither the characters nor the actors who play them are necessarily themselves queer. At the same time, this content links up with a diffuse realm of queer labor. The discussion below addresses a production subculture centralized in the US, which has a transnational history in terms of personnel and circulation. It may have parallels and counterparts in other national contexts, as well as possible compatriots on a global scale. In one episode of the Home Box Office/British Broadcasting Corporation (HBO/BBC) quasi-documentary series Extras (2005), for example, Ian McKellen, an internationally recognized actor and prominent mainstream LGBT rights activist in England, casts Andy Millman (Ricky Gervais), a sitcom star, in a gay play after McKellen describes his preparation for The Lord of the Rings, a Hollywood franchise filmed in New Zealand. While the present chapter focuses on a specific subgenre of television, insight into the collaborative dynamics that arise in relation to the production of TV comedy can serve as a model for readers interested in other formats, genres, and media industries. Even within television, insider material turns a satirical eye on many different production cultures around Hollywood, including those related to film, music, dance, design, software, advertising, publicity, and other media arts. While I focus on television's representations of itself and on its producers, backstage series shed light on queer elements in a variety of production traditions. My study suggests that investigations of divergent threads and subgenres in different media can contribute to the recovery of queer histories at a level beyond traditional accounts of production studies and the conventional politics of representation. Exploring how these histories intersect is an essential step in understanding the full weight of queer media history.

Production Studies, Expanded

The US television industry has generated many satirical backstage series since its inception, such as the variety programs of Ed Wynn, Milton Berle, Burns and Allen, Ernie Kovacs, and Jack Benny; Where's Raymond? (ABC, 1953–1954), The Bob Cummings Show (NBC, 1955–1959), and Mr. Adams and Eve (CBS, 1957–1958); The Dick Van Dyke Show (CBS, 1961–1966), Seinfeld (NBC, 1989–1998), and The Larry Sanders Show (HBO, 1992–1998); Curb Your Enthusiasm (HBO, 2000–), Joey (NBC, 2004–2006), The Comeback (HBO, 2005), The Starter Wife (USA, 2008–2009), and Californication (HBO, 2007–). Programs about media producers feature aspects of industry jobs that usually remain outside the limelight, portraying meetings in the writers' room of a series, for example, or the activities of a talk-show host during commercials. The backstage subgenre calls for methods of study focused on queer forms and meanings as well as on queer characters and producers. Integrating queer studies with media production studies more fully offers an opportunity to expand the field's critique of production cultures and the representations they make. In the case of queer media studies, this entails seeking an understanding of queer representation beyond the scope of figures that are gay, lesbian, bisexual, pansexual, and so on – be they characters, performers, writers, or directors.

Queer production is evident throughout the history of television comedy in various elements of queer gender, queer sexuality, and queer culture. The phrase “queer gender” refers to expressions and styles of gender that question or critique universalized sex, gender, and sexuality categories, or show no interest in upholding them. One principal way this attitude appears in television programming is through rejections, ironic inflections, and transpositions of supposedly natural gender norms, including attraction to the so-called opposite sex. In the context of most culture industries, first censors and then scholars quite systematically omit queer elements from a variety of media texts. The queer elements that scholars overlook, which have survived censorship, often take the form of implicit references to the actual production process. I discuss this set of evidence as “insider material.” In the context of US culture industries, insider material concerns, at its broadest level, the way the politics of representation plays out in a free-market economy disinclined from protecting minority groups. Encompassing a mass of queer content that congregates in seemingly minor details, insider material offers traces of queer media production that are independent of the purported sexual identities or sex practices of their producers, as well as of those of the fictional insider characters that breathe life into these traces. Capturing queer content distinct from sexual categories is important for the recovery of queer history. Historians often presume to find proof of queer representation in sexual categories, but queer representation actually resists the idea of a point of origin in identity, and many aspects of industry life that are not particularly queer – as in LGBT – contribute to production contexts and texts that are queer in other ways.

Self-reflexive attention to the social spaces in which the people who produce media interact with one another may seem superfluous compared to factual accounts of production practices. However, comic acknowledgments of alternate TV histories within programming texts connect to actual industry contexts and are crucial for capturing characteristics of production cultures that are necessary for understanding queer representation. Insider material illuminates a tradition of experiences adjacent to dominant norms, which are too often subsumed within a single, universal narrative. As Lynn Spigel (2001, p. 22) writes, “media have numerous histories through which they were imagined and used by different groups.” Through a study of Hollywood film criticism, Chon Noriega (1990) has shown that people often project onto the past the notion of a “monolithic anti-homosexual” climate that is not historically accurate. Even though documentable queer representation proliferated long before the contemporary era of commercialized LGBT representation, scholars regularly assume that “historical evidence and homosexual ‘images’ either do not exist or were censored” (ibid., p. 21). Whether historians assume that references to queer people and queer culture would have been unthinkable or would have been inevitably censored, queer facets of broadcast texts fall disproportionately by the wayside.

Attention to media production on screen makes visible a world of queer content that in turn illuminates production cultures backstage. The insider material that appears throughout US TV programming, much of which occurs at a level of detail rarely included within the scope of TV scholars' objects of study, channels an intangible aspect of the medium's history of production. Media producers can recall elements of their everyday lives; but, even when peppered with anecdotes, these retellings will always be filtered through narratives centered on “bigger” issues. Bringing queer methods to bear on insider material allows historians to capture a production tradition with a unique structure of feeling around industry hierarchies, comic sensibilities, sexual experiences, and queer gender. Despite enormous changes in the television landscape brought on by shifts in technology, demographics, and delivery systems, insider material cuts across the industry's history. Insider material is evidence not merely of a secondary queer history, but of television history itself. A consistent set of risqué backstage comedies recognized as important contributors to TV history have also made important contributions to queer history through their presentation of insider material.

With insider material, producers refer to television production in the present moment and in earlier periods. These types of reference defamiliarize US TV history, opening up past production cultures for re-examination. In addition to insights into the context of production as it existed at the specific moment when a media product was made, seemingly inconsequential moments of programming transmit a vast realm of showbiz knowledge, which is oriented toward the industry's own history. Backstage comedies regularly depict unconventional gender relations, idiosyncratic gender presentations, and coded frankness about non-normative sex practices and sexual identities. I discuss this material under the label “queer” because it defies boundaries related to gender and sexual norms, and it does so in ways that relate to historical queer cultures established beyond the limits of dominant media representation. When backstage series feature insider styles of comedy, they often represent queerness as a primary characteristic of the entertainment industry, recapturing an especially ephemeral aspect of media production.

Insider Positions

A broader understanding of the position that media industry insiders occupy can help scholars use the insider material in backstage sitcoms to illuminate queer TV production. The word “insider” designates a set of people with access to information withheld from others. I hesitate to use the term in relation to queerness, because people tend to think that an insider position automatically signals privilege, and heteronormative (and homonormative) forces continually police and expel queerness – from public and private life as well as from representation. The perspective that insider material channels is more typically the province of social outsiders, whose relationship to privilege can be complicated.

Consumer capitalism, which demands the appearance of novelty alongside familiarity and sameness, makes specific demands on the producers of popular culture. Standardized modes of production, distribution, and exhibition ask creative people to make concessions to turning a profit – which is the “bottom line” – demanding they navigate a maze of social relations oriented toward making money from art (or making money rather than art). Through self-reflexivity around topics related to these processes, insider material highlights the constraints and contradictions that media makers encounter in creative work, which stem from pressure to please the public – or at least to strike a chord with a certain audience segment.

In the commercial arts, the relationship between workers' knowledge of the industry and their position within it can be out of step. Memoirs of Hollywood players attest to this. Diversely positioned participants in studio systems cultivate knowing viewpoints on industry relations in light of their everyday encounters with the business side of entertainment – be these direct encounters or ones that happen through decisions trickling down from people with more control. Whether owners, executive producers, high-profile actors, and in-demand writers or bit players, uncredited editors, prop artists, and personal assistants, media producers draw on experience with and on hearsay about contracts, casting calls, rewrites, and the like. Compared to people without access to Hollywood behind the scenes, these workers know more about why and how specific products get made. At the same time, different degrees of such knowledge mark divisions between producers with different roles, incomes, backgrounds, lifestyles, investments, interests, and alliances in the industry.

The insider perspective is not necessarily snide or condescending, although it can be. Being jaded by the industry is part of a complex pattern of emotional investment and disillusionment. There is a prevalent image of insiders as malicious executives; but self-deprecation and defeatism are also common outcomes of immersion in showbiz, particularly for those who occupy lower positions within industry hierarchies or who have a sense of artistic integrity in their work. Censorship, assimilation, and compromise are a fundamental part of life backstage. Experiencing these processes affects producers, especially those who belong to minorities and are unable to represent themselves on their own terms due to the cultural norms, interpersonal mores, and economic incentives driving the industry. The label “insider” may have a certain allure, but the entertainment world is full of (queer) people who see the high life without fully living it and may struggle for decades without ever really making it. Whatever their position within Hollywood ranks in terms of compensation and job security, or creative control and credit, workers maneuver for knowledge and clout in ways that relate to their subject position and status within the broader social hierarchies replicated (or refigured) by the industry. While there is considerable freedom in specific pockets of US media production with regard to diversity in gender and sexuality, the roles of influential LGBT players have historically been contingent upon these players' obscuring central aspects of their lives or finding a way to be open where others could not.

Complex power dynamics related to these issues color the operations of the entire industry. Some producers who are not LGBT become knowledgeable about queer life and sympathetic to the everyday oppressions it entails, and they do so on the basis of behind-the-scenes contact with people in the industry. Participating in, or being privy to, the production process can give people a skeptical view about the standard wheelings and dealings of show business. While many media makers remain immersed in the broader ideological beliefs of the culture, others see through them. Discrimination, favoritism, hypocrisy, and corruption consistently impact the making of major media texts. For those who are aware of the institutional dynamics surrounding decisions about different media properties, the personal is political. Whatever the producers' positions, their interpretations of their own everyday experiences at work shape their perspectives on hierarchies of power, cultural production, and the Hollywood racket.

Insider Material on TV

Most US television producers today live in Southern California and work in Los Angeles. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that, as of 2008, there were over 350,000 people in film and television production there. While New York – the TV industry's initial home – remains a broadcast center, industry wisdom holds that, for a chance at true success, hopeful workers must move to LA, an area whose palpable orientation toward Hollywood fosters hip and alternative social opportunities, cultivating specific industry subcultures marked by class, race, education, and language. In a context where studio big wigs tap into local talent and starving artists court a level of success that will forever transform their work, insider material emphasizes the ironies of the “tinsel town” experience for an assortment of media makers.

Satirical backstage programs regularly reflect insider perspectives by comparing the world depicted on television screens with the lives of the people who produce programming. Through cleverly orchestrated indirect meanings, these series express some of the ways in which life in the industry affects people's subject positions and sensibilities. Insider material tends to accentuate the ways in which media production cultures differ from the outside world. For example, when asked if one of his colleagues could find a child to act in a commercial he was directing, The Dick Van Dyke Show's Robert Petrie, head writer of a fictional variety show, joked that he did not think they knew any; as a family man with a hybrid identity merging entertainment experience with a suburban-dad mentality, he was surrounded by people whose desires departed from cultural norms such as the convention of becoming parents. According to the insider view on backstage life – which typically occurs behind the scenes, but in this case appears on screen – people in the industry have different ways of living and crack jokes about topics that are taboo outside of either show business or queer culture.

While laying bare the reality of the industry's production cultures, first-hand knowledge of studio practices gives media producers a vantage point that differs from that of most people. Inasmuch as people interact with popular culture, it makes a significant difference if they encounter backstage details about certain figures and affairs, particularly information that is not part of official marketing campaigns. Someone who takes celebrity reports at face value has a perspective on Hollywood products that diverges from that of someone with blackmail fodder on a closeted star, for example. While the average consumer must seek out information to deflate the romantic view the media industries cultivate about themselves, producers on the inside of the dream factory see these myths punctured as a part of their everyday lives. Being privy to behind-the-scenes affairs allows producers to form opinions about the actual – rather than the stated – circumstances around industry decisions. In view of the hierarchies and injustices of the system, acquiring insight into professional matters beyond the level of other people's insight can lend insiders a unique form of power.

Insider material indicative of this reality shines through in backstage TV programming. For example, comedy writers with a satirical bent generally have an intimate understanding of the censorship tendencies around queer representation and give vent to their frustrations through self-reflexivity in scripts. Backstage texts offer media producers an opportunity to create fictional representations of people in their own positions. Series set in the world of TV production open up a circle of knowing characters – which serve as proxies for actual insiders – for the home viewer and for the historian. In some cases, this connection is direct. Real-life comedy writer Selma Diamond inspired Rose Marie's Sally Rogers in The Dick Van Dyke Show. The talent agent Ari Emanuel influenced Bob Odenkirk's Stevie Grant in The Larry Sanders Show, as well as Jeremy Priven's Ari Gold in Entourage (HBO, 2004–2011). Even these characters, however, are an amalgam of different industry figures that their producers have encountered in the business. Series like these provide an important venue for examining industry tensions. Where the infrastructures of broadcasting guard the type of information that could provoke social change, backstage texts intervene. They channel undocumented histories of queer experience that resist the effects of dominant infrastructures and ideologies.

Insider Aesthetics

Backstage texts showcase undervalued aspects of TV history and should be analyzed as camp because they resonate at more than one level. Camp is a comic mode that interrupts conceptual divisions commonly depicted as essential and unproblematic. It does so by playing on incongruities related to sexuality, gender, race, ethnicity, age, era, and other markers of social distinction. Camp is a unique mode of production and a particular style of insider discourse. It is tied to the experience of minority groups with dominant culture. One of camp's principal markers is that its content exceeds what would be considered obvious by the average person. According to literary critic Susan Sontag (1999, p. 54), the camp mode approaches mass media products “as an aesthetic phenomenon [. . .] not in terms of beauty but in terms of the degree of artifice, or stylization.” In treating popular culture as an art, camp emphasizes unforeseen implications in everyday objects and texts and constantly creates new ideas with the cultural meanings that circulate through media. Through the most minor inflections, camp practices bring out profound nuances in different experiences and social dynamics. By experimenting with signification and other cultural phenomena, they create new possibilities. As Michael Bronski (1984, p. 43) writes, camp marks the talent to “see beyond what is clearly evident; to grasp a reality beneath or totally separate from what is taught [. . .] it contains the possibility of structuring and encouraging limitless imagination – to literally create a new reality.” Media producers draw on this talent, as do consumers.

Despite producers' involvement in camp, scholars often study camp as a style of reception, explaining it as inherently about media consumption. Where the idea of camp texts is recognized in this school of thought, the double meanings of such texts are considered unintended meanings that viewers create as part of an original, unexpected interpretation. This approach involves an implicit assumption – and sometimes an explicit condition – that the sensibility consumers bring to bear on a product was completely foreign to the scene of its production. In this model, camp texts correspond to a history of cultural appropriation undertaken by oppressed groups, and not to anything camp about the texts themselves or about the people who made them. In fact, critics generally represent camp as a reading practice that goes against the original intentions of the producers behind the texts. Often things are understood to be more camp if their makers are sincere and the audience is not.

Within this paradigm, scholars have addressed camp as an underground queer practice that, particularly after the attention that Sontag's “Notes on Camp” essay brought to it in the late 1960s, has been intermittently in the cultural spotlight, generally as a relatively sanitized version of a formerly queer practice. Along with studies of queer camp practices that take place far from the gaze of the mass media, scholarship has understood camp as a type of fan culture that, like other subcultures, is constantly being appropriated for profit by the culture industries, in cases ranging from ABC's Batman series (1966–1968) to Madonna hits like “Vogue” (Sire, 1990) and beyond. Queer culture and camp are far from synonymous, but camp has been integral to many strands of queer production, from Wildean dandies, roaring 1920s drag performers, and interwar cabaret artists to the Harlem Renaissance, the postwar underground, and ACT UP (the Aids Coalition to Unleash Power). Camp has been a news item for decades, but it is still not widely understood. As Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (1997, p. 27) points out, camp is often “seriously misrecognized” even by scholars working within gender and queer studies.

The literature on camp thus focuses on issues of hegemony, including the ways in which on the one hand marginalized groups put popular culture to their own use and, on the other, the culture industries help secure ideological dominance by incorporating creative energies from these same oppressed groups. Television, for example, whether in music videos, “quality” programming, or cartoons, is a prominent mechanism for integrating queer sensibilities into the dominant culture by making them consumable for the broader public. While this model of cultural appropriation is invaluable for understanding many historical incidents concerning camp, it does not cover all of the ways in which camp interacts with the media industries. In spite of camp's underground status and of the misperceptions surrounding it, many aspects of camp thrived before it surfaced in the mainstream; and they continue to do so, in television as well as in film and the fine arts.

Insider material is about production, not appropriation, and camp's status as a queer mode of production is fundamental to understanding how TV's backstage series differ from other forms of camp. Writers, performers, and other workers draw on camp as they make programs, treating their own everyday lives as an object of art, to satirical ends, through displaced and specialized forms of address. Camp's foremost characteristics are an interest in the artistry of everyday objects, an investment in intricacy and in increasing embellishment, and a desire to expose contradictions and ironies in the way people think about culture. On the basis of this orientation toward overlooked elements of everyday life, camp continually draws attention to details about the way things are made and meanings circulate. As a result, while its connections to queer culture on the receiving end of the media industries are vital, camp is about media production – and in many ways fundamentally so.

The most compelling work on camp production stems from scholars' attempts to describe where queer culture comes from and how it is produced amid such hostility. Satirical queerness often appears in the guise of straight characters, and this helps producers avoid having their work (and themselves) identified as queer. The need to displace queerness feeds into camp's satirical work by calling for representations that are simultaneously undetectable to those who disagree with them and “in your face” from a queer perspective. Steven Cohan (2005, p. 17), for example, describes camp as the “outright satire” of “straights' blindness to a queerness standing with hands on hips right before their eyes.” Even when it is seemingly unrecognizable as queer, camp reflects – as Bronski (1984, p. 43) explains – the various ways in which “queers try to preserve their own [. . .] livelihood in a homophobic setting.” When producers make media in the camp mode, they activate a layer of meaning that others, who share their view, can appreciate. While television programming and the culture that surrounds it are certainly known to provide camp – whether in the form of movie reruns or sitcom characters like Will and Grace's Jack McFarland and Karen Walker (NBC, 1998–2006), or like Queer as Folk's Emmett Honeycutt (Showtime, 2000–2005) – backstage series have yet to be critically addressed as a primary source of camp. Various aspects of the industry have established and sustained camp as an everyday part of the culture of television comedy production – a part that is noticeably queer and intimately tied to the industry's production processes across the postwar era and today.

Safety in Numbers

Camp, insider material, and queer television representation are intimately intertwined, historically as well as conceptually. Like camp, comedy works through multiple layers of meaning, and satirical producers tend to play up the camp viewpoint that generates insider material because queer content is often comic and can serve as a punch line. Self-reflexive media texts like satirical backstage TV series call for critical distance on the production process and build a space of knowingness into programming content. This space sustains the density of signification required for queer meaning. As Chris Straayer (1996, p. 2) writes: “A queer viewpoint [. . .] raise[s] questions and propose[s] strategies that reveal subtexts and subversive readings in a more complex system than the patriarchal heterosexual system assumes.” In the US TV context, camp gives vent to comedy producers' feelings about what their networks and sponsors consider permissible and what they will include or cut.

From the industry's inception, broadcasters have understood censorship of programming content to be an integral stage of the production process. As a 1951 article in the trade journal Sponsor put it, “the business man” working in TV had a responsibility to “reflect and echo public taste as commonly interpreted” (Boddy, 1990, p. 98). The US networks acted in the private interest of corporations and, in conjunction with government regulation, promoted the need for censorship. With McCarthyism and the purge of dissidents from entertainment, the industry carefully sought to prevent any evidence of a connection to the “political, artistic or literary avant garde” from appearing in programs, in part because it relied on unorthodox creative laborers. With ongoing deliberations about what was permissible and what would be aired or excised, insider material often appeared as a form of retaliation to network bias against it. In this context, comedians would regularly poke fun at executives and at their censorship practices through the programming they produced. To do so, they often created suggestive material around sexual non-conformity and gender variance.

While camp is by definition attuned to issues of production, as these relate to social differences such as gender and sexuality, the camp mode evident in satirical backstage television comedy is especially oriented toward the heteronormative constraints on creativity that a range of producers experience in the television medium. The industry is hyperaware of demographics, marketing, and Neilsen ratings, and producers are regularly coached to prevent anything that might alienate the show's desired audience from making it to the final product. This process can be contentious, as was demonstrated by the production histories of programs like Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In – a late 1960s variety show with slang and in-jokes that NBC's censors could barely keep up with – or Ellen – a 1990s sitcom that ABC (and Disney) monitored so closely when the lead character was about to “come out” that this point in the plot became more about publicity than about crafting a nuanced story. Camp responds to this kind of situation without implicating its producers, by generating incisive and specialized commentary around the industry's protocols and failed attempts at repression. On a special event program that promoted the new NBC shows of the 1958/9 TV season, for example, George Gobel momentarily spoke the language of NBC's “suits,” presenting a pie chart that showed the decline in comedy variety – one of the main sources of insider material at that time. Suggesting that the network favored money over morals while it promoted itself as a guardian of American values, Gobel called NBC executives “not really crooked, but a little kinky” (The Steve Allen Show of September 21, 1958). Referencing the industry's corruption and hypocrisy just as the quiz show scandals broke, this metaphor of kinkiness as being better than crooked doubled as slang for niche erotic behaviors, many of which can be understood as queer. Gobel's jab at NBC may seem like stereotyping, since it associates sexual “deviancy” with violations of business ethics. However, with TV comedy producers implicated, to an even higher degree than their bosses, through associations of entertainment production and sexual non-normativity, this line emphasizes queerness at each end of the industry. At another level, it ironically gives voice to the ribald sensibility executives were attempting to strike from programming by firing comedians and by dropping variety shows. At postwar moments like this and through to the present, camp productions have been informed by an insider sense of the freedom of representation available in backstage situations. Participating in this tradition, they have recirculated queer history from an insider perspective.

In television comedy, the camp mode has contributed to representations that were potentially scandalous, but ultimately fleeting and generally unremarked upon. Adapting to the industry's production processes, the producers of backstage shows typically situate minor characters and incidental guest stars as sources of queer history, simply because these are more expendable and less in the spotlight. Because not everyone who is queer participates in camp and not everyone who participates is queer, insider material emerges as if from a diffuse collective, as part of everyday life behind the scenes in a profession that relies on queer producers while willfully ignoring their centrality.

Writers and performers are major forces in the circulation of insider material. The collective authorship of scripts means that writers are not always themselves held responsible for the risqué material they may produce. Comedy series can have 10 or 20 writers on staff at any time, and they often employ more. While a writer constantly referencing queer things may not get very far or last very long, the potentially taboo content of television productions is typically assessed at the group level, through general negotiations with the writing staff as a whole. Producers tend to mediate conflicts with executives, allowing writers and performers a certain amount of leeway in what they can try to get away with before encountering pressure from censors or being forced to drop material that people higher up consider beyond the pale. Actors and television personalities engage with insider material across a similarly mediated playing field. While TV stars are under extreme pressure to maintain a particular image, they can always blame questionable material they perform on writers. Entertainers are under intense scrutiny, but they are also rewarded – and often – for “ad libbing” racy material. They may be experts at slipping even racier material under the radar of the industry's authorities. While a series showcasing an insider sensibility can be up a creek if it does not have enough general appeal, a person with this sensibility has an advantage.

Throughout commercial television history censors have continually attempted to shut down material with overtly sexual connotations, a subset of which includes queer content. In relation to queer representation, the industry wins the war but wages a losing battle on a smaller scale. Television camp is thus a great example of how queer culture proliferates in the face of attempted repression (and it does so at the level of discourse as well as at that of individual agency). It also indicates the extent to which camp, like other forms of queer production, springs from a string of factors beyond individuals' self-identification as LGBT. Although the creative mindset behind camp is directly tied to queer experience – most commonly, the experience of eluding or defying social norms around gender and sexuality – it is never a direct function of sexual orientation. Paul Roen (1994, p. 9) notes, “an enormous amount of camp has been perpetrated by heterosexuals,” while “a dreary assortment of gay men [. . .] are unable to comprehend the very concept of camp.” Within an industrial production context for film, Cohan notes that camp is a complicated result of “the collaboration of queer and straight personnel” as they produce programming by following standardized network procedures for specific formats and genres (2005, p. 87). This collaboration process adds another queer element to camp by resisting the essentializing connections among gay men and camp that people commonly assert.

Queer TV Culture

The term “queer” is crucial for tracking the interconnections among insider material and camp in backstage TV over the years. Scholars often use “queer” to designate representations that call into question the apparent coherence of concepts like heterosexuality, homosexuality, masculinity, and femininity. As scholars in many disciplines point out, social inequalities take place through the construction of categories like female, male, straight, and gay, as they intersect with particular ethnicities, cultural locations, and material contexts. “Queer” describes textual and intertextual dynamics – in addition to social dynamics – that undermine the formation of dichotomies and hierarchies in the realms of sex, gender, sexuality, race, class, ability – and beyond. “Queer” can also signal an emerging or erratic space of cultural production, particularly of new or unregulated possibilities for gender and sexual relations.

“Queer,” in this use, is often assumed to be a recent derivation. It is commonly understood that activists first reclaimed “queer” in the 1990s; but some artists appear to have had a similar relationship with the word much earlier. When scholars encounter instances of “queer” people, or of behavior labeled “queer,” prior to the 1990s, they typically infer the exclusively derogatory meaning of a slur, or they translate it into a more benign sense of odd or eclectic, deemed to be unconnected to the proud usage of contemporary queers. Yet the term's use in the past can also be seen as a marker of pride in social difference, as well as an appropriately evasive strategy for representing gender and sexual non-conformists who rejected the medicalized label of homosexuality. Dating back to the postwar period, self-identified coteries of queers united around shared artistic ideals, gender rebellion, and other points of social antagonism. Throughout the era of early television, various subcultures eluded hetero norms and refigured them for their own purposes. Historiographers (Howard, 1999) and literary scholars (Adams, 1999) have found that self-described queers used “queer” as “a self-conscious redeployment of the pejorative connotations that accompanied the term” at least as early as the 1950s (ibid., pp. 554–555).

At the same time, modes of artistic production that are not self-consciously queer have regularly fostered queer culture. When considering insider material, television's unique forms of representation are as important to address as its specific modes of production. Particular forms, especially comedic and episodic forms, can be understood as queer for a variety of complex political and aesthetic reasons. Many camp forms are queer because of a formal connection as well as because of a cultural relation. In response to secrecy, denial, and silence around queer culture, these representations employ inventive and anarchic logics; turn naturalizing discourses on their heads; and occupy positions in contradistinction to dominant norms. While producers often engage different facets of queerness through double entendre, intertextual references, physical performance, and fast-paced dialogue, their use of similar strategies to represent not so queer content has also, in many cases, circulated queer meanings and new possibilities. These strategies, in addition to being formally queer due to their divergence from conventions of verisimilitude and sincerity, are also recognizably queer in that producers have very often used them to convey queer content that industry watchdogs would otherwise censor. Queer forms tend to foster queer content and concurrently call it up by association.

Camp strategies can also be queer by virtue of the particular ways in which, as circulating texts, they produced queer possibilities in public culture. While the content of queer images is crucial to the ways they signify, insider material in a camp mode also proliferates queer forms. From Arnold the pig's TV watching on Green Acres, which simultaneously takes a derisive swipe at audiences and construes the small screen as a magical medium, to the flicker of Chuck Lorre's split-second vanity card rants (readable only on “pause”), which allow this writer–producer–director to vent about his experience in the industry, images that might not seem queer or have queer people identified with them regularly participate in queer culture. Queer culture is a realm of public interaction stemming from “queer” as a point of positive self-identification. Queer culture emerges from the social spaces, artistic productions, and popular touchstones negotiated by queer people. Its markers are blurry because of its generally queer-phobic surroundings and because of the crossover between it, show business, and other art cultures. While hostile to queers and queerness in its own ways, Hollywood has long welcomed queer labor and has thus been more likely than other fields to harbor queer culture.

Even as the media industries have promoted dominant norms, they have been crucial to the development of alternatives to traditional family living, both through the production cultures they generate and at the level of representation. Hollywood's queer enclaves predate TV. As Abrams (2008, p. 7) shows in Hollywood Bohemians: Transgressive Sexuality and the Selling of the Movieland Dream, popular images produced in Southern California represent the place as a world of freedom and artistic expression. Throughout the first half of the twentieth century and beyond, such images associated opportunities for producers with the region's “sexual abandon,” depicting a social landscape in which “homosexuals, adulterers, effeminate males, and butch females [. . .] embodied the pleasures of the forbidden and the taboo.” According to him, this convention of using sexual nonconformity and queer gender to represent Hollywood demonstrated to viewers that “those who did not follow norms could lead successful lives” (ibid.). While myriad changes have taken place since the period addressed in Abrams's study, media publicity has continued to associate Hollywood with offbeat opportunities and queer labor with the media industries. Images of commercial artists often present simplified versions of lived deviations from dominant gender and sexual norms in ways that demonized or ridiculed these differences. Nevertheless, these representations generally establish connections between media production, the freedom to be queer, and the possibility of being rewarded for queer work. As Matthew Tinkcom (2002, p. 32) explains, the “chance given to queer men and women to labor as queers” is a fundamental component of the “liberatory possibilities” available in Hollywood.

One subplot of a 2008 episode of 30 Rock titled “Subway Hero” demonstrates the strong links between backstage series' self-reflexivity about media production and their understanding of queerness as a part of entertainment. While exposing the mid-century media industries' rampant sexism and racism (à la AMC's Mad Men, 2007–), this narrative thread simultaneously represents the seemingly archaic culture of NBC during TV's “golden age” as a place of unforeseen sexual freedom. With rapid fire winks, the show suggests that, while some things have changed – Tina Fey's Liz Lemon is a big shot, not a “sandwich girl” – many other things too taboo to be broadcast remain the same behind the scenes. This subplot hinges on the performance of seasoned character actor Tim Conway's guest appearance as Bucky Bright, a forgotten television celebrity. Visiting the studios where the fictional TGS (a doppelganger of sorts for Saturday Night Live, NBC, 1975 –) is produced, Bright reveals repressed aspects of the medium's past to network page Kenneth Parcell (Jack McBrayer). Kenneth, a straight-laced aficionado of broadcasting minutiae who claims to have studied TV theory at Kentucky Mountain Bible College, is thrilled to meet the former star, until Bright's comments about the earlier period disrupt Kenneth's naïve vision of their sacrosanct profession.

In one of the more striking comic moments, Kenneth – a character that, as 30 Rock's writers alternately suggest, is closeted to himself and straight (but really weird) – is shocked to hear Bright reminisce about how having sex with another man did not make you gay when he worked in TV – from the 1940s, when TV broadcasts first began, through to the early 1970s, an era still undisturbed by the emergence of cable channels and fanfare around overt LGBT characters. After Bright sees a picture of himself among a boat crew resembling the cast of McHale's Navy – a satirical military sitcom from the 1960s on which Conway starred – he tells Kenneth about a time when “men were men” and he spent a lot of time with “the boys.” Back then, he says, “If you wanted to do something private with another man, it wasn't gay. It was just two men celebrating each other's strength.” As Kenneth recoils from the picture of old school television production that Bright paints, he realizes that his experience at the network is just as outrageous.

Bright's comments identify a disavowed history from the postwar period within the infrastructure of network television, describing the queerness thought to be absent from US TV culture prior to the 1980s as quite obviously present. Bright's revelations about the medium's golden age depict it as a time during which practices related to everyday queer life went on undeterred, despite the fact that anything even vaguely sexual – much less homosexual – was purportedly censored. Conway's appearance is one of many recognizable doppelgangers connected to real-life production contexts in 30 Rock. The tour of NBC's office and studios that the employees of its show-within-a-show give visitors, which mirrors an actual tour and facilitates namedropping from the network's history, is another. In one instance, Kenneth directs a group to the place where, he says, comedian Gracie Allen “took Jack Paar's virginity.”

Like the material written for Conway, this joke represents a queer take on gender and sexuality. It also connects the ostensibly fictional to actual history, by revealing queerness in the repertoires of TV comedians from the postwar period – a broadcast era assumed to be conservative and conformist, but which actually aired a lot of controversial material under the radar of industry watchdogs. The line is funny in part because, at the level of gender trouble, it rings true to the performers' oeuvres. Kenneth's evocation of Gracie Allen (one of the medium's stars in the 1950s, who was routinely dismissed as scatterbrained and childlike but demonstrated an expert command of adult humor) and of Jack Paar (a major personality in TV in the 1960s, who was emotionally volatile and famously confronted the network about censorship while on air) suggests privileged insight into the semi-public lives and performance styles of comedy icons – lives and styles that conflict with the ways official TV history represents their onscreen personae and overall output. Bringing together two icons that a contemporary audience may not know, the joke associates stars who delivered queer content over the course of their careers with a televisual legacy of gender and sexual eccentricity.

Backstage images produced within a camp mode have continually celebrated and explored what Alexander Doty (2000, p. xiii) calls “moments of ‘multiple queerness’.” In order to pursue the line of questioning above, consider an example from The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show (1950–1958), a hybrid sitcom-variety vehicle for the radio legends that merged theatrical skits with direct address. On a 1950 episode of this program, Gracie informed her husband that “ninety per cent of all fickle husbands are men!” and George, turning to the audience, said: “The remaining ten per cent are handled by our agent.” This joke suggests that there are a lot of queers working in Hollywood, and it does so by raising the possibility that not all husbands are men and by referencing a statistic that is resonant both with the Kinsey reports on the prevalence of homosexuality and with the standard cut agents receive from their clients' paychecks. Husbands who are not men can refer to husbands who are women (like butch dykes or trans women), and to husbands who are not women but might be likened to them (fags and trans men). By simultaneously alluding to these possibilities while also evoking something outside of them (whether non-binary genders or a more elusive sense of queerness), the episode creates a moment when, as Doty (1993, p. xiii) puts it, “a number of distinct, sometimes contradictory, queer aspects or approaches suggest themselves in the face of a mass culture event.” In Doty's words, this “multiple queerness” is part of why it can be “difficult [. . .] to attribute the queerness of mass culture to just one source or another” (ibid.). In light of the collaborative process of comedy production and of the way in which insider material circulates within show business, such instances of queer representation can be seen to arise from the industry itself as much as from an individual writer or performer.

Camp accrues even around Hollywood types that seem completely straight. For example, when hyper-heterosexual shock jock Howard Stern makes a guest appearance on The Larry Sanders Show – a series concerning the eponymous late-night talk show in which writer–producer and star Garry Shandling regularly interviewed celebrities playing themselves – and it turns out that Sid (Sid Newman), the man in charge of the cue cards, is a huge fan, Stern tells Sid to “take his top off,” comically likening Sid to the babe-types that Stern regularly ogles during his radio program, despite Sid's gender. This joke does not mean that either figure is gay; as it collapses Stern's male and female fans and points to the homoeroticism of media consumption, it should be understood as queer – as should the appearance, in the series, of stars like Brett Butler, Ellen DeGeneres, and David Duchovny, all of whom played against their perceived sexualities. Issues of gender presentation and perception work similarly. In the 30 Rock episode addressed earlier, for example, Conway's Bucky Bright character reports that, while wandering the halls of the NBC building overnight, he encountered a “giant lesbian,” and he asks Kenneth: “Who is Conan O'Brian, and why is she so sad?” While this line might seem homophobic in its appeal to the narrow-minded perception of lesbians as “imitation men,” it accentuates the queerness of industry types – pointing to Conan himself as an “imitation man” – and thus it trades in the discourse of stereotypes while cultivating representational inversions and ironies for comic effect. As Ann Pellegrini (2007, p. 178) writes, “by refusing to refuse [. . .] stereotype[s],” camp “convert[s] the sting of stereotype into the sharp wit of social commentary.” This camp conversion links queer gender, queer sexuality, and queer forms of representation.

Distinct from gender identity, yet highly intertwined with gender representation, queer sexuality refers to eroticisms that resist description as exclusively straight or gay. In some cases, an image registers differently from both hetero- and homosexuality. In other cases, it is especially distinct from one but not in a way that fits with the other. Consider, for example, a brief exchange during the Burns and Allen episode discussed above, in which Gracie thinks that her neighbor Harry is sleeping with his new secretary behind his wife Blanche's back. Gracie's suspicions are initially aroused because she assumes the secretary is a woman; but when Harry arrives with Blanche and introduces a man as his new hire, Gracie takes the same attitude despite the change of gender, telling Harry: “You're silly to chase after him. She's much prettier.” This joke suggests that there is no significant difference between homo-and heterosexuality, even though differences between men and women are obvious. This sentiment runs counter to the dominant discourses on gender and sexuality in place during the time of the episode's production.

Not all topics are fair game in showbiz at all times. However, as countless Hollywood memoirs (and the 2005 film The Aristocrats) show, a significant amount of space has been available backstage for speaking about subjects considered unmentionable elsewhere. Looking at the way references circulate about homoeroticism, sex, women's sexual conquests, gender variance, and bi/pansexuality sheds light on the possibilities for queer production in media contexts assumed to be homogeneous. Insider material highlights the fact that the world of big-time media production and the world outside of it can be vastly different, and that this difference can affect the industries' final products. Camp representations mobilize queer content through insider material, doing their defamiliarizing work not though statements with a traditional veracity but rather through hyperbole, obliqueness, and euphemism, or even through comments that seem patently false. The queer investments of camp include, as Sedgwick (1997, p. 28) explains, “the prodigal production of alternate historiographies,” an “irrepressible fascination with ventriloquistic experimentation,” and “disorienting juxtapositions of present with past.”

Without striving to translate insider material at a literal level, we can use it to record a complex legacy of small screen comedy that has otherwise been absent from television studies' version of TV history. To return to a 30 Rock example cited above, it is possible, but unlikely, that Gracie Allen actually had sex with Jack Paar in the hallway at NBC; so why is she represented as having “screwed” a fellow comedian? Jokes about television comedians in quasi-fictional series point to an important interchange between onscreen and behind-the-scenes television production across time. Representations of what it is like to make television connect with reality in direct and indirect ways, which illuminate actual TV productions and texts. While the connection between the backstage worlds on television and their real social contexts can be metaphorical, specific details often signal that some aspects of the fictional environment emanate from actual occurrences. Queer content that appears in this representational space reveals an unacknowledged aspect of industry life.

Conclusion

The material that backstage programs use to satirize the industry broadcasts an insider version of TV history that treats the creation of queer media as an established fact rather than as an unfounded allegation or an impossibility. For anti-homophobic and anti-transphobic media scholars, the unique truth value of insider material provides leverage for reckoning with heteronormative interpretative contexts that are constantly second-guessing the existence of queer media. Taking a wide view of censorship, artistic compromise, and small-scale rebellions, we can use backstage series' representations of production contexts to capture the textual effects of collaborative work in industrial media in the present and in the past. Across decades, the networks of TV comedy producers who create backstage representations have demonstrated great facility with the instabilities of the sex/gender/sexuality system. Given the tight constraints on programming, comedy producers' most interesting work – from an artistic perspective and from a political standpoint – often plays out in ephemeral aspects of life as a commercial artist, both on and off the clock.

Not all backstage shows were camp, and not all camp took place in backstage settings; but, when brought together, the various components of “queer” collided, providing fertile ground for unpredictably queer dynamics. Camp moments of television programming, no matter how brief, created dense nodes of queerness, which expand the space of formation for possible queer subject positions. For viewers, recognizing camp requires an investment in the details of multiple webs of interconnected insider perspectives. Camp knowledge of different social contexts, production factors, and textual forms produces insider material; a predisposition to mobilize this type of insight aids in its reception. It may be the case that queer producers are the entire insider audience at the receiving end of camp. However, it might also be the case that televised camp engenders queer producers. As critic Bruce Hainley (1993, p. 2) has observed, during the 1950s, TV was “almost as instructive” in teaching gay camp traditions as first-person initiation into queer subcultures.

There has been a consistency about the insider position across historical change, because, despite increased rights (typically, for those who are already relatively privileged), the broader heteronormative context and the pressures it creates for queer artists persist. Today's popular culture would seem to be vastly different from the media climate that existed when television programming debuted, yet insider material figures just as prominently in contemporary TV, not least because there is a continued need for queer perspectives that conflict with dominant LGBT norms as well as with hetero norms. An understanding of insider material that foregrounds its satirical powers is crucial to the study of queer camp in a post-network culture in which blindness to a more radical queerness occurs amid a hyperawareness of homosexuality and of an increasing range of gender and sexual minorities.

The archive of insider material in backstage comedy calls for paradigms of media analysis that allow for the possibility of queer representation no matter how heteronormative (or homonormative) the text or production context may appear (or how many LGBT characters or producers it may involve). Traditional frameworks for historicizing media production might dismiss fictional programming as a source of evidence in the study of actual studio cultures. However, historians can benefit greatly from this material. While clueing us into important forgotten aspects of media production, the appearance of Hollywood production contexts on screen can help scholars develop analytic models sophisticated enough to unpack these representations. Camp complexity lends itself to a historical perspective on popular culture that recognizes queer production as an integral aspect of television comedy since the beginning of broadcast culture. It behooves scholars to interpret the insider material that producers reveal during comic moments within this sphere of recognition. From the beginnings of satirical TV comedy through to 30 Rock, the camp productions of Hollywood workers have been informed by, and have recirculated, the queerness of showbiz history and the profound freedom in backstage comedy representation, available where it is least expected.

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