and another thing I love about b99
Nov. 16th, 2017 01:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sciatrixOne thing I fucking love about Holt is that the portrayal of an older, well-established gay man is absolutely pitch perfect, in the sense that–he is neither a one-dimensional Activist Who Cares About Nothing But His Community nor the other trap that middle-aged gay men tend to fall into on mainstream comedy, going “eh, fuck it, I got mine” and joking about fleeing the city for Pride and being faintly embarrassed by activism. Holt’s not a professional activist–he’s got his career and that’s his priority–but he also clearly cares about his community, and tbh as someone who has done the whole founding something because no one else cared enough to do it and then being challenged by someone who has better ideas for the organization… well, his response to the whole AAGLNYCPA thing is 100% on point. Fuck. I have so many feelings about him.
Holt is actually my perfect counter to “a well-rounded queer character is one where you take a perfectly rounded regular character and they just Happen To Be Queer,” because there’s very little about who he is that doesn’t reference back to the fact that he’s a gay black man who came up in a very specific time and place, and both his experiences and his responses to them have shaped the person he has grown and settled into. And at the same time, those choices and responses and his coping mechanisms and his warped sense of humor are all things that came directly out of who he is as a person–if, for example, you put the basic personality of Jake or of Terry or Rosa into those circumstances, you don’t magically get Holt out. People occupying specific intersectional experiences respond differently to those experiences in some ways and similarly in others, and I love the way the writers have clearly thought through how those effect the characters they’re writing.
So for example, if you look at gender and emotional expression in Holt versus Terry, you notice that Holt is very, very guarded about his emotional expression and tucks his entire sense of humor and most of his ridiculous penchant for drama away when he doesn’t know the 99 very well. Holt’s king of the stoneface, straight-faced stare at something utterly ridiculous, and while he’ll occasionally dip into a cultural reference (his quip at Jake about his manscaping routine in the pilot, for example), he has a very clearly sharp division between who he is at work and who he is at home. And Holt’s work persona is very, very emotionally closed down, very butch, very serious and guarded and always watching for potential avenues of attack until he’s ready to relax. He carefully avoids anything that might come off as too femme or too gay unless he’s relaxing with his own crew–the drama references slowly begin to appear as he begins to trust the 99, for example, and ditto the references to Kevin.
And then there’s Terry, who is in many ways more femme than Holt is despite being 100% straight: Terry who is much more in touch with his emotions than Holt is, who makes a point of enjoying yogurt (a product that is coded female to the point that it’s a staple of fragile masculinity advertising), who is deeply involved in parenting his children and cares intensely about safety and being polite and appropriate. Terry, who is not afraid to cry in frustration because he can’t assemble a princess castle for his kids, who will hug anyone who needs it, who is emotionally expressive in the extreme, more than any of the men on the show except perhaps Charles.
When you think about it, that difference in gender expression between these two black male police officers makes absolutely perfect sense: Holt has been openly gay and black for decades, and will have faced down a lot of shit from other officers assuming that this makes him a “sissy”; he’s therefore not going to give anyone any fucking ammunition to level at him until he can work out whether they’re going to be a problem. Even the manscaping insult is actually a dig at Jake for caring too much about his appearance and grooming: the reminder that Jake is clearly investing into his shaving routine is intended to discomfit Jake and set him off guard when he’s standing there in his underwear, because Holt might know what manscaping is but Jake indulges in it, and who’s the femme one in this masculine power play now?
(Remember, this is a Holt who has no idea who any of these people except Terry are, a Holt whose entire experience with Jake is Jake refusing to listen when he asks the man to abide by basic rules of professionalism, a man who just showed up in fucking underwear in a blatant attempt to humiliate Holt. The dig at Jake’s own vanity, refusal to appear in any way flustered, and immediate call to the crew to come in and watch Jake humiliate himself is absolutely and totally deserved, in context. And you can see Holt going: is this an authority thing, or is this a response to being commanded by a gay, black officer from a white straight boy thing?)
By contrast, Terry is an enormous man, and before he got ripped–which he’s happy to point out is an active effort and decision on his part!–he was not thin but fat. Terry has never in his life not been huge. So when you have a black guy (especially one in policing!) who hits up the gym all the time and can’t always find shirts that fit which don’t have gross shit on them, well–stereotypes that hit black men characterize them as threats. Terry serves a pretty wide and diverse community, and it makes 100% complete sense that he’d lean heavily on more femme-coded markers as a way to make himself less threatening to people, especially in the sense of paying attention to saying positive things and pointing out that he worked to get to where he is. It makes sense that Terry pivots to make himself less scary, because the initial reaction he typically gets from people is almost certainly “thug/threat”, and he’s in a career that involves a lot of talking to people and trying to get them to trust him–more so as he’s been promoted and moved into management. So the exaggerated femmeness and comfort with his less masculine side is probably in part a deliberate way to control and modify the responses to his own context so that he can actually connect with people and do his damn job–combined, of course, with the fact that Terry doesn’t see the point of making people scared when he can just be himself and cackle to himself about it later.
(And of course, the two men’s relative responses to projected masculinity don’t have as much to do with Holt’s being gay and Terry’s being straight as you might think: I’ve known quite a few black gay men, especially big guys, who take Terry’s tack and amp the femme presentation up to eleven as a way of making themselves seem less threatening in order to, you know, interact as a human and get people to engage with the mind behind the muscle. But that tactic would never have appealed to Holt as a person, having grown up in an emotionally-closed-off household to start and working in a very masculinity-soaked environment; if he’d tried it, it would probably have made him a hell of a target, and Holt is pretty clearly aware that just being openly himself without lying made him a big enough target already.)
I could easily spin a very similar discussion about Rosa and Amy, to be honest. I think the secret to B99 is that you can see an effort made when having the show to sort of double up on some of the minority experiences that appear: it’s not one black man or one Latina woman; it’s two, and that naturally means the writers can’t just rely on stereotypes or the inversion of stereotype to characterize, say, Amy: because the contrast in the way that Rosa would react in that situation immediately points out that reality is more complex that that. and then you wind up going “well, is this reaction to that expectation actually in or out of character for that person?” Which is great characterization, right there!
I think that’s a huge strength of the show, and one that ought to be replicated more often: if you’re having a character stand in for one marginalized experience in your writing, make an effort to bring in a second character occupying a similar experience to play off of them with. Just one, and nothing you do with the character can escape the notion that you’re making a commentary on stereotypes or the dialogue between stereotyping and personhood and reality. But if you have two, you immediately can point to the places where their personalities respond to the expectations around them differently, and surprise: there’s a fully realized, human pair of characters that suddenly feel 100% more human and deeply realized than otherwise.
Holt is actually my perfect counter to “a well-rounded queer character is one where you take a perfectly rounded regular character and they just Happen To Be Queer,” because there’s very little about who he is that doesn’t reference back to the fact that he’s a gay black man who came up in a very specific time and place, and both his experiences and his responses to them have shaped the person he has grown and settled into. And at the same time, those choices and responses and his coping mechanisms and his warped sense of humor are all things that came directly out of who he is as a person–if, for example, you put the basic personality of Jake or of Terry or Rosa into those circumstances, you don’t magically get Holt out. People occupying specific intersectional experiences respond differently to those experiences in some ways and similarly in others, and I love the way the writers have clearly thought through how those effect the characters they’re writing.
So for example, if you look at gender and emotional expression in Holt versus Terry, you notice that Holt is very, very guarded about his emotional expression and tucks his entire sense of humor and most of his ridiculous penchant for drama away when he doesn’t know the 99 very well. Holt’s king of the stoneface, straight-faced stare at something utterly ridiculous, and while he’ll occasionally dip into a cultural reference (his quip at Jake about his manscaping routine in the pilot, for example), he has a very clearly sharp division between who he is at work and who he is at home. And Holt’s work persona is very, very emotionally closed down, very butch, very serious and guarded and always watching for potential avenues of attack until he’s ready to relax. He carefully avoids anything that might come off as too femme or too gay unless he’s relaxing with his own crew–the drama references slowly begin to appear as he begins to trust the 99, for example, and ditto the references to Kevin.
And then there’s Terry, who is in many ways more femme than Holt is despite being 100% straight: Terry who is much more in touch with his emotions than Holt is, who makes a point of enjoying yogurt (a product that is coded female to the point that it’s a staple of fragile masculinity advertising), who is deeply involved in parenting his children and cares intensely about safety and being polite and appropriate. Terry, who is not afraid to cry in frustration because he can’t assemble a princess castle for his kids, who will hug anyone who needs it, who is emotionally expressive in the extreme, more than any of the men on the show except perhaps Charles.
When you think about it, that difference in gender expression between these two black male police officers makes absolutely perfect sense: Holt has been openly gay and black for decades, and will have faced down a lot of shit from other officers assuming that this makes him a “sissy”; he’s therefore not going to give anyone any fucking ammunition to level at him until he can work out whether they’re going to be a problem. Even the manscaping insult is actually a dig at Jake for caring too much about his appearance and grooming: the reminder that Jake is clearly investing into his shaving routine is intended to discomfit Jake and set him off guard when he’s standing there in his underwear, because Holt might know what manscaping is but Jake indulges in it, and who’s the femme one in this masculine power play now?
(Remember, this is a Holt who has no idea who any of these people except Terry are, a Holt whose entire experience with Jake is Jake refusing to listen when he asks the man to abide by basic rules of professionalism, a man who just showed up in fucking underwear in a blatant attempt to humiliate Holt. The dig at Jake’s own vanity, refusal to appear in any way flustered, and immediate call to the crew to come in and watch Jake humiliate himself is absolutely and totally deserved, in context. And you can see Holt going: is this an authority thing, or is this a response to being commanded by a gay, black officer from a white straight boy thing?)
By contrast, Terry is an enormous man, and before he got ripped–which he’s happy to point out is an active effort and decision on his part!–he was not thin but fat. Terry has never in his life not been huge. So when you have a black guy (especially one in policing!) who hits up the gym all the time and can’t always find shirts that fit which don’t have gross shit on them, well–stereotypes that hit black men characterize them as threats. Terry serves a pretty wide and diverse community, and it makes 100% complete sense that he’d lean heavily on more femme-coded markers as a way to make himself less threatening to people, especially in the sense of paying attention to saying positive things and pointing out that he worked to get to where he is. It makes sense that Terry pivots to make himself less scary, because the initial reaction he typically gets from people is almost certainly “thug/threat”, and he’s in a career that involves a lot of talking to people and trying to get them to trust him–more so as he’s been promoted and moved into management. So the exaggerated femmeness and comfort with his less masculine side is probably in part a deliberate way to control and modify the responses to his own context so that he can actually connect with people and do his damn job–combined, of course, with the fact that Terry doesn’t see the point of making people scared when he can just be himself and cackle to himself about it later.
(And of course, the two men’s relative responses to projected masculinity don’t have as much to do with Holt’s being gay and Terry’s being straight as you might think: I’ve known quite a few black gay men, especially big guys, who take Terry’s tack and amp the femme presentation up to eleven as a way of making themselves seem less threatening in order to, you know, interact as a human and get people to engage with the mind behind the muscle. But that tactic would never have appealed to Holt as a person, having grown up in an emotionally-closed-off household to start and working in a very masculinity-soaked environment; if he’d tried it, it would probably have made him a hell of a target, and Holt is pretty clearly aware that just being openly himself without lying made him a big enough target already.)
I could easily spin a very similar discussion about Rosa and Amy, to be honest. I think the secret to B99 is that you can see an effort made when having the show to sort of double up on some of the minority experiences that appear: it’s not one black man or one Latina woman; it’s two, and that naturally means the writers can’t just rely on stereotypes or the inversion of stereotype to characterize, say, Amy: because the contrast in the way that Rosa would react in that situation immediately points out that reality is more complex that that. and then you wind up going “well, is this reaction to that expectation actually in or out of character for that person?” Which is great characterization, right there!
I think that’s a huge strength of the show, and one that ought to be replicated more often: if you’re having a character stand in for one marginalized experience in your writing, make an effort to bring in a second character occupying a similar experience to play off of them with. Just one, and nothing you do with the character can escape the notion that you’re making a commentary on stereotypes or the dialogue between stereotyping and personhood and reality. But if you have two, you immediately can point to the places where their personalities respond to the expectations around them differently, and surprise: there’s a fully realized, human pair of characters that suddenly feel 100% more human and deeply realized than otherwise.
no subject
Date: 2018-12-12 03:35 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-12-12 06:19 pm (UTC)(god I love Holt let me count the ways)