Ode to Gay Stuff

or, a TV show to watch

Though I am reluctant to admit it, my spouse and I watch a good amount of TV. I feel antsy writing this, like I should rush in and tell you that we don’t watch TV-TV; we stream shows, which is different, though it is and isn’t. We watch a good amount of TV. Lately we’ve been into Severance, which is brilliant, and we spent a good part of 2021 on a gentle horror bender, watching all the delicious Mike Flanagan stuff on Netflix: The Haunting of Hill House, The Haunting of Bly Manor, and Midnight Mass. Ash keeps a running catalog of shows-to-watch and past favorites on their Notes app, and just knowing that it exists, this ever-growing promise of potential pleasure, delivers to me a steady, low-thrumming sense of contentment. Someday I will write about the joys of Selling Sunset. This is a story about one particular category of the catalog: Gay Stuff.

I think it began with Looking, though I could be wrong and it wouldn’t matter. Looking was an American series centered on three gay men in modern-day San Francisco, and it ran on HBO from 2014 to 2016. One of the main characters, Patrick, is played by none other than Jonathan Groff, whom you also know as every kid’s favorite reindeer-whisperer Kristoff, from Frozen.

God I miss Richie and Patrick

I didn’t know about Looking when it originally aired, possibly because my life was a lot more straight then, and not a ton of non-queer-identifying people watched Looking. I have a feeling I would have liked it then too, because it is moving and smart and beautiful. It’s easy to look at the premise and call it a gay man’s version of Sex and the City — which I should say that I loved as much as anyone back in the day — but it is darker and deeper and quieter and more textured, extraordinary in part because its portrayal of gay characters let them be ordinary, the way straight characters are allowed to be. The scenes of intimacy are fun and tender and hot and full of the complications of being a thinking brain in a physical body, like the best sex scenes in any medium. Also, the actors are nice to look at. We like that. Ash and I have watched the whole series twice through, and some of the episodes three times. We talk sometimes about how much we miss it, how it felt to be a person on the sofa watching Looking. The same goes for the 2011 movie Weekend, which is no surprise, because it Looking and Weekend share a director in Andrew Haigh.

I think sometimes about why we like Gay Stuff, why we have a category for it in our list of TV shows. I know it seems like a dumb question: we are a non-straight couple, so, I mean, of course we like Gay Stuff¹. Everything they say about representation and how much it matters — it’s true! The sex is also part of it. Non-straight sex is of interest to us, and Gay Stuff is where you often have to go if you want to see non-straight sex. Titillation is not not part of it.