From Ellen to Mama Ru: The pro-corporate mainstreaming of LGBTQ culture
By: Ali Karamustafa
Tags: LGBTQ, Corporate Culture, Ellen DeGeneres, Neoliberalism, Rupauls Drag Race

From Ellen to Mama Ru: The pro-corporate mainstreaming of LGBTQ culture

Ellen Degeneres’ alleged cruel treatment of her employees has sparked months of speculative murmurs about the media mogul’s true character. Since the juicer details are likely to remain buried in The Ellen Show’s HR office, the incident better serves as an occasion for reflection on the success of Ellen’s brand as America’s kind lesbian entertainer. I argue that even the good Ellen, untarnished by accusations of ill treatment, has a dark side: she embodies the false progressive branding of the LGBTQ image in the new age of queer visibility. She highlights a broader pattern, which this essay examines, in which mainstream gay culture’s business friendly orientation echoes and promotes the Democratic Party’s pro-corporate economic agenda.

The past two decades have been widely celebrated for bearing witness to a sea change in attitudes towards LGBTQ people among Americans. There are now more openly queer and transgender public figures, public opinion has flipped in favor of gay marriage, and LGBTQ people have more representation in electoral politics than in prior decades. These changes owe much to the gay activism of the 1960s and 70s as well as the trauma and ensuing solidarity of the HIV/AIDS crisis in the 80s, but the reasons for the swift change in attitudes remain obscure. In her book, The Gay Revolution: The Story of the Struggle (2015), Fresno State emeritus professor in literature Lillian Faderman describes the shift as “something miraculous” that happened during the Obama presidency, perhaps only explained by a mass “coming out” event that quashed the stigma around queer identities. Fear and hatred of gay and especially transgender people has not been wholly eradicated, but now even mainstream conservative politicians seldom bother exploiting homophobia in their culture wars with liberals. The legalization of gay marriage in 2015, following an international trend in Europe and Latin American, seemed to settle the debate.

But a better grasp of popular culture through the lens of Ellen and others like her who have mainstreamed gay identity permits us to observe the ways in which America’s embrace of LGBTQ identities has contributed to the construction and maintenance of an increasingly unequal economic and political order, particularly in the wake of globalization, deindustrialization, and the fallout of the 2008 economic crisis. While the convergence of the gay or LGBTQ “movements” and the growth of economic disparities began as a coincidence, a rosy view of the former has increasingly obscured the horrors of the latter.

A typical example of this trend was recently dropped into our laps by the New York Times. In a September 2020 interview, feminist icon Gloria Steinem was asked to explain Trump’s election and the eminent possibility of forfeiting the progressive achievements of past decades. She reasoned that “The most dangerous time is after a victory — eight years of Obama and moving forward…means that 40 percent of the country feels deprived of their position in an old hierarchy, and they’re in full backlash…gay marriage [has] journeyed from being the concern of an insurgent movement to being a majority view.” To Steinem, gay marriage serves as irrefutable evidence of overarching social progress, despite the fact that, for instance, the Obama administration oversaw a “recovery” to the 2008 crisis which saw a widespread replacement of middle-class jobs with precarious work. Black wealth, already paltry in comparison to white wealth, was also disproportionately lost in the aftermath. Steinem’s portrayal of the Obama years suggests that the triumph of marriage equality offset these casualties, and thus that any dissatisfaction with this legacy must stem from deep homophobic rage among the ranks of the “old hierarchy.”

But the triumph of marriage equality has not only become a red herring for the instability of the increasingly financialized American economy and the harmful growth of monopoly power. Since the 1990s, gay narratives in popular culture have become mainstream by reflecting the core values of neoliberal economics — especially those of personal freedom, self-acceptance, tolerance, and individual success. LGBTQ political discourses have come to mirror this pattern by emphasizing a basic civil rights agenda oriented around an exclusively legal notion of equality, mainly the right to marry and anti-discrimination protections.

In addition to legal rights, the second pillar in political and cultural discourses surrounding gayness is the concept of representation. An emphasis on gay and recently, transgender visibility has upheld a triumphant Steinem-style view of the past decades which obscures the way in which prominent gay people serve as symbols and enablers of corporate power. The focus on representation is key to diversity discourses common in universities, the mainstream media, the political realm, and corporate settings. LGBTQ people are only the most recent addition to a laundry list of vulnerable groups of which liberals are determined to better the plight by making them more visible.

I won’t argue that representation is inherently harmful to LGBTQ people. Still, the shallowness of visibility could be critiqued, as could a facile faith in the benefits of exposure — akin to believing that watching Jake Gyllenhall and Heath Ledger roll around in a tent is a cure chronic homophobia. There are certainly mixed views among LGBTQ people about the ways in which we have joined the mainstream, with particular concern that representatives of gay interests have come to harbor a myopic desire to imitate the deeply flawed social institution of marriage. I argue that the focus on representation, so central to political and culture discourses regarding gayness, obscures deeper issues of inequality and the concentration of economic power.

Going mainstream: Ellen and Ru

It is worth reviewing how rapidly gay identity went from being an economic liability to a valuable commodity in the entertainment industry. In the 1990s, gay culture went public far beyond its early urban hubs in New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, and gay narratives, particularly male, began to filter into the mainstream in movies like Philadelphia (1993) and television shows like Will and Grace (1998–2006). Although prominent figures from Barney Frank to Harvey Fierstein had been openly gay in the 80s, Ellen’s 1997 pioneering of the “I’m gay” magazine cover genre — later imitated by Lance Bass (2006) and Caitlyn Jenner (2017) — proved that queerness had become edgy. More celebrities went public in the 2000s and gay storylines went mainstream. Previously, one had to tap into the murky reservoir of low-budget gay film to see a same sex kiss. Now, on television there was Queer as Folk (2000–2005) and The L-Word (2004–2009), and the big-budget film Brokeback Mountain (2005) offered an authentic gay love story. More recent academy award nominated films Moonlight (2016) and Call Me By Your Name (2017) have offered complex gay storylines, outstanding acting, and even good directing.

Obviously, this new prominence has been buoyed by studio producers who have realized the market appeal for gay narratives. This is of no concern for proponents of representation, who celebrate the minority’s proximity to power even in morally ambiguous circumstances. Being gay and successful has been widely considered virtuous in liberal circles and inherently good for LGBTQ equality, a model of which Ellen is a paradigm, if not the defining example. Because of her pioneering role on television and her famous “be kind” message, she was even awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2016.

Ellen’s emphasis on equality has studiously ignored the criticism, or indeed any mention whatsoever, of concentrated economic and political power. Her relationship with her guests underscores this orientation. In a 2018 interview she had only praise for Bill Gates, the longtime billionaire tech mogul who has constructed a benevolent public persona based on philanthropy while engaging in monopolistic business practices which perpetuate inequalities. She lauded his personal financial sacrifices for the sake of fighting infant mortality in Africa and improving the unequal American education system, adding “I’m glad you’re a billionaire.”

She also has a record of cozying up to America’s great political dynasties. In a 2017 interview with George W. Bush, whose presidency oversaw tax cuts for the wealthy and massive giveaways to American weapons manufacturers for destructive and wasteful foreign wars, she gushed that she loved his entire family and applauded him for his civility towards the mainstream media. In a September 2015 interview, in an open field of candidates months before the 2016 Democratic Party presidential primaries had begun, Ellen interviewed Hillary Clinton, a frequent guest on the show, and made a heartfelt proclamation. “I want someone who is qualified, and I feel like…if I look at all the other candidates, someone who is for rights across the board…the only person I can look at, is you.” Ellen frames these relationships with wealthy and well-connected guests as part of her message of tolerance, equality, and “rights”.

We might expect an extraordinarily wealthy individual such as Ellen to adopt “moderate” political views out of sheer self-preservation, but she fits a larger pattern of queer icons who tacitly endorse corporate domination in American life. Another example is the cultural phenomenon of RuPaul’s Drag Race, the reality TV show 12 seasons running in which drag queens compete against one another for a cash prize and a spot in the show’s Hall of Fame. It is a recent example of the mainstreaming of LGBTQ culture — the show’s contestants are mostly gay males and a small number of trans women, but its fan base has expanded far beyond its original queer audience. The show’s founder and guiding spirit is the veteran drag queen RuPaul, who exercises a Tyra Banks-like authority over the competition and indeed the entire subculture of drag (“A drag queen? I am the queen of drag!” he upbraided Jimmy Fallon on The Tonight Show). The contestants of the show call him Mama Ru in deference.

In a way that is reminiscent of Ellen’s identity-adjacent branding, RuPaul has built Drag Race up into a moral Jenga tower of principles: Life is a performance; Be your authentic self; Gay people get to choose their family; and so forth. But this dazzling framework is weighed down by a profound contradiction between its message of unconditional self-love and its chief objective of funneling competitors into the entertainment industry. Judges on the show relentlessly push the narrative that strong performers are also emotionally mature. Hysterical outbursts from queens on the verge of elimination, such as Roxxxy Andrews (season 5) and Blair St. Clair (season 10), show how contestants internalize the notion that failure to perform stems from personal deficiency or psychological distress. The most successful unseasoned queens — take for instance Tatiana, Adore Delano, Pearl, and Kameron Michaels — follow the triumphal narrative arc in which success in performance comes by accruing confidence and self-expression. By deeming winners morally virtuous, Drag Race grafts self-acceptance onto entertainment value.

RuPaul embodies the central contradiction of the show by proudly preaching the axiom, “If you can’t love yourself, how in the hell you gonna love somebody else?”, despite being unapologetic in his own pursuit of profit. (Recent revelations have shown how he leases thousands, and perhaps tens of thousands, of acres on his Wyoming ranch to fracking and oil-drilling operations). Of course, it is patently absurd for a competition reality show to make such strong moral claims, in a genre which thrives on confrontation, humiliation, and emotional drama. Contestants take part because they are cognizant of the economic opportunity before them — in season 10, Kameron Michaels and Miz Kracker disclosed that their respective budgets surpassed a mortgage down payment for one and college tuition for the other. The show’s financial logic ensures the cooperation of the competitors in the presentation of its conflicting moral message.

It bears reflection that gay identity, which used to be subversive and deviant before its mainstreaming in the 90s and 2000s, has come to be represented by the bland “be kind” and “be yourself” slogans that Ellen and RuPaul promulgate. Lady Gaga is a third personality who has fertilized this cultural terrain with her steady refrains of self-acceptance and individualism. She has been an outspoken marriage rights advocate, is given credit for “queering mainstream pop,” and is idolized in the LGBTQ community. Her brand, a crazy quilt of fantasy and high fashion but light on concrete gay themes, is a telling example of the mainstream spirit of LGBTQ identity.

For celebrities, joining the queer club has become so common as to be almost blasé. Still, baring one’s non-heterosexual orientation is regarded as a noble political act, which many of the rich and famous describe as a love for “just people” rather than genders. Seen in this light, the line of argument that criticizes gay narratives for their superficiality, such as the charge that Call Me By Your Name lacks real sexual and emotional intimacy, may be less a matter of homophobia than a by-product of Hollywood’s insistent peddling of anodyne moralism as gay or queer love. It is easy to sell this sanitized version of gayness as a vessel for a moralistic message on the freedom to love, as the embodiment of liberal progress.

A movement for rights

What explains this strong moralistic and pro-corporate streak in representations of gay culture today? It may in part arise from a historical convergence of entities representing the lesbian and gay “movement” on the one hand, and Democratic Party politics on the other. In an August 2020 interview with Jacobin, historian John D’Emilio noted how gay activism in the 1970s pivoted away from its early broad anti-capitalist orientation. Early activists were “replaced by other groups that remain militant but are single-issue, identity-based organizations. What I mean is you have organizations out there fighting in the streets, challenging the police, and causing disruption, but all they want is equal rights for gays.” A great many advocacy groups were formed in the 70s and 80s mainly on the cities of the East Coast, such as PFLAG (originally short for Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays) and GLBTQ Legal Advocates and Defenders (GLAD), and they usually came to participate actively in the political process as legal advocates.

In the 1990s and 2000s, these gay and lesbian activists found a home in the Democratic Party in its culture wars against the Republicans. Advocacy groups presented lesbians and gays (and later, bisexual and transgender people as the acronym expanded; queer would be the latest stable addition) as a strategic voting bloc to the Democratic coalition. In doing so, advocates embraced the politics of multiculturalism that the party has used to frame its politics in the last half-century, which paints the party as the protector of vulnerable minority groups against right-wing hostility but largely abandons its former working-class identity. One of the most iconic and well-funded of these groups, the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), hosted a forum for Democratic presidential candidates in 2007 in conjunction with Logo TV (incidentally the cable television channel which aired the first 8 seasons of RuPaul’s Drag Race), and have since continued to collaborate with the party. The group’s direct political ties remain strong today — in 2015, the current head of the HRC, Alphonso David, was appointed as chief council and legal advisor to the Democratic governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo.

Today, these groups occupy a strange nexus between political advocacy, non-profit work, and business. For instance, the head of Lambda Legal, one of the oldest and largest LGBTQ advocacy groups, is John Stafstrom Jr., a prominent Connecticut lawyer specializing in business law with close links to local politics. A close look at GLAD’s board of directors is also instructive. The 17 board members listed on the website include the senior director of Akamai Technologies Inc., the VP of employee relations at financial services firm State Street Corporation, a financial advisor with Morgan Stanley, a former executive VP and COO of Liberty Mutual Investments, an advisor to the Boston Federal Reserve, and several specialists in finance, tax, and commercial law. Perhaps an unsurprising profile for a legal advocacy group, but nonetheless one which suggests how financial interests, for instance, silently exert influence on LGBTQ activism today. Even more suggestive, the head of GLAAD (Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, not to be confused with GLAD) is the Coca-Cola Company vice president of national retail sales Pamela Stewart.

These advocacy groups collectively moved to frame the LGBTQ movement as a struggle for legal rights centered on the marriage equality issue. The push for marriage rights entailed support for the politics of privatization pushed by Clinton and Obama-era Democratic politicians by portraying marriage as a legal and cultural solution to poverty and inequality. Popular political discourse in gay culture (and perhaps even more visibly today, in the politics of transgender rights) has followed the trend of using liberal, universal rights language and has long been couched in legal terms such as equal rights and equal access.

From the perspective of the Democratic Party, an LGBTQ political constituency has proved simple to integrate into its post-Reagan class-blind message of diversity and inclusion. Supporting the struggle for gay rights — first for civil unions and later for marriage — was an easy way for politicians to signal their support for social freedoms. Perhaps as importantly, the representatives of the LGBTQ rights movement offered an economic profile that fit in well with the new Democratic coalition. By embracing the myth that gays and lesbians are disproportionately white, wealthy, highly educated, and urban, advocates depicted a group that would both offer loyalty as a “minority” constituency as well as follow the trend of the post-70s era of an increasingly wealthy and educated Democratic voter profile.

No other identity group fits so conveniently into the party’s neoliberal ideology of diversity and progress. Black Americans face a similar dynamic as a minority group taking refuge from white supremacy in the Democratic big tent, but the rosy image of this constituency relationship has been marred by the continued economic neglect of black communities (aided by the destruction of black wealth after the 2008 economic crisis). In contrast, the LGBTQ struggle for equality can boast a recent concrete victory in marriage equality, and offers a message of progress that is still fresh and believable. “In virtually no other country have LGBT groups and leftist parties forged such a durable or fruitful alliance,” wrote an opinion piece in the LA Review of Books in 2019. That year fittingly saw the first gay Democratic candidate for president, Pete Buttigieg, portray himself as barrier-breaking because of his identity while running on an entirely conventional political platform which earned him the praises of corporate donors.

One could characterize the broader cultural and political trend that this essay describes as pinkwashing, although that term overemphasizes an element of clear intent. While there have been instances of the deliberate manipulation and cooptation of LGBTQ identities to justify a corporate agenda, a more subtle business-friendly attitude cloaked in equal rights discourse has become a typical feature of popular gay culture. It may surface in somewhat gratuitous manifestations of the Democratic Party’s public relations machine, as with Ellen’s confidence with the Clintons or Nancy Pelosi’s appearance on RuPaul’s Drag Race (“you betta werk!” she tweeted afterward unconvincingly). Other times, it functions by simple omission; the 2019 Netflix miniseries, Tales of the City, embodies such selective blindness in its depiction of San Francisco as a queer mecca. The show wholly erases the negative impact of the tech boom which has rendered the city prohibitively expensive for the likes of the millennials who act in the show and instead reoriented the character of the city’s queer scene towards a wealthy Silicon Valley clientele. In show, though, queer love is impervious to corporate power.

Nancy werks her Twitter following after an appearance on RuPaul’s Drag Race

Once more, representation is not detrimental on its face, and LGBTQ people have enjoyed many legal and cultural milestones over the past decades. It is difficult for most of us to criticize the monumental gains of this period as part of a larger political and economic project which has exacerbated inequalities for the past 40 years. But gay narratives and cultural icons have played an important role in legitimizing our highly unequal and corporate-friendly economic and political system. Their role should be acknowledged instead of the indiscriminate feting of all LGBTQ voices and stories as beacons of progress.