Last week's show was great. I'm still trying to figure out how/what it contributes to the highly volatile issue of homosexuality in American culture. (The reference to gays in the military, in the coffee shop scene, made this episode one of the most topical I've seen.) I know one thing: it's a hepper, 90's version of the issue than what we've seen on most TV and seems to be doing new things (that the show has been doing here and there on gay issues but never so consistently as here). Compared to other treatments, Seinfeld's take is funny--frequently you get this deadly serious, usually sanctimonious morlalism (remember Maude, Dallas, an episode of Alice)--thus the humor of the parody when George bursts in and dramatically causes a scene; humourous exceptions being: "All in the Family," and of course Billy C. from "Soap." The difference here was that the episode takes the very hep, hot 80s/90s Village issue of "outing." And there are no "representatives" on the actual show, no gay characters to provide the experience that is most repressed and threatening--made all the more frightening by its absence. Now this is something you can take in a couple of ways: first, it's bad because the absence of any gay characters goes along with the tag line "not that there's anything wrong with that" which, while it reflects the liberal realization that homophobia is bad, is funny and ironic since, of course, at the same time there is something terribly wrong with it given the hysterical panic of Jerry and George at being so identified (if there really was nothing wrong with it, they wouldn't have cared, there would have been no problem to be resolved, no plot, no show.) Hence the desperate, homophobic panic of: "Come on, have sex with me right now! Come on!" and other scenes. The fact that there are/were no gay characters, as with almost all of TV since Soap (and aborted attempts to place a lesbian charcter on LA Law, and of course the very stupid limp-wristed stereotypes from "Brothers" as well as "Living Colors"--but these don't reach the level of full characters--only flat, one-dimensional cartoons) is indicative of the real problem that gay people still pose for the US cultural psyche. (The great exception is the most progressive show on US TV today, one of the most so perhaps of all time--of course, "Roseanne" which now has two to-be-taken-serious gay characters in those played by Martin Mull and the incomparable Sandra Bernhart.) In these ways, the show does nothing to address or challenge the homophobia that still discriminates and poses a barrier to such folks' possession of full citizen status.
On the other hand--what was really great about the show, what was the source of the comedy, was the way the show, I think, made fun of homophobia by making fun of the characters' fears of becoming, or being seen as gay--hence when Jerry got a Bette Midler CD and tickets to "a lavish Broadway musical" etc.--it was funny that these things suddenly took on these "scary" implications that Jerry was gay by association. What the show plays on is the suddenly fragile line opened up in those instances between straight and gay sexuality that men, especially, like to think is very solid. This of course was the source of humor when George got a massage in a previous episode and paniced because "it moved"--his whole identity was destabilized. Ha-ha-ha! Now that's what I call funny! The show also made fun of, and highlighted the homoeroticism of everyday life and in the otherwise hetero relations between men, as in the scene where George says, "See the way he talks to me," like an old married couple. Remember that Johnson and Johnson suggested way back in the 50s that there is a kind of continuum between gay and straight and that most individual's sexuality seems to fall somewhere in between, neither totally one nor the other. And of course, Freud was convinced that the infant's first mode of sexuality is "polymorphous" and should be understood as bisexual. The problem is that our frightened, repressive and basically intolerant society predominantly attempts to establish binary boundary categories that result in the oppression of real people that find themselves on the negativized side of these dichotomies--and suffer the brunt of the fear that these categories are highly unstable, hence gay bashing. What was almost radical about Seinfeld was how it plays on these fears and makes light of them in a way that is very sophisticated, very 90s, very hep, and very liberal--but still marked by, and finally unable to escape, the homophobia it tries so humorously to parody.