Elaine Qiao

Sitcoms love gay people. 

In the pilot episode of Modern Family, the central conflict features couple Mitchell and Cameron’s frantic—and thanks to Cam, elaborate—preparations to introduce their newly adopted baby to the rest of the family. The biggest question is whether Jay, the gruff and irrefutably homophobic patriarch, can celebrate this development without causing a scene. The episode culminates in a Lion King–inspired unveiling and Jay’s rare sentimentality—before, of course, baby Lily pees on him. A similar plot comprises the pilot episode of Shameless, where ladies’ man Lip finds a gay porn magazine hidden in a Playboy under his brother Ian’s bed. While bluntly questioning how Ian could enjoy something entering what he terms “one-way traffic,” Lip comes to support his brother in a moment that reaffirms their previously unsettled family bond. Time and again, queer acceptance seems to be the determining factor in efficiently establishing a flawed but fundamentally loving family in television. In family sitcoms where establishing characters one can root for is key, it’s unsurprising that this trope is selected. What says unconditional love better than “Love is Love”?  

When I came out to my mother, the conversation was neither the blown-up disownment I had half-imagined nor the corporate image of acceptance I’d grown used to seeing. It was unplanned and quiet. There was no hug to give, as the conversation happened over the phone. She didn’t tell me I was confused, only to keep it from my father. The conversation has never come up again. When I bring up anything related to my queerness, she responds accordingly—usually to advise me to keep it hidden. She has stopped telling me I’m “straight beyond question.” Yet she continues to tease me about getting a boyfriend, and some days it feels as if the call were some liminal fantasy. 

Though her response to my coming out could only be termed as disappointing, during the entire exchange I never questioned our bond, nor her love. I cried, of course, because I had hoped for whispers of support and apologies for her repression. I thought back to Modern Family, then, resentful that our family was not more Americanized, that sexuality weighed too heavily to be a punchline. But I resist that her motherly love pales because she was unable to process what I am. I cannot deem her less for choosing silence over performativity. 

I always thought my family read more like a novel than a television series. We demanded a certain seriousness, a maintained attention for nuance that does not translate to the screen. Ocean Vuong wrote in On Earth, We’re Briefly Gorgeous, “I got what I wanted—a boy swimming toward me. Except I was no shore, Ma. I was driftwood trying to remember what I had broken from to get here.” I think about Asian melancholia: an inherited grief, a psychic sort of sadness that has shaped the Asian American identity. A rootlessness entering through nailbeds. I think of the ocean my mother traversed to give me a different life, and I cannot quite understand why such a pioneer cannot grasp love. 

In a world where we don’t even fully understand our own relationalities, how can we expect genuine embrace from one another? Sara Ahmed, in Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others, talks about how bodies are oriented in a restaurant. “I am shocked by the sheer force of the regularity of that which is familiar: how each table presents the same form of sociality as the form of the heterosexual couple.” Entering the restaurant’s patio, Ahmed is affronted, “How is it possible, with all that is possible, that the same form is repeated again and again? How does the openness of the future get closed down into so little in the present?” Even the chairs we sit in and tables we eat at are submerged in heteronormativity, reconstituted in uninspired form. The unnamed gay porno is Playboy’s parallel; Cam and Mitch cannot be understood without one filling in the role of a wife (see Season 5, Episode 18). What does it mean to be queer in a world that was not designed for queerness? Am I to expect that comprehension from my mother when I do not understand it myself?

I don’t claim to know how to feel about my coming out. I don’t understand what my mother’s inability to accept me has done for her morality. In Concerning My Daughter, a novel centering a widowed mother coming to terms with her daughter’s lesbianism, Kim Hye-jin writes about blame: “It’s not my fault. It’s not your fault. It’s no one’s fault. If we keep telling ourselves that, then who should all the victims of the world go to for their apology?” I wonder if my mother has these moments with herself. Have I condemned her to guilt by making her face me? Will we ever talk about all of this? I don’t know who to blame for my silencing, but I know I do not want to blame my mother. 

---

I don’t know who to blame for my silencing, but I know I do not want to blame my mother. 

---

The afterimages are biting. I still remember breaking down in tears over the phone, my mother’s careful detachment so as to not get caught herself. American progressivism would depict a begrudging figure like Lip or Jay who, though initially affronted, comes so far around that queerness is allowed to exist as an imitation of heterosexuality. What does being queer look like in a vacuum, without its oppressive countermodel? I can’t pretend that acceptance is not the end goal, that I don’t hope to slowly desensitize my mother and father until the fact that I could love a woman is nothing but dinner-table teasing. But I prefer silence over both pain and a lie. I know that’s why my mother has fallen into omission. 

I’m currently rewatching Modern Family with my mother, long distance through the phone. She does not say much about Mitch and Cam, only that she enjoys their bickering. I’ll let myself slip for as long as it takes for us to find the words.

---