"They say we'll rot in Hell, but I don't think we will."

I watch a lot of TV; and I have said things in the past before like “Thank God, they finally put some gay people on TV.” Reading this first article really made me question that thought. Especially when it brought up two TV shows I really love, Friends and Will and Grace. Though they include “gay” characters, “the specter of same-sex desire between the male regulars on the show is suggested, but the markers of that desire are frequently connotative and thus ambiguous. Same-sex desire between the men is regularly invoked to propel the action of the series, but it is never allowed to achieve sexual expression” (2). It made me think about a TV show that is currently off the air, but I started watching it recently: Spartacus. It had four seasons on STARZ from 2010-2013. Throughout the show there are central homosexual relationships in which the people are main characters. However, it wasn’t until season 4 that there was a full on sex scene between two males. It was the episode I watched last night and I noticed it because I thought to myself, we’ve never actually seen the guys have sex…only kiss and go into corners and then it’ll cut. This is a show where we see everyone have sex all of the time, which reminded me of Foucault’s The History of Sexuality and how that’s how it was before the Victorian times, but in any case it made me think why show it now? It brings up all of the questions discussed in this article including the sanitizing of queer life. I will definitely have to question those relationships in all of the media I see to be able to tell if they are realistically representing queer life, or if they are just reinforcing a heteronormative society.