Do We Need "Imaginary Couples?"

1/25/2016

I stumbled onto an article on the Huffington Post earlier today about a photography exhibit called "Imaginary Couples," wherein straight people pose with other same-sex people as couples. The point is supposed to be that love is universal and that gay love is not inferior to straight love.

While I think the idea behind this series is great, it feels kind of weird, as if it is saying that homosexuality is somehow validated by the fact that even straight people can demonstrate loving queerness. Or something.

I know that this isn't what the exhibit is trying to say--not at all. But something about it still feels "off" to me. Like... we can represent ourselves, thanks. I mean, what about an exhibit that showed able-bodied people in wheelchairs? Wouldn't that be kind of offensive?

To me, this would have been more conceptually interesting if it had also included gay people pretending to be straight, or simply people who weren't in relationships pretending to be in relationships. Or all of the above, plus some gay and straight couples who actually were in relationships. That might have said something kind of interesting about how we think about love and coupling and relationships.

But instead, I'm just left kind of scratching my head. What do you all think about this?

8 Comments

Penny

1/25/2016 05:45:02 pm

I am maybe a step further because I honestly don't think it is okay at all. Het cis people to represent Queer?! How is that not a different sort of "black face"? Actual queer people are already too few in all media.

MELISSA link

1/25/2016 05:51:51 pm

This is very insulting to me. Had this photographer done his homework and put out a call for LGBTQ individuals for a photoshoot, they would have responded in droves. Real gay celebrities might even had volunteered. My girlfriend and I certainly would have responded. We are as attractive as any fake gay couple this guy photographed. I have a feeling this is mainly about celebrity and not showing the beautiful LGBTQ people of the world. Silly and sad.

Mal

1/25/2016 07:06:51 pm

I just saw this earlier today and I hadn't even read the article yet before I was already just sharing at the screen like um... I'm really not sure how I feel about it either. On the one hand, I'm like, okay I get that and it's sweet to be like, look being gay isn't terrible. Even straight people can get close to people of the same sex. NO BIG. But, really, I feel like it probably does two things other than bring attention to being an lgbtqialphabetsoup ally. It probably makes people think: "Oh my, I wonder what those two guys are actually thinking right now!?" Laughter ensues. OR it probably, as it seems, is just upsetting the queer community. ?? I wouldn't personally get upset because, like we want people to accept us, right? And sometimes they don't know exactly the best way. But there's definitely some discussion to be had.

Drew Taylor

1/25/2016 08:12:06 pm

Previous comment.

Kirsten link

1/26/2016 09:46:05 am

Because it's not enough that straight cis actors play most of the queer parts in film and on television, let's use them in visual art, too!
I'm sure it's more nuanced than this, but I can't help feeling like this is a cheap stunt rather than a meaningful attempt at allyship.

Susan

1/26/2016 11:58:11 am

Dumb. Period.

Trig

1/26/2016 12:26:01 pm

I also think that this art exhibit is odd and falls short of its purported goal. *Maybe* this could have been meaningful to show audiences that the celebrities they are used to seeing in straight relationships look the same when posing in same-sex relationships, therefore it's the same love? But showing people in real same-sex relationships still seems more effective and ethical.

Honestly, it reminds me of this recent issue where a journalist tried to celebrate traditional African dress by photo-shopping the clothing onto herself: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jan/07/boglarka-balogh-seven-types-of-blackface

Wendell Ricketts link

1/29/2016 11:07:11 am

Like most of your other commenters, I, too, thought the concept was flawed and essentially misguided, though I’m not ready to flay anyone inasmuch as I don’t think the intention was malign. I imagine the idea was some version of that “love is universal” slogan that has been making me retch for a couple of years now. It’s a way of “despecifying” queer sex and queer love that mostly leaves me shaking my head, but I also understand that good straight people (and a lot of gay people) think this is message that will “work.”
All of that said, what the photos mostly made me think of was the way queer can be simultaneously visible and not visible. It reminded me of all those 19th-century photos that have come to light over recent years after being discovered in archives or personal collections. They’re of same-sex pairs, almost always making some sort of physical contact, and the people in the photo are always presented as “gay couples” or “lesbian couples” even though we rarely know anything for certain about who the people were or what they were to one another. (And that, in turn, makes me think of that famous Man Ray photo of Alice B. Toklas and Gertrude Stein in which they sit at opposite ends of a large living room, separated by an enormous low table. If we didn’t know who they were, who could look at that photo and see a couple?).
So there’s something in the “Imaginary Couples” photos about the idea that people are gay/lesbian/queer only to the extent that they are coupled. Or, think of it this way: let’s suppose they had just decided to photograph *individual* straight people pretending to be gay/lesbian. What would they do? How would they “signify” that they were queer?

At the same time, the photos seem to suggest that any two people of the same (apparent) biological sex who are touching one another more-or-less intimately must be queer—that is, must be sexually involved. Yet they can’t show sex; so they show physical closeness or affection as a kind of proxy. That’s an intriguing and troubling notion.

All of which raises, in a way I think is not entirely wrong, the question of “What is queer?” The problem is that it does not, at least not in the ways the campaign is currently being discussed, also immediately raise the question of “What is straight?”

Last thought: I’m exhausted by the rote sloganeering of “these are ‘cis’ people and therefore it’s all transphobic and mean-spirited, and anti-queer,” but that doesn’t mean there isn’t something worth saying about gender or the appearance of gender in these photos. The people in the the images are relentlessly “gender-appropriate,” especially (but not exclusively) the women.

So what bugs me much more than the “cis is bad” discourse—because, really, if you’re already pretending they’re straight, you can just as easily pretend they’re trans—is the campaign’s contribution to the normalization discourse. Queers R Us if they’re in committed couples, if they’re attractive, if they’re parents, if they’re young, if they don’t depart from gender stereotypes, etc.

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