| "It's a harder life," "It's a miserable life," and "It's a lonely life" are commentaries attached to cultural scripts of gay male aging. For decades, film and television have presented a bleak, if not villainous, portrait of what it means to live as a gay male. Gay men are painted as monsters, predators, and creatures of the night, offering a cautionary tale to steer "confused" youngsters away from a doomed future of self-hatred, bitterness, and isolation. This cautionary tale is intensified with older gay men, whose bodies are marked with weakness, shame, developmental failure, and desperation for their lost youth. This study examines post millennium mainstream film and television production of gay male identity in the United States to interrogate how gay aging is constructed in contemporary discourse, meanings attached to gay male futures, and foreclosures presented to queer futurity through the governing logic of heteronormative temporalities. Bridging queer media criticism, queer theories of temporality, and the utopian project of queer futurity with Burkean criticism, this dissertation analyzes how gay male aging is constructed to reify the correctness of heteronormativity through enacting a tragic ritual of gay male sacrifice and punishment. The rhetorical construction of the 1990s "normal gay" continues to circulate, working to separate "productive" gay citizenship from "other gays," in an effort to bridge normative identification through dominant designations of future---most commonly procreation, family, and marriage. Adopting homonormative postures, the "normal gay" seeks to rhetorically rectify alienation from dominant---yet limited---notions of future through the reification of consumerism, whiteness, and patriarchy. Rejecting the perpetuation of heteronormative tragedy, as well as homonormative apolitical complicity with dominant systems of oppression, the study theorizes moments of alternative queer temporal articulation. Gesturing to the existence of queer lives, futures, and conceptions of aging outside of the linear framework of straight heteronormative time, the conclusion locates potential temporal representations at the margins of the cultural frame. Challenging sedimented conceptions of time, aging, and future, queered engagements with time offer a comic corrective to the heteronormative tragedy and the temporal disciplining of the culturally produced gay male future. |
