Glee normalized queerness by making it ordinary and square rather than transgressive

Evidence

This line didn’t age well, particularly in an era of heightened awareness around racial and social equality, but Glee undeniably expanded representation on network TV. The show featured romantic subplots for actors with Down syndrome and, as Slate’s June Thomas noted, “did more to normalize homosexuality than any other show in TV history, perhaps more than any other mainstream work of art.” Where queerness in earlier decades felt transgressive—for example, when Nirvana bandmembers French-kissed each other on Saturday Night Live—Glee made queerness look ordinary, even square. By 2015, 73 percent of millennials, many of whom had been raised on Glee, supported same-sex marriage. — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 351

Categorization

Category: Contrarian or Surprising Claims

• ADDENDUM: Connects to the reader’s article on how moral panics over ‘immodest’ dress work as class/identity signaling — here we see the inverse: a panic-era transgression (queerness) becoming normalized through mainstream TV until it reads as ‘square,’ the same cultural flattening mechanism.

Related

• Mainstream television normalized previously transgressive identities faster than prior decades did (similarity 0.93)