Pal o' Me Heart

Ryan Murphy claims that he’s always “worshipped” Ellis’s work, and, indeed, one can imagine why the creator of “Glee,” a show about the agonies and the ecstasies of high-school drama, might find the adolescent milieu of “The Shards” compelling. But where “Glee” is a sentimental artifice, a snow-globe world in which teen-age angst and melodrama are of planetary importance, Ellis’s vision of teen-agers, as painted in “Less Than Zero,” his icy début, is numb, droll, sadistic, and alienated. In 2011, Ellis tweeted, “I like the idea of ‘Glee’ but why is it that every time I watch an episode I feel like I’ve stepped into a puddle of HIV?” In his own manner, Ellis may have summed up the disparity between his and Murphy’s sensibilities perfectly. As a novel, “The Shards” is an ambitious metafictional thriller-slash-gay-awakening story, and although, unlike “Less Than Zero,” it’s plot-forward and emotionally intense, Murphy’s attempt to adapt it has, to some degree, amounted to a “Glee”- ification.

Murphy obviously wasn’t interested in making a direct adaptation of Ellis’s novel, and most of the time it’s unclear what, exactly, he did want to do with the material. This is not, in any meaningful sense, a show about a teen-ager’s gay awakening, or the fraught management of such a secret; nor is it about the destructive and violent feelings that can accompany creative ambition. (In some ways, “Euphoria” is a better adaptation of “The Shards,” with its competing moral narratives and depictions of the often annihilating power of adolescent sexuality.) At times, Murphy’s show gestures at these themes, but not with any real conviction, and by the end of the series nothing much has been said.

I won’t discover, for decades—when my father goes on a genealogical kick—that the name Cunningham was invented by my father’s father, who, as a second-generation Croatian immigrant, felt that a name like Cunningham would get him further than his family name, Grgic, which, even amended into Grig, was not sufficiently Western for Gary, Indiana. My grandfather simply moved to the far side of the city, to a debatably better neighborhood, and started introducing himself as Cunningham. He never had it legally changed.

Having apparently done less-than-exhaustive research, he chose a common Irish name that, even if it was a better sell in Indiana, did not carry with it the English patrician connotations of a name like Stewart or Spencer or Scott.

I grew up, then, with an invented foreign lineage that, counter to my grandfather’s intentions, would have run more to potato farmers than nobility. The name Cunningham originated as Coney-Hame, coneys being rabbits. Our fictive ancestors were rabbit keepers. I feel confident, though, that even if my grandfather had been informed, after he’d turned us into Cunninghams, he’d still have preferred Irish potato farmers and rabbit keepers to the potato farmers „and rabbit keepers of Croatia.

Unsayable
Michael Cunningham

What’s in a word? It’s more than just a shift in linguistic fashion. “Queer” carries an adversarial charge that “gay” does not, and that charge has a specific intellectual lineage. In 1990 an activist group called Queer Nation published a manifesto exhorting gay people to call themselves “queer.” Its rationale was that “gay” was “a much brighter word” and that “queer” better conveyed the anger and disgust they felt at how society treated gay people: as marginal others whose deaths barely mattered. That sentiment had an understandable resonance at the height of the AIDS epidemic, but the us-versus-them posture it represented has outlived that crisis.

This oppositional framing of “queer” achieved its most enduring influence through the rise of queer theory. In that academic context, “queer” did not simply mean “gay or bisexual.” It meant “anti-normative” in a sweeping sense. As the queer theorist David Halperin wrote, “Queer is by definition whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant.” By that standard, same-sex relationships could be queer, but so could open marriages, prostitution and public sex, even when heterosexual.

But the capaciousness that makes “queer” appealing to some also makes the term remarkably easy for anybody — regardless of orientation — to adopt as a kind of radical chic identity label. Because the word “queer” can describe any departure from social norms, it becomes an open door through which almost anyone can walk. Polyamorous? Queer. Vaguely uncomfortable with gender expectations? Possibly queer, too.

That elasticity has helped fuel a sharp rise in young people identifying as something other than straight, even if they are unlikely to ever pursue a same-sex relationship. Some of this increase represents people who were previously closeted but are now free to be honest about their sexual orientation, which is a welcome development. But the broader trend of casting the queer net ever wider has muddled a once-clear public message about who gay people are. Being gay begins to look less like an inborn trait and more like a chosen ideology or aesthetic.