Unlike My Beautiful Launderette, whose narrative refused our identification with Omar and Johnny’s romantic life, the 2013 Australian TV show Please Like Me is structured almost solely around relationships. Queer love and intimacy are a complete spectacle, where most of the narrative (and much of the comedy) comes from Josh’s (Josh Thomas) sometimes awkward —and other times heartedly tepid — steps into life as a gay man. We enter the show with him being “outed” by his girlfriend Claire (Caitlin Stasey) where, among shots of a delicious and colorful ice cream sundae, we hear Josh ramble off his self-loathing neuroses and — within minutes — Claire interrupts and identifies him as gay. Her “outing” marks the end of their romantic relationship but the beginning of Josh’s romantic life with men. Living in a house with his roommate and co-star Tom (Thomas Ward), who has a wildly unhealthy on-again off-again relationship with girlfriend Niamh (Nikita Leigh-Pritchard), the two navigate life and love in their 20’s.
As highlighted in last week’s post, one of the concerns with shows that revolve around queer romance is the risk of defining what queer love is supposed to look like. To that concern I would add a danger in queer representation that attempts to answer “what queer life is supposed to look like.” However, within a seemingly bland sitcom formula that would enact these dangerous representations, Please Like Me adds a twist. Josh’s gay coming of age story is constantly interrupted by his mother’s (Debra Lawrence) mental illness. It is her constant need of care that disrupts what would be a classic coming-out narrative. Through these disruptions, a better reflection of the realities of living as a queer individual is displayed.
In the very same episode, Josh has his first queer encounter with Tom’s coworker Geoffrey (Wade Briggs) and hears of his mother’s attempted suicide. The morning after an awkward and ultimately sexless night with Geoffrey, he checks his phone to find multiple voicemails from his frantic father. But the shot itself lacks the urgency of a reaction to a suicide attempt: the camera gradually zooms in on a banal scene of Josh brushing his teeth with his phone at his ear, signifying for the audience that rather than a surprise, these calls are routine.
This event suddenly shifts the trajectory of the narrative, denying what should have been the “coming-out” moment between Josh and his best friend Tom. As Tom drives Josh to the hospital they casually talk about the previous night and Tom says, “Just so I know, we aren’t talking about your mum because you’re all like, emotionally stunted yeah? And we are just ignoring the fact that Geoffrey is a man?” To which Josh answers, “Yup.” Tom’s casual introduction of the two events exemplifies how Josh’s mother’s suicide acts to disrupt and expose the fiction of the singular coming out “moment”. In life, there is no true “coming out” where individuals exclaim their queerness to the world popularized in shows like Glee.
In Sedgwick’s The Epistemology of the Closet, she demystifies this idea, highlighting how life institutes a plethora of closets to “come out” from, “every encounter with a new classful of students, to say nothing of a new boss, social worker, loan officer, landlord, doctor, erects new closets whose fraught and characteristic laws of optics and physics exact from at least gay people new surveys, new calculations, new draughts and requisitions of secrecy or disclosure. Even an out gay person deals daily with interlocutors about whom she doesn’t know whether they know or not.” (68) By disrupting the show’s narrative from Josh’s gay storyline to Rose’s struggle with mental health, Please Like Me illustrates the reality behind life as an “out” queer person: the daily trials of “Do they know? Should I tell them? Do they even need to know?” In fact, Josh lives in sexual identity limbo for most of the first season. There is no actual moment in which he says, “I’m gay” (he makes a quip about how coming out is so 90’s) instead he is outed multiple times by the show’s other characters: Claire’s outing of him to the audience and Geoffrey’s outing of him to his father and mother on separate occasions; these multiple outings better represent life alongside Sedgewick’s theorizations and life as an out queer person.
Please Like Me also complicates the representation of queer life through scenarios between Josh and his lovers in heteronormative and hypermasculine spaces. These scenes show how interconnected these oppressive structures are in the mindset of queer individuals, how they influence behavior, even how they influence opinions. In the first season, Geoffrey buys tickets for him and Josh to watch a rugby match. Josh, reluctant to see any sports at first, is titillated by the aggressive catharsis in engaging with the highs and lows of a rugby match. The two bond over escalating insults towards the players’ poor performance that results in emasculation, eventually calling the players faggots. They are immediately asked to leave for “homophobic language” to which Geoffrey responds, “This is my boyfriend, we’re not being homophobic” and energetically kisses Josh.
The scene leaves us with no closure other than the irony of two gay people removed from a hypermasculine space for being homophobic. But it does bring up interesting questions: is it okay to scream faggot if you’re gay? Who gets to scream faggot? Or better yet, who gets to tell whom whether they can or can’t scream faggot?
This scene is much more complex when considering queer affection in hypermasculine spaces and unearths for viewers a unique complication: queer Public Displays of Affection (PDA). After getting booted from the game, Josh and Geoffrey start fighting over the kiss. The camera angles reveal the shame that each feels for the other: as they spar the shot switches between them, cutting the face off the other, signifying their inability to “meet the other’s eyes.” Josh is ashamed of being known as queer in public, whereas Geoffrey is ashamed and frustrated with Josh’s inability to express his feelings publicly.
This scene is surely familiar to many queer people and brings up deeper questions: Is Josh really ashamed to be seen kissing a man? Or does he generally not like PDA? Queer individuals constantly wrestle with this dilemma, one that is often confused and interconnected, asking a darker question: Can I truly dislike PDA without it being part of gay shame? The interconnection here marks heteronormative structures’ infiltration into the very conceptions of our own opinions on our queer intimacies. Please Like Me offers no resolution to these questions (because there aren’t any) and in its ambivalence better reflects the reality of queer experience.
Mark Muster is a master’s candidate at Syracuse University studying the relationship between time and alternative kinship formations in American film and literature.
Amazingly insightful. Prompting deeper thought!