There was a time when we had no television in our home. Televisionlessness became part of our identity — distinguishing us as bohemian, or at least people at the intersection of “cosmopolitan” and “busy”. It’s a signifier of taste, not unlike the trope of gay men who won’t tolerate overhead lights. A laptop proved good enough. We briefly tried a projector, but that seemed grandiose.
We did have a set in the early noughties, a bulky old thing inherited from my parents and lugged between rented apartments in San Francisco. That was a time before gay marriage, when the foreign partner in a binational same-sex couple wasn’t eligible to immigrate on the basis of the relationship, so my British boyfriend found himself subsisting as an undocumented resident.
My new memoir Deep House details how, cohabiting illicitly, we made a home together in which to imagine our lives as legitimate. On the television: Buffy the Vampire Slayer marathons, a way to unwind, and movies by European auteurs lost in vast American landscapes — Zabriskie Point, Bagdad Café — that inspired my scofflaw to rethink his circumstances as a weird but chic holiday. During those unauthorised years, we could feel like idiots, as in the term idiōtēs, used in Greek antiquity to identify a layman sequestered away from public life. Home was a place in which to hide away.
I moved to London in 2007 following the advent of civil partnerships. We unburdened ourselves of the vast majority of our stuff — sold books, donated shoes, left the bulky television behind for the new tenant. For more than a decade and a half, we didn’t buy a new one. We were out in the museums and the gay bars, regularly swimming, attending graduate school.
Eventually we left London for a flat in a Victorian conversion in St Leonards-on-Sea on the East Sussex coast. It has an original fireplace, and after a visit from a flue cleaner — one of several going by the name Shawn the Sweep — it truly became a hearth. A roaring fire adds a calming, organic, dynamic element to the room, like an extinguishable pet. Who needs a television, we continued to claim. Certainly, we would never put one on the mantelpiece.
When my now husband recently suggested the time had come, I immediately realised I’d just been waiting for him to bring it up. Our primary criteria: a discreet profile, and a picture quality without overly sharp HD, which erases cinematic haze to the point of making everything look cheap or, as Frank Ocean sang, “too real”. We settled on a Sony Bravia, and installed it not above the noble fireplace but to the side on a Vitsœ shelf where, like Cynthia Erivo in Wicked, its slight form belies a powerhouse performer.
Through our laptop years, we still generally had a series on the go, but television wasn’t a part of the design — or ambience — of our interior. Now, with three times as many inches, we swim inside other people’s stories. Early on, we couldn’t stop rewatching Almodóvar films, stunned by the sumptuousness. We balked at the insensitivity of the default interface, so connected it to Apple TV, with its streamlined menu and screensavers of Utah canyons and megacities. We hooked up a Sonos system so that sound washes over us. When friends are over for RuPaul’s Drag Race, the speaker in the kitchen allows them to refill their drinks without missing a single double-entendre.
For his 1997 exhibition Fragments of their Pleasant Spaces (in my fashionable version), artist Tobias Rehberger created solutions to domestic quandaries submitted by friends. In “Together, lean back”, wrestling over the remote is rendered moot by a pair of sleek armchairs installed side-by-side in front of two suspended televisions. Each monitor is encased in a football, continuing the joke that the piece solves the spat over whether to watch sport or a foreign film.
We never seem to disagree much on our programming. These days, when we aren’t watching The Bear, we are talking about The Bear. If that sounds faintly depressing, please recall the line from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Airman’s Odyssey: “Love does not consist of gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction.”
Come to think of it, shared television moments rank among the most formative of my cultural life. When I was an undergrad at UCLA, I attended weekly potluck suppers to watch Beverly Hills, 90210 and Melrose Place at the apartment of a gay couple. Melrose Place especially brought about my edification in camp. A maniacal doctor wrenching off her prosthetic face; a cat fight that ends in the swimming pool. Howling with laughter, we put proof to Susan Sontag’s point that homosexuals constitute the “most articulate audience” of camp. To Sontag, camp taste is not about snide judgment but enjoyment, even a “love for human nature”. She insists, “Camp is a tender feeling.” Our generous hosts helped me come into my own as a thoughtful observer through these group viewing sessions. They remain together today, both academics in the arts who encourage students to actively pay attention.
An idiot box doesn’t necessarily keep a person from discourse and debate. “My ‘comfort watch’ is tennis,” philosopher Judith Butler recently said. “I watch tennis on television when I just need to relax. And I think it might be something about how the ball goes from there to there.” In the current cacophony of politicians threatening to roll back civil rights progress, it feels appropriate to devote time to shifting focus. A little dissociation can be helpful, such as getting lost in a game where “love” rarely wins.
“Deep House: The Gayest Love Story Ever Told” is published by Allen Lane/Penguin on June 5
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