you can say anything you want about Glee, but tell me which other show will ever be THAT iconic and ballsy enough to: include 20+ notable LGBT+ characters; offend literally anyone in every single episode; have serious performances of ‘Gangnam Style’ and ‘What Does The Fox Say?’;
have guest stars such as Britney Spears or Demi Lovato (who played a lesbian); produce The Flash & Supergirl; have the messiest cast and feuds of all time, or break Beatles’ Billboard record? WHICH one? I’ll wait…
I always thought there should be a Glee fanvid to Taylor Swift’s “Welcome to New York.” Years too late, I made it exist.
Ahhhhhhhhh I love this so MUCH! I can’t stop rewatching. I mean, damn, the song and show obviously gel perfectly, in a thematic sense – but my god, THAT EDITING!! You didn’t have to go that hard, but you did.
I think seeing this in 2018 actually makes me appreciate it in a way that I couldn’t have when the show was airing. It’s such a good, good nostalgia punch. Thank you for posting it over here!
Behind the scenes, the tone was lighter. O’Malley joked about “his big gay son” during rehearsal, teasing Chris Colfer’s Kurt that “Your mom would be so happy if she weren’t dead,” with the kind of practiced ease the comes with playing family for six years. When it came time to run the actual vows, the first few times through the actors couldn’t keep it together. It’s wordy. When they got to the parts that reference Shel Silverstein’s “The Missing Piece,” it required Colfer to stare into Darren Criss’ eyes and say “Roll away with me, Blaine” with a straight face. Criss immediately bowed at the middle in laughter, and Colfer bemoaned, “there’s no other way for me to say it, sorry.” Eventually, they made it through.
Nothing ages more quickly or brutally than a piece of entertainment that was revolutionary for its moment. So it’s easy to look back at the debut of Glee and wonder what the big deal was. After all, it certainly wasn’t the first TV show to depict gay characters. But Glee was the first to put a gay kid front and center and to eschew patronizing “Look, he’s just like us!” cultural tourism. The tart-tongued Kurt Hummel, played by actor Chris Colfer (who astonishingly for TV was actually a teenager), was femme, high-voiced, fashion-obsessed, lonely, special. He wasn’t tokenistic or neutered—Kurt got to have a coming-out, a boyfriend, a sex life. He didn’t have to be “just like us”; he only had to be himself.
At its apex, the series was not on the fringes of pop culture but at its center, airing after the Super Bowl and turning Katy Perry’s “Teenage Dream” into a same-sex I-think-you’re-hot song that reached Billboard’s top ten. At least as significantly, Glee forced its largely non-gay, non-kid audience to confront the existence and the struggles of queer children in a sustained way. In that, the show accomplished something television can do better than almost any other medium—it normalized a conversation. The year after the show’s premiere, Dan Savage launched his deeply affecting and deeply effective “It Gets Better” video project. Savage understood that if one role of entertainment is to kick down a barrier, the job of activism is to make sure it never gets rebuilt.
Now a generation of queer kids who saw themselves in Glee (not to mention a generation of queer kids who didn’t) is in college arguing about gender fluidity and intersectionality. And in ten years, some of them will run for local, state, and national office. For a show that began with a bunch of high-schoolers singing “Don’t Stop Believin’,” that’s not a bad legacy.
I have a sinking feeling that there are going to be people who use this gif set as evidence that Blam or Sam is queerbaiting (i just have a stellar bullshit meter and I know how that group rolls), but I just have to say, that if you were to put this side by side with some choice quotes from Puck (washing your balls is gay) and Finn (shh don’t tell people you’re on the syncronized swim team, that’s a girly sport) and it will actually kind of make clear why Sam’s always been different. Like how not once in Rumors did we get Sam insisting that he’s not hooking up with Kurt because he’s straight, instead it was Sam insisting he’s not a cheater. This isn’t new with Sam, and it’s fun, and it’s funny. And Sam isn’t acting like he deserves and award for not being homophobic, he’s just a good guy. It’s one of my favorite things about him.
fivepercent 