“Everybody else in this fucking town’s falling in love, and getting engaged, and having babies. Has it ever fucking occured to you that Lafayette, that Queen that make all you white heterosexuals laugh and feel good about yourselves, has it fucking ever occured to you that maybe I want a piece of happiness too?”
– Lafayette Reynolds, True Blood, Season 7 Ep. 5
The summer of 2014 welcomed the final season of the HBO vampire/horror/fantasy/soft-core porn series True Blood, and as a viewer since its inception, I have to say it was not disappointing. Don’t get me wrong though, that’s not meant in a good way. It had been on a downhill slide for a while now, and it successfully maintained that momentum all the way to the end, which was just a few dancing Ewoks away from being completely disingenuous and emotionally inauthentic cheese. (Just kidding. You know I love me some Yub Nub.) However, one moment genuinely shocked me, when after being caught having sex with Jessica’s (a hetero-female character) boyfriend, Lafayette was given dialogue so unsubtle that it borderline shattered the fourth wall, where the character directly addressed the pervasive problem, throughout all media, of Queer “type” characters and their limited dimensionality as human beings.
“Type” characters are seen not just with LGBTQ characters, but with racial minorities, as well as with gender and class, and they are seen anytime a character is acting the way that dominant society repeatedly tells us they are supposed to act. There are select traits and features are emphasized to more easily identify the character as Other than what is dominant, and there is no development or growth in terms of the character’s story, or in terms of their internal development as a person. In other words, the character exists mainly as an object that reinforces what is normal by explicitly acting out what is familiar as different and therefore odd.
Examples of the “Type” characters can often be found in mainstream representations of Queer characters, where they mainly exist to inform the heterosexuality of the main characters as normal. As Angelique Harris discusses in her essay titled “I’m a Militant Queen”: Queering Blaxploitation Films, in many films of the 70’s, the Queer characters were used for comedic relief and for juxtaposition with the protagonists as a reminder of just how masculine or how NOT Queer the main characters were. Derogatory words like faggot were used not just to refer to Queer characters, but to insult the hetero-masculine characters, as if equating them with the “faggots” is a threat to their masculinity and to their being “normal.”
The legacy of this comedic Queer, which Harris names “The Jester,” whose comedy is rooted only in their sexuality and their Otherness from the “normal” main characters has survived past the Blaxploitation era films that Harris discusses, and is most currently personified in Lafayette. Lafayette exists primarily as comedic relief, with most of his comedy being based on his sexuality and the outgoing and constantly gleeful personality that is suggested to accompany being a gay man. Because he is an African American gay man he is made into a “queen” by being given flamboyant gestures and an emphasized accent. He is dressed in makeup and clothes that would be considered feminine, and he is a deviant to social norms through being a drug dealer and user, which can be equated with the deviancy of his sexuality from the hetero social norm. However, although Lafayette fits so perfectly into the comedic Queer, or Jester “type,” I believe that what True Blood has done with the character is managed to successfully renegotiate the place of that “type” within a narrative, and give multiple dimensions to develop Lafayette into a human being, beyond being only defined by his “type.”
The creative team behind True Blood used the “type” character of Lafayette as an opportunity to have an open discussion with audiences about Queer representation in the media. I think it’s evident by the fact that Lafayette was supposed to die early on, as he does in the Sookie Stackhouse books, but instead is kept around until the very end (spoiler alert?), that the writers understood the unique opportunity they had with this type of character and the creative freedom granted to them on a premium channel like HBO to redefine what the comedic queer character could be. The show has offered alternatives to Lafayette’s Queer representation throughout the seasons by offering multiple Queer characters, vampire and human both, who don’t so easily and directly fit into historic Queer “types,” and have given Lafayette storylines and interactions that move beyond his sexual orientation. Lafayette always maintains signifiers of his “Queerness,” but it becomes less about reinforcing the heteronormativity of the rest of the cast, and more about maintaining that although his Queer identity is a major part of his character it is not what completely defines him. His Queer identity at certain points even allows the writers to directly address bigotry and homophobia beyond the metaphor of humans prejudice toward vampires. Essentially, Lafayette is a multi-dimensional character, just like the rest of the cast, but also has to deal with the added problems of prejudice that accompany being Queer.
The pinnacle of the writers using Lafayette to address Queer representation came in the episode I have discussed, where he directly attacks the possible one dimensionality that his character could so easily become trapped in. When Lafayette asks Jessica if it has occurred that he wants love to, his character is openly negotiating between the audience and his “type,” asking at the very least that he can be recognized as more than a comedic prop. There is room for a Queer character who acts like a “Queen” and who finds comedic value within his or her persona, but what the True Blood writers argue through Lafayette is that these character types are unique individuals, and that they are actual human beings with fears and struggles and success and relationships, just like the main hetero-normative characters. Lafayette may fit into a “type,” but he is just one Queer representation among options as infinite as all of humanity. Lafayette exists within True Blood to start to make room for more complex and diverse Queer representation, starting with one familiar “type,” sending a message that whether a Queer character fits into a certain defined role or not, they are a fully developed human being, and should be treated as such.
The Pictures Make My Head Hurt 