Art Vandelay is Gay: Queer Observations on ‘Seinfeld’

I watch a lot of Seinfeld. It’s my safe place, in a way, a place where it seems nothing truly bad can happen; despite the surprising number of people who actually die throughout the series, for the four principle characters, nothing that happens has much consequence or permanence beyond the moment itself (let’s just pretend that “The Finale” never happened, shall we?). It’s the nature of Seinfeld‘s anti-narrative that all events, no matter how damaging or disturbing, simply transpire with no physical or emotional consequences. That’s why, when I’m anxious or otherwise not feeling great, Seinfeld can reliably pick me up with its inspiringly detached sociopathy. Nothing really matters in the long run.

Queer Observations on Seinfeld

Refreshingly far removed from Norman Lear social problem television, Seinfeld, as in all things, is entirely unsentimental about its queers; the show radically takes queerness for granted rather than present it as something that needs to be taught to heterosexuals. LGB characters flicker in and out of Seinfeld‘s extensive body of what must be called straight theory (television’s answer to academia: nine seasons worth of empirical explorations of the nature of heterosexuality, which, if the series is any accurate indication, must be excruciating), necessary foils against which to reiterate heterosexuality (“I’m not a lesbian! I hate men, but I’m not a lesbian!”).

Conversely, the “high talker” in “The Pledge Drive” leads to Kramer giving an deliciously condescending speech about all the PBS shows that feature queer characters or narratives. It’s a moment that should ring true for any gay man who’s ever been gifted a DVD of Brokeback Mountain or trans woman who’s ever been she ought to watch Transamerica.

The oft-repeated aphorism of “The Outing”, “not that there’s anything wrong with that”, encapsulates a nineties-onward liberal ideology of begrudging tolerance in the presence of never-ending heterosexual affirmation. When George and Jerry are quote-unquote outed in “The Outing”, the fissures in the heterosexual façade are revealed only to be ostensibly sealed up again through the performance of aforementioned politically correct mantra; the queer is resigned to the junk heap of mainstream approval.

If “The Outing” is the ultimate abjection of queerness in an AIDS-aware nineties — even outdoing its cinematic counterpart, Jonathan Demme’s Philadelphia — then “The Beard” and “The Smelly Car” function as an interlocking dyad of attempts to fit queer pegs into round holes. Taking as their subjects the “conversion” of a gay man and a lesbian, respectively, these two episodes complementarily explore what it means to be queer through the eyes of heterosexuals, or rather, what it means to be a queer caught up in a strong heterosexual orbit.

In “The Beard”, Elaine poses as a girlfriend for a gay man in front of his conservative boss, only to try to “convert” him to heterosexuality under the tortured metaphor of changing “teams” (there are only two teams in Seinfeld, which must make the whole sport rather dull) and the use of particular “equipment” (Larry David continues the metaphor and even takes it to extremes in an episode of Curb, whose introduction of a bisexual character arguably makes the whole thing worse). Where she at first appears to succeed, she eventually fails, and a tiny pocket of homosexuality is restored (necessary, of course, for heterosexuality to exist at all).

But if gay men in Seinfeld are seen as immutably gay (as good liberalism demands), gay women, particularly in “The Smelly Car”, have sexualities that fluctuate at the whims of men: George is multiply described as driving women to lesbianism, while Kramer (who, throughout the series, is supposed to be possessed of a sexual magnetism irresistible to women) is seen to convert a woman to heterosexuality without even trying. Kramer, in fact, has to try not to convert women, whether a lesbian in “The Smelly Car” or a soon-to-be-nun in “The Conversion”. Kramer’s “kavorka” shores up male sexual power at the expense of female sexual autonomy. The point here is not just the divergent attitudes towards male and female (homo)sexuality, but that queer sexualities come into contact in with the Seinfeld foursome largely when those sexualities come into question. And when trapped in the orbit of heterosexuality, queer sexualities are invariably up in the air.

That said, the presence of queerness throws heterosexuality into question, at least when it comes to George Costanza. The observation that George Costanza is probably bisexual should scarcely be shocking, considering George’s history of paranoid anti-gay introspection, or lack thereof. Suggesting that George’s continued fear of being gay might be said to reveal latent queer desires on his part would be an indulgence to pop psychology that I’m more than willing to make if only because it would make George himself cringe at the thought.

“Just admitting a man is handsome doesn’t necessarily make you a homosexual”, Elaine tells George in “The Jimmy”, who replies, “it doesn’t help”. George knows a slippery slope when he sees one. When, in “The Outing”, George sees his heterosexual fantasy (tellingly a girl-girl fantasy: one woman giving another a sponge bath, from “The Contest”) replicated as a homosexual scenario, it is both the psychic expression of male sexual paranoia and the most potent clue that George is hiding something about his sexuality: from himself, from the world.

Both “The Outing” — in which George and Jerry are mistaken for a couple — and the later episode “The Cartoon” — in which George dates a woman who bears an uncanny resemblance to Jerry — explore the tenuous boundary between the homosocial and the homosexual: like all boundaries, it requires constant maintenance to avoid slippage. In “The Friars’ Club” — during the time in which George is engaged to Susan — Jerry tries to date Susan’s best friend, which results in a date in which the two homosocial “couples” essentially spend all their time talking to one another. George wants it to work out because it will lead to “movies together, dinner together, vacation together” with Jerry (“it’s almost as good as if I didn’t get married”); Jerry and George’s respective paramours are revealed to be simply sexual surrogates for one another, something perpetuated with George’s Jerry-lookalike girlfriend in “The Cartoon”. Heterosexuality is shown to be in constant verge of collapsing into homosexuality, and as such it requires constant maintenance.

Just as heterosexuality require constant maintenance, so too does the gender binary. That’s why it’s such a point of fascination when someone deviates from those norms, whether its Gillian, the woman with “man hands”, in “The Bizarro Jerry” (“it’s like a creature out of Greek mythology”) or Dan, the “high talker”, in “The Pledge Drive”. In each case, the incongruent features (hands and voice, respectively) are played by different performers than play the rest of the role, which creates a fragmentation effect not unlike that which I’ve explored elsewhere.

But then, Seinfeld‘s identity play is well-known: most famously George Costanza’s frequent alternate persona Art Vandelay, but also Elaine being mistaken for a fictional woman who takes on a life of her own in “The Susie” and Jerry switching identities with Kramer in “The Chicken Roaster”. In part owing to the show’s nihilism, identity is presented less a fixed entity than a construct of the observers and surroundings. A stable sense of self becomes just one more relic of overly sentimental storytelling to be discarded by this show about nothing.