Looking for Results

WHAT I WATCHED

LAST NIGHT

WORDS BY ZEON KANE

It's the second episode of the second season of Looking, and after last week's camping glamping trip, we're back in San Francisco. That's good. The city is the show's best asset.

Patrick (Jonathan Groff) and Kevin's affair continues, moving from the office floor and the woods to its most appropriate venue, a sleazy motel. It's hard not to rail against them: Patrick is a privileged WASP, and Kevin (Russell Tovey) is English. They're like hot young versions of Bush and Blair. (Now there's a stomach-churning image.) But seriously, I can't help thinking about Patrick's hard done by ex Richie (Raul Castillo), the blue collar Latino and the only character who acquitted himself with some dignity in season one. But regardless of the rights and wrongs of their relationship, Patrick and Kevin are very sexy together. What's hotter is knowing that the actors are out gay men. I remarked to my boyfriend as we watched, "Do you think they're at it off-screen too?" That's the added frisson Looking gifts us.

Dom (Murray Bartlett) takes a back seat in this episode, although there's some awkwardness with his daddy Lynn (Scott Bakula) over their open relationship. That's not going to end well, is it?

Augustin (Frankie J. Alvarez) is back in the gutter (where he belongs) after getting trashed on drugs in the club. Privileged fags have that luxury, to get wasted and lay down in the gutter. (Or were we supposed to feel sorry for him?) Fortunately for Augustin, a decent blue collar guy came along to drag him up. Me, I wouldn't spit on the obnoxious bitch if he was on fire. But getting Augustin home meant getting him home to Patrick. Yes, it was Richie who found him drooling on the sidewalk, and so ensued an awkward reunion. Patrick was clearly gagging for it, Richie less so.

Richie's representation in Looking, and his fractious relationship with Augustin, is one of the most interesting, and important, aspects of the show. Rarely in gay media do we see any acknowledgement of class; race, yes, but rarely class. Looking tells us about a proud, blue collar Latino man, and the indulged Augustin, who only speaks español when he's trashed. (It's interesting that many in the black gay media took one look at Looking's cast photos, and wrote the show off as a "white show". In fact, in that first season, two of the six male leads were Latino, and one - Britain's own O.T. Fagbenle - black. Their loss.)

I was once told by a prominent gay playwright and activist not to talk about well-off, entitled gays, because that's how we're perceived by the wider world. But it's because well-off, entitled gays - like so many spoilt children in their exclusive city playgrounds - are most often seen and heard that we must stand up and say, "I'm not Augustin. I'm not Stephen Fry. I'm not the ghastly Ivan Massow." It's when we're silent that we end up locked out, and end up with movies full of college-educated trustafarians like the pretty people in Patrik Ian-Polk's The Skinny. Those characters might be black and Latino, but they're not an honest reflection of the lives of many black and Latino Americans, any more than those of their white counterparts in the likes of Queer As Folk are of white Americans.

Back to Looking's latest episode. Patrick was fretting over an unusual blemish on his torso, with writer Michael Lannan extracting every last drop of comedy value from our pretty WASP's AIDS paranoia. Can HIV ever be funny? Are we now post-AIDS? It was very funny, but it felt a little uncomfortable laughing at a hot young San Francisco bottom's (unfounded) fears about the plague.

Looking continues to go from strength to strength. If you didn't get it first time around, it's not too late. Don't miss out.

Looking for something better

HBO's Looking has been renewed for a second season, news that comes as a huge relief to this fan. But not everyone gets the show, with critics and the audience divided over this tale of sex, love and friendship in San Francisco. It's been branded slow and boring, but if, say, Noah's Arc is your yardstick for gay TV drama, then Looking's slow-burning, nuanced, and unforgiving take on gay men's lives will inevitably disappoint.

Some will cry "but Noah's Arc represents us! Those white shows don't" but I wonder how many black gay men live the kind of life the characters in Noah's Arc live. Noah's Arc is many things (fabulously entertaining, for one) but no one could ever accuse it of being realistic or deep. It's pure T.V. bubblegum fantasy, as true to life as Lost In Space is representative of space travel, and some of its tropes (gay boy falling for straight boy) were tired and played out even in 2005.

On the other hand, Looking is a genuine attempt to shine a light on the lives of a group of gay men in San Francisco. It is slower than, say, Scandal, and if that's a problem for you, maybe Glee might fit you better? Looking is to gay T.V. drama what The Wire is to cop shows: profound, literary and cinematic (yes, it also looks visually stunning).

The characters hale from a variety of racial backgrounds, and manage to cover age and class, too. Patrick (Jonathan Groff) is the classic whitebread American WASP. His awful friend August (Frankie J. Alvarez) is a spoilt rich (Latino) kid. Their other friend, Dom (Murray Bartlett), is the daddy of the group, a man who's just hit the dreaded forty. Their friends and lovers are Britain's own (black) O.T. Fagbenle; Lauren Weedman, as the best fag hag ever ("he can sit on my face anytime"); and Raúl Castillo's painfully sensitive blue collar Richie.

Patrik-Ian Polk - demonstrating a disappointing grasp of professional courtesy - said of Looking, "It's dull as ditchwater." That's ironic, coming from a guy whose entire oeuvre consists of rehashing the same storyline: a group of conservative gay college dudes, one of whom falls for a "straight" guy. In Polk's world, "racial diversity" amounts to a token (hot slut) Latino dude. There's nothing wrong with being a hot slut, but if I was a gay Latino, I'd question why Polk thinks "hot slut" encapsulates the entirety of my identity.

Some people can't accept the fact the central character is a WASP, and yeah, I'd love to see a gay drama of this calibre about a black dude who is neither a stereotypical thug, or one of Patrik-Ian Polk's pearl-clutching elites. But you know what, in the gay community, there's many, many more dudes like Jonathan Groff's Patrick than there are that smart, blue collar black dude we've yet to see represented on screen. Looking's writers have written about a WASP, but they've written about a WASP who's in love with a blue collar Latino, and who is, at the very least, on the road to recognising that his background doesn't make him a better person. That's infinitely more relevant in 2014 - that juxtaposition of economic background and class - than Polk's tired obsession with the HBCU down low brotha.

Noah's Arc may be about black gay men, yes, but it also happens to be about a particular kind of gay man; that privileged, college-educated, gay man who looks down on blue collar men as, at best, sexual playthings, and at worst, inferior beings. Looking, at least, has the grace to call into question the assumption that class, background and education make a better man. In Noah's Arc, the lead characters consistently use and dispose of "blue collar" men - T-Money, Wade's boyfriend Dre - as if their lives are of less value than those of Noah, Wade, Ricky, Alex and Chance. Noah's Arc flirts with the issue of economic disparity and class privilege, but is terrified to face it head on, and so we end up with scenes where Chance is stranded - terrified - in the ghetto. If Chance had been a white character, the audience would rightly be appalled at his prejudice, but because he's black, it's somehow okay to denigrate the denizens of the 'hood. Looking faces up to it in blistering detail; an entire episode is devoted to Patrick and Richie's first date (none of the other characters appear) and we're allowed to fall in love with the characters as they fall in love with each other. That makes the subsequent car crash even more brutal: Patrick's cringe-inducing snobbery about Richie's job, and rich kid August's stomach-churning snideness towards his fellow papi. Patrick hates that side of him, and fights it. As a working class boy, I love that; the characters in Noah's Arc seem to not only embrace their class privilege, but positively revel in it.

Back to Looking, which ended, beautifully, on a nod to The Golden Girls. Me and my boy were watching together, laughing out loud at Blanche and Dorothy, laughing along with Patrick in the final moments of the surprising and heartreaking season finale. The credits rolled over The Golden Girls theme tune, a genuinely clever and touching move: these guys know what they're doing.

Looking, like HBO sibling The Wire, feels more like a novel, or arthouse cinema, than the conventional network T.V. we're used to. It forgoes intrusive background music and the tedious plot conventions viewers are usually force-fed. It goes deeper, and some people just don't get that. Looking isn't just the best gay T.V. series I've seen in a long time, it's one of the best T.V. shows in recent years. Look no further.