Adam Lambert Performance

As I do not have cable and am generally unexposed to pop culture, I heard about the Adam Lambert performance on the American Music Awards from my grandmother. It seems as if the openly gay singer has garnered a substantial degree of controversy surrounding his performance Sunday. During the performance he kissed one of his musicians on the lips. The musician was also male.

Apparently, since the incident about 1,500 angry Americans have called ABC to complain. According to a Huffington Post article, "They're outraged," said Timothy Winters, president of the Parents Television Council. "They just can't believe the nature of the content, the explicit nature, and how much graphic content there was."

As it relates to pointing out the irony and hypocrisy of this situation, I do not really know where to start. But I think this will be fun.

Let’s get the obvious analogies out of the way. “Graphic and explicit content” is cited as being the source of the parents’ anger. What about the virtual violence that we subject our children to on a regular basis? Here are some numbers from the Center for Teaching Science at csun.edu. Number of murders seen on TV by the time an average child finishes elementary school: 8,000. Number of violent acts seen on TV by age 18: 200,000.
Percentage of Americans who believe TV violence helps precipitate real life mayhem: 79.

Ok, so most of us believe that exposing our children to this material will “help precipitate real life mayhem,” but apparently we are complacent enough with that reality to not pick up the phone and let ABC know about it on a nightly basis.

And we all know that TV is generally saturated with hetero-normative sex, constantly. We seem to have gotten somewhat use to that fact as well.

Now, what if Lambert had been kissing a woman? Certainly we would not have had the public outcry that resulted from him kissing another man. His behavior simply violated what we consider to be our family values, right? If we allow the GLBT community to rewrite the traditional strictures defining marriage and thus violate its sanctity, we will initiate this country’s downward spiral along the slippery slope of moral ambiguity. Our family structures will crumble and our children will surely be corrupted and their futures compromised, right?

Well, the bad news for the conventional family values proponents is that conservative hetero-normativity has already imploded and is dying. With the divorce at 50% for first time marriages, 67% for second marriages, and 74% for third time marriages, and infidelity rates at an all time high (recent studies reveal that 50-60% of married men and 45-55% of married women engage in extramarital sex at some time or another during their relationship) {Atwood & Schwartz, 2002 - Journal of Couple & Relationship Therapy} it is safe to say that the “sanctity” of marriage has already been bastardized by the very people who claim to strive for its protection.

If we want our children to grow up aspiring to live the virtues and family values that we pretend to extol, hopefully they are not modeling their lifestyles in accordance with what their parents are exhibiting.

And not only have the “straights” certainly not been good stewards of the “gift of marriage,” but their apparent paranoia surrounding what the GLBT community will do to it is entirely unfounded, empirically anyway. We have not had enough queer couples raising kids to conduct studies at a scale that would offer any legitimate insight into this issue. Fortunately, that is rapidly changing and research findings will begin to see the light of day in the very near future.

So, given that the sanctity of marriage has already been catapulted into the depths of existential oblivion and the “concern for the well-being of our children” is just a post-hoc rationalization for our discomfort, what are conservative Americans really trying to protect? Why did so many people freak out when they saw a flamboyant male entertainer kiss another male on TV?

I would assert that conservative Americans are simply trying to preserve the customs, traditions, and social structures that they have blindly been conditioned to live in accordance with, despite the inherent irrationality and social divisiveness in doing so. These people are generally admittedly xenophobic and fear dictates the knee jerk reactions that they display in response to any shred of exposure that they have to unfamiliar alternate lifestyles and realities. They even go so far as to construct appeals to the divine in order to explain their intolerance.

One might suggest that the joke is ultimately on them for their willful ignorance, but that is not really true, as a brief look at American history can demonstrate. The potential harms to minority communities by prejudiced or discriminatory ideals and actions are substantial, as I am sure anyone reading this will recognize.

The acknowledgement of this fact has recently manifest in American law with the passage of the Matthew Shepard Hate Crimes Prevention Act, which expands U.S. hate crimes law to include a victim’s actual or perceived gender, sexual orientation, or gender identity.

Finally, I would like to address that perhaps another phenomenon that the overt reaction to Adam Lambert’s live television antics demonstrates is that parents are now utilizing TV as a tool for raising their children. Studies show that most American kids watch about 4 hours of TV per day. Does that not indicate another hypocrisy on the part of the “family values” people? Just the fact that the Parents Television Council even exists is frightening enough; like parents and TV are teaming up to ensure the well being of our youth, together.

The response that this situation evoked should be reserved for situations in which a parent deems that a teacher or mentor has misguided a child. But American families have elevated TV into those positions, so we get riled up at it.

Rusty Black