A Queer Query into Friends and The Golden Girls
Picture it: evening, present day. You kick your feet up on the couch because you earned it honey! After a long day of work, you turn on the TV and wrap yourself in the comfort of a nostalgic favorite. You’re laughing along with the studio audience when BAM — you’re hit with an offensive joke that’s as jarring as a jump scare. Maybe even more so because at least horror movies give a little warning with music cues and creaky trees.
How do we navigate problematic “jokes” and storylines in our beloved shows of yesteryear — which basically means little more than a decade ago? As a gay woman, I often find myself bobbing and weaving homophobia to try to stay in a place of joy. The tension between comfort and pain has become more difficult to reconcile recently. I formed an attachment to these shows as an entirely different version of myself.
When I was eleven, I flipped the channel to Lifetime as I was wont to do (their movies were something else). At that moment, I saw a gorgeous orange sunrise and heard six words that would forever change my life, “thank you for being a friend.” I became enthralled with The Golden Girls and never looked back. For some reason, as a tween I connected to this show about four older women living together in Miami moving through the highs and lows of their golden years. We’ve been on a journey, the gals and I. Whenever I need a surefire laugh, I turn to my girls.
What better shows to analyze for this reflection than my current number one, The Golden Girls, and my former number one, Friends? Friends follows six twenty-something friends who are more like family as they navigate their lives in New York City. I first found comfort in Friends as a fifteen-year-old with a wicked case of mono. While the mono cleared up, I developed a full-blown case of Friends obsession. In recent years, this obsession has gone the way of the mono as I am watching Friends through a new lens.
In Friends, Chandler Bing (Matthew Perry) cannot accept that his father, Charles Bing (Kathleen Turner), is gay. Anytime Chandler mentions his dad throughout the series, he makes a homophobic joke about him that comes from a place of anger and shame. In “The One with Chandler’s Dad,” one of Chandler’s punchlines about his father is “he stars in a drag show in Vegas.” This is … a fact. The audience laughs because Chandler’s dad is a drag queen. As if drag queens are to be mocked instead of respected for the artists they are.
In The Golden Girls, Blanche Devereaux (Rue McClanahan) similarly has difficulty accepting her gay brother Clayton Hollingsworth (Monte Markham). In “Scared Straight,” Clayton comes out to Rose Nylund (Betty White), who after some fumbling comforts Clayton and encourages him to come out to Blanche. When he does so, Blanche is upset and refuses to believe it is true. Later in the episode, the two share a meaningful conversation leading to Blanche changing her perspective and supporting her brother.
In Friends, Chandler’s dad mostly exists as a joke. While we actually get to see him in “The One with Chandler’s Dad,” he isn’t given the same nuance Clayton is in The Golden Girls. Clayton is given a chance to share his experience and is ultimately met with genuine support. A lot of what Clayton says also resonates with me and my own experience.
Friends isn’t wholly bad and The Golden Girls isn’t wholly good. Friends did have a redeeming moment in “The One with Chandler’s Dad” when Chandler uses an artificial gruff voice to order a beer from a drag queen (Alexis Arquette) to which the queen responds “you’re straight, I get it.” And The Golden Girls did have a disappointing moment in “Scared Straight” when Sophia Petrillo (Estelle Getty) misunderstands a moment between Dorothy Zbornak (Bea Arthur) and Blanche and says “I’m going to be dead in twenty-four hours, couldn’t you stay in the closet for one more day?”
There are clear differences between the shows overall. It could be that Friends is more heteronormative and The Golden Girls is more queer. It could be that the presence of toxic masculinity in Friends and its absence from The Golden Girls shaped the varying responses to LGBTQ+ characters.
The timeline is especially telling. It could be easy to assume the more progressive show would be the most recent. However, The Golden Girls was on a full ten years before Friends — it ran from 1985 to 1992, and Friends didn’t even debut until 1994. So the “it was a different time” argument carries no weight. Contextualizing is a part of understanding, but it is not an excuse in this case.
Examining a comfort show can be … well, uncomfortable. It might bring on the exact feeling we sought to escape by turning on the show in the first place. But there is value in sitting in this discomfort because it demonstrates how much we have grown. Fifteen-year-old “straight” Sara probably laughed at the “he stars in a drag show in Vegas” punchline (once again, pure fact) in Friends.
This kind of reflection can also delineate between what is offensive and what is just difficult to watch. While I’m not offended by The Golden Girls episode “Scared Straight,” there are times when I just am not in the headspace to handle a character being rejected because he is gay, even if he is accepted later.
I won’t offer any sort of general conclusion about how to move forward with problematic comfort rewatches. Each situation is unique and deserves its own reflection and solution. However, I do encourage engaging in this sort of examination. I typically turn on these shows to turn my brain off, but by thinking more deeply about these specific examples I was able to work through the tension I previously had felt.
To some, I might be taking all of this a bit too seriously. But I disagree. The casual homophobia which I saw in television shows as a child sent me an incorrect and damaging negative message about myself. It is so refreshing to see a wider variety of authentic representation in television today. Maybe the reason I’m not able to tolerate the casual homophobia anymore is because I don’t have to. It’s no longer baked into every show.
Friends doesn’t provide the same comfort it once gave my mono-riddled teenage self. Watching it now is more like flipping through an old photo album. There’s the warmth of happy memories coupled with the discomfort of dated choices. Thankfully, I can still turn to my girls, who have remained pals, confidants, and apparently allies.
