Where Do You Go If Your Queerness Doesn’t “Fit” : The Circle
If you’ve been on the internet within the last few weeks, I’m sure you've heard of the hit Netflix original reality series, The Circle. In summary, the show brings in contestants who can only interact through an online social media platform (called the Circle), where they flirt, charm, and do whatever else to impress each other in order to be ranked the best. The plot twist? Contestants can never see each other, meaning some people come into the game prepared to catfish.
Now, originally I was opposed to anyone being a catfish. If you’re gonna play this game, play it fair, right? But the Circle revealed that how well our social media personas perform have a lot less to do with who we are, but how we present ourselves.
This lesson came in the contestant of Karen, who catfished as someone called Mercedes. Karen was someone I took to immediately. She was upfront, funny, and had a tactical ruthlessness to her that I knew would make the game more interesting than her peers who were all playing the “nice” game. When Karen gets sent home, however, her last conversation delved deeper into the shallowness of social media and why she felt she couldn’t play as herself.
Karen was a black, heavy-set, older, butch lesbian. Mercedes was a young, black, straight and conventionally attractive woman. Although Karen/Mercedes didn’t make it far, when she was eliminated, Karen asked a man who had been flirting with her, “Would you have wanted to talk to me if you knew?”
The reality of that statement, especially in regards to how people perceive queerness, is real. Another gay contestant, Chris, was immediately fawned over because Chris is in alignment with what people accept as gay. He’s femme, bright and bubbly, the template of the perfect gay best friend stereotype that our culture has accepted as the norm. We think that because we worship the Chrises of the world for their bravery, that we have advanced past homophobia and that we are better than the past generations that look down on them. And that is not to discredit the bravery it does take to be a femme gay man, because being visibily queer in any shape is scary. However, for people like Karen whose visibility is at an intersection for so many other things that isn’t palatable to the public, those open arms are suddenly nowhere to be found.
This storyline in the show opens up a larger conversation about how far we’ve actually come in regards to acceptance of queerness. As much as everyone claims to be liberal and wants to show up to PRIDE as any ally, there are still versions of queerness that are cast aside because it’s not tied in the sparkly rainbow colored box people want it come in. People aren’t actually prepared (or educated enough) to fully engage with all ranges of queerness. We’ve come to settle now that we have Ellen Degeneres (white and thin) and Billy Porter (black and queer but also femme and thin), that we as a society have successfully crossed the border past homophobia and that we cannot stop doing any work now.
As long as a queer person can fit into a very specific outline, then we are safe and the status quo will stay uninterrupted. But intersectionality within queerness has long been overlooked. A person can have layers of marginalized identities and shouldn’t have to hide in order to be accepted. It’s a shallow vapid way to look at queerness, and that’s being accurately reflected on the show.
Intersectionality is a concept that seems to be too difficult for many to grasp, but until the standard of acceptance that we hold up is confronted and changed, we will never actually be able to claim that we are accepting of queerness. That comes with challenging racism, fatphobia, ableism, in every form.
This moment felt so different because it’s rare to see these conversations happening on a reality TV show. That moment was not staged or pre-rehearsed with a script already prepared. It instead came from two real human beings sitting down and trying to dig into why this woman couldn’t be herself. Though the moment wasn’t long, it stuck with me for a long time because it’s something so many people never challenge themselves to think about. Many people will clearly say catfishing is wrong, but they never consider: am I the problem? Do I contribute to why this person felt this way in the first place?
Karen’s time on The Circle may have been short lived, but her impact on the show and commentary on how we accept queerness is long standing. All that is left is to hope that people recognize and address their own biases when it comes to queerness and learn to be better.
About the Author
Iyana Jones (she/her) is starting her graduate program in Media Studies with New School. She found her passion for writing in high school for writing for the school paper and now has expanded her interests to lifestyle, pop culture, and identity. Her goal is to write as the missing first generational black female voice she wish she had found earlier in life. Outside of writing, she's likely to be found feeding stray cats or watching bad MTV shows unironically. You can read more of her work on her blog here.
