Cheryl Clarke’s Clit Agency

Abstract

This chapter focuses on Noah’s Arc (Logo, 2005-2006) a television show featuring four gay men of color that aired for two seasons on the gay lifestyle-oriented cable channel Logo. It argues that Noah's Arc works within the popular cultural genre of the dramedy to engage with—while also contradicting and disrupting—new normativities of race, sexuality and its intersections. First it contextualizes the anxieties around black middle class heteronormativity and outlines some of the ways in which these anxieties have been negotiated through black televisuality. Then it provides an interpretation of Noah’s Arc from a queer of color perspective to understand its problematic framing of race, sexuality and its intersections as mostly an intra-racial problem of gay black masculinities and femininities. Given that the program has been criticized for foregrounding its characters’ negotiation of gender and sexuality at the expense of their race, it theorizes the program’s use of media self-reflexivity—in other words, its own representations of the television and film industry—to complicate its message about the roles of race and sexuality in the culture industry. Finally, it examines digital reception of the program to understand the way differently positioned audiences—primarily queer men of color—derived pleasure from the program’s campy aesthetics and melodramatic excess.