The question of whether or not Will & Grace gave anything politically progressive to American culture feels a little moot. If Will & Grace normalized talk of gay existence to some homophobes, it did so by sweetening the medicine with whiteness, lots of money, and nice clothes. There is nothing transgressive about these friendships. The show has become a shorthand for depictions of gayness on television that are way out of fashion: the gayness of Will & Grace was barely sexual, uniformly caucasian, and profoundly cisgendered, and it stayed that way for eight seasons.Īs the Hollywood Reporter staff reported in 1998, “there’s never been a comedy about a gay man and straight woman who are best friends and roommates.” But the foundational social unit of the show-white gay man and white straight woman-is actually an ancient one in entertainment, as Megan Reynolds has explored at Vulture. Now Will & Grace is returning for a ninth season, set eleven years after the last finale. Instead, it gave us twenty-minute bursts of one-liners zinged across a quadrant formed by four people: straight-acting lawyer Will, underemployed and funny and mean Jack, red-haired straight lady Grace, and the drunk rich straight-but-kinky sociopath Karen. But then again, Will & Grace was not a show about gay love. Pinkney doesn’t mention Will & Grace, the sitcom that ran from 1998 to 2006. Pinckney watched for gay relationships the way his “grandmother used to count the black faces in the Christmas choir on television.” But eventually he “made a rule not to watch” if he knew that “one of the guys was going to die.” In the September 2017 issue of the New Yorker, Darryl Pinckney had a sweet little one-pager called “A Sentimental Education.” In it, he writes about watching supercuts of gay relationship storylines from soap operas on YouTube, about ten years ago.
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