INTRODUCTION

SOME NOTES ON ESCAPISM


An iPhone blared the sound of an old-timey newsroom telephone, and the bedside lamp flicked on. My mom sat on the edge of the other queen bed and mostly listened. “Okay … okay.…” She had to be talking to my dad. “And you’re at the hospital now?” My eyes fluttered open, and I took in the hotel room. It was a Route 66–themed Best Western in Missouri. Staying on theme, the walls were dotted with black-and-white photos of road trippers posing with their big, bulky Fords—an homage to those who’d done the route from Chicago to Los Angeles before my mom and I had started eighteen hours prior. I bet those people made it more than one night on the route, though. I sat up, silent and disoriented, hoping this was a very vivid, very bad dream. After a few minutes, she hung up.

Zach had fallen, Mom said, but he was okay—okay being a euphemism for alive—conscious and responsive, but he had passed out and busted his face on the bathroom floor. An ambulance came to our house, to our childhood bathroom, where my thirty-year-old brother had fainted around midnight. They rushed him to the closest hospital. The ER doctors thought it must’ve been related to the headaches Zach had been having in the days leading up to our departure. His oncologists at Northwestern, who had been treating his leukemia on and off for four years, believed the headaches were a side effect of the new trial drug he was on. In the emergency room, my mother continued, he had a temporary catheter drilled into the side of his head in the middle of the night. That had relieved the symptoms nearly immediately. He was resting now. He showed no signs of permanent brain damage. He was “okay.”

“Oh, and Dad said something else,” my mom added. “Before the procedure, Zach’s mental state started to … well, deteriorate. Apparently he wasn’t making any sense. He was just … spelling out words and speaking in numbers?” My heart pounded. “And at one point, I guess he just started speaking only in Spanish? Like, he was saying, ‘No más!’ and ‘Vámonos!’ ’cause he wanted to get out of there.”

I replied with an absurd line I’d find myself repeating a lot over the next week: “Oh, yeah, that’s a thing with brain injuries. I saw that on an episode of Grey’s Anatomy.” My mom burst out laughing.

It was true, though! In early season fourteen, Dr. Amelia Shepherd (Dr. McDreamy’s sister—McDreamy died in a botched surgery two seasons prior. Catch up.) is diagnosed with a massive brain tumor. She’s a neurosurgeon, too, which makes the diagnosis extra wild. Anyway, she gets the tumor removed, and two days post-op, she finally speaks for the first time. Meredith and the others get word that Amelia’s up and talking, and they rush to her room. And yes, she’s speaking, but she’s speaking French: “Un verre d’eau, s’il te plaît,” she croaks, “J’ai soif.” The Grey-Sloan Memorial Hospital (formally Seattle Grace Mercy West, née Seattle Grace Hospital. Catch! Up!) gang is confused. Amelia doesn’t speak French, she speaks German! But Meredith, a Shepherd in-law, recalls that the Shepherd kids all went to French preschool, so that language must be somewhere in the recesses of her brain. “It reverses on its own … it’s still good, it’s progress,” Dr. Grey explains. My Grey’s knowledge served me well. I didn’t have to google speaking foreign language brain injury to figure out what was going on with Zach. I didn’t have to subject myself to the limitless permutations of diagnoses WebMD would offer. I didn’t wonder whether Zach had entirely forgotten the English language. I’d heard of this before. It happened to Amelia Shepherd, and she was more or less fine in the next scene. So Zach would be fine, too. Meredith Grey said so.

At the very moment Zach’s face hit our bathroom floor, I was literally dreaming I was in surgery with Meredith Grey. Not because I have ever even vaguely aspired to be a surgeon, but because it was simply the only material my subconscious had to work with come nightfall. I’d been bingeing Grey’s Anatomy nearly every night for the four months prior—partially because I’d watched Killing Eve and craved more Sandra Oh, partially because I was living at home to save money, but mostly because I was going through a breakup and wanted a new personality and elected for one based solely on the Shondaland tentpole. I’d watched the first couple of seasons in high school, but I fell off before the long-standing, seminal queer romance between Drs. Callie Torres and Arizona Robbins. I intended to just rewatch the first two seasons; how naive I was. Shonda Rhimes does not create content of which one can simply “watch a few episodes.” And so, single and living with my parents, I watched fourteen seasons of Grey’s Anatomy in four months. At the time I left Chicago for California, my brain was about 70 percent Grey’s Anatomy.

When we use the word escapism, we’re generally talking about a person’s desire to leave reality, to withdraw from some terrible set of IRL circumstances. So, when we describe a book or movie or TV show as escapist, we mean it’s so different from our real, everyday world that engaging with it lets us forget that the real world exists. Entertainment labeled escapist is usually absurd, or pulpy, or heightened to an unrealistic extreme. Fantasy shows are an obvious example—Game of Thrones brings the viewer into a whole new world of dragons and White Walkers and full-frontal male nudity. But escapist media can also be just a slightly removed version of real life. Musical theater allows us to escape into a world where streets full of New York City strangers burst into coordinated song and dance. The Real Housewives franchise lets us leave our own lives to peek into the gauche, surreal environs of permadrunk, middle-aged baronesses, who lead lives utterly unlike our own. Escapism is a euphemism for guilty pleasure, used in an attempt to obscure the embarrassing fact that we, as a species, love silly and frivolous stories. It’s a highbrow-sounding word that validates our cravings for the idiotic. Escapist is grown-up code for, “I know it’s canonically asinine—just let me fucking watch it.”

One could characterize my Grey’s Anatomy binge as escapist, but I wouldn’t. No matter how outlandish the world or story, I find the whole notion of escapism to be disingenuous. Or, at least, I think it’s an unhelpful way to describe our experience of engaging with pop culture. The word escape implies attaining some kind of permanent state of freedom. It’s a word with a wide-open future. That doesn’t really fit for how we engage with entertainment. Watching a TV show is a finite experience. Even when we nurse a post-birthday hangover by watching season three of 30 Rock in one sitting for the forty-fifth time, that binge eventually comes to an end. We come back to reality, come back to the doldrums or nightmare or whatever it is pop culture helped us avoid. We turn on the TV, and then we turn it off. We go away for a while, and then we come back.

So, perhaps, thinking of pop culture as escapism isn’t the right framing at all. Maybe it’s actually vacationism, or retreatism, or getting-the-fuck-away-for-a-whileism. And like most getaways, we usually bring some kind of souvenir back with us. If our vacation is, say, a bachelorette party in New Orleans, we return with a daiquiri-stained tongue and Mardi Gras beads. If it’s a trip to Canada, we at least return with a moose keychain. If we’re a white tween girl and it’s a family trip to Jamaica in 2002, we return, tragically, with cornrows. But when we vacation to pop culture, we always return, toting a little emotional or intellectual memento along with us.

So, like a full idiot, when I walked into the neuro ICU the afternoon following Zach’s fall, I thought, Oh, the neuro ICU, from TV, as if I’d seen a bottle of Proactiv on a drugstore shelf.

I can’t pretend I wasn’t disappointed to learn Zach’s neurosurgeon wasn’t Dr. McDreamy (even if he had died way back in season eleven). Dr. Patel was young and kind and communicative and flanked by a group of four eager residents. Dr. Patel told Zach and our family that he was going to insert a shunt into Zach’s brain. “It’s a permanent apparatus that will divert the excess spinal fluid that Zach’s brain has been producing,” he told us. We didn’t know why Zach’s brain was producing extra fluid, Dr. Patel explained, but the good thing about a shunt is that it’s not dangerous once left in the brain. I definitely would’ve felt more secure had he been wearing a scrub cap with ferryboats on it while he told us the plan, but this guy seemed good.

“A shunt is a super common procedure,” I assured my parents once the doctors left, my confidence that of an elite neurosurgery fellow. I’m not sure they were even listening to me in that moment—why would they? I had gathered this information from a Grey’s episode where McDreamy is complaining about how bored and under-stimulated he’s been lately. “I’m doing three shunts a day,” Dr. McDreamy whines to Meredith. His brilliance can’t shine through in such a routine, safe procedure. The fact that a very fictional doctor could’ve performed this operation on my big brother with his eyes closed made me genuinely optimistic about Zach’s health.

I’d spent plenty of time with Zach at the hospital before this particular incident, but never mid-Grey’s binge. This hospitalization, my brain processed my environment in terms of (and only in terms of) the medical drama. I couldn’t help it. I imagined Dr. Patel’s team of neurosurgery residents brushing off through the hallway of the ICU together. I imagined their real talk: “I mean, it’s got to be the leukemia in his CNF, right?” that skinny resident with the curly bun asks Dr. Patel.

“Probably,” Dr. Patel replies, his voice a bit sharper. It’s his real voice, not his patient voice. “But we can’t tell the family that until we know. Let’s get a consult with the patient’s onc team. Who’s the lead on that?”

“Um…” The shorter guy with the broad, flat face flips through Zach’s chart as they walk.

“C’mon, Lacey. You’ve already reviewed his chart, you should know this.”

“It’s Dr. Becker,” blurts Curly Bun again. Lacey rolls his eyes. She’s always outdoing him.

“He’s lucky. Becker’s a real piece of work. For now, let’s just let him rest. The patient’s had a major trauma. He’s lucky to be alive.”

Obviously, those residents must have been banging each other. If we’re going by Grey’s rules, two combinations of them have fucked in an elevator, one had a pregnancy scare, and one found out they were secretly the half sibling of another (but luckily, those two wouldn’t have hooked up). Do they actually have on-call rooms in hospitals? I wonder where theirs is. Probably down that Employees Only hallway. If I were to strut through those doors with confidence, would I find Dr. Patel enwrapped in sustained, penetrative eye contact with Curly Bun? Or worse, would they share such loving gazes over my brother’s open skull?

Of course, I “knew” in my “brain” that Grey’s Anatomy isn’t real life. I wasn’t completely delusional. But once I entered the neuro ICU, once I saw my sweet big brother’s busted teeth and flocks of surgical residents and real-life scrub caps, I became incapable of leaving Grey-Sloan Memorial Hospital.

Because no matter how “escapist” the pop culture, when we turn off the TV, flecks of it come back with us—and often remain with us. As a kid, the Animorphs book series—where a ragtag group of teens obtains the power to transform into any animal they touch and uses said power to combat an invasive alien-slug species called the Yeerks—inspired my dolphin imitation whenever I entered a swimming pool. An episode of the ’90s teen mystery series Ghostwriter instigated my childhood constipation issues; I believed a purple, pleather-trench-coat-clad “slime monster” named Gooey Gus (his catchphrase: “Slime, anyone?”) lived in my toilet, and I thus spent as little time sitting on it as possible. We grow up, and the motifs we extract from pop culture might become less literal, but they permeate nonetheless.

As those references (and this book’s title) should indicate, I’m a millennial. I was born in 1989. If we bookend the Generation Y birth years from 1981 to 1996, I’m not just a millennial but a smack-dab-in-the-middle millennial. I became a ninety-words-per-minute typist by ferociously gossiping on AIM. I’ve worked for apps where clients rate me out of five stars. I wear glasses I ordered online and have gotten most of my dates via various cursed apps. By any boomer’s standard, I am a cliché. I’m fine with that, honestly; I just needed to get that admission out of the way. If you haven’t done the math yet, that means I was a teenager from 2002 to 2009. I became a full person in the aughts. And thus, 2000s teen pop culture had an acute, intimate effect on the person I am now. If our dexterous and identity-seeking teenage brains look to TV and movies for guidance, flashes of my adult self can be traced back to aughts pop culture. And my adult life is a very gay one.

Once and forever a teen of the aughts, I use this collection to explore the pop culture I devoured as a kid. I’ll pick apart Harry Potter, The O.C., Gossip Girl, Real World/Road Rules Challenge, Mean Girls, early Taylor Swift, Disney Channel Original Movies, Best in Show, Moulin Rouge! The Office, The L Word, and, finally, Glee. Indeed, each time my brain went on vacation to Newport Beach or Scranton, Pennsylvania, or Montmartre, it returned to “real life” with insights and opinions and role models. Only some of these pieces of media have openly gay characters in them, and the queer characters of the aughts are—well, incomplete is a kind way to put it. Still, despite the utter dearth of fully realized gay plotlines and characters in the 2000s, I still gained a hyper-specific brand of queer identity from the pop culture of the decade.

This isn’t to say good gay pop culture didn’t exist in my teen years. After all, millennials grew up online. Gay content was out there, just harder to find than it is now, and I was too closeted to bring myself to do the work of scouring the internet for it. A lot of LGBTQ+ friends of mine sought out queer content and community online via message boards and the immeasurable world of fan fiction. Lots of queer women I know were fervent followers of Queer as Folk, deluding themselves into believing it was because they were good gay allies and not because they, too, were raging queers. While I was just too young for Buffy—it went off the air in 2003—I’d later learn that gay peers of mine cultivated a clandestine obsession with Tara and Willow, the first recurring lesbian couple on prime time. But I was neither cool nor self-aware enough to get into Buffy as an adolescent.

This collection examines the particular smattering of media I’ve chosen because a) this was the pop culture I was genuinely into then, and I can’t well retroactively enlighten myself, and b) these shows/movies/books were, for the most part, very popular, and thus they had the most broad appeal and broad effects on millennials on the whole. These were the pieces of pop culture I loved, talked about, posted quotes from on my friends’ walls on a nascent Facebook dot com.

Which brings me to this book’s title: The 2000s Made Me Gay. I don’t think pop culture, as ubiquitous and intoxicating as it might be, has the power to plant seeds of desire within us. Whatever part of us wants to bang in a nonhetero way is always in there, somewhere. I think I’ve had some latent queer beast within me since childhood, one who clung to the exhibitions of nonnormativity I saw in media—on The Real World, in Disney Channel Original Movies, in Olivia Wilde’s sheer existence. But equally strong was—and is—compulsory straightness. These two forces duke it out within queer people until it all comes to a head, and we eventually, if we can, come out. And then, as out and proud and open and happy as we might be, the two keep duking it out internally until we die. It’s great, really, existing like this.

I do think, though, that pop culture can shape our responses, internal and external, to such preexisting gayness. The ways gender and sex and relationships play out in movies and TV and books and plays can bolster either side of that queer vs. non-queer duel. Sometimes, the same piece of media can fuel both sides. For a gay man in 1998, seeing Will & Grace might validate and amplify his queer identity—“Wow, I, too, can be out and normal and happy!”—while simultaneously telling him that he could only be out and happy if he were wealthy and thin and white and cis and lived in New York City and spent all his time with Debra Messing. Seeing Britney Spears and Madonna kiss onstage at the 2003 MTV Video Music Awards might’ve jolted awake some bisexual yen in young women—and some might’ve embraced that lust—and others (like me) might’ve built a great big barricade in their brains to entrap it, ideally forever.a

This collection explores that push-pull. While the aughts were a period with more gender-bending and gay characters in mainstream media than ever before, such depictions were imperfect: incomplete, discreet, overwhelmingly white and cisgender. Which is to say, yes, the 2000s made me gay, but not without a whole heap of caveats and complications. Perhaps a more accurate book title would’ve been The 2000s Are to Blame for the Specific Kind of Gay Person I Am Today, but I never would’ve finished the book, as I’d have been utterly drained upon finishing writing its name.

That said, I didn’t write this book to relitigate the relative lack of wokeness in 2000s pop culture. First of all, that’s no fun. Example: I loved Garden State (2004) in high school. My excuses are fourfold: I was fourteen, in search of some Profound Meaning to my life and the world, liked the Shins, and had a latent crush on Natalie Portman. In 2012, a friend and I got day drunk, listened to “Your Ex-Lover Is Dead” by Stars, and agreed to an immediate Garden State rewatch. It was a terrible idea. Oh God, I realized, several rum cocktails and fifteen minutes into the rewatch, this movie might actually be extremely bad. Nearly two hours of faux-deep platitudes and the standard-issue Manic Pixie Dream Girl later, I emerged horrified and enraged that Zach Braff’s directorial debut had so duped me as a teen. Garden State is a particular example; revisiting art I loved as a kid typically fills me with warm nostalgia, a fondness despite myself. But the point still stands—ruining what we loved in adolescence is saddening and needlessly judgmental of our younger selves. It’s a futile exercise meant only to flex our contemporary understanding of what’s good and what’s not.

But more than that, condemning pop culture we once loved installs an artificial barrier between who we are now and who we once were. Yes, of course I’ve grown up and gained perspective (have taken exactly one feminist philosophy class) since 2004. But in 2021, roasting, say, Wedding Crashers (2005) for the whole “date-rapey guys lying to women to get them in bed” thing (bad!) is just, well, obvious. Sure, Wedding Crashers deserved to be panned in real time for that plot, but hindsight criticism is too easy to be interesting. When we say a movie doesn’t “hold up” today, what we’re really saying is that, assuming we loved it at the time, we’ve changed—the audience has evolved, our shared values and understanding of what’s okay and what’s not has shifted. I’m more interested in examining the ways in which those pieces of pop culture have weaseled their ways into our current lives and shaped who we are now, for better or for worse.


Copyright © 2021 by Grace Elizabeth Perry