PicoBlog

I’ve been a fan of Frasier since it was on the air, but it’s only recently that I’ve felt the urge to watch it again. I’m not sure exactly what drew me to this series in particular, but I suppose it stems from two things: one, the fact that a good friend of mine has mentioned it quite a lot of recently and two, my desire to watch an old-fashioned sitcom, one that doesn’t try to do something new or imaginative with the genre but instead just dishes up what you want. Very quickly during this most recent rewatch, I started to notice something very interesting, indeed. Namely, it really leapt out at me how queer this series was, even if on the surface it appears to be a heterosexual sitcom like so many others.

Obviously, some of this has to do with the cast. Though it wouldn’t be publicly known for quite some time, David Hyde Pierce is gay (he publicly came out in the early 2000s), and at least two other members of the cast are as well: Dan Butler (who played Bulldog, the resident sports show at KACL) and Edward Hibbert (who played Gil, the fussy and campy restaurant critic at the station). Of course, all three are supposedly “straight” within the universe of the show, with even the overwrought Gil supposedly married to a woman (though whether this is actually true or not is a running gag). There’s even some evidence to suggest that John Mahoney was also gay in real life, and even if he wasn’t he still had an important role in the gay film The Broken Hearts Club (which is an embarrassment of riches when it comes to straight 1990s and early 2000s actors playing queer). 

Bulldog is an especially interesting case, as his character is one of the most abrasively straight characters to appear in the series. He appears very early on in the first season, making himself as obnoxiously loud as possible. Obviously, his character is meant to be a thorn in Frasier’s side, another working-class man whose bluntness is at odds with his own supposedly elevated sensibilities. At the same time, I think it’s easy to read him as nothing less than a send-up of the very personality type that he supposedly embodies. Of course, most straight audiences probably would have read him as, well, straight, but I’ve no doubt that there were many queer people who would have been in on the joke. 

However, it goes beyond who was chosen to play these characters. Indeed, queerness seems to simply saturate the entire series’ ethos. To begin with, there’s the fact that both Frasier and Niles have a refined sensibility that is sharply at odds with the people around them. They enjoy fine wines and going out to dinner at fancy restaurants, and they relish every chance to show off their learning and their erudition, whether that’s on Frasier’s radio show or Niles’ clinical profession. And, of course, they are both in love with the art scene, a fact that becomes clear very early on when Frasier buys what he believes to be a work from a renowned local artist, only to find out that it’s a forgery. 

What’s more, there’s an archness to the humor that, to me at least, feels as if it could only fully be appreciated by queer audiences, those who were trained in the art of seeing what lurked beneath the surface. I don’t think it’s going too far to say that, in an earlier period of television history, either Niles or Frasier–or, in fact, both of them–would have been read as queer precisely because of their affectations. Niles in particular has a queer sort of fussiness that is evocative of various other “sissy” characters that have long been a staple of both film and television, whether it was the many sissy characters played by Edward Everett Horton or the camp gay couple that made such a memorable appearance in Barney Miller (to say nothing of the overwrought caterer that made an appearance in The Golden Girls). Though the brothers’ sparring is very much in line with what one would expect of a pair of siblings, I can’t help but feel that they just as often appear to be a gay couple that has been together so long that they are as annoyed with one another as they are in love.

Of course, Frasier and Niles don’t get to have everything their own way. Their father Marty in particular seems to take a great deal of pleasure in bringing them down to earth, his rough-around-the-edges, blue-collar mentality in stark contrast to their elevated tastes (which, it is made clear, they inherited from their mother). He seems to take an especial joy in reminding them of the fact that they are far from the blue-bloods that they aspire to be, that they are in fact of humble stock. While more often than not the series aligns us with the senior Crane–after all, there’s no question that both Frasier and Niles are pompous and so obsessed with their own cultural superiority that they can be more than a little irritating–there is, I think, another way of reading these confrontations, i.e. as two queer kids confronting the fact that their father doesn’t understand them. Perhaps I’m reading into this here a bit, given that my relationship with my own blue-collar parents is, at times, strained by the same different-world culture clash but, given how queer-coded the Crane brothers are, I think the argument holds water.

Nor is its queerness limited to its male characters. It’s easy to see, for example, why Peri Gilpin’s Roz would be the stuff of which gay icons are made. With her husky voice, her ability to puncture Frasier’s self-righteous and self-important arrogance, and of course in her relentless pursuit of men, she is everything that gay men could possibly want. At the risk of comparing everything to The Golden Girls—an admitted habit of mine—it’s easy to draw a link between Blanche’s voraciously unapologetic sexual energies and those of Roz.

Thus, even though both Frasier and Niles are very straight–one of the key narrative through-lines is the latter’s infatuation with and eventual marriage to Daphne–the truth is that Frasier is the sort of series that offers itself up to all sorts of queer readings. In that respect, it is very much like The Nanny, another 1990s sitcom that was, on the surface, quite heterosexual but offered many sorts of pleasures for queer audiences who knew what to look for. Even now, Frasier can’t hide its exquisite queerness.

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