It’s so much more than the “gay Girls .” In depicting the subtleties and reality of day-to-day life for three gay men in San Francisco, Looking is a major step forward for LGBT representation.
Agustín (Frankie J. Alvarez), Dom (Murray Bartlett), and Patrick (Jonathan Groff) take Muni.
David Moir / HBO
As a gay audience member, there are few things more bittersweet than a character who "just happens to be gay."
On the one hand, this is progress: A character's sexual identity has become incidental — not his or her one defining trait, not a problem to overcome, not the impetus for the narrative. On the other hand, it's a cheap way to avoid any actual discussions of what it means to be a member of the LGBT community. The character exists simply so the show can proclaim its own diversity, and that kind of tokenism no longer flies in 2014.
Enter Looking, Michael Lannan's HBO series — which begins Jan. 19 at 10:30 p.m. — about gay men that has found that seemingly unattainable balance: This is a show about characters who just happen to be gay that is also about their gayness, insofar as it explores their romantic and sexual relationships. It's a series where the queerness is intrinsic but not limiting, offering characters who are fleshed out enough to not be dismissed as mere gay types, while also putting their sexuality front and center. In terms of representation of gay men on screen, Looking stands alone.
To call Looking the "gay Girls" is to seriously diminish the essential work that it's doing. Jonathan Groff stars as Patrick, a successful video game developer who struggles in his romantic life. At his side are friends Agustín (Frankie J. Alvarez), an artist's assistant, and Dom (Murray Bartlett), an aspiring restaurateur stuck in limbo as a waiter. These are rich, complex characters — not to mention the San Franciscans they interact with — and they speak to the question that has daunted entertainment for decades: How do you make a gay TV series without making it just about being gay?
Agustín at his artist's assistant job.
John P. Johnson / HBO
Like Girls, Looking is about a very specific subset of people. (Just as Girls feels innately Brooklyn, Looking is inextricably tied to San Francisco.) It is not a show about every gay man, but it is a show about particular gay male experiences, which is ultimately more valuable. Whether or not you see yourself in these characters, their journeys are grounded in reality. In the first four episodes, Patrick tries to impress his new crush Richie (Raúl Castillo), Agustín navigates non-monogamy with his long-term boyfriend, and Dom contemplates leaving behind his dead-end job while courting a potential investor, Lynn (Scott Bakula).
Showtime's Queer as Folk deserves credit for its ballsy early 2000s approach to LGBT representation, but it was a vague approximation of gay life. Looking is honest, from the awkwardness of cruising to the sweat and leather of the Folsom Street Fair. Patrick's uncomfortable date with a doctor in the first episode, during which he naively admits he experimented with cruising the night before, is a painfully accurate depiction of a twentysomething's romantic foibles.
That true-to-life quality, particularly in terms of sexual encounters that aren't as smooth or softly lit as Hollywood led us to believe, is the strongest link between Looking and Girls. (It's also why both series are well suited to HBO, which allows this kind of sexually frank representation without network constraints.) Tonally, however, Looking is a very different show, closer to 2011's Weekend, a film written and directed by Andrew Haigh, who directed Looking's pilot. It's a bit more melancholy — still funny but hardly a comedy. It's a show about searching for a connection, and while that's standard joke fodder, Looking mostly takes a subtler approach.
