Doty’s voice was vivid in his work, so open and personal that far more than with most scholars reading his writing felt like listening to someone you knew well. His work brought you into his world, allowing you to re-experience Gentlemen Prefer Blondes or the bothersome but beloved Hitchcock catalog through new eyes. When I had the privilege of hearing him speak, his humor, warmth, and passion were readily apparent and his interest in nurturing a queer scholarly community was obvious; this inviting spirit came through in both his speaking and his writing, including his two pivotal books Making Things Perfectly Queer and Flaming Classics and numerous articles.

This spirit has made Doty’s work my go-to resource when first bringing queer theory, particularly queer reading, into the classroom. Whenever students find it difficult to see beyond the surface of a text, the detailed, lively confidence of Doty’s readings of classic texts opens up whole new ways of seeing to new audiences. Like many great theorists, his work provided numerous tools that has allowed me to be a better teacher not only when teaching queer theory but also when introducing students to decoding texts and varied audience practices. From his work I have seen students adopt a new lens through which they can make sense of media and the world.

While for many what Doty offered was a new way of seeing, for me, and for many others, he gave an even greater gift….a language for what we had experienced and did not yet know how to bring into our scholarly lives. I do not remember the first time I read Flaming Classics, but I do remember discovering for the first time a common language to put a name to what, as a young girl, I had always felt was going on in Batman: The Animated Series between Poison Ivy and Harley Quinn. He showed me how I could use in my work the strange feeling my teenage self had that I saw more of myself in Hawkeye in M*A*S*H then I did Hotlips and how I at once identified with James Bond and the Bond girls. Through his example, Doty showed the value in mining our own, sometimes complicated and conflicted, media consumption and responses in our work. He helped give me the vocabulary with which to explain myself, to bring what I saw in texts into conversation with queer theory. As a young scholar, being given a way to talk about what I saw in a way that was legible to others was an invaluable gift.

Doty’s work passionately argued for the importance of space for both the personal and political in our academic work. In so doing he helped to validate the labors of those of us who do not see academia and activism as antithetical, who find the political valuable–even inescapable–in work we do on queer sexualities and media. By problematizing but creating space for the “I” in our work, he helped to make us aware of our place as distinct readers of media texts even in our scholarly voice. By sharing with his readers little slices of his life and how they shaped him into the scholar that he was, he helped to give us the license needed to attempt to do the same. Doty’s work showed the value of getting beyond the simple empirical and understanding queer reading not as an optional or imposed reading but as simply another facet of a complex text.

It is through this lesson that Doty has impacted all of my work, not only my research on queer reading and representation but much of my textual analysis of media texts. The principles that Doty used in his queer reading practices went beyond the texts he discussed, or even queer reading as a methodology. Rather, it helped me to understand how to approach reading texts with an open mind, a sharp attention to detail and connotative meaning, and to trust the value in the meanings that we can wrest from texts rather than just those that are obviously there.

For all that Doty’s work has taught me, and all that it simply helped me learn how to say, I will always be grateful. While I never had an opportunity to take a class with Dr. Doty, I nonetheless hope that I can count myself as one of his students. I hope through my writing and my teaching, Doty will have many more students in the years to come. I mourn the work that he might have written, I mourn what else I could have learned from him, and I mourn that I gave up my opportunity out of cowardice to tell him how much his work meant to me. I regret that I never was able to thank him for the gifts that his work gave to me. I can only hope that those of us he touched gave something back to him, in the knowledge of the impact that his work had on so many of us and in the growth of the queer media scholarship tradition that he helped to foster.

Niall Horan, Zayn Malik, Liam Payne, Harry Styles, and Louis Tomlinson, the five boys who make up One Direction, are a fascinating case study in the changing dynamics of the modern music industry. While they share similarities with American boy bands of the past (from New Kids on the Block to *NSync) and with those original moptops of the British Invasion, they also represent a shift in the way such bands are formed, marketed, and made visible to the public. But what interests me most is the way in which the boys’ open, affectionate, and even homoerotic interaction represents a new (and welcome) shift in Western youth culture.

Perhaps the primary appeal of One Direction as a boy band is the combination of youth, exposure, and authenticity that is inherent in their marketing. The boys are all between 18 and 20 years old, already younger than the boy bands of the late 90s, but their youthful image is exacerbated by the rough, unpolished style of their marketing. While bands like *NSync and the Backstreet Boys spent years honing their dance moves, media training, and constructed personality archetypes in countries like Japan and Germany before hitting the Anglo-American market, One Direction has boarded an immediate and unstoppable roller coaster of international fame. As a result of this compressed timeline, the boys can’t actually dance (as anyone who saw their SNL appearance could attest), and their encounters with the press tend to be awkward and unpracticed.

In the era of instantly-posted YouTube clips, personal twitter accounts, and livestreaming webcam video, the boys of One Direction aren’t just reality TV stars – they are reality TV stars positioned in such a way as to appear stripped of almost all mediation and editing. This aesthetic celebrates notions of authenticity and connectedness with the fanbase, following the model my colleague Lindsay Hogan has studied regarding the stardom of Justin Bieber. As a result, YouTube is flooded with videos of the boys acting young and goofy in casual (or perhaps “casual”) settings: teasing each other, playing games, and generally acting like the teenage boys they are.

These kinds of shenanigans are not new. They are strikingly similar, in fact, to clips from the videos my own tweenage musical love, Hanson, would sell to the fans on VHS. The boys of Hanson, like One Direction, were younger than their ’90s boy band counterparts and thus free to act sillier. But Hanson was a band composed of brothers, and thus their videos lacked the final element of One Direction’s “authentic” portrayal of boy band friendship: comfortable homoeroticism.

Even a casual observer of One Direction and its marketing would notice the fact that the boys can’t seem to keep their hands off each other. They hug, grope, and fall asleep on each other constantly, pretend to kiss each other for laughs, and joke about queer relationships between them – to the extent of planning out elaborate hypothetical Valentine’s Day dates with each other. They are also remarkably affectionate, proclaiming their love and devotion to the other boys in the group without a hint of irony.

This is not, of course, the first time the idea of the boy band has been queered. “Popslash,” the term for homoerotic fanfiction about boy bands in the *NSync/BSB era, was one of the first large-scale internet fandoms for so-called “real person” fanfiction. And charges of queerness have always been levied at these types of bands by anti-fans seeking to use sexist, homophobic language to devalue the music tastes of young women. But past incarnations of boy bands always kept up defensively heterosexual presentations, to the extent that *NSync member Lance Bass did not feel comfortable coming out of the closet until 2006 (long after the band’s indefinite “hiatus”).

There are many possible explanations for this phenomenon. First and foremost, the One Direction boys are all quite open about their heterosexuality, publicly tweeting with their current girlfriends and giving interviews about their exes. Their homoeroticism, then, can be seen as a variation on the “bromance” trend – they can play with queerness because their heterosexuality is constantly reinforced, both in the reports of their personal lives and in their aggressively heteronormative song lyrics.

Yet this seems an inadequate explanation when, unlike the highly-constructed joke setups of bromance comedies, One Direction relies so heavily on an aesthetic of honesty and authenticity. What seems more likely is a phenomenon like the one sociologist Mark McCormack presented in a Huffington Post report, which points out the ways in which British teen boy culture is becoming less and less homophobic and more and more accepting of demonstrative male friendship. While the equivalence with American school cultures is less clear, the boys’ rapidly-growing transnational stardom, despite no national differences in marketing, may point to an increasing acceptance of this gentler form of masculinity in the American classroom.

Whatever the explanation, the casual affection and homoeroticism of One Direction opens up new avenues for analysis in the study of tween music cultures. How, for example, is the target tween girl audience responding to the softer masculinities of these presentations? And what effect might this marketing have on tween boys, particularly queer boys struggling to come to terms with their own sexuality?

I don’t have the answers right now, but I plan to keep looking. As soon as I finish listening to “One Thing” on repeat.

Before you hit the comment button in anger and chastise me for ignoring the scholars who have already incorporated queer theory into studies of digital gaming (I know them, I’ve read them, I like them, heck…I’m one of them), let me be clear about what I mean. There are studies of queer game content, production, and audiences. Many of these are more rightly described as studies of gay content, production, and audiences (though some do incorporate the L, B, and T’s of the LGBT acronym). These studies tend to address the lack of, potential of, or seek out what might be defined as queer content, production, and audiences. Folks have also suggested that there is an argument to be made for the inherent queerness of play and a queer critique to be made of how play in constructed (Ben Aslinger, for one, was kind enough to share his conference papers calling for queer game studies as I prepared this post).

What I am discussing here, however, is not just a study of queerness in games, queer readings made available by games, players who identify as queer, or even the inherent queerness at play (pun intended) in digital games.  Rather, what I think needs to be more clearly articulated is an incorporation of queer theory into the study of games. As Gayle Salamon describes in “Justification and Queer Method, or Leaving Philosophy”:

“Queer theory underscores the ways in which our identity choices are always to some extent circumscribed by powers beyond our control, while simultaneously arguing in favor of our capacities to enact gender or sexuality in other than normative ways, and one of its premises is that identities tend to codify that which they seek to describe, thereby instantiating new norms that can be just as oppressive as the norms they sought to counter.” (2009, p. 229)

I have argued elsewhere that game studies often draws on the language but not the conflicts of cultural studies. A similar problem exists in the use of queer theory. Noting, for example, that a player is somehow “queered” by playing as an avatar whose presented gender is different from that of the player is actually an inherently un-queer claim to make (one which re-inscribes the construction of binary gender it claims to dispel). Studies that focus on queerness only in relation to representations of non-heterosexuality, miss much of the potential of a queer games critique (just as studies which only discuss gender when they are doing projects “about gender” are missing the point made by feminist game studies).

What play is “good” and what play is “bad” is something I continually come back to in my own research, as well as my daily life. Rather than justify the study of games by disproving the lonely gamer stereotype, for example, the very basis of that being a delegitimizing factor could be questioned. As Salamon writes: “If justification is concerned with the ordering of beliefs, the reconciliation of one thing with another… then queerness as a method would proceed in the opposite way, by supposing a diversion or estrangement from the norm and using that divergence as a source of proliferation and multiplication with the aim of increasing the livability of those lives outside of the norm.” (p. 229)

There are similarities to how certain kinds of play (and indeed media consumption among other activities) are marked as “good” or “bad” and Gayle Rubin’s Charmed Circle of Sex. Playing with a group of people in the same room is, I would argue, often read as positive (at least if the game is of the family or party game variety and not a too serious game session). Playing alone or online with strangers is read as somehow sad and not a valid use of time. Drawing on Rubin’s circle we might read this as the difference between sex that is engaged of as part of a committed, heterosexual couple existing within the “charmed circle” versus sex is enjoyed alone or with a group being part of the “outer limits.” Granted, the value of certain forms of play from a particular gaming community will differ from those made by non-gamers. For example, casual gaming has negative connotations in “gaming culture,” just as obsessive gaming has negative connotations in “mainstream culture.” In either case, however, boundaries and limits are being drawn, justifying certain practices while de-legitimizing others.

In the interest of space, I will not elaborate the connections between manners of gaming and Rubin’s circle here (I am still developing the comparison), but I believe it points to the utility of a queer method: “[Q]ueerness is a methodology, one that gives us a way to articulate a queer ethics and a queer politics, where each of these insists on the generative capacities of claiming desire, and a fundamental openness to difference, located in the world and also in ourselves” (Salamon, 2009, p. 229-230). When game studies engages in a largely descriptive project, when researchers seek to define and bracket out certain kinds of gaming from others, and when games seek to create content for marginalized audiences—all of these are moments in which queer theory and method can (and should) be employed. The Charmed Circle can be used to demonstrate the very disciplinary power of the Magic Circle of play (an example I hope to elaborate in my next post).

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Rubin, Galye. (1993).“Thinking Sex: Note for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality” in The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader eds. H. Abelove, M.A. Barale and D.M. Halperin. New York: Routledge. P. 3-44.

Salamon, Gayle. (2009). “Justification and Queer Method, or Leaving Philosophy,” Hypatia 24(1). P. 225-230.