Plasma Pool

In “The Outing,”¹ an iconic 1993 episode of NBC’s Seinfeld (1989-1998), Jerry Seinfeld (Jerry Seinfeld) and George Costanza (Jason Alexander) are mistakenly outed as homosexuals by Sharon Leonard (Paula Marshall), an NYU journalism graduate student who eavesdrops on a conversation among Elaine Benes (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), Jerry, and George at Monk’s Café about the most unattractive world leader of all time.² The Elaine of Seinfeld’s earlier seasons is acid-tongued. She declares that Golda Meir could make all other candidates run up a tree. Upon noticing that Sharon, with whom the group is not yet acquainted, is eavesdropping, Elaine puckishly engineers their conversation to imply, for Sharon’s benefit, that Jerry and George are gay. Elaine spins her yarn, attempting with George’s help to convince Jerry to participate in the ruse, and Jerry resists, comparing his friends to Nazi collaborators: “I’m not going along! I can just see you in Berlin in 1939 goosestepping past me: ‘Come on, Jerry, go along, go along!’”

Sharon eavesdrops on Elaine, Jerry, and George

This association of homosexuality and Nazism on Jerry’s part is incidental, the consequence of a facetious speculative analogy, but the American popcultural Nazi stereotype does nevertheless share a key characteristic of the gay male stereotype as constructed by the Seinfeld episode’s progression: an anal-retentive valorization of, and unflinching demand for, neatness and order. Aside from Jerry’s abnormally-tight turtleneck—almost certainly chosen especially for this scene—among the only plausible bits of evidence for his supposed homosexuality, he tells Elaine and George, is his neatness:

JERRY        You know I hear that all the time.
ELAINE      Hear what?
JERRY        That I’m gay, people think I’m gay.
ELAINE      Yeah, you know, people ask me that about you too.
JERRY        Yeah because I’m single, I’m thin, and I’m neat.

Neatness here is taken as evidence of gayness. Indeed, it is absolutely essential to the way in which Sharon’s article—initially published in an NYU campus paper, then picked up by the New York Post—implies Jerry’s homosexuality. Sharon is careful never to make an explicit claim about Jerry’s sexuality, instead recounting an anecdote that superficially maintains his straightness while strongly suggesting that he and George are a gay couple: “Within the confines of his fastidious bachelor pad,” she writes, “Seinfeld and Costanza bicker over the cleanliness of a piece of fruit like an old married couple.” Sharon’s case, as she presents it, rests largely on Jerry and George’s ostensible obsession with cleanliness. Jerry’s stand-up routine concluding “The Outing” cements neatness as a central characteristic of homosexuality, even going so far as to suggest that making a vacuuming noise—a symbol of cleanliness—should become conversational shorthand for implying that a man is gay:

I am not gay. I am, however, thin, single and neat. Sometimes when someone is thin, single and neat people assume they are gay because that is a stereotype. [...] If people are even going to assume that people that are neat are gay, maybe instead of doin’ this: “Y’know I think Joe might be a little… [waves hand back and forth]“, they should vacuum: “Y’know I think Joe might be VROOM; [makes vacuuming motion]. Yeah, I got a feeling he’s a little VROOM….

George lambasts Jerry for failing to wash his fruit

Jerry does challenge this cleanliness stereotype, expressing sympathy for gays who might face discrimination for their sloppiness. Despite this, the vision of homosexuality the episode ultimately offers is anchored in an almost military proclivity for cleanliness. Jerry may want to solace dirty homos, but they have no place in this episode other than as objects of pity, as sites of at least three potential traumas: that of homosexuality as such, that of rejection by stereotypical homosexuals, and that of estrangement from mainstream society for failing to fit the received, digestible, user-friendly cultural stereotype.

Between the influence of received stereotypes and the restrictions of censors, gays who did not fit rigid, popularly assimilable molds had little place in nineties network comedy period. NBC’s programming, especially, suffered from this sort of stereotyping, culminating in the unabashedly stereotype-perpetuating, and thus user-friendly, Will & Grace (which is nonetheless innovative in its own right). Now, fifteen years after Jerry’s outing, NBC’s offers us The Office’s Oscar Martinez (Oscar Nuñez), a gay member of Dunder-Mifflin Scranton’s three-person accounting department whose character debuts as ostensibly straight. Oscar is revolutionary in network TV comedy not because he defies outmoded stereotypes, which he does, but because his homosexuality—along with what his culturally insensitive boss, Michael Scott (Steve Carell), terms his “Mexicanity”—is kept consistently incidental to his character.

The first time we meaningfully meet Oscar, in the second episode of the first season, “Diversity Day,” not only is he not introduced as a homosexual—downplaying, in retrospect, the importance of homosexuality to the constitution of his character beyond his choice of sexual partner—he is introduced as an examplar of another stereotype: Mexicanity. But Oscar no more embodies Mexican or Chicano or Hispanic stereotypes than he embodies gay stereotypes; he is nothing but symbol: Oscar, for Michael, stands for Mexican, just as customer service representative Kelly Kapoor stands for Indian and salesman Stanley Hudson stands for black. Beyond these nominal symbolic roles, Oscar has no particular relationship, for us, to either homosexuality or Mexicanity.

The Office's Oscar Martinez (Oscar Nuñez)

When we do find out that Oscar is gay, it is by accident. Oscar is outed for the audience—in the second season episode “The Secret“—as a fortuitous result of an investigation by Dwight Schrute (Rainn Wilson), Michael’s number-two, into whether the sick day Oscar has taken is legitimate. The title of the episode might at first seem to highlight Oscar’s “secret,” and to an extent it does. In Oscar’s mind, Dwight, upon finding Oscar arriving at his home with his partner Gil, has discovered that Oscar is gay. Dwight, who tells Oscar simply that he won’t “tell Michael,” doesn’t that realize Oscar is gay. The secret he believes himself to be keeping for Oscar—in return for a favor redeemable at a time and place of his choosing—is that Oscar has taken an illegitimate sick day. The episode’s primary storyline concerns the revelation of yet another secret, a third vying for representation by the title, and the one having the greatest effect on the volition of the show: that salesman Jim Halpert (John Krasinski) had and perhaps still has feelings for receptionist Pam Beesley (Jenna Fischer). The secret of Oscar’s homosexuality is certainly referred to by the title, but it is by no means the title’s sole referent. It comes to us as an incidental consequence of an investigation that produces a second, more widely-revealed secret—Oscar’s attendance “malfeasance,” in Dwight’s term. Both of these secrets concerning Oscar are then largely eclipsed by a third, stage-stealing secret concerning Jim and Pam: the starting point for what would become the program’s primary storyline over the next three seasons. Although the secret of Oscar’s homosexuality is submerged beneath these other secrets for Oscar’s fellow characters, it is for us perhaps the most potent secret of the three: we alone share it with him. Yet knowledge of his homosexuality changes nothing about his character. Oscar’s homosexuality is both undeniable and unspeakable; but it is neither flamboyant nor timid. It is simply there.

Wonderfully, and in a confounding of Seinfeld-era stereotypes, it is Oscar’s defiance of cleanliness—which is both stereotypically gay and, for Michael, stereotypically Mexican—that leads us to discover that he’s gay. Dwight launches his investigation in “The Secret” not simply because Oscar has taken a day off, but because in doing so, Oscar has refused to participate in the office’s “spring cleaning” day. When Michael calls Oscar’s home to confirm that he is indeed there recuperating, he casts Oscar’s refusal in terms of his Mexicanity: “You know it’s cleaning day here today? Coulda’ used some of that famous Hispanic cleaning ethic!” Oscar won’t be cleaning that day, but it has nothing to do with his ethnicity or his sexuality. He just wants a day off.

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1. Full episode available via Todou; full script available here.

2. With thanks to Eric Freeman.