Fox Network’s Family Guy is a Sunday line up staple. The Simpsons has been around for millions of years now and is firmly a classic in our culture and what The Simpsons leave out, Family Guy seems sure to cover. Family Guy continues to impress in the Sunday animation line up, a revival after being canned by the network originally. In this month’s issue of Playboy, the show’s creator, Seth MacFarlane, discusses baby Stewie’s sexual orientation, but refuses to declare Stewie gay or straight.
It is no secret that the writers of Family Guy are well in tune with the ins and outs of the gay community. The “gay episode” (Season 7, Episode 8) where Peter is injected with a “gay gene” proves this point ten fold. Allusions were made here and innuendos made there (excerpt provided by Hulu.com at end of post). It solidifies the writers’ ability to ride the line of gay-straight with Stewie, the clever and speaking baby, who once focused on murdering his mother, but now seems more inclined to pursue other ventures. Like an actual growing child, Stewie’s sexual orientation seems to be revealing itself more and more and is being alluded to more often by the family dog, Brian.
MacFarlane told the gay magazine, The Advocate, last year:
We all feel that Stewie is almost certainly gay, and he’s in the process of figuring it out for himself. We haven’t ever really locked into it because we get a lot of good jokes from both sides, but we treat him oftentimes as if we were writing a gay character.
This is something the writers continue to do well with as seasons progress. Historically, the flamboyant character in television or cinemas has always been utilized as either comic relief, making them almost clown like, or more dramatically, as the sad lost character meant to show audience the horrors of being gay, as to dissuade those watching from accepting homosexuality. The great part about Stewie’s character is his ability to follow neither of these classic representations. His ambiguous sexuality is used for humor, but seems less offensive in the environment of this program. Intercept the innocence of his childhood appearance with the adult quality of his speech, and the comedy is almost natural, and his baby state makes his ambiguous sexuality realistic and acceptable.
Stewie consistently has a love/hate relationship with his mother, Lois. He also has aspirations of a hostile take over of the world. MacFarlane tells Playboy:
Ultimately, Stewie will be gay or a very unhappy repressed heterosexual. It also explains why he’s so hellbent on killing [his mother, Lois] and taking over the world: He has a lot of aggression, which comes from confusion and uncertainty about his orientation.
When we take a cultural view at this idea, we can see progression, in that, 50 years ago the “gay characters” were unhappy because of their homosexuality, which was widely considered abnormal and unhealthy, resulting in the suicide or continued unhappiness of those characters. We see in 2009, in a cartoon, the audiences being exposed to the consequences of repression, in a comedic manner, as means of exploiting the atrocity of such socially enforced ideals.
Although outrageous at times, and comically awkward at others, Family Guy is able to utilize these qualities in presenting real ideas and social commentary to broad audiences. Some audiences may be too stupid to pick up on it, and others too prude. In the end, those on the fence, like Stewie, get to see the evolution of a baby’s character to one that may just be a gay toddler. Only Seth MacFarlane and his fellow writers know how this will turn out.
Here’s another classic Family Guy moment…
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