The tender allure of modern love

MANILA, Philippines - Whatever people tell you about love, consider it bullsh*t — especially gay love. Framed from the perspective of failed cracks at relationships, little triumphs, and an unhealthy dose of wide-eyed dreaming, these easily dispensed bon-mots on romanticism can only work from a pop-cultural standpoint. It’s how many of us, who are reared in rom-coms, dreary mumblecore wrecks, Taylor Swift songs, “groundbreaking” gay sitcoms, and the films from the gay filmmaking boom of the 2000s, are lured into thinking that we can conquer Mount Modern Love. But it’s hard not to lay down the lines of your experience against these pillars that you uphold. They form the foundations of your being, the blood that keeps you going in the hopes of finding True Love’s Kiss.

Sex, on the other hand, especially for most in the gay community, is a river easily navigated. It’s easier to hook up these days, what with all the smartphone apps that connect you from one warm body to another. Grindr, Jackd, Hornet, Scruff — evolutionary steps from the customary wink to mIRC chatrooms. It seems gay men have been at the forefront of finding ways to ease hooking up.

It’s in this arena that HBO’s new show, Looking, hailed as the gay equivalent of Girls, and Sex and the City — ever the reference for tales of city love and lust, almost insinuates itself into. From the title of the series alone Looking, created by Michael Lannan and developed by Andrew Haigh, the director of the critically acclaimed film Weekend, which chronicles the budding romance of two gay men in Nottingham, is a jab at the gay hook-up lingo (“Looking?” the men on hook-up apps ask, luring men into their beefed-up but probably years-old display photos). But from the get-go, Looking aspires to be more than sex, unlike the path previously tread by shows like Queer as Folk (although it isn’t entirely about sex) and The Hunting Season (which is unabashedly about sex, sex, sex). And it’s set in San Francisco, not New York.

Complaints have been piled upon Looking: its dreariness, boring characters, bland storylines. But most importantly there’s the complaint about the absence of sex, stemming from an overriding perception by many people that gay dudes are all about just going to town and riding it hard. Four episodes into the show, Looking is on shaky ground, its hyperrealism almost too ordinary to watch.

But it’s that same element that makes it engaging for viewers who want to see a realistic portrayal of the motions of ordinariness, that your sexuality is not the focal point in everything that happens in your life. “It’s that real life is... awkward, I suppose,” Haigh told Out in their January 2014 issue. “It’s the difference between people, the lack of clarity, all those things that make people gently butt up against each other — that’s what’s fascinating and sexy. It’s not about big conflict or high drama; it’s about all those little things in life that make us embarrassed or uncomfortable.”

Looking’s characters skirt around the gay stereotype — an issue that gay men are always touchy on. The show’s lead, Patrick (Jonathan Groff), is a twentysomething video-game level designer who fumbles through dates with his unfiltered banter and awkwardness, Augustin (Frankie J. Alvarez, the only straight actor in the trio) is in his 30s and looking for something more out of his relationship and professional life, or lack thereof, and then there’s Dom (Murray Bartlett), all beefy and DILF-y who is approaching his 40s with the frustration that he has yet to make something out of himself.

The show is comfortable in the post-gay category; its leads work around their lives without the pre-determined baggage that other gay shows assign to their characters. As Matthew Zoller Seitz notes in New York magazine, “Patrick and his friends are people first, men second, gay men third (maybe fourth, if they’ve got something else going on that week).” Looking is less preoccupied about running a show about the central gay experience. There are threesomes, bathhouse scenes, a leather parade, and smartphone app hook-ups but they do more than signify the sexuality of the characters involved. It almost doesn’t give a damn about the prejudice that people assign to shows of the same make, that is has to be progressive or pushing a certain agenda. Looking though contains a certain degree of these things but it is more concerned about mapping out the complexities of relationships and how the things we are told about love are essentially meaningless when you’re neck-deep in the battle zone.

There are Patrick’s failed attempts at starting a relationship. The revelation that he hasn’t had a long-term relationship is something that isn’t limited to gay men. He shields himself from judgment, more apparent in the series’s opening scene where his public park handjob (“The guy that gave it to me is not even hipster hairy…like gym teacher hairy,” he tells his friends afterwards) is interrupted by a phone call that he thought was coming from his mom who will scold him for “being that kind of gay”. It’s Patrick’s grappling that comprises most of the show and it’s a reminder that the travails of modern love are trickier than we thought — a point that is blown to greater proportions with Looking’s intimate and observational approach. 

Looking is far from perfect. That it took four episodes before the show fully unveiled its tottering potential can be worrying. But at least it doesn’t concern itself with attaching itself to the male member to signify progress or pride—yet. As Seitz puts it, “There’s nothing formally or dramatically groundbreaking about it, except for its “no big deal” attitude. But that in itself is striking. It should be counted as progress. That Looking doesn’t seem to be terribly concerned with words like progress should count as progress, too.”

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