Hunting, meth and big cats: Tiger King's rarely seen version of southern queerness
In the early 2000s, the most popular queer characters on TV were Jack McFarland and Will Truman of the sitcom Will & Grace. Will and Jack were so beloved, Vice-President Joe Biden once theorized the show had played a major role in shifting views on marriage equality. The characters were also the start of a trope that would prevail on TV for years: the cosmopolitan gay male. The image would live on in shows such as Queer as Folk, Looking, and the reality competitions Project Runway and America’s Next Top Model. Who could imagine that 20 years on, a mullet-wearing, gay, polyamorous exotic animal owner from rural Oklahoma would become TV’s biggest talked about gay star?
Joe Exotic, the eccentric subject of the Netflix docu-series Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem and Madness, has amassed a fervent following in the short time since the show’s premiere on Friday. The rapper Cardi B live-tweeted her reactions and expressed a desire to start a GoFundMe campaign for Mr Exotic, whose full name Wikipedia gives as Joseph Allen Maldonado-Passage (né Schreibvogel). Fans have taken to dressing up as Joe, slapping on fake handlebar mustaches and blond mullet wigs. And actors such as Dax Shepard and Jared Leto are pitching themselves to play the gun-loving zookeeper in a forthcoming scripted miniseries. Amid the anxiety of the coronavirus pandemic, we are finding humor and relief in an imperfect, self-described “redneck” queer who owns more than 200 tigers. He’s the furthest cry from the affable, anodyne queer men who typically win America over, such as Cam and Mitchell of Modern Family and the “gay best friend” cast of Queer Eye. But unlikely times call for an unlikely hero.
“It’s possible people need a really flawed person to humanize right now,” says Matt Brim, professor and author of Poor Queer Studies. Brim says the love for Joe might be more complicated than it immediately appears to be. “What is the calculus here? For some viewers, Joe Exotic’s rural white queer class identity may be his flaw, so that looking past or accepting it signals tolerance, that most passive-aggressive of power plays. For other viewers, those same qualities – in their specific and unwieldy combination – may represent the very soup of our common dilemma. One thing’s for sure: we’re not in South Bend any more,” he said, referring to the city where the former Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg was mayor.
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Joe belongs to a rural, Republican-voting, working-class background, which makes for great TV for those who have a superficial understanding of the south. Joe appears to be keenly aware of this fact, playing into the shock value of his queer, southern life. Before Tiger King, he pitched multiple reality shows about his life to networks and starred in country music videos with his husbands. He is the perfect kind of reality star – straddling the line between an unrestrained “big” personality and a caricature.
Joe’s queerness and southern-ness intersect in distinct, complex ways. This includes his use of meth, a popular gay recreational drug. (In 2018, Oklahoma, site of Joe’s zoo, was listed as having one of the highest rates of meth use in the US.) He goes out of his way to associate with traditional ideas of masculinity through his love for guns, collection of large, aggressive animals, and pursuit of young, butch men who have previous histories of only dating women.
In the show, Joe says he fell in love with tigers while recovering from a suicide attempt he linked to his parents’ homophobia. Did Joe decide the best way to reconcile his queerness with his surroundings was to assimilate in the most extreme ways – leaning into the love for hunting and control over wildlife that dominates southern culture? Then he cultivated this assimilation and it grew into a profitable persona. Joe made it so that the most outrageous thing about him in Oklahoma was neither his queerness or poly relationships. It was his tigers.
Despite his progressive lifestyle, Joe himself is not a progressive. He believes in unregulated gun rights and, during his bizarre, far-fetched run for governor of Oklahoma, positioned himself as a libertarian. A viral video shows him pondering why black people can say the N-word but white people can’t. However, his queerness complicates this otherwise predictable ideology. At his wedding, we see Joe and his two husbands dressed in fuschia western shirts – none of the elements feel coherent or like they belong together. Since its legalization in 2015, same-sex marriage no longer possesses the same air of radicalism and defiance. But a polyamorous one? Even the progressives in Brooklyn might bat a lash at that.
In Tiger King, Joe presents a less than perfect view of himself – from his meth use to nasty spats with co-workers to his tragic, failed marriages to allegedly straight men. But, in many ways, Joe’s imperfections (and criminal convictions) are what make him feel like a breakthrough for queer representation. Because “perfect” is so 1998.
However, there is the danger we are collectively laughing at Joe and his rural background, instead of laughing with him.
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In a post, the runner of the popular Instagram account QueerAppalachia expressed concerns over Joe’s popularity, writing: “I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about why Joe is a joke to everyone, even to the folks that understand the nuanced history & economics that brought him into existence as a rural queer… [Joe Exotic] is more than just another #hillbillyjoke, so much of his story is about class & access.”
Representation of queerness in red states has always been sparse and complicated. The portrayals often face accusations of being exploitative or overly simplistic. A recent one was John B McLemore of the hit podcast series S-Town. McLemore was a queer horologist living in Woodstock, Alabama, a small, conservative place he hated. Critics called the podcast “voyeuristic” and irresponsible for outing McLemore after his death. Netflix’s Queer Eye occasionally chooses LGBTQ+ subjects living in conservative locales for its transformations, and the show’s format – “fix all your problems in an hour” with a group of affluent, pro-consumption coastal gay men – has drawn scrutiny.
Does the novelty of a complicated figure such as Joe Exotic expose our preferences for coastal queer narratives? “Yes,” says John Howard, professor and author of Men Like That: A Southern Queer History. “For 25 years, scholars have criticized a bicoastal bias in US queer history that has focused attention on east and west coast metropolitan areas. But this is changing.” Howard points to the conversations Tiger King is producing. “Let’s hope the public debate expands. Perhaps we’ll learn more about working-class queers and trans people of color who, as yet, remain at the margins of Joe’s narrative.”
• In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on 116 123 or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-8255. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at www.befrienders.org
