When lips don't say much

In a world where Betty White can be drafted onto the SNL stage by a Facebook movement, people have discovered the power they have to influence the course their favorite television shows take. In essence, the television is no longer seen as a one-way road where the audience is told stories. Rather, the audience has found a way to exercise their voice to advocate for what they want to see on the television, and in many cases, demanding that characters at a certain way. In the way that Facebook paid off for Betty White, Facebook users have now also demanded that Cameron and Mitchell, the resident gay couple on Modern Family, share a same-sex smooch. While the Facebook community has marked the issue as one of equality—all the straight couples get to kiss!—this issue is more correctly an issue of normalcy—all the other couples get to kiss!

The thesis behind Modern Family is simple and classic. Normal families are boring, and the families that have their own unique struggles, arguments, and hurdles are much more worthy of scrutiny. Recall the first line of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina. Being a comedy, the show is based on outlandish, absurd characters--people who shouldn't have lived live this long without accidentally causing their own comical death. The family is trenched in uniqueness--a foolish father who shouldn't be allowed near children, a gold-digger Colombian wife, a suave ten year old--and part of the Facebook community's need to see two people in a relationship kiss is also a need to see something normal, something with which they can identify.

I don't find any problem with Modern Family not writing a Cameron and Mitchell kiss into the script. We don't know these characters fully yet. Maybe there's a reason these two characters haven't engaged in much kissing. They're under the stress of a new baby, Ed O'Neill's patriarch character hasn't really set comfortable into the idea of their relationship yet, and hey, maybe they're old-fashioned! With the upper-class, liberal slant of Modern Family's comedy, I don't think that there's a large equality issue behind the issue of Cameron and Mitchell not sharing a kiss. Nor do I mind that they are now going to share a much-celebrated kiss (obviously). Rather, my fascination is with a community of people who believe themselves to be so progressive, so I-watch-Will-and-Grace-and-therefore-I'm-liberal-and-accepting, that they believe that a kiss on Modern Family is a real step towards equality.

Frankly, Modern Family is a very sexless show--though I am not equating kissing to sex. With the exception of the sexy Sofia Vergara, none of the characters seem to be particularly sexy or sex-driven. There are jokes thrown in here and there about characters sexual lives and sexual identities, but the show is a family-friendly show, and there won't be any Gossip Girl-esque ménage-à-trois anytime soon. The gay community often feels as if they are often viewed as oversexed in shows like Queer as Folk, and are too often portrayed as the "best friend," especially in reality shows about women like the Real Housewives franchise. If oversexed best friends get screen time, can't chaste domestic dads get in a word or two? The portrayal of the gay community is such a delicate dance that people find offense when men are detached from their sexuality just as much as we raise an eyebrow when we see a man make himself a bit too available.

Regardless of whether straight Eric Stonestreet (newly-minted Emmy winner for his portrayal of Cam) and openly gay Jesse Tyler Ferguson (Mitchell) share a lip-lock on screen, Modern Family is still the number one comedy on television, fresh off its Emmy win for Best Comedy Series. Rather than hoping to showcase the couples affection for its viewers, we should be both thanking the show for its very real portrayal of gay characters, and asking that it raise issues of equality, tolerance, and acceptance that its younger viewers can absorb. A kiss is not a step towards equality, only the product of a "show-me" crazy Facebook community. The real duty of Modern Family's writers, who are allowed to tackle societal debates with sharp-shooter timeliness and admirable alacrity, shouldn't be to pander to online groups, but rather use their national platform to have their viewers ponder issues that are important to the LGBT community. Don't focus on the personal problems of kissing and intimacy, use the modern family you present as a small way of talking about the big issues our community faces.

-Mathew Rodriquez is a New York-based writer and advocate.