The Lady and the Tramp: Feminizing Will and Jack on Will & Grace 

Will & Grace is a gay media success story. Since its debut in the fall of 1998, the sitcom has won numerous Emmys, as well as awards from the watchdog group GLAAD—The Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, which funded the research upon which this article is based. Currently in its seventh season, it is watched by millions of people each week and consistently rates in the Nielsen top twenty.

For many people, Will & Grace is their most consistent source of images of gay men. Because of this, it is important to ask what these images say about gay men in contemporary American society.

The show is notable not only for its popularity, but also because it contains multiple representations of gay men. Flamboyant and effeminate, Jack McFarland joins a list of television characters who embody longstanding stereotype of the gay man. Will Truman, in contrast, is a type that American viewers had seldom seen before: the “straight-acting” guy who is an aggressive, suit-and-tie-wearing corporate lawyer (look at his last name: Tru Man). In this way, Will & Grace could be considered a pioneer of gay-positive media.

However, through a careful content analysis of all 138 episodes from the first six seasons of the show, I have developed results that show that these representations are not quite as straightforward as they seem. Using tapes of the episodes and verbatim transcripts from a fan’s web site (www.durfee.net), my research assistants and I located every instance where a man was referred to in the feminine: as a woman, as a girl, as a bitch, as a she, as a wife, as a queen, as Dorothy, as Cher, or as Madame Butterfly. Other instances included references to a man having female body parts (“I am buying myself an EPT”) or wearing women’s clothing (“Nice shirt. Somewhere a ballerina is shivering”). For each of these instances, we kept track of who said what to whom, in what context they said it, and whether or not they made the feminine reference because the man was supposedly acting like a woman (carrying a purse, screaming in a high-pitched voice).

What I found tells us a lot about the dominant conceptions of gay men in American society.

Over the course of these 138 episodes, men have been referred to in the feminine 553 times. For 548 of these, or 99% of the time,the object was a gay man. At an average of four times per episode, a gay man is referred to in the feminine, reinforcing the long held stereotype of the effeminate homosexual. But of course you’re thinking: “Most of these references are made to the effeminate character, right?” Wrong.

Will, the more masculine character, has been the feminized object in 256 instances, while only 231 references are to Jack. The remaining 66 comments were made about other characters on the show.

A reasonable explanation for this might be that Will, a title character, gets more screen time than Jack, a secondary character. To address this possibility, I recorded how much time each character is on screen. When the raw number of occurrences is translated into the average number of minutes between each occurrence, an interesting trend occurs. In the earlier seasons of the show, Jack was indeed referenced more frequently (about once every three minutes to Will’s once every eight minutes). But this has changed over time, so that now Will is referenced more frequently. In season six, Will was feminized once every 5.5 minutes, Jack once every 7.5 minutes.

This turns our typical understanding of these characters on its head.

If Will and Jack are continually referred to in the feminine, who is responsible for these designations? Interestingly, many of them are self-references: 22% of the references made to Will are made by Will; 30% of the references made to Jack are made by Jack. This signals that it is common for gay men to think of themselves in the feminine. It is also common that gay men refer to each other in the feminine, as 34% of the references to Jack are from Will and 26% of the references to Will are from Jack.

Just as important as who said what is when they said it. Given that the show is a sitcom, it should come as no surprise that almost 42% of these references come in moments of banter. Here, the men’s feminine nature is the object of humor, and is to be taken lightly. Below is an example of such an exchange. It comes from a scene in season six, when Will is trying to persuade Jack to date a client from his law firm:

WILL: Come on, Jack. This is a really big client. And I need to score points with the firm. I’ve been still trying to make up for mismanaging the office potluck. Like I don’t hate myself enough for having two ambrosia salads. Come on, please do this.

JACK: Willicent Truman! Are you trying to pimp me? Like some common tramp trolling the docks? Well, I’m here to tell you, there ain’t enough money in the world that would make me your ho.

WILL: I’ll give you this old ChapStick and all the coins in my pocket.

JACK: Buy a lady a drink, sailor?

It is clear from the exchange, especially upon viewing it, that the characters are not taking themselves seriously. Therefore, the feminizing references are done in mere jest. But while 11% of the references occur in a moment of affection and an additional 5% in a quick greeting moment (“Hi Wilma!”),another 26% of them are made in moments of conflict. Here,the characters are expressing genuine anger at each other, and express this anger through feminization. One example is from season three, when Will and Jack are giving a sensitivity seminar to a group of New York City police officers. When Jack ruins their presentation, Will angrily attacks him:

WILL: I just asked you to abandon that queer voice.

JACK: Queer?! Who you callin’ queer, you blouse-wearin’ fairy?

WILL: This from the homo who minces around the gym in a lycra onesie!

JACK: Grace wears one!

WILL: She’s a woman, you girl!

JACK: Don’t call me a girl! Eyebrow-plucker!

WILL: Leg-waxer!

JACK: Lady!

WILL: Tramp!

It is this context that is troubling, as the feminization is meant to say, “I need to express my anger at you, so I will call you a woman,” thus simultaneously putting down both gay men and women in one fell swoop.

Only12% of the 548 references occur after the men have acted like women. Again and again, the show reaffirms that gay men, simply by their sexual orientation, are feminized. They don’t need to do anything to provoke such references.

After going over these findings in presentations or lectures, the most common question people ask me is “Do you still enjoy the show?” The answer is “Yes.” But one may enjoy a cultural product and still be critical of it, especially if its images have the power to reinforce, in a subtle way, an often damaging stereotype.

*Thomas J. Linneman is associate professor of sociology at The College of William and Mary. His research interests include contemporary social change, social movements, media, gay studies, and religion. He is the author of Weathering Change: Gays and Lesbians, Christian Conservatives, and Everyday Hostilities, published in 2003 by New York University Press.