ABC’s Modern Family ended this week after 11 seasons. When it premiered in 2009, during the height of the marriage equality battle in the U.S., the two gay dads in its ensemble cast gave many viewers their first positive, ongoing, on-screen images of same-sex parents.
ERIC STONESTREET, JESSE TYLER FERGUSON, AUBREY ANDERSON-EMMONS
Over the course of the show, we saw gay couple Mitch (Jesse Tyler Ferguson) and Cam (Eric Stonestreet) adopt and raise their daughter Lily, and also gradually change the conservative attitude of family patriarch Jay (Ed O’Neill). It wasn’t first show to include an LGBTQ parent, but it was the first on a mainstream network channel to have them in a starring role.
Yes, the show was cautious at first—as the Advocate notes, “it took until season 2 for Mitch and Cam to kiss,” and one 2010 storyline involving the dads was almost identical to a 2008 L Word storyline involving moms Bette and Tina. Yet the show strove through humor to change people’s hearts at a critical time for LGBTQ equality. While it wasn’t the first fictionalized television show to depict a same-sex wedding, the timing of Cam and Mitch’s wedding episode, in May 2014, put it squarely in between the seminal U.S. Supreme Court decisions on marriage equality, U.S. v. Windsor (June 2013) and Obergefell v. Hodges (June 2015), giving it an added significance. The Fosters, Freeform’s drama about a family headed by lesbian moms, aired its own wedding episode in the summer of 2013—but as much as I loved The Fosters, it ran on the teen-focused Freeform, with a much smaller audience (even though plenty of us queer parents dropped in to watch). The Fosters didn’t reach mainstream America, especially older viewers more likely to need persuading, in the same way that Modern Family, on one of the three major networks, did. And while The Fosters had a good run of five years, it was nothing like the decade-spanning longevity of Modern Family. Perhaps part of the trick for Modern Family, too, was including the gay parents in an ensemble cast so they weren’t the sole focus of the show.
As Steve Majors writes in a piece for NBC, though, there was a downside to Modern Family’s upbeat portrayal of Mitch, Cam, and Lily: “A rainbow-washed depiction of our families as well-adjusted also did us a disservice. They created expectations that no family, gay or straight, could ever live up to. Gay parents felt a subtle pressure to always put a positive face on our parenting, especially in public.”
That’s true, although that pressure existed long before Modern Families, as a read of Abigail Garner’s 2005 Families Like Mine: Children of Gay Parents Tell It Like It Is
My kids today have a more balanced view of gay families. They now see marriage equality in the world and yes, gay divorce. They see examples of people who have bad parenting moments, and who also happen to be gay. And my kids know they’re not expected to be model citizens for me nor the poster children for any cause.
I believe that change is due in no small part to Modern Family and the shows that followed it and which—perhaps swayed by its positive reception and multiple awards—included realistic and multifaceted images of LGBTQ parents and our children. For that, we should all be grateful.
There is already talk of a spinoff, Deadline reports—and the “possibility” that it would involve Mitch, Cam, and their family. We can hope.