Now, for those of you who are unfamiliar with baseball games, at several points during the game the big screen on the scoreboard shows camera shots of the crowd. One of these times, the screen shows what it calls the Kiss Cam. The camera scans the crowd and shows us a shot of a couple who are then expected to kiss. The fans enjoy seeing the realizations of people as they figure out that they are on the big screen, and the whole crowd cheers when they kiss. Such a practice is supposed to represent a fun thing that they do for everyone's enjoyment. I enjoyed it and cheered along with the rest, at first.
But something started to bother me about the couples they showed. To the best of my memory, every single one of the couples shown was white and heterosexual. Before you reach for your indignant hat, let me explain why I have a problem with this.
First of all, why were all of the couples white? You can blather on about the demographics of the crowd all you want, but you cannot tell me that no Black or Latino or Asian American or any other racial minorities attended the game. And if there are people of any race at a baseball game, there will be couples. Why only show white couples? Just as importantly, why not show interracial couples? It would be silly to argue that there were no interracial couples in the crowd. Racially mixed couples are not a porn fetish. They exist in the real world. Why were they not represented here? And, please, don't start saying that all of the couples just happened to be white. The people operating the cameras made deliberate choices in deciding who to show on the screen.
Secondly, why were all of the pairings one man and one woman? This one is slightly trickier. Queer couples exist too and they deserve representation just as much as heterosexual couples do. Why were they not shown? Now, you may be saying something along the lines of, "But how are they supposed to know who's a couple and who isn't unless it's a man and a woman?" My response to that would be that they have no guarantee. But if you think about it, they never know for sure if they are showing a couple. They use their best guess. It is no different for two men, or two women, or someone who is genderqueer with a trans man. They have no way of knowing. They have to go with assumptions. And if you always pick heterosexual couples and never queer couples, it means something. It means that you assume heterosexuality.
Of course, I'm sure the people running the cameras also think about it from the other direction as well. Think about the consequences of they are wrong. With a man and a woman, the two can just laugh it off if the camerapeople are incorrect and maybe they'll kiss anyway, in the spirit of the thing. But I'd bet my britches (if I had any) that any two men shown on the camera who were heterosexual would feel insulted. It would take a rare man (by which I mean a non-homophobic "straight" man, of which there are few) to not be put off by such a display. That's just the reality of our society, disappointing as it is. I'd bet that two men mistaken for a couple would almost NEVER kiss. The crowd would be weirded out by this as well.
But even if the people in charge were considering these angles as carefully as I have, their failure to challenge anyone's thinking and their compliance with racist and heterosexist biases among their customers means that they participated in what is known as an institutionalization of heterosexuality.
Finally, I want to talk about the whole premise of the thing. It would not surprise me to hear that some people don't particularly want to be on the Kiss Cam. The idea of the Kiss Cam is that people perform a sexual/romantic act for everybody else. This means that their sexuality becomes a performance for everybody else. Now that I think about it, in my mind, I wouldn't particularly want my relationship with somebody else to become lowered some form of entertainment for other people. My sexuality is my concern, not the concern of everyone in the stadium. And especially if I were, say, a lesbian for example, I would NOT want a sexual act of mine to become the domain of all of the people watching. The image of two women making out has been so commercialized and hypersexualized in the media that I honestly wouldn't like how all of the people would be looking at me before, during, and afterwards. My point here is that I don't think sexuality should be a performance for everyone to observe and judge. Relationships are supposed to mean more than that.
I hope that I've made you think about this a little more deeply, because now that I am... I think the Kiss Cam idea is totally fucked up.
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