At this year’s American Music Awards (22 November), Adam Lambert, the openly gay American Idol star, shared an on-stage kiss with a male keyboardist. According to the BBC News website the incident — if you can call it that — received more than 1,500 complaints, and the show was roundly dismissed as “vulgar” by the self-appointed US media watchdog Parents Television Council (PTC).
But Lambert was right when, interviewed after the performance, he described the resultant furore as “a form of discrimination”: “I feel like women performers have been pushing the envelope sexually for the past 20 years, and all of a sudden, a male does it and everybody goes: ‘Oh, we can’t show that on TV.'”
The kiss itself was fleeting, and a small part of the sexually-charged performance delivered by the pop star (which included far raunchier skits, such as dragging a woman across the stage by her leg). In a CNN report on the controversy, Jo Piazza accuses Lambert of “focusing on the shock factor”, while Janell Snowden, a VH1 news host, recalls how she “dropped [her] jaw when [she] saw that whole display of sexuality”.
I doubt too many jaws would have dropped if Lambert had kissed a woman. It’s a dispiriting reminder of the double standards that still exist when it comes to on-screen representations of sexuality: tacky but acceptable when it’s Britney and Madonna (or Madonna and anybody), but somehow “shocking” when it’s Adam and keyboard-man-with-hairdo.
The opinions of the PTC, meanwhile, should be taken with a pinch of salt. The council was set up as an offshoot of the Media Research Centre under the guidance of arch conservative Brent Bozell, who once complained about “leftist views” in “prime-time programmes” (yawn). In 2004, Mediaweek reported that 99 per cent of the 1.1 million indecency complaints that were received by the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) originated from PTC members — hardly a representative swathe of the telly-watching population. I can only guess how many of the 1,500 complaints lodged over Lambert’s show were sent from the outboxes of “outraged” PTC mums and dads.