Near the climax of the premiere episode of Peacock’s Queer as Folk reboot, an armed man enters Babylon, the club, during the momentous debut performance of an aspiring young drag queen, and begins shooting. The scene is short: No violence is depicted directly. Rather, gunshots, screams and broken glass indicate the horror, followed by a fade into the aftermath.
The show premiered just days before the six-year anniversary of the very real tragedy that happened at Pulse Nightclub in Orlando, Florida in 2016, when Omar Mateen killed 49 people and wounded 53 others in the night’s waning hours. For some, the plotline and timing felt like a poignant and necessary commemoration of a tragedy that devastated LGBTQ+ people across the country. But for others, particularly those directly affected by the tragedy, it has felt distressingly close to home.
Peacock’s Queer As Folk is the second reimagining of Russell T. Davies’ original 1999 series, which was about three gay men living in Manchester, England. The popular Showtime reboot debuted in 2000 and took place in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Set in New Orleans this time, Stephen Dunn’s series is intently set in the present and has followed the recent reboot trend — think Gossip Girl, And Just Like That and The L Word: Generation Q — of leaning into inclusivity, with contemporary plot lines exploring gender fluidity and disabilities, and a much more diverse cast than its predecessors.
Presumably, the theme of trauma that runs throughout the season helps drive those storylines. But it also places the new show within an ongoing conversation about navigating the desire to reflect the real-life experiences of marginalized people in Hollywood and the risk of turning their trauma into spectacle or retraumatizing those who were directly involved.
For many Pulse survivors and others directly impacted by the tragedy, the memory of the event still feels raw. And despite excitement for a beloved show’s return, some said they’d need to wait a bit before seeing it due to the show’s release being so close to the shooting’s anniversary.
“I love the original show, but I don’t know how to feel about this seeing that it happened to my home,” one tweet about the show trailer, which was released last month, read. “That’s going to take some time to recover from,” another Orlando resident said.
Orlando-based drag performer Mr Ms Adrien, who worked at Pulse at the time of the shooting, says the trailer ruined her day when she watched it that morning. “Do I think using trauma for entertainment is tasteless? Yes,” she says. “But my real, honest issue with it was the fact that there was no trigger warning, or any sort of explanation that this is the way this trailer was going to go.” After watching the trailer, Adrien wrote a post on Facebook for her friends to warn them about its content. “Orlando’s suffering was not, and is not, fiction,” she wrote. “There are survivors, families, communities that are still grieving, still hurting, still healing, and I see no respect for them in this trailer.”
Others were similarly disturbed by the lack of warning. “Survivors of the story are still alive and walking around today and carrying this weight with them every single day,” says Christopher Cuevas, an Orlando native and community organizer. “And to be re-traumatized in the way that they have been without giving them the option to to avoid that — it's something just thrown in their face — is absolutely irresponsible.”
Though Peacock did not warn casual viewers about the violence in the trailer, there is a warning card prior to the first episode, which states that some viewers may find the episode “distressing” as it depicts a shooting. And the show’s creators did not wade into this fraught story without help. In 2018, Queer as Folk writer and director Stephen Dunn reached out to Joél Morales, a crisis responder during the 2016 tragedy, and Morales facilitated listening sessions between producers, community stakeholders, and a handful of willing survivors. Nobody involved in those discussions felt that a shooting plotline would be a bad idea, according to Morales. “Everybody felt like this is a story that needs to be told,” he said. “What happened at Pulse was real. We shouldn't hide away from it.”
The show’s creator had envisioned the reboot to focus on the tragic shooting from the beginning. Dunn told The Hollywood Reporter that there was “only one way” to redo the show, and that a Pulse-like shooting would serve as the catalyst. “After Pulse,” he said, “the community had really felt united. It happened in Orlando, but the ripple effect was felt across the world.”
According to Dunn, the community members involved in the listening sessions felt specifically that it was important to share what happened in the aftermath of the tragedy, when the national media had turned its attention elsewhere. “At first, I was reluctant,” Jeff Xcentric, another paid consultant on the show who was shot several times during the tragedy and was the only permanently injured survivor to participate in the sessions, says. “But then I eventually gave in and I did interact and reach out because I felt like I had to share my story — our story, because it's not just mine.”
Queer as Folk has never shied away from difficult topics; former iterations featured storylines about HIV/AIDS, substance use disorders, and abuse, just to name a few. In fact, the American reboot ends its fifth season with the bombing of Babylon, which kills seven people and injures 67 others. Of course, this bombing doesn’t closely reflect an actual event that happened in recent history and still lives firmly in survivors’ memories. Dunn says that he hopes the show can be a catalyst for reflection on this very real tragedy and the sequelae of gun violence. “It’s important to tell the stories of people who don’t get to necessarily move on,” he said, “and what that experience is like.”
Pain is almost always a running motif in queer narratives, at least partly because the vibrance of queer community is often formed on the edges of darkness. You love and celebrate your chosen family, but implicit in a chosen family is the fact that you've had to choose one. In many ways, the new Queer as Folk does depict the complexity of our current moment, where no safe space feels safe, gun control is nowhere on the legislative horizon, and queer people, despite it all, do find love and make friends. But the question remains: does a show that responds to this cultural moment necessarily need to depict its most brutal horrors? And if it does, what’s the right way to do so?
In a review for Vanity Fair, critic Richard Lawson says the show extracts little insight from the shooting, claiming that the tragedy instead “hangs in the background awkwardly, almost forgotten—while in the foreground, we are served the usual, and expected, offering of romantic travails, intra-social squabbles, and sex.” Lawson argues that this selective use of tragedy — the decision not to have it darken every scene or plot point— “makes the framing device seem awfully cynical, an exploitation of a real trauma as a marketable hook.”
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In the days following the shooting in Uvalde, Texas, some fans asked Abbott Elementary creator Quinta Brunson to write a school shooting episode into the show’s next season, hoping it might be able to sway public and political opinion. “I don’t want to sound mean,” Brunson said in a Twitter thread explaining why she bristled at these requests, “but I want people to understand the flaw in asking for something like this,” going on to point out that people seem to rely too much on the media to effect change instead of the politicians with power to actually change laws.
David Boardman, the dean of Temple University’s Klein College of Media and Communication, tweeted that he “couldn’t have imagined saying this years ago, but it’s time — with the permission of a surviving parent — to show what a slaughtered 7-year-old looks like. Maybe only then will we find the courage for more than thoughts and prayers.” (Of course, some people think this might have the opposite effect: The New Yorker’s Jelani Cobb suggested that showing images of those affected by gun violence could lead some people to avoid media about the subject or accustom people to its terrible nature.)
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It’s easy to understand the reluctance to trust media to take care with portrayals of real suffering especially in relationship to Pulse. For six years straight, Orlando’s queer community has had to decipher whether documentarians, journalists, or TV producers are going to exploit their trauma. In 2017, Spanish-language television network Univision aired a dramatization of the Pulse shooting not even a year after it occurred, despite urges from the community not to do so. At the time, Pulse’s official Facebook profile said the network was exploiting victims for financial gain and urged folks to ask Univision not to air the episode, while queer media advocacy group GLAAD sent a similar plea.
Let’s assume, though, that Univision’s intention was not based in an appeal for ratings, but rather in a drive to bring awareness to the human toll of the tragedy. What capabilities, if any, does graphic depiction of pain — real or fake — have to change hearts and minds? The answer has long been debated. What’s definite is that social movements have historically been catalyzed by powerful, heart-wrenching imagery. Civil rights movements, including the ongoing Black Lives Matter movement and calls to defund or abolish police, for instance, gained momentum in large part through widely shared photos and videos documenting police brutality. In those cases, though, many have critiqued the ways that over-circulation of such violent imagery has inflicted trauma on Black Americans simply scrolling through social media and turned Black death into a spectacle.
For what it’s worth, the new Queer as Folk avoids directly depicting extreme violence. In the first episode, as in the trailer, you won’t see anybody get shot. The massacre is indicated by way of screams and repeated gunshots at the club’s signage. There’s a fade to black, and then a montage of aftermath: broken glasses on the floor, caution tape around the premises, ambulance sirens, and people on stretchers.
Queer as Folk cast and creators have said they don’t want people to become numb to violence, but rather learn that people don’t need to be defined by it. “There are beautiful things that come from places that have been destroyed," said actor Devin Way in a promotional interview about the film with GLAAD. "When massive fires happen, the land that is created underneath the fire is richer than it could possibly be, and I love that our show isn’t about trauma, but it is about the richness that happens in the land after the trauma existed.”
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