Gay shameless
Mickey Milkovich: A Personality Analysis of Shameless’ Leading Piece of Southside Trash
Spoiler Warning: This article discusses events in Shameless principal up to the Season 7 finale.
“Kiss me and I’ll cut your fucking tongue out,” is what Mickey Milkovich (Noel Fisher) says to Ian Gallagher (Cameron Monaghan) after their first sexual experience in season 1, episode 7 of Shameless, which reveals that Mickey is gay. It is this line that he says after Ian tries to kiss him that epitomizes who Mickey is, at least in the commencing of the series.
Mickey lives on the rough streets of southside Chicago and is first depicted as a hardened thug with a nasty mouth who likes to steal from the store where Ian works. He seems to have no qualms about using his fists, as he is frequently shown fighting various different people throughout the series. So of course, I automatically assumed he would be the typical bully traits, meant to be a thorn in the adorable Ian Gallagher’s side. Envision my surprise when he was revealed to be, in fact, gay and attracted to Ian.
In a lot of shows I’ve watched, male characters who are in the closet tend to be tough bullies because they are self co
Queer Narratives & Precise Portrayals on Showtimes' Shameless
Sierra Skelly
2017 has been a big year for GLBT representations in media. Many top-rated network shows such as Modern Family and Empire situate gay characters as central to their narratives. “Hollywood now offers more GLBT-themed movies than ever before, some which garner Academy Award attention” (Ross, pg. 201). Just this year, the Academy Award for best picture went to Moonlight. A movie not just about two queer men, but two gay black men that struggle with their black male identity and its conflicts with sexual identity. While this was a gigantic step in modern media representations for minorities, it still does not accurately represent the struggles that they confront. I am going to analyze the popular Showtime series Shameless and investigate how it is one of the only shows that do not display the LGBTQ collective as something that is black and white, but dynamic and fluid.
We’ve seen lesbian, same-sex attracted and bi representations in medi
Defying Stereotypes: Analyzing Shameless’ Mickey Milkovich
Lauren Goudie
Shameless
Living below the poverty line in a run-down neighborhood of Chicago, Illinois, the Gallagher family and friends survive one morning at a time. Shameless: the entitle of the television series created by Paul Abbott, and distributed by Showtime and other streaming platforms, that follows the daily struggles in the lives of its underprivileged and chaotic characters. Paul Abbott and the producers of the series, including John Wells, Stamp Mylod and Andrew Stern create a twisted yet feasible atmosphere that addresses many issues relevant to today’s societal struggles. It’s crucial to note that the show’s creators and producers are all white, heterosexual males. I chose to analyze the character Mickey Milkovich in Shameless due to the show’s popularity and inclusion of interesting dynamics regarding different minorities and stereotypes. In terms of acting for aspects of the LGBTQ community, Shameless successfully provides logical and relatable lgbtq+ characters that defy popular homosexual stereotypes.
Mickey Milkovich
Mic
- Abigail Reiter, The University of North Carolina at Pembroke
- Tyler Flockhart, Viterbo University
Abstract
On the pilot of Shameless, in 2011, one of the primary characters, Phillip (“Lip”) Gallagher, finds a magazine full of naked men behind his brother, Ian’s, dresser. What follows is a brief period of resistance from Lip, who is not ready to accept that his brother is gay. By the end of the episode, however, Lip has accepted his brother’s sexuality. The rest of the family follows suit. In truth, Ian’s sexuality is portrayed as a non-issue with his siblings and most every other traits in the Shameless universe.
This does not mean, however, that representations of gayness in Shameless, nor being a gay character in the show, is without issue. Representations of queer1 people in popular television and film often align with what sexualities scholars refer to as a “post-gay” narrative (see Coleman-Fountain 2014; Russell et al. 2009). Here, social, political, and legal advances over the last decade are used as evidence that homophobia is a thing of the past, and that the United States has achieved what Gay Liberationists set out to accomplish decad