I've been thoroughly enjoying AMC's newest show Halt and Catch Fire starring Lee Pace (Pushing Daisies) and Scott McNairy (Argo). The show tells a fictionalized version of the personal computer revolution in the 1980s and has been doing horrible in the ratings. The 3rd episode got only 0.77 million viewers.
Lee Pace plays the ambitious Joe MacMillan. Joe formerly worked at IBM but has now been hired at Cardiff Electric, a system software company. His past is mysterious and he's not above lying and manipulating people to get what he wants. After the first episode, I read a post by someone asking if Joe is a visionary or a sociopath. Most people seemed to agree that he was both.
It will take too long to explain everything, so I'll just cut to the chase. In the 3rd episode, Cardiff Electric sets up a meeting with an heiress named Lulu Lutherford in hopes of getting her to invest in their project. After Lulu offers to buy 80% of the project for only $10 million, Joe verbally voices his anger with her, but the deal goes through anyways. Later, Joe seduces Lulu's husband, Travis into kissing him (whether or not they had sex isn't made clear). When he reveals this to Lulu, she immediately pulls out of the deal. Joe wanted her out of the picture and now he gets what he wants.
The scene has pissed many people off. People feel the show is yet another example of that evil, barbaric thing called homosexuality being forced down people's throats. It's part of the evil gay agenda or whatever, trying to...make homosexuality acceptable. First off, there's no graphic gay sex scene. They kiss and the show moves to the next scene. Secondly, Joe is smart but he's also an unlikable sociopathic douche. I really doubt the show was trying to use his character to say "Hey look, here's an example of how cool gay people are." Lastly, the scene isn't about homosexuality. There's no indication that Joe is gay on the show and that scene changes nothing.
The scene was no more intimate than a scene in the first episode when Joe has sex with a woman named Cameron. So if you're going to argue that the scene with Travis means Joe likes guys, then the scene with Cameron must mean Joe likes girls as well. So by that logic, he's bisexual, not homosexual.
But I don't think he's bisexual either. I don't think there was any sexual attraction going on in either scene. Joe had sex with Cameron to get her to ditch school and work for him. He kissed Travis to get Lulu to call off the deal. The point of the scene wasn't to say anything about homosexuality. It was to show how Joe will do literally anything to get what he wants, including make out with a guy he barely knows. Joe doesn't use sex for any kind of intimate pleasure. He uses sex to manipulate people and get what he wants. To me, I'm guessing Joe is asexual. At the very least, there's no true evidence to suggest he's gay or straight, since I've never felt like he's actually felt sexually attracted to anyone on the show. Like I said, he uses sex as a weapon to manipulate people. Of course, that's not to suggest that asexuals are sociopaths, but I think Joe is both.
I find the controversy humorous because of how irrelevant gender actually is in that scene. Lulu could have been a male investor named Louis who annoyed Joe. Joe would have tried to screw things up by kissing his wife and thus the same result would have happened. Similarly, Joe could have been a female character who was annoyed by Lulu and screws things up by kissing Lulu's husband, Travis. The dynamics of the scene aren't altered by change in gender.
In a lot of ways, Joe is like a male version of the classic femme fatale character. He seduces people to get his way. Lots of female characters do this and nobody cares, so it really says a lot when people freak out because they see an inversion of this common trope.
