Hood Girls and Homos: Sex and Class in Shameless

“Brother you gotta stop embarrassing yourself. Fiona’s a hood girl, not a debutant from Glencoe. It’s painful man, you always askin’ her on lunches, takin’ a getaway? What’s next, co-ed bikini waxes and a spa day? When she says ‘fuck you’ she means ‘I like you.’ It’s hood girl speak, learn the language. All day, all she does is make decisions. Stop askin’ her what she needs—tell her.”

Steve, a rich boy turned professional car thief, can’t seem to win over Fiona Gallagher. After failing to convince Fiona to leave behind her household responsibilities and spend a night with him at a fancy hotel, Kev reminds him that Fiona is a “hood girl” and can’t be won like the rich girls he’s used to. Expensive gifts and luxuries, no matter how much she might want or need them (like the washing machine he buys when the old one breaks) only offend her. For a hood girl, accepting gifts is charity—and she will not lower herself that way for a partner. She refuses to be part of a power dynamic that puts her at her partner’s mercy or debt. She’s survived this long without him; she doesn’t need his help.

Being openly affectionate is dangerous for a hood girl. Fiona has been abandoned by both of her parents and the future of her siblings depends almost entirely on her ability to survive despite almost never having enough to make ends meet. To be attached (emotionally or otherwise) to an outsider who has no investment in her family’s wellbeing is dangerous. Yet Fiona still desires sex and love, and struggles with reconciling her romantic relationships with her primary priority: her family. As a result, Fiona is characterized as somewhat of a party girl, who prefers hookups to romance. Steve doesn’t understand the danger involved for Fiona in letting him in—because she has a lot more to lose. He doesn’t understand what makes a hood girl have to say “fuck you” when she really means “I like you.”

The Gallaghers are a white, working class family living in Chicago. Mom is long gone and dad is an absent, deadbeat alcoholic, leaving Fiona, 23 years old and the eldest Gallagher child, to care for Lip, Ian, Debbie, Karl, and Liam. Despite its often heavy content, the tone of Showtime’s Shameless is comedic. It addresses urban poverty in the United States in a way that could very easily be exploitative, but is instead sympathetic. Unlike other TV programs (see Honey Boo Boo) that frame working class (and particularly Southern) life in a way that emphasizes difference so that viewers can laugh at their white trash antics, we are supposed to see a bit of ourselves in Shameless. The Gallaghers are fucked up, but in a way we are meant to relate to. After all, the majority of Americans do not enjoy the cushy middle class lifestyle of other family dramas along the lines of Modern Family. In many ways, we are the Gallaghers. Well, that would be true if the show managed to deal critically with race, which it skillfully avoids.

Still, Shameless offers an opportunity to examine how we think about sexuality in terms of socioeconomic class. As we’ve seen with Fiona, both her sexuality and the actual sex acts she engages in are influenced by her class—by being a “hood girl.” That tension underlies all of her relationships on the show. In season two, her friend encourages her to take on an older man as a sort of “sugar daddy” who will take her out and provide for her in exchange for her looking good on his arm and stroking his ego. She feels compelled to lie about her background in order to seem more presentable, leading to an embarrassing confrontation. In a later season, she begins dating her boss. While Fiona’s experiences of sexuality and class almost always revolve around power and money, Ian’s do not, or if they do, they do in very different ways.

Ian is (so far) the only gay Gallagher and seemingly the more obvious candidate for an analysis of sexuality in Shameless. Although he begins the series in an affair with his employer, owner of a corner store and a married man, Ian eventually ends up in a relationship with Mickey, the neighborhood punk from the well-known “bad family” in a neighborhood of “bad families.” Although Kash (Ian’s employer) is perhaps better off than the Gallagher family, I would still categorize him as working class. His store, located in the same “bad” neighborhood in which the show takes place, is frequently stolen from and he expresses economic insecurity to Ian multiple times. Ian’s relationship with Kash ends early in the show, and Mickey becomes Ian’s primary love interest for the rest of the show.

 Mickey: Why the fuck you actin’ like a girl?

Ian: You’re sick of livin’ a lie, aren’t you?

Mickey: I’m not lying to you.

Ian: Everyone else?

Mickey: Who gives a shit about everybody else? What fuckin’ difference does it make if I lie to them?

Ian: Because you’re not free.

Mickey: Ian, what you and I have makes me free. Not what these assholes know.

Ian and Mickey have what is arguably the most complicated relationship on the show. On and off again since the very first season, the two lovers fight, fuck, and make up over and over again. Their sex and arguments often have violent undertones (they did, after all, have sex for the first time in the middle of a brawl after Ian broke into Mickey’s house). Their relationship is passionate, perhaps in a way that Ian and Kash’s was not, but far from stable. Although their relationship does have a power dynamic, it is unlike Fiona’s relationships in that it is not a classed one. They are often very aggressive with each other, both verbally and physically, perhaps in an attempt to reestablish their masculinity in a social context where losing masculine power (and the privilege that comes with it) is dangerous. To be both gay and poor is a precarious social position—their performance of hyper masculinity, especially in romantic or sexual contexts where lovers might be tender with each other—is an effort to make the meeting of their class and sexuality smoother.

Despite both being gay, white, and working class, they have very different experiences of their own sexuality. Ian’s coming out was relatively painless. While Lip initially gave him shit for it (as family is liable to do when they see an opportunity to embarrass you), none of the Gallagher family was ever all that concerned with Ian’s sexuality or relationships. Something more than benign neglect but less than pride, they see Ian’s sexuality as not much different different from their own. This is an interesting way to handle Ian’s gayness. Would the show be any different if instead of seeming blind to Ian’s difference, the family embraced and acknowledged it? There is something to be said about avoiding making Ian’s storyline a token gay story, but there is also value in exploring how his sexuality informs his life in aspects other than sex and relationships. There is a difference between treating Ian differently because of his sexuality and recognizing that his sexuality is something that differentiates his experiences from those of his family.

Mickey’s coming out, on the other hand, was much more dramatic and painful, providing an alternate example of how similar working class families deal with sexuality. At the after-party of his son’s christening, Mickey asks Ian to leave in order to avoid conflict with his wife and family. Offended, Ian says that he’s tired of keeping their relationship a secret and pushes Mickey to come out to everyone at the bar or he will end the relationship. Angry at Ian but unwilling to lose him, Mickey speaks right as Ian is about to walk out:

 Hey, ‘scuze me. I’d like everybody’s attention please. I just want everybody here to know, I’m fuckin’ gay. Big homo. Thought everybody should know that. [to Ian] You happy now?

Enraged, Mickey’s father lunges at him, starting a bar fight which is eventually broken up by police. Bloody and gasping, both handcuffed and bent over the hood of a police car, Mickey taunts his father, who is screaming slurs and insults at him:

 I been stayin’ at Ian’s since you been in the can, bitch. Guess what we been doin’ daddy? We been fuckin! [humps cop car] He gives it to me good and hard and I fuckin’ like it. Fuck you, I suck his dick and I fuckin’ love it

This scene perfectly embodies the messy, violent, and often absurd nature of the Milkovich family. Mickey’s reluctance to come out was out of more than a simple fear of what his father would think—he knew what his father thought, just as well as his father knew that he was gay. But to openly defy his authority (which is far more patriarchal in nature than in the Gallagher family) would incite violence. In other words, Mickey wouldn’t simply be disowned by coming out; he would very likely be killed. Mickey’s family might read as the typical working stereotype—violent, stupid, and intolerant—and indeed they are meant to. They are something of a foil for the dysfunctional but ultimately benevolent Gallagher family, two sides of the same coin of poverty in South Side Chicago.

This dichotomy of “bad poor” and “good poor” is nothing new. There is an American ideal that “good” poor will work hard and not exploit or take advantage of others. They are honest, hard-working, and never complain too loudly about their status. The Gallaghers are pretty solidly “good poor,” despite having their own rebellious and raunchy twist on the trope. The Milkoviches, however, are stereotypically “bad poor.” Undeserving, trashy, and morally deficient, the Milkoviches are a scapegoat for middle-class distaste for the poor. We can love the Gallaghers without issue because we are validated in our beliefs that there is a bad poor we are allowed to hate.

There is one aspect of working class sex in Shameless that tends to be dismissed because of its general problematic nature before it can be read as particularly classed. Rape, particularly of men, is trivialized on more than one occasion. For Frank Gallagher, who is raped more than once, it is seen as another genre of comic situations that he finds himself mixed up in. Also notable is the rape of Mickey by a prostitute, ordered by his father at gunpoint. Why do we need to tear down Frank and Mickey in such a sexualized way, and is this in some way classed? In Frank’s case, is it his punishment for being the absent father and deadbeat dad? Or is sexual violence against men simply not taken seriously in working class communities? I would say it’s a bit of both, as we are clearly meant to laugh at Frank rather than empathize with him, and the popular belief that men cannot be raped might find itself more at home in a class situation where men (with their access to higher paying, stable work) are crucial as providers. In this case, Frank is far from a provider to his struggling family, as he is quite literally fucking around instead of helping out, and his multiple instances of assault can be seen as a comic punishment for his failure to support the family, both emotionally and financially. Mickey is raped when his father finds out about his relationship with Ian and the gravity of this traumatic event (and the resulting child and marriage to his rapist) is never fully acknowledged in the show. Ian (and even Mickey) does not seem to understand what occurred as assault, as Ian asks Mickey if he is in love with the assailant he is being forced to marry. While not presented as comical, Mickey’s rape is not given much weight despite being a significant plot point in his life.

Shameless tells us not only that poor men can be raped without consequence, but that this is a typical result of bad behavior. Even when rape is a clearly negative event (as in Mickey’s case), it is not afforded the traumatic, life-changing status that it often is for women. In other words, Mickey is not given space to process or react to his experience. It is his punishment for being gay and poor in a bad family.

Shameless, a show that is almost entirely about experiences of class, is not afraid of exploring, exploiting, and using sex in its plot. As a result, it is rich with assumptions about the meeting of class and sexuality: lower class people are promiscuous and their relationships have particular power dynamics; poor sex can be gay, but it is always about power, and to some extent, money. These assumptions, like any we encounter in media, should be analyzed and critiqued for the work they do in creating and reinforcing ideas about what it means to be working class (specifically, working class and white) in the U.S. While being richly problematic, perhaps Shameless seems more down to earth and effortlessly funny because gives us a more human representation of working class life than we’re used to.

Header image credit: Den of Geek