The second season of Looking, a drama about gay San Franciscans, opened in January this year. In the first episode Patrick, one of the three gay men around whom the show revolves, tells Dom: "Happiness, not in another place but this place...not for another hour, but this hour." They are in the woods, in a cabin that belongs to Lynn, whom Dom knows from work and is considering a relationship with. The Walt Whitman quote captures the show, and the gay weltanschauung, pretty aptly. After all, what else is there but the present moment?
We met the three friends - Patrick, Dom and Agustin - first when the show premiered last year. Patrick is properly the protagonist and it is through his eyes that the show refracts gay life in 21st-century San Francisco. This is the heyday of gay liberation, a time when the debate is moving steadily from the battle for equality to the specifics of gay life. It is great that even mainstream TV (Looking is an HBO product) is now capturing this change. The show is as devoid of political baggage as it is mindful of the craters still strewn across gay identity.
In the first episode of the current season, the friends run away from the city to spend a blissful weekend but the shadows of the past are present everywhere. Patrick whose affair with Richie ended with the close of Season 1 is yet to tell Dom and Agustin that he has started sleeping with Kevin, his boss. Dom, meanwhile, is raring to give Lynn a chance. It is from Agustin, the first season's enfant terrible, that we anticipate a degree of sanity this time. When he meets a socially conscious bear (gay slang for a chubby, hairy middle-aged man), we cross our fingers.
But really, the show works because, through its albeit limited two-season span, it has covered a whole lot of ground. Its first season tried to make a statement by showing the middle finger to breeder norms. (Breeder is a term of mild disparagement that gay people use for straight people.) In Season 1, being gay meant the men on the show had to attest to certain categories. They were promiscuous, confused, complaisant. It was difficult to know what they stood for, except for a steady refusal to stand for anything.
Of course, I love the show, even its earlier season. I love the way it empathises with its characters without judgment, and represents a slice of gay life that is both modern and aspirational. But also, I didn't entirely get Season 1. Any gay show must walk the fine line between being too mawkish (HIV, death and so on) and too hedonistic (meth, sex and so on). It is not easy to walk this line and the best of queer shows - Queer As Folk comes to mind - have started on one theme only to shift to the next.
Perhaps this need is a function of where the viewer himself is on the gay life cycle. If I were younger and still located myself in the bylanes of rapid, hot sex, I might have been happy with Looking. But by the end of Season 1, I wanted the show to speak to me at levels that were more profound than the categories it was restricting itself to.
So, it was a welcome relief that the makers of the show, led by Andrew Haigh, the director of the wonderful 2011 film, Weekend, moved on by the time Season 2 arrived. The shock of the utilitarian sex which was a theme connecting the first season has morphed into something more delicate - a desire on the part of the protagonists to find love - in this season.
We find Agustin battle his attraction for an HIV-positive man, and the act of sex itself reflects those anxieties. Even though Eddie's HIV is undetectable, his sero-positive status is a bridge that Agustin is yet to cross. Patrick is with Kevin but the viewer wants him to be with Richie, and hopes for a Season 3 so that those two can get back together. Dom is trying to find his feet after his friend Doris has begun a romantic relationship.
For each of the protagonists the very real problems of finding love and sustenance as gay men is now a life project, not something that can be brushed under the rubric of sex. The show still has the understated beauty that comes from shaping a life in the mould one deems fit, a remarkable gift given every gay man. At no point does it give in, a worry that gets the most tranquil of gays up in arms. But by enlarging the scope of what gayness means and how gay men can define it, Looking has made that search more diverse and on that count, much more attractive.
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