Enter a familiar scene. You, an unsuspecting victim to violent embarrassment, are trying to watch a show or movie with your parents. Maybe you didn’t Google the plot pre-screening, maybe you didn’t pick up on the sexual tension between characters, or maybe you thought you could beeline it to the bathroom before it all unfolds. But the lights dim down, dialogue pauses, and in what feels like a rush of unstoppable force, it’s there: the sex scene. 

There’s panting, there’s sweat, and subtitles like “*with passion*” and “*aggressively grunts*” flash by as you hide behind a pillow, avoiding eye contact with the woman you came out of 20-some years ago. Dad fumbles for the remote. Everyone grows violently quiet. For the most part, you’re all waiting for the moment to pass. 

Just as I, like many others, couldn’t have fathomed a more upsetting situation, the Modern Family theme song begins to blare through the speakers. I find myself wishing the sex scene would start playing again, because it would be astronomically better than what’s to come—enter my least favorite on-screen gay couple ever, Cam and Mitchell. 

One simple Google search of this white, cisgender male duo will suffice in proving how worshiped the pair has been throughout the show’s eleven-year run. Words like “groundbreaking” and “inclusive” are thrown around like confetti, each outlet offering their take on why CaMitchell's (the ugliest ship name I’ve ever seen) on-set love was epic. I’d sit through conversations with straight family members and friends, and the couple seemed to be a source of common ground to any queer relationship that was brought up—my own included. 

Was this the couple that queer people were being compared to? Were we being held to the golden standard that Cam and Mitchell’s on-screen relationship was creating? If so, I couldn’t help but think about how limiting it felt—this performative “woke” take on the nuclear family that had been given to the world wrapped in a bow. They were a “normal,” easy-to-swallow, lovable, and very quotable gay couple written for straight people to soak up and enjoy. 

Throughout the series, despite comedy-ridden obstacles and story arcs, they successfully get married, adopt a daughter from Vietnam, adopt a son from the same agency, live in a humongous suburban home, and end up moving to Missouri. Throw in a golden retriever, and they’re the archetypal American family unit, but make it (only a very slightly and kind of drowned, grayscale version) gay. 

Feminist researcher Susan Mayhew explains that the depiction of a gay couple doing typically heteronormative things (i.e. marrying, having children, and living a suburban life) inherently “upholds and sustains them while promising the possibility of a demobilized gay constituency and a privatized, depoliticized gay culture.” This is precisely my issue with Cam and Mitchell and sets the scene for the hill I will most likely die on. 

I’d be remiss not to acknowledge that, yes, an on-screen gay couple being featured on a daytime ABC sitcom did a lot for representation and normalization of queer couples and families in America at it’s 2009 premiere. I’ll also add that Jesse Tyler Ferguson and Eric Stonestreet play lovable characters. Despite their validity as an on-screen queer couple, there is simply nothing groundbreaking about this relationship that makes it worthy of the amount of received praise and recognition. Start with the fact that only one of them (Ferguson) is actually queer in real life.

This is not to say that if you like Cam and Mitchell’s on-screen relationship, you’re homophobic. I’m mainly concerned about the fact that this type—a still very valid and beautiful but very heteronormative type—of gay relationship is what’s being seen as “good” to straight-identifying viewers. Cam and Mitchell were laying a clear path for gays like them who wanted to be part of their own new “modern family.” The danger in this is that it creates an unsaid expectation that alienates real queer couples who don’t fit the domestic, “good” queer mold. 

All this in conjunction with the fact that they seem like an otherwise pretty boring pair, I feel safe in voicing how adamantly I feel that this is simply not the pinnacle of capturing a queer relationship today. Although a stepping stone for its time, everything about this couple is inherently performative. But, they’ll live on to be someone’s favorite sidedish micro-dose of queer culture for as long as Modern Family is streamable.