I.
“Sometimes offensive” warns the dictionary before providing the definition of “housewife.” Often defined as a married woman whose primary occupation is managing her own household. A hold on the house. A house to hold.
But it’s not just her. A woman alone is not a housewife. She is just a woman in a house. A housewife must care for others. Some definitions mention a family which implies children. Though children are not required of marriage or of a housewife. One may have a house. But not a housewife. One may have a wife. But not a house. One may be a wife. But not a housewife. The point is a house is required.
But what is a house? A trailer? An apartment? A shack? Are these houses? Like that game I played as a kid that predicts your future. A game for girls (or so they said). MASH. Not the TV show. Mansion. Apartment. Shack. House.
A mansion was the most desirable. The lifestyles of the rich and famous. Robin Leach’s voice. A parody of fancy. Like Goldie Hawn in Overboard, which I loved as a kid. Desired being the fabulous version of her from the beginning of the movie. Thong and all. I desired the yacht, the clothes, the shoes, the caviar (though I had no idea what caviar was at the time). I was just a kid in a small city in Indiana. We didn’t have caviar.
But I could also see the appeal of Kurt Russell when he pulls that muscle-tee together in front of his chest revealing both nipples and smirks at her. At her ridiculousness. We are supposed to see her as absurd. See him as working-class sex appeal. Overboard is a movie of extremes. Another way of Hollywood telling us we should love our shitty lives because they are more authentic. They sell us this idea so they can go buy yachts and mansions and caviar and maybe even thongs.
An apartment was the next option in the game. An apartment was not desirable in my childhood mind. I had never been inside an apartment. Poor people lived in apartments as far as I was concerned. Not that my family was rich. But we had a house, which meant we weren’t as bad off as others. This was a time in America where a family could afford to live off one income and still own a house. My father, who didn’t have a college degree, worked at a school bus factory and supported a family of five for my early childhood years.
Apartments were a foreign idea. I remember the school bus dropping off a girl (just one) to an apartment complex. Very few in my hometown. They reminded me of the motels we stayed in on our way to Florida: Knights Inn with those faux paintings of Italian gardens and purple bedspreads. Like Olive Garden for sleeping. No, an apartment was not what we dreamed of. Though as an adult, I have only ever lived in apartments. Never a house.
A shack. What was a shack? Like a love shack? I didn’t have a real context for a shack other than you didn’t want one in the game or probably in real life. A shack was a poor I didn’t know.
House was the final option. An okay option. Fine, I’ll take a house. Better than an apartment. Much better than a shack. But it wasn’t a mansion. A house was something I knew. What I lived in. A space for a family. For a wife. For a husband. For three kids. Me and my two sisters. My dad. My mom. Was she a housewife?
My mother didn’t officially work until I was around the age of ten. But she did work, of course. She raised us. She babysat other people’s kids for extra cash. She went to college. Nursing school. Night classes. She ran the house. Had a hold on the house. Yet it feels odd to call her a housewife. A term I never remember her saying.
What do you do? Oh, I’m a housewife. No, never.
Maybe no one ever asked. It was the 1980s to early 90s. It was the Midwest. There were assumptions made. Mothers were mothers. Mothers were in charge of the house. Work or not work. School or not school. Mothers were mothering.
The game MASH also included predictions for your future jobs, spouses, and cars. What would you drive? A burning question for any child. At the time all I drove was my bike. And the main job I imagined was being a writer or a teacher (I’ve become both).
I played with my sisters. We were young. I was the middle child. The only boy, which gave me special access to games and toys that boys weren’t supposed to play with. But because I was a boy my choices differed from theirs. Had to differ from theirs. Childhood is so often defined by gender. Especially in the 1980s. All the boys line up here. All the girls here. Boys don’t do that. Boys don’t let their wrists move like that. Boys don’t cry like that. Boys don’t sound like that. Boys don’t like other boys.
We were young, so our potential spouses were hardly ever real people. I mean they were real people but not people from our lives. Not people we knew. They were celebrities. I always picked Alyssa Milano from Who’s the Boss? My first celebrity beard. This would be an on-going trend for me. I would select a female celebrity as my answer to any crush question to prove my heterosexuality to my peers for years. The celebrity would shift with time and pop culture trends. This was my era of Alyssa Milano.
Of course, it was really Tony Danza (her daddy on the show) who I wanted to live in a mansion with. Who I wanted to drive around in a convertible top down. Tony Danza made me question my desires. He was a man. A manly man. Fit. Athletic. Italian. Oh and that hair. But in this show, he was basically a housewife. He took care of the family. He was the caregiver. The nurturer. Though he was being paid to do so. Basically, an employee. He did not have this role by default. It was a choice.
The 1980s loved to play with gender roles in film and television. Just not in real life. It was very cutting edge. Very let’s explore what it means to have women work. Think 9 to 5. Think Mr. Mom. Think Baby Boom. Think Who’s the Boss? A show that posed a question in its very title. There can only be one boss, right? And boss was still a very male-dominated term in the 1980s.
But the show posed other questions for me. Like episode five, season one when Tony replaces the actor for Angela’s commercial for “Machismo” shaving cream. This requires him to be in the shower nearly naked or as naked as you could be on network TV in the 1980s. We get abs. And arms. And pits. And tits. And they are all wet. Nearly every queer boy’s fantasy. Yes, even as a young child, I was convinced I’d buy anything this man was selling. Even shaving cream with a stupid name.
But he was more than sex appeal. He was a man who cooked. A man who cared. A man who looked very much like “a real man” of the era but did things others said were not for men. I wanted to cook. I wanted to care for others. For other men. For the Tonys of the world. I wanted to be a housewife.
II.
Historically, the British have also used the word “housewife” to mean a sewing kit given to soldiers to mend their uniforms. The needles could also be used to remove splinters. The name suggests this is something your wife should be doing. Your housewife. But she can’t. It’s war. So you have to be your own housewife.
It is also noted that many wounded soldiers after World War I took up needlework to pass the time. Not something commonly shown in war movies. Like where is the needlework WWI epic?
War is not something commonly connected to housewives (the people not the kits). Unless you count waiting. Housewives are known for their devotion to waiting. Like the image embedded in my head of a perfectly dressed woman taking a drag from a cigarette while anxiously looking out the kitchen window. A longing. A desire for more. A void so deep nothing will satisfy it.
There’s a sadness to the stories we tell about housewives, which over the years has become my weakness. Give me a story about a sad, complex, and bitter housewife, and I’ll give you all my money. These stories are typically rooted in the lore of midcentury America. One of my favorite eras. Not because life was better. It wasn’t. Especially for anyone seen as an outsider. Like queer people. People of color. Immigrants. And women. Horrible things happened. But I love the design. The fashion. And yes, even the hypocrisy of it all. It’s a façade. It’s layered. It’s complicated. It's very American.
These stories about housewives are also deeply rooted in whiteness with a good dose of financial privilege. Poor women cannot be sad, lonely housewives staring out of windows, dragging on cigarettes, imagining the life unlived. No, poor women have always had to work. To find a way. To survive. Their stories are different. And because white supremacy dominates our culture and institutions, more women of color have found themselves in those positions than white women.
The housewives I’m drawn to are best captured by Betty Draper (played by January Jones) in Mad Men. One of my all-time favorite TV shows. Here is a very white and very wealthy housewife. She is beautiful. Movie star beautiful. Grace Kelly beautiful. She is impeccably dressed at all times. She cares for the children. Mostly. Sort of. She is a cold mother. But still a mother. A mother who is a little uncomfortable with mothering. She cooks. Even though she does have help, it isn’t live-in help. She plans events. Perfect nights of cards with the couple down the street. Dinners for her husband’s work partners. Birthday parties for the children complete with heavily-poured cocktails for the adults. She has it all. A beautiful house. Money. And a husband who is more gorgeous than everyone else’s.
I highly respect how attractive Jon Hamm (who plays Don Draper) is and how it is used in the storylines of the show. He is one of my all-time celebrity crushes. Mad Men mentions Don’s good looks more than any other character on the show. Men mention it. Women mention it. It is vital to his character in a way we don’t often see in male characters. There is a recognition that an unattractive man would never get away with everything Don Draper gets away with in this show. This is demonstrated time and time again by the men around him. Pete. Harry. Duck. Lane. Looks matter. As they do with Betty.
Together, they create the perfect image to crack open the disfunction of the midcentury nuclear family. In many ways, Betty and Don are a lot alike, which isn’t completely obvious at first. They handle things very differently and are separated by the demands of their given genders, but both are attempting to follow the expectations of the era and finding themselves miserable. Both also have an obsession with being desired. Their daughter, Sally, points this out late in the series.
Betty stopped modeling and married Don and immediately had children so by the age of 28 (when the series begins), Betty already feels very alone and isolated by her choices. She’s done what she was told to do. What she thought she wanted. But now what?
For Don, he clings to the idea of the nuclear family that he longed to have as a kid and hopes it will make him feel like a real person. It doesn’t. In an early episode of the series, he leaves his daughter’s birthday party to go pick up her cake and doesn’t come back for hours. When he does, the party has ended. He’s overwhelmed by the life he’s created. He attempts to make up for this by bringing back a dog as a gift.
These are the housewife stories I’m drawn to. I long for the privileged sadness of Betty Draper. In a now famous sequence from season two, Betty begins to unravel after hosting a dinner party for Don’s work where she feels she’s been made the brunt of a joke, so she stays in her polka dot party dress for days. The image of her sitting on her bed with her tear-stained face in the puff of her dress has made for many a good meme. It serves as the perfect image of the troubled housewife of the era. There is an elegance and beauty even to her unraveling.
But there is almost always a safety net in her situation and in the situation of other wealthy white housewives of the era. Betty isn’t going to end up homeless on the street no matter what. And in many ways, she could do a lot more with her life, if she just made the choice. She’s partly upholding her own cage, which many white women have done throughout history and even to this day (see all the white women who voted for Trump not once but twice).
Betty finally does make an important choice in the final season by going to get her Master’s degree in psychology. This is upended by her lung cancer diagnosis, which AMC originally aired on Mother’s Day as if for an extra punch, yet it still serves as a strong progression for her character.
But it is the sadness and longing of the early seasons that appeal to me most. This idea of being devoted to keeping things nice and presentable. A home. Your own appearance. The ability to plan perfect events. Get all the details right. Then stand there in your gorgeous outfit with a wine glass in hand and find something to make you angry or upset. It’s not enough. It’s never enough.
I’ve done this. I’ve been that person. Though it lands different in this era. Lands different as a queer person in a same-sex couple. Feels less acceptable.
In many ways, I’ve channeled the anger I feel at the world and its expectations of gender and heteronormative behaviors through my own idea of this imagined housewife. There’s drama in it. There’s rage. A rage that often has unleashed within me without warning. Perhaps it is my own identities and expectations duking it out inside that makes me see a part of myself in these characters when in fact I am not like them at all.
I want to be allowed to be as bitter and angry as these housewives and as beautifully dressed (just with my own queer twist). I want to be as absurd as Betty slapping her neighbor right in the middle of the grocery store and just walking out. Leaving her cart. Or Betty, cigarette hanging between her lips, raising that gun to shoot at the neighbors doves in one of my favorite episodes from season one aptly titled “Shoot.”
But it doesn’t work that way for queers. Our anger has to come in other packages. Again, those damn expectations. I want the sadness of a housewife like Betty that makes others pay attention. Makes them give all their money just to hear your story. Oh, to be a wealthy white housewife of 1960’s America.
III.
In 2008, five years into my relationship with my now husband, the queer singer-songwriter Jay Brannan released a song called “Housewife,” which includes the lyrics “I want to be a housewife / what’s so wrong with that.” I was immediately in love.
The song goes on to reclaim tasks often associated with housewives like cleaning and cooking and having babies, but it begins in a clearly queer way by talking of two boys together in bed: “The smell of sweat and leather / a kinky greeting card.” This isn’t just placing a queer couple into a heteronormative narrative. There’s a queering of it that very much mirrored my own existence.
Here was a queer man writing about housewives in a way I had never seen before, which connected to my own desires. Underneath my love of the sad, troubled housewife of midcentury America, I also truly wanted to fill that role more happily. As in without the window gazing and cigarette drag.
The various feminist movements of the 20th and now 21st centuries have done powerful things for the advancement of women, but while there has been a push for women to do “what men do,” the opposite still often remains taboo. In this way, much of feminism still works within the patriarchy because it embraces those symbols and statuses. Like the suit. Women now commonly wear suits: a long-time symbol of masculine power. Think of how common they are for female politicians. In fact, women can now pretty much wear whatever they want and they should, but as a man, if I want to don a dress or skirt, it’s going to be an event. Trust me, I do it sometimes.
I love genderfluid clothing. I love skirts and kaftans. But I love them on my body. My male body. My queer body. I love that image. That combination that brings together the different parts of me. Of who I am. How I see myself. How I see my own gender. It’s a performance. It always has been. And the older I’ve gotten, the more I’ve embraced this side of me, which is helping tame that inner anger I’ve held onto for so long.
A few months ago, I stepped away from a work environment that had grown very toxic. It was an unwelcoming space that was affecting my own mental health. Up to this point, I had never quit a job when I didn’t have another one lined up. But things were not good, and with the support of my husband, we found a way to make it work for a while. I would take some time off and focus on my creative work. My writing. I would rely on my husband’s job and money to keep us afloat. Which meant, suddenly at the age of 40, I was basically a housewife.
Or was I? I am not a wife. I am a husband. But I do love to play with gendered terms within my relationship, though I also will not tolerate the who’s the man and who’s the woman? question I’ve been asked so many times by heterosexuals. Like seriously, stop doing this. It’s one of those things that only works when I’m talking with other queer people. For example, my husband and I often call each other lady. Of course, we also call our 17-year-old male dog lady as well. He really is a lady.
I also don’t have a house. Which feels vital to the role. I live in New York City, so I live in an apartment in a midcentury building which I’ve decorated in a midcentury modern style, of course. But still I found myself living my own version of a housewife. Or maybe I should say an Apartment-Husband? But that doesn’t have the same ring to it, now does it?
Part of me felt a little uncomfortable with the shift. It was strange at first to not be making any money. To be tied so completely to another person. Though we’ve been together almost 20 years at this point, so that tie is very strong. But strange gendered feelings did pop up, because we’ve all been conditioned to think them even if you’ve spent most of your life resisting them. A man not working, even in 2023, feels different culturally than a woman not working. Even though it shouldn’t. It’s absurd. If a husband can financially support their wife without question, why can’t my husband do the same for me?
To be honest, not much changed in our day to day other than having less money. I’ve always done most of the cleaning (though he does the laundry) and I do all the cooking. This is because I truly enjoy cooking. But now I could do it all with more flair. More drama. A few times I made elaborate midcentury dinners as if I was right out of the 1960s (but heavily modified as we are vegetarians). These dinners included a signature cocktail of the night. Like a Tom Collins, which young Sally Draper learns to make quite well. There was even a night with Flaming Alaska.
Overtime, I let those cultural norms and pressures slip away and I enjoyed being home. Having more time to take care of the space I so carefully decorated and designed. Taking more care of myself mentally and physically. But also devoting much of my time to my writing. I was working, but as any creative person knows, our culture does not support the creative lifestyle. It takes a lot of courage and discipline to set aside time to just be creative in modern day America.
My time as a “housewife” is waning as I will be returning to teaching in the fall. But over the last six months, there’s been days I’ve found myself looking out of my 24-story midcentury window in the kitchen like my imagined housewife. I stare down at all the rooftops while wearing one of my colorful kaftans or a beautifully printed pant. I look good. Put together. No cigarette, as I don’t smoke. Maybe just a wine glass or a gin and tonic or a gimlet, which I started drinking mostly because of Betty Draper. But there is a difference. I’m not longing for another life. I’m not empty or lonely. I’m not imagining the life unlived. Because I’ve lived. Truly lived. I’ve lived the life the game of MASH could never have predicted.
I want to thank Jeff Walt and the Desert Rat Residency for the space and time to write this essay.
The essay was originally published in Volume 13 of Defunkt Magazine.