The problem with SVU's hypothetical account of the crime, in this instance, is that the victim won’t accommodate his tale to theirs. When Olivia and Elliot finally catch up with the elusive Wesley at his apartment he is uncooperative, and denies he was raped. The detectives are incredulously confronting him with the “evidence” when his wife and daughter walk in. In this instant juxtaposition of a narrative of gay violence with a portrait of nuclear normativity, the detectives’ (and the audience’s) interpretation is thrown into fatal disarray (in the sort of entertaining plot twist that advances virtually every episode of SVU). This is the first transposition of the episode, from a sordid saga of homosexual, subcultural sex and violence to a drama of an ordinary family threatened — and I would argue that the combination is not coincidental. The connection is emphasized by an initial period of confusion when it seems that Wesley’s family might be endangered precisely by gay desire. When the detectives question him back at the station, there’s this exchange:
Wesley: “No one raped me.”
Elliot: “Then how do you explain the semen inside of you — was it consensual?”
Wesley: “I’m married, I’ve got a kid.”
Olivia: “Look, lots of people hit for both teams. Now either you were forced, or you weren’t.”
Wesley: “OK, I’m bisexual. Are we done?”
All the unmappable territories of marital (in)fidelity, sexual orientation, the closet, the sexual body, and consent converge here in a hermeneutic sinkhole that renders rape stubbornly indefinable in the binary terms that Olivia insists should characterize it. In her potent line, retaining the absolute opposition between forced and consensual sex dictates abandoning the one segregating desire into homo and hetero (not an insignificant maneuver given that this is our culture‚Äôs structuring premise, as Sedgwick conceives it). In evidence also is the potential boomerang effect of the vague ‚Äúlots of people‚Äù: when Olivia is the one who defends transgressive erotics (as she often is, the foil to her more conservative partner), there‚Äôs always the risk that her sympathy will be viewed as a subtle suggestion about her own sexuality. Olivia presses Wesley for the ‚Äútruth‚Äù with benevolent frustration that he won‚Äôt allow SVU to ‚Äúhelp‚Äù him, demonstrating an axiom of SVU‚Äôs investigative logics (and those of the culture at large, perhaps): people ‚Äî and television characters ‚Äî don‚Äôt often willingly offer up the verities of their desire; this knowledge can only be produced through vigilant observation and inquest. So, at this point in ‚ÄúSacrifice,‚Äù the figure of a family in crisis momentarily overlaps with the concurrent difficulties of delineating both desire (which appears mystifyingly bisexual rather than stably homosexual) and violence ‚Äî and hence also with the fissures in the supposedly rock solid reality of rape itself, the show‚Äôs ostensible raison d‚Äô?™tre (as Olivia expresses their dilemma: ‚Äúwithout a complaining witness [the rape] doesn‚Äôt exist‚Äù).
Much of this murkiness is conveniently cleared up, though, when there’s a break in the case: it turns out Wesley is a gay porn star. In what I’m identifying as the episode’s second transposition, another suspect confirms that their “victim” is “not gay... Wesley’s strictly gay for pay at 1500 bucks a bang,” and any exploration of homosexual (or even bisexual) desire, whether violent or consensual, quite effectively vanishes from the episode as the detectives wholeheartedly adopt this rather simplistic explanation. Thus, homosexuality as the episode’s framing perversion is displaced (quite baldly, I’d say) onto the commercialization and spectacularization of sexuality, the moral debate transferred from the peccadilloes of (married, closeted) homosexuals to those of pornographers. Whether Wesley is a closeted homo or a closeted porn star, however, the effects of the closet are still in force. The detectives aren’t surprised that Wesley refused to come clean, and Tutuola states the obvious: “a straight guy wouldn’t want the world to know he’s doing gay porn.” The SVU team’s own ambivalence about pornographic eroticism easily matches their tribulations policing homosexual desire. In a subsequent interview, Elliot tetchily reminds Wesley that “Pornography isn’t illegal. Making it isn’t illegal” (establishing that, in this episode of SVU, there isn’t any bona fide sex crime involved), but Wesley highlights the pique in his tone over the reassurance in his words when he responds, “I see the way you’re looking at me. I’m scum because I make money having sex.” Later, Alex goes to court to remove his daughter from her parents, on the grounds that “pornography is a form of legal prostitution. The minor’s physical, mental, and emotional welfare was corrupted... [by] exposing her to an environment of wanton sexual activity.” These attitudes are representative of how SVU’s narrative language is shaped by imperatives of normative containment as much as by the legal enforcement of sexuality, whether the deviance in question is homosexuality or another eminently substitutable threat to the conventional family.
