“We really don’t have to watch it.”
“Baby, I want to watch it,” my girlfriend tells me. “Really. I want to understand.”
“Okay,” I say, scanning her face for some flicker of doubt or revulsion. “If you’re sure.”
“I’m sure.”
I take a deep breath and press play on Season Three, Episode Thirteen of NBC’s Emmy Award-winning sitcom Frasier (1993-2004).
The episode, “Moon Dance,” is the one where Niles takes Daphne to the ball. It opens in the recording studio of radio psychiatrist and buffoon Frasier Crane, whom the show Frasier is theoretically “about.” Frasier is engaging in patronizing banter with one of his callers. His producer Roz is also there; they have a merrily asexual, bantering dynamic (banter is a big word for the show Frasier). It’s all perfectly fine.
“Ignore this bit,” I tell my girlfriend. “We can skip past it, if you want.”
“Calm down and let me watch,” she says. I begin to bite my thumbnail.
The next scene opens in the froufrou apartment Frasier shares with his ex-cop father, Martin; Martin’s eccentrically English physical therapist, Daphne Moon; and Eddie, the comedic dog. Martin and Daphne do what feels like half an hour’s worth of dog comedy. The waiting is excruciating. Eventually, Frasier’s doorbell rings. Daphne opens it. In steps a man with a knobbly jaw, a slightly-too-large double-breasted suit and sickly blond hair combed so flat it looks painted on. “Oh, hello, Dr. Crane,” says Daphne. “I appreciate the false cheer, Daphne,” the man says, in an unaccountably transatlantic accent. “But I’m sure you’ve seen this?” He holds up a newspaper. “Today’s society page?”
I exhale. It’s him. Niles Crane has come.
●
I first saw Frasier in the summer of 2019. At the time, I was trying to exhibit Normal Gender—by which I mean, I told people I was nonbinary, but also kept assuring them I would never do anything about it (“Of course I don’t want to go on T,” I said, “I sing soprano in choir”). I was also reading lots of novels about sad undersexed dying priests, as people with normal relationships to masculinity famously love to do. I spent that summer in Oxford researching a tiny medieval manuscript full of love poems, and it was very hot, and I was very lonely. All this put me in a susceptible state. I am sure that the friend who showed me the amusing nineties sitcom Frasier in her dorm room one afternoon was not trying to irrevocably alter my brain chemistry. That is, however, what happened.
I latched onto Niles instantly. His twitchiness, his aspirated whs (actor David Hyde Pierce pronounces the word “what” like “hwæt”), a certain consumptive quality (less Tiny Tim, more Miss Havisham), his flicks of the wrist, his tremors… Every Niles line sounds like the last words of an eighteenth-century French femme de chambre spoken as the guillotine’s about to fall. Everything in Niles’s world is immensely magnified, and often curiously distorted. He can make silently ironing trousers into an operetta. He can make heterosexuality feel aberrant—feel, somehow, distinctly queer.
After watching that first episode (the pilot, I think, though I can’t remember anything other than Niles’s skinny shoulders in his big double-breasted suit), I proceeded to gorge on Frasier in private, screencapping Niles one-liners frantically, showing no one. The behavior felt familiar. When I was a teenager, there were characters in the shows I liked—almost all male, almost all angular and clever, almost all typified, I am sorry to say, by Benedict Cumberbatch’s Sherlock—whom I would clutch close to me and brood over after school. If anyone spoke their names aloud, I would feel violated, almost skinned. They were too proximate to me. They were too much of the stuff out of which I was trying to build myself.
It was unnerving to look at Niles and feel those same prickings, at my adult age. I was not on Tumblr anymore. I was done with trying to manufacture a self on the basis of teenage fan art of boys kissing.
Still, I kept watching. I kept watching because Frasier’s stories were silly, and I was hungry for silliness. But I also kept watching because I felt burdened by a need to figure out exactly what kind of man Niles Crane was—and why that kind of man made me feel so strangely, electrically split open.
●
Being a man is like making a soufflé: there are so many ways to fail at it. You can overdo it, becoming so butch that you enter the territory of camp; you can underdo it, drooping into effeteness; you can be a malewife; you can be impotent; you can be a mummy’s boy; you can fail at becoming whatever your father dreamed you’d be. The main cast of Succession alone, with the debatable exception of Logan, offers up a veritable gallery of differently failed and failing men. I am loath to come across as the boy version of America Ferrera’s “it is literally impossible to be a woman” monologue from the Barbie movie, but it’s true: maleness is a volatile, flighty, highly contingent thing, a club with elaborate hazing rituals and countless opportunities to flunk out.
I am not moved by just any old Failed Man, however. My tastes are refined and particular. Let me hazard a definition: there’s a genre of men who are striving so much to be good, but they’re after a goodness their world can’t accommodate, and so they suffer, and that suffering deforms them into not-quite-men.
These men are honorable, devoted, virtuous, often in a manner that hearkens back to now-defunct models of masculinity—the chivalric knight, the gentleman scholar, the desert monk. I’m often struck by the fact that modern reimaginings of medieval masculinity, in particular, emphasize martial might—think of Jacob Chansley, the “QAnon Shaman,” in a pseudo-Viking helmet at the Capitol insurrection, or the rioters wearing Templar crosses at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville. Such white-nationalist fetishists of crusader manhood might get a nasty shock if they ever read, say, Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, in which the titular knight spends most of his time fainting, weeping and getting penetrated by Cupid’s arrows. It is toward this kind of gentil masculinity, not the butch TV Viking, that my failed men gesture. Their anachronistic manhood evokes the theorist Heather Love’s analysis in Feeling Backward of the longstanding queer tendency to embrace “backwardness … in explorations of haunting and memory, and in stubborn attachments to lost objects.” Backwards-facing anachronism has always been a little… well… gay.
Importantly, I do not mean here to denote the “nice guy,” who merely thinks he’s being honorable, devoted, virtuous, etc., while actually nursing secret resentments against those thwarters—mostly women—who stand in the way of his manhood’s triumph. My kind of man does not identify the cause of his failures as external. He fears—he knows—that there is something amiss inside. He lives in the tension between being a good man, and not being good at being a man.
Despite his effeminacy, the Failed Man must always be textually cisgender, and almost always textually heterosexual (or asexual in a somehow unimpeachably heterosexual way). At the same time, he must exist primarily in homosocial settings, such that other men are available to pass judgment on his deficiencies. His affections for women are either structurally or emotionally unrealizable—he is, in effect, closetedly straight. He has faith in the nobility of institutions: the church, the navy, even the police. He wants these institutions to perceive and affirm his goodness. They never will. Examples of my kind of man include:
- Sergeant Howie, glittering blond sacrifice of The Wicker Man (1973), gritting his teeth as he says he doesn’t “believe in it… before marriage,” squashing his desire so deep down inside himself that it compacts into a diamond;
- Billy Budd, too pretty to live, in Herman Melville’s posthumously published novella of the same name (sailors are fertile ground here: see also Midshipman Hollom in the 2003 nautical epic Master and Commander, at whose funeral Captain Aubrey memorably says, “the simple truth is not all of us become the men we once hoped we might be”);
- Almost any priest who might be described as “sickly,” like the nosebleeder Lucas in Hlynur Pálmason’s 2022 film Godland;
- The virgin knights Sir Percival and Sir Galahad in Arthurian Grail quest narratives;
- Jesus Christ, as presented in the Gospel of Luke, but not as he appears in the Gospel of John, where he cuts a more severe, remote figure;
And, of course, shiningly, paradigmatically, Niles Crane. He’s the nexus of my understanding of this whole category. Particularly in the show’s early seasons, Niles—runty little brother, un-gay divorcé, sufferer of allergies and wiper of coffee tables—is almost more failure than man. And, as a devout psychotherapist, I imagine he would be delighted by my illustrating this by way of a case study.
●
In “Moon Dance,” Niles fails almost as soon as he steps on screen. The society page that he brandishes at Daphne shows his nearly ex-wife Maris—a human Borzoi who never actually appears on the show—on the arm of some smarmy rich hunk. Seconds in, and Niles has already been rendered that most cringing, smooth-crotched antonym of healthy masculinity: the cuck. Disaster! Who will he take to the hottest event for Seattle’s elite, the Snow Ball?
Enter Daphne—beautiful, batty, possessed of a Mancunian accent that, to Jane Leeves’s credit, does improve fractionally with time. Niles has been infatuated with Daphne since first he laid eyes on her. For seven seasons, he loves her in the manner of a knight errant in a fourteenth-century romance: with a fervor that almost kills him, and with absolutely no hope of consummation. There’s a reason we often see Niles absorbed in cod-medieval role-play—sword-fighting for his wife’s love in Season Two, doing Cyrano de Bergerac (replete with ruffles) in Season Five for Halloween. He loves to play the preux chevalier. For the story of the knight and his lady to work, the knight must perform a strange psychic operation, a kind of willful forgetting. He has to pretend that he does not, in all material ways, have power over the lady’s body, property and sexual autonomy by virtue of his maleness, and sink himself in the fantasy of living and dying by her word. To be a courtly lover is to dream yourself disenfranchised and unmanned.
Frasier, I should note here, is my favorite show, but I have long refused to rewatch it past Season Seven. The reason is that the later seasons’ consummation of Niles’s love for Daphne struck me, on first watch, as perverse. It’s the undoing of what he is, I thought. They wrote a man whose body was strung tight with yearning, and then they imagined that he could credibly embrace a woman whom he loves? And who loves him back? And that I would watch it, with my human eyes? I don’t think so! I am not a dupe!
But, for the moment, we are still in Season Three: Niles is still fruitlessly yearning, Daphne is still blithely, unwittingly beloved. She’d love to go to the ball with him, she announces. It’ll be such fun! She can even teach him ballroom dancing! Niles, insane with skin-hunger, agrees. After coaxing him out of his awkwardness, Daphne takes him through various dance styles that amount to different postures of masculinity. She shows him how to drape his body over hers in a louche, slow waltz; how to flaunt energy and urgency in a samba. This is key: in the Niles Crane school of masculinity, a beautiful woman always has to teach you how to be her man.
At the ball, Niles is cucked again. A high-society couple croons at him about his separation from Maris, how they’ve seen her out and about with this or that heir apparent. Niles goes all forlorn, like a Tennessee Williams heroine watching someone trample over her party dress. “Everyone,” he says, “seems to have this idea that while Maris is out living the high life, I’m sitting at home, crushed and lonely” (regular viewers will recognize “sitting at home, crushed and lonely” as Niles’s resting state). Daphne decides to give the snobs a show. A tango comes on.
Niles frets; she never taught him this one. It’s alright, Daphne tells him—he just has to feel his way into it. Possibly knowing he can’t do this intuitively, she paints him a picture. He’s to imagine himself as an “Argentine slum-dweller,” poor, desperate, incandescent with passion. Niles gets into it, responding in an unforgivable accent. Here, in order to assume leading-man masculinity, Niles has to be coached through an entire cultural fantasia. Becoming Daphne’s man literally involves putting on a silly voice. Watching this scene now makes Daphne’s assurance at the beginning of the dance—“[the tango’s] perfect for you”—feel like a cruel joke.
But Niles’s poor performance looses something true in him. “Daphne, I adore you,” he bursts out, before clapping his hand over his mouth—this was not in the script. “I adore you too,” she says. He can’t believe it. Is this real? Could he actually be living out the story of reciprocal desire that customarily belongs only to other men (and, occasionally, other Marises)? Seemingly, yes. Daphne piles on more endearments; they whirl about the room; they kiss! Ecstasy! It’s only when they get back to their seats that she delivers the killing blow: “I knew you were a good dancer, but I had no idea you were such a good actor!”
It hits him immediately. Just when he thought he was revealing the meat of himself to Daphne, she was admiring the shininess of what she perceived to be his costumed adoration. This is Niles’s tragedy. Even when he’s performing at his best—even when he says all the right words and does all the right moves—even when he performs so well he persuades himself he’s no longer performing—he still isn’t quite believable. Not as a lover, and, often, not as a man: a previous season’s episode shows his housekeeper Marta persistently calling him “Missy Crane,” about which Niles says only, “Marta has trouble with her pronouns” (don’t we all). Niles’s masculinity always feels a little too much like playing dress-up—a little too much like naïve drag.
●
I am familiar with feeling like my gender is an unsuccessful piece of costuming. I recognize this feeling now as dysphoria. Most trans people are assumed by a sizable chunk of society to be failing at several genders simultaneously: the transphobic narrative runs that, having failed out of the gender assigned to you at birth, you are presently failing to convince in the gender you’re living as. This rhetoric is especially virulent for trans women, whose failure to be born cisgender is often framed as a danger to womanhood writ large, but it exists for transmasculine people too. I suspect that, because maleness under patriarchy is the ur-gender, the gold standard against which other genders are measured (Eve, after all, being nothing but an offshoot from Adam’s rib), both trans women and trans men are construed as “failed men” first and foremost. Even within trans communities, we talk about whether we do or do not “pass” in our assumed gender identities—language that contains within it the shadow possibility of flunking the gender exam.
I know none of this is real. I can repeat the affirmations to myself over and over. But the question of whether I am man enough, or boy enough, or able-to-convincingly-go-to-the-men’s-bathroom enough, has wriggled into my brain and lodged there like a polyp.
How strange, then, to see a cis man wrestling with those same questions over a decade’s worth of television. How strangely consoling. It took me several rewatches to realize that what compelled me about Niles was not—as with my teenage obsessions—the prospect of a rigid, cerebral masculinity I could model myself on, but rather, the feeling of finding companionship in getting masculinity wrong. Over the years I have known Niles Crane, I have shuffled and blundered toward a gender identification and presentation closer to his—less straightforwardly nonbinary, more “vitiated ex-husband trying his best.” This is not because Niles’s masculinity is aspirational. It’s because, from Niles and other fictional failed men, as well as from the trans people around me who have strayed their way toward their present identities, I have come to understand that you are still allowed to try to be a man, even if you’re not very good at it. Watching Niles lose to his brother, or move into his sad little bachelor studio after his divorce, or fumble Daphne dozens and dozens of times, feels like friendly confirmation that masculinity is hard to master, even for those to the manor born. It’s a slippery art: you can fail at it repeatedly, and still find yourself not quite hitting the mark.
But Niles’s story is also confirmation that failure isn’t a death sentence. “Under certain circumstances,” writes the queer theorist Jack Halberstam, “failing, losing, forgetting, unmaking, undoing, unbecoming, not knowing may in fact offer more creative, more cooperative, more surprising ways of being in the world.” More cooperative, more surprising: this is certainly true of later-season Niles, who becomes, by increments, gentler and kinder, a better friend and brother, than he was at the series’ beginning. And, crucially, Niles is held by those around him through every one of his failures. True, his story diverges significantly from that of many trans people in that those around him are, for the most part, his nuclear family. Nonetheless, if Frasier has a message, beyond “do not ever try to hold a dinner party,” it’s that failure does not have to mean being ejected from the bonds of community—or of love.
●
Four years on from my first encounter with Niles, I am watching Frasier with my girlfriend for the first time. It’s one of many firsts with her—this is my first time trying to be anyone’s boyfriend, for example, and I want desperately to do a good job of it. Showing her Frasier is part of that project. Like Niles in “Moon Dance,” I sometimes find myself presenting her with different versions of masculinity, different poses I might assume, as if to say: Like this? Like this? With Frasier, I seem to have hit on a good one, because at the end of “Moon Dance,” she grins at me. “It makes so much sense,” she says, “your Niles thing.” It feels nice to be made sense of in this way, to know that my affinity is legible. A little like getting a good grade on my end-of-year gender experiment. Except that this time, the person holding my masculinity up to the light is also trans—also trying, also erring, closer to a collaborator than an examiner.
Later, when we go to bed, I lie in the dark thinking about whether we’ll still be watching Frasier months from now—whether we’ll be watching it in the summer, when I’m scheduled to get top surgery. It would be good, I think, to lie immobile with drains in my chest, listening to my girlfriend tell me why she thinks Niles and Daphne are a T4T couple over the sound of thirty-year-old canned laughter. I wonder if maybe this time we’ll watch all the way through to the later seasons, the ones where, having failed out of one marriage and another engagement, Niles finally confesses to Daphne, and Daphne loves him back. The ones where he’s happy.
Image credit: David Hyde Pierce as Niles Crane in NBC’s Frasier, 1999-2000, directed by Pamela Fryman. United Archives GmbH / Alamy Stock Photo.
“We really don’t have to watch it.”
“Baby, I want to watch it,” my girlfriend tells me. “Really. I want to understand.”
“Okay,” I say, scanning her face for some flicker of doubt or revulsion. “If you’re sure.”
“I’m sure.”
I take a deep breath and press play on Season Three, Episode Thirteen of NBC’s Emmy Award-winning sitcom Frasier (1993-2004).
The episode, “Moon Dance,” is the one where Niles takes Daphne to the ball. It opens in the recording studio of radio psychiatrist and buffoon Frasier Crane, whom the show Frasier is theoretically “about.” Frasier is engaging in patronizing banter with one of his callers. His producer Roz is also there; they have a merrily asexual, bantering dynamic (banter is a big word for the show Frasier). It’s all perfectly fine.
“Ignore this bit,” I tell my girlfriend. “We can skip past it, if you want.”
“Calm down and let me watch,” she says. I begin to bite my thumbnail.
The next scene opens in the froufrou apartment Frasier shares with his ex-cop father, Martin; Martin’s eccentrically English physical therapist, Daphne Moon; and Eddie, the comedic dog. Martin and Daphne do what feels like half an hour’s worth of dog comedy. The waiting is excruciating. Eventually, Frasier’s doorbell rings. Daphne opens it. In steps a man with a knobbly jaw, a slightly-too-large double-breasted suit and sickly blond hair combed so flat it looks painted on. “Oh, hello, Dr. Crane,” says Daphne. “I appreciate the false cheer, Daphne,” the man says, in an unaccountably transatlantic accent. “But I’m sure you’ve seen this?” He holds up a newspaper. “Today’s society page?”
I exhale. It’s him. Niles Crane has come.
●
I first saw Frasier in the summer of 2019. At the time, I was trying to exhibit Normal Gender—by which I mean, I told people I was nonbinary, but also kept assuring them I would never do anything about it (“Of course I don’t want to go on T,” I said, “I sing soprano in choir”). I was also reading lots of novels about sad undersexed dying priests, as people with normal relationships to masculinity famously love to do. I spent that summer in Oxford researching a tiny medieval manuscript full of love poems, and it was very hot, and I was very lonely. All this put me in a susceptible state. I am sure that the friend who showed me the amusing nineties sitcom Frasier in her dorm room one afternoon was not trying to irrevocably alter my brain chemistry. That is, however, what happened.
I latched onto Niles instantly. His twitchiness, his aspirated whs (actor David Hyde Pierce pronounces the word “what” like “hwæt”), a certain consumptive quality (less Tiny Tim, more Miss Havisham), his flicks of the wrist, his tremors… Every Niles line sounds like the last words of an eighteenth-century French femme de chambre spoken as the guillotine’s about to fall. Everything in Niles’s world is immensely magnified, and often curiously distorted. He can make silently ironing trousers into an operetta. He can make heterosexuality feel aberrant—feel, somehow, distinctly queer.
After watching that first episode (the pilot, I think, though I can’t remember anything other than Niles’s skinny shoulders in his big double-breasted suit), I proceeded to gorge on Frasier in private, screencapping Niles one-liners frantically, showing no one. The behavior felt familiar. When I was a teenager, there were characters in the shows I liked—almost all male, almost all angular and clever, almost all typified, I am sorry to say, by Benedict Cumberbatch’s Sherlock—whom I would clutch close to me and brood over after school. If anyone spoke their names aloud, I would feel violated, almost skinned. They were too proximate to me. They were too much of the stuff out of which I was trying to build myself.
It was unnerving to look at Niles and feel those same prickings, at my adult age. I was not on Tumblr anymore. I was done with trying to manufacture a self on the basis of teenage fan art of boys kissing.
Still, I kept watching. I kept watching because Frasier’s stories were silly, and I was hungry for silliness. But I also kept watching because I felt burdened by a need to figure out exactly what kind of man Niles Crane was—and why that kind of man made me feel so strangely, electrically split open.
●
Being a man is like making a soufflé: there are so many ways to fail at it. You can overdo it, becoming so butch that you enter the territory of camp; you can underdo it, drooping into effeteness; you can be a malewife; you can be impotent; you can be a mummy’s boy; you can fail at becoming whatever your father dreamed you’d be. The main cast of Succession alone, with the debatable exception of Logan, offers up a veritable gallery of differently failed and failing men. I am loath to come across as the boy version of America Ferrera’s “it is literally impossible to be a woman” monologue from the Barbie movie, but it’s true: maleness is a volatile, flighty, highly contingent thing, a club with elaborate hazing rituals and countless opportunities to flunk out.
I am not moved by just any old Failed Man, however. My tastes are refined and particular. Let me hazard a definition: there’s a genre of men who are striving so much to be good, but they’re after a goodness their world can’t accommodate, and so they suffer, and that suffering deforms them into not-quite-men.
These men are honorable, devoted, virtuous, often in a manner that hearkens back to now-defunct models of masculinity—the chivalric knight, the gentleman scholar, the desert monk. I’m often struck by the fact that modern reimaginings of medieval masculinity, in particular, emphasize martial might—think of Jacob Chansley, the “QAnon Shaman,” in a pseudo-Viking helmet at the Capitol insurrection, or the rioters wearing Templar crosses at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville. Such white-nationalist fetishists of crusader manhood might get a nasty shock if they ever read, say, Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, in which the titular knight spends most of his time fainting, weeping and getting penetrated by Cupid’s arrows. It is toward this kind of gentil masculinity, not the butch TV Viking, that my failed men gesture. Their anachronistic manhood evokes the theorist Heather Love’s analysis in Feeling Backward of the longstanding queer tendency to embrace “backwardness … in explorations of haunting and memory, and in stubborn attachments to lost objects.” Backwards-facing anachronism has always been a little… well… gay.
Importantly, I do not mean here to denote the “nice guy,” who merely thinks he’s being honorable, devoted, virtuous, etc., while actually nursing secret resentments against those thwarters—mostly women—who stand in the way of his manhood’s triumph. My kind of man does not identify the cause of his failures as external. He fears—he knows—that there is something amiss inside. He lives in the tension between being a good man, and not being good at being a man.
Despite his effeminacy, the Failed Man must always be textually cisgender, and almost always textually heterosexual (or asexual in a somehow unimpeachably heterosexual way). At the same time, he must exist primarily in homosocial settings, such that other men are available to pass judgment on his deficiencies. His affections for women are either structurally or emotionally unrealizable—he is, in effect, closetedly straight. He has faith in the nobility of institutions: the church, the navy, even the police. He wants these institutions to perceive and affirm his goodness. They never will. Examples of my kind of man include:
And, of course, shiningly, paradigmatically, Niles Crane. He’s the nexus of my understanding of this whole category. Particularly in the show’s early seasons, Niles—runty little brother, un-gay divorcé, sufferer of allergies and wiper of coffee tables—is almost more failure than man. And, as a devout psychotherapist, I imagine he would be delighted by my illustrating this by way of a case study.
●
In “Moon Dance,” Niles fails almost as soon as he steps on screen. The society page that he brandishes at Daphne shows his nearly ex-wife Maris—a human Borzoi who never actually appears on the show—on the arm of some smarmy rich hunk. Seconds in, and Niles has already been rendered that most cringing, smooth-crotched antonym of healthy masculinity: the cuck. Disaster! Who will he take to the hottest event for Seattle’s elite, the Snow Ball?
Enter Daphne—beautiful, batty, possessed of a Mancunian accent that, to Jane Leeves’s credit, does improve fractionally with time. Niles has been infatuated with Daphne since first he laid eyes on her. For seven seasons, he loves her in the manner of a knight errant in a fourteenth-century romance: with a fervor that almost kills him, and with absolutely no hope of consummation. There’s a reason we often see Niles absorbed in cod-medieval role-play—sword-fighting for his wife’s love in Season Two, doing Cyrano de Bergerac (replete with ruffles) in Season Five for Halloween. He loves to play the preux chevalier. For the story of the knight and his lady to work, the knight must perform a strange psychic operation, a kind of willful forgetting. He has to pretend that he does not, in all material ways, have power over the lady’s body, property and sexual autonomy by virtue of his maleness, and sink himself in the fantasy of living and dying by her word. To be a courtly lover is to dream yourself disenfranchised and unmanned.
Frasier, I should note here, is my favorite show, but I have long refused to rewatch it past Season Seven. The reason is that the later seasons’ consummation of Niles’s love for Daphne struck me, on first watch, as perverse. It’s the undoing of what he is, I thought. They wrote a man whose body was strung tight with yearning, and then they imagined that he could credibly embrace a woman whom he loves? And who loves him back? And that I would watch it, with my human eyes? I don’t think so! I am not a dupe!
But, for the moment, we are still in Season Three: Niles is still fruitlessly yearning, Daphne is still blithely, unwittingly beloved. She’d love to go to the ball with him, she announces. It’ll be such fun! She can even teach him ballroom dancing! Niles, insane with skin-hunger, agrees. After coaxing him out of his awkwardness, Daphne takes him through various dance styles that amount to different postures of masculinity. She shows him how to drape his body over hers in a louche, slow waltz; how to flaunt energy and urgency in a samba. This is key: in the Niles Crane school of masculinity, a beautiful woman always has to teach you how to be her man.
At the ball, Niles is cucked again. A high-society couple croons at him about his separation from Maris, how they’ve seen her out and about with this or that heir apparent. Niles goes all forlorn, like a Tennessee Williams heroine watching someone trample over her party dress. “Everyone,” he says, “seems to have this idea that while Maris is out living the high life, I’m sitting at home, crushed and lonely” (regular viewers will recognize “sitting at home, crushed and lonely” as Niles’s resting state). Daphne decides to give the snobs a show. A tango comes on.
Niles frets; she never taught him this one. It’s alright, Daphne tells him—he just has to feel his way into it. Possibly knowing he can’t do this intuitively, she paints him a picture. He’s to imagine himself as an “Argentine slum-dweller,” poor, desperate, incandescent with passion. Niles gets into it, responding in an unforgivable accent. Here, in order to assume leading-man masculinity, Niles has to be coached through an entire cultural fantasia. Becoming Daphne’s man literally involves putting on a silly voice. Watching this scene now makes Daphne’s assurance at the beginning of the dance—“[the tango’s] perfect for you”—feel like a cruel joke.
But Niles’s poor performance looses something true in him. “Daphne, I adore you,” he bursts out, before clapping his hand over his mouth—this was not in the script. “I adore you too,” she says. He can’t believe it. Is this real? Could he actually be living out the story of reciprocal desire that customarily belongs only to other men (and, occasionally, other Marises)? Seemingly, yes. Daphne piles on more endearments; they whirl about the room; they kiss! Ecstasy! It’s only when they get back to their seats that she delivers the killing blow: “I knew you were a good dancer, but I had no idea you were such a good actor!”
It hits him immediately. Just when he thought he was revealing the meat of himself to Daphne, she was admiring the shininess of what she perceived to be his costumed adoration. This is Niles’s tragedy. Even when he’s performing at his best—even when he says all the right words and does all the right moves—even when he performs so well he persuades himself he’s no longer performing—he still isn’t quite believable. Not as a lover, and, often, not as a man: a previous season’s episode shows his housekeeper Marta persistently calling him “Missy Crane,” about which Niles says only, “Marta has trouble with her pronouns” (don’t we all). Niles’s masculinity always feels a little too much like playing dress-up—a little too much like naïve drag.
●
I am familiar with feeling like my gender is an unsuccessful piece of costuming. I recognize this feeling now as dysphoria. Most trans people are assumed by a sizable chunk of society to be failing at several genders simultaneously: the transphobic narrative runs that, having failed out of the gender assigned to you at birth, you are presently failing to convince in the gender you’re living as. This rhetoric is especially virulent for trans women, whose failure to be born cisgender is often framed as a danger to womanhood writ large, but it exists for transmasculine people too. I suspect that, because maleness under patriarchy is the ur-gender, the gold standard against which other genders are measured (Eve, after all, being nothing but an offshoot from Adam’s rib), both trans women and trans men are construed as “failed men” first and foremost. Even within trans communities, we talk about whether we do or do not “pass” in our assumed gender identities—language that contains within it the shadow possibility of flunking the gender exam.
I know none of this is real. I can repeat the affirmations to myself over and over. But the question of whether I am man enough, or boy enough, or able-to-convincingly-go-to-the-men’s-bathroom enough, has wriggled into my brain and lodged there like a polyp.
How strange, then, to see a cis man wrestling with those same questions over a decade’s worth of television. How strangely consoling. It took me several rewatches to realize that what compelled me about Niles was not—as with my teenage obsessions—the prospect of a rigid, cerebral masculinity I could model myself on, but rather, the feeling of finding companionship in getting masculinity wrong. Over the years I have known Niles Crane, I have shuffled and blundered toward a gender identification and presentation closer to his—less straightforwardly nonbinary, more “vitiated ex-husband trying his best.” This is not because Niles’s masculinity is aspirational. It’s because, from Niles and other fictional failed men, as well as from the trans people around me who have strayed their way toward their present identities, I have come to understand that you are still allowed to try to be a man, even if you’re not very good at it. Watching Niles lose to his brother, or move into his sad little bachelor studio after his divorce, or fumble Daphne dozens and dozens of times, feels like friendly confirmation that masculinity is hard to master, even for those to the manor born. It’s a slippery art: you can fail at it repeatedly, and still find yourself not quite hitting the mark.
But Niles’s story is also confirmation that failure isn’t a death sentence. “Under certain circumstances,” writes the queer theorist Jack Halberstam, “failing, losing, forgetting, unmaking, undoing, unbecoming, not knowing may in fact offer more creative, more cooperative, more surprising ways of being in the world.” More cooperative, more surprising: this is certainly true of later-season Niles, who becomes, by increments, gentler and kinder, a better friend and brother, than he was at the series’ beginning. And, crucially, Niles is held by those around him through every one of his failures. True, his story diverges significantly from that of many trans people in that those around him are, for the most part, his nuclear family. Nonetheless, if Frasier has a message, beyond “do not ever try to hold a dinner party,” it’s that failure does not have to mean being ejected from the bonds of community—or of love.
●
Four years on from my first encounter with Niles, I am watching Frasier with my girlfriend for the first time. It’s one of many firsts with her—this is my first time trying to be anyone’s boyfriend, for example, and I want desperately to do a good job of it. Showing her Frasier is part of that project. Like Niles in “Moon Dance,” I sometimes find myself presenting her with different versions of masculinity, different poses I might assume, as if to say: Like this? Like this? With Frasier, I seem to have hit on a good one, because at the end of “Moon Dance,” she grins at me. “It makes so much sense,” she says, “your Niles thing.” It feels nice to be made sense of in this way, to know that my affinity is legible. A little like getting a good grade on my end-of-year gender experiment. Except that this time, the person holding my masculinity up to the light is also trans—also trying, also erring, closer to a collaborator than an examiner.
Later, when we go to bed, I lie in the dark thinking about whether we’ll still be watching Frasier months from now—whether we’ll be watching it in the summer, when I’m scheduled to get top surgery. It would be good, I think, to lie immobile with drains in my chest, listening to my girlfriend tell me why she thinks Niles and Daphne are a T4T couple over the sound of thirty-year-old canned laughter. I wonder if maybe this time we’ll watch all the way through to the later seasons, the ones where, having failed out of one marriage and another engagement, Niles finally confesses to Daphne, and Daphne loves him back. The ones where he’s happy.
Image credit: David Hyde Pierce as Niles Crane in NBC’s Frasier, 1999-2000, directed by Pamela Fryman. United Archives GmbH / Alamy Stock Photo.
If you liked this essay, you’ll love reading The Point in print.