Queerness, Closure, and the Finale Dance in It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia

In the season 13 finale of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Mac MacDonald (Rob McElhenny) discloses to his friend, Frank Reynolds (Danny Devito), his imagined experience of "coming out" as a gay man. A storm is raging inside of him, and it overwhelms any sense of safety and closure. The author suggests that, at first glance, the dance’s movement vocabularies and depictions of dancing bodies seem to re-assert conventional gender roles, whereby Mac’s public articulation of queerness is represented through images of traditional masculinity. The dance therefore implies that queer identity is made legible and accessible to an assumed heteronormative audience only if it conforms to dominant gendered ideals. The gendered performance therefore renders queer sexualities legible and implicitly connects mainstream acceptance with the performance of traditional masculinity. Closure, Carroll asserts, produces a “sense of finality” about the plot and characters, offering coherence for viewers through the tidy completion of narrative progress.