Youman Road Trip Analysis

In the episode “Road Trip” from “Falling in Love... with Chris and Greg,” Chris Vargas, a trans man, is more suited to forming queer critiques on various subjects and not conforming to social norms while Greg Youmans, a cis man, has many desires that fit homo- and heteronormative standards. Furthermore, the relationship between Vargas and Youmans is tenuous at best and appears liable to fall apart at any moment due to Youman’s ignorance and transphobia and the fact that it is not Vargas’s responsibility to constantly educate him.
In this episode, Youmans expresses several very homonormative desires and consistently ignores Vargas’s objections to these desires. Homonormativity is the result of neoliberalization and “market mainstreaming” of

Collective caretaking is the idea of love being democratic, publicized, and not competitive, so that everyone within a community takes partial responsibility for the loving and caring for each other person in the community. This is meant to remove love from the domestic, nationalistic, neoliberalized, and institutionalized form it too often takes. Unfortunately, though Vargas and Youmans’s bond is most certainly queer, it fails to meet this definition of collective caretaking. Youmans essentially wants to colonize Vargas’s body against his will by impregnating him, a very individualistic act that does not take into account Vargas’s personal discomforts surrounding having children at all, let alone birthing them. Additionally, even within the individualistic confines of their bond, Youmans hardly cares for Vargas at all. He consistently uses transphobic and ableist slurs and outdated language that clearly makes Vargas uncomfortable in addition to trying to make Vargas feel guilty for not wanting to get pregnant. He is very blunt when talking about Vargas and does not seem to be sensitive to his needs whatsoever, which hardly falls under the category of caretaking, either individualistic or