i've had so many people tell me the office is a straight show and parks and rec and community are gay shows, and i won't necessarily disagree, bc yeah, i honestly feel the same way. but i also think that that's interesting, bc i think in a lot of ways p&r and community aren't actually all that much more progressive than the office when it comes to lgbtq+ representation.
like, let's look at the gay characters in these shows. p&r has no long-term, narratively important queer characters as far as i remember. there were april's boyfriend and his boyfriend, craig, and those penguins. according to the wiki, jean ralphio was bi (?), which i didn't even remember. most of these are basically played for laughs—the closest any of these characters get to being a serious character is craig, who is only in the final few seasons and isn't all that major.
next, community. the dean's flamboyance is mostly played for laughs, his costumes and drag are always jokes, and, most relevantly, he's creepy with jeff. he touches him randomly and without consent, constantly flirts with him when jeff is a student and he's an administrator, he blackmails jeff into spending the day with him (studies in modern movement), and he moves into the condo next to jeff's (i think this is in history 101). i've sen this sort of thing called out for a lot of shows, most notably in glee, which is also a gay teacher being creepy to a student (albeit in a high school rather than a community college, which changes the ages), but never in community. there are some good things—i think s6ep4 "queer studies & advanced waxing" has a brilliant way of exploring tokenization and the ways labels don't always fit people's full experiences. the other instances of gay characters are fairly lackluster—they pull that thing where a character comes out at the very end of a show's run with chang, which i've always thought was sort of a cheap joke, and other characters are often called gay or implied to be gay by other characters (britta, troy and abed, frankie), but none of those characters end up being canonically queer in the show. troy and abed do have a relationship that many interpret as queer, however, which i feel warrants mentioning.
then there's the office, where we have oscar. oscar is confirmed to be gay fairly early in the show's run (s2ep13 "the secret"), then forced to come out in s3ep1 "gay witch hunt". characters are certainly weird to him about it, but the joke generally seems to be on the people making fun of him; for example, in "gay witch hunt", when michael kisses oscar, it's pretty clear that the audience is supposed to be solidly on oscar's side. there are also a few nice moments; one that stands out to me is the time darryl gets defensive against a homophobe when paired up with oscar in s9ep16 couples discount. of course, later they do the whole gay senator thing, which is a little annoying (the whole duplicitous gay conservative politician is kind of a tired trope, and there are a bunch of things in the senator that you could probably get hung up on), but overall i would maybe say that the office has better gay rep than p&r and community (i'd say it's almost definitely better than p&r).
anyway, this makes me wonder why others have told me that community is a gayer show, and i think this comes down to two big things, which are 1) progressivism and 2) assimilationism.
progressivism is a bigger deal when it comes to contrasting p&r and the office. p&r is a very progressive show; leslie knope is a very progressive person, and since she's the main character, the whole show follows that bent (most other characters are also progressive, with the notable exception of ron swanson). the office is not; it's humor is often more offensive and edgy (which i think can partially be drawn back to the facts that it started airing in 2005 rather than 2009) and it's not set in a government environment; the show as a whole isn't really based on politics, and it doesn't explore the characters' political views all that often. i think it's this progressivism and political focus that people connect with gayness in p&r.
for community, i think the main way you can contrast it with the office is by looking at the long-running gay characters. oscar is gay, but he basically fits the mold of a straight character who dates men (a la love, simon). he says himself that "Besides having sex with men, I would say the Finer Things Club is the gayest thing about me." he is rarely shown being romantically interested in men, and rarely does anything else that might identify him as gay. the dean, however, is flamboyant, dresses in drag, is constantly shown to be interested in men, and is generally seen as gay by other characters. i think this creates a different attitude about queerness within the show: community's more questionable (in my opinion, at least) portrayal of flamboyant and obvious queerness is more attractive than the office's portrayal of accepting assimilated queerness. (we could also talk about how troy and abed seem to be relatable for gay people, but that's a whole different post.)
anyway, this isn't meant to flame any of these shows for their gay rep. i just think the differences between the attitudes we have towards them kind of reveals what makes us see tv shows as gay, and especially where that diverges from 1) what would be expected and 2) what tv writers may be trying to do.
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