In Wilbert L. Cooper’s new memoir, The Black Shield, he tells two intertwining stories: the history of the city’s Black Shield Police Association, one of the country’s oldest Black policing organizations, and the multigenerational narrative of his own family, embedded in the police force. Both of his parents and sister are retired Black Cleveland cops, and on his mother’s side, there’s been a Cleveland cop in the family since 1950. In this book about race, policing, and power, Cooper examines the complex duality of the Black cop, what it was like for his parents to navigate an institution that was hostile to their own community, and, ultimately, what this all has meant for him.

This excerpt combines the prologue and a chapter focused on his mother’s beginnings in Cleveland’s police department. Two individuals mentioned spearheaded legal efforts in the 1970s to diversify the department: Fred Johnson, the association’s president who led a lawsuit over the department’s discriminatory hiring and promotion practices, and Jean Clayton, a policewoman and the organization’s secretary whose parallel lawsuit disbanded the segregated Women’s Bureau and integrated women into the department. Below, Cooper recounts how his mother, Gayle, walked through the door that they opened. But it was not without a struggle.

—Cheri Lucas Rowlands

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The gun was always there. I used to see it in flashes as Dad would get ready to leave the house. After he doused himself in spicy cologne and sliced a plastic comb through the waves of his jet-black Jheri curl, I would catch that 9-millimeter sliding between the small of his back and the belted waistband of his blue jeans. 

Mom had her own. She kept it in her purse. One of those big leather bags, the kind they show behind the counter at Dillard’s, with shiny metal clasps and countless compartments. Her gun would be in there with red lipstick, a double-sided compact mirror, and her bulky pager. I knew the gun was there because I sensed its heft whenever I’d have to move the bag off the kitchen table to do my homework. It felt like a bowling ball in a pillowcase.

Dad used to store his 9-millimeter above the fine china, on top of the large, baby-pink Victorian-style cabinet in our dining room. One time while he was sleeping, I climbed on top of the pink-velvet-upholstered chairs to get a good look at it through the scrollwork. When I came face-to-face with the gun, I was too intimidated to actually pick it up and play with it.

It took a few moments for me to work up the gumption to run my little fingers across the raised bumps of its grip. Then I touched the ridges of the slide and the smooth, cold, hard barrel from where bullets burst. And just that alone felt crazy to me. Even in the dusty, mundane space of the cabinet, the stock-still object pulsated with wild energy. It was like petting a tiger.

Even now, it’s overwhelming for me to imagine that all that calamitous potential to take life, to inflict pain, to inspire fear, to demand subservience, to have your way with the world, to finally be the actor instead of the one who is acted upon—was right there and it was theirs.

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I was 7 or 8 when I saw Dad shoot that gun. It must have been the summer, because I still remember the heavy outside air kissing my arms and legs, the suburban sunlight beaming on me. I see that light reverberating off the concrete, making vivid every blade of green grass in the yard and every goose-egg stone in the gravel strips. But I cannot hear the gunshot. I cannot tune in to the boom. All I sense is the fear, because it is so foreign. I’m still there. Standing in the driveway. Stuck and dumbfounded. Until Dad’s shouts break through, begging me to run inside before those crackers come back, commanding me to have Mom call the cops.

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Have you heard of Pastor Leon McCray? The man of faith who saw two White people dumping a refrigerator on his property. When McCray tried to stop them, the duo threatened him. One of the Whites ran off to grab three more racists. McCray says that’s when they all ganged up on him. That’s when they told him that his “Black life didn’t matter.” The beating didn’t stop until McCray pulled out his gun. When the police showed up at the scene, they handcuffed McCray and put him in the back of the cruiser. His assailants laughed and waved at him as he was taken off.

But at least McCray survived. You know that many of us aren’t so lucky: The police shot and killed the father Philando Castile during a traffic stop after he told them he had a firearm. The police shot and killed the father John Crawford while he was carrying a pellet rifle inside the Walmart that retailed the damn pellet rifle. Police shot Emantic F. Bradford Jr. at a shopping mall while they were responding to a call about gunshots at the mall. Witnesses say they killed Bradford as he was trying to direct shoppers to safety.

These killings now give shape and sharpness to that immense and totalizing fear I felt in the driveway as a child. That American malice is always there anytime we try to commandeer a power that wasn’t intended for us. Black people are killed or incarcerated every day for much less than what Dad did. Simply owning a gun can put a bullseye on your back. Pulling one on a White man can turn you into a hashtag.

So why did Dad want to call 911? I know that he’d tell you it was because his gun was different from Pastor Leon’s. Dad didn’t buy it at Walmart or Bass Pro alongside camouflage galoshes and fly-fishing rods. He didn’t pick it up at a gun shop with a shooting range full of targets depicting men in turbans and hip-hop gear. He didn’t procure it across state lines at a gun show with bundles of cash and no identification or background check. And he didn’t get it off the street, with scratched-out serial numbers and bodies on it.

Dad got his gun from the City of Cleveland. That’s where Mom got hers, too. Both are tools of policing, the Cooper family business. They hold up those guns and their power to use them as symbols of our freedom in a country that will not stop killing or incarcerating Black folks. When I was a child, I never questioned that contradiction. But to become my own man in the America I inherited, I realized I’d have to try to solve the paradox of my parents.

By the time the Black Shield had forced the hand of the Cleveland Police Department in 1977, Gayle had given birth to another child—a little boy named Geoffrey. Now with three kids, she was even more entrenched in a wrathful marriage and farther away from the working world. And losing her uncle Lloyd, which felt a lot like losing a father, only made her feel that much more alone. When he died, the dream of becoming a cop and the freedom the job promised died with him. 

It was at the moment that she’d almost completely resigned herself that it all came raging back. She opened up an issue of the Plain Dealer to find that people who’d taken the test with her and were lower than her on the eligibility list were being appointed to the police academy. And quickly, her despondency turned to confusion. And then her confusion turned to anger. She said to herself, “I know my number is higher than this and they’ve gone eighty past me and I’m not getting called?!” As she started to look into the issue, she found out that the city had expunged her from the eligibility list. “They were trying to lose Black folks’ stuff,” she told me. The city claimed it was because her addresses had changed and she hadn’t notified the civil service. To get back on the list, she had to go to court. “They claimed I had moved, but I owned my own home!” she said. “I told them, ‘I bought this house, I haven’t gone anywhere.’” As soon as she prevailed in her hearing, a White officer walked up to her in court. He simply said, “I’m from the academy.” He took her information. And then he said, “You will start the police academy on Monday.”

Later that same night, Fred Johnson called Gayle’s phone. It was the first time she’d ever spoken to the man. Lloyd was never big on the Shield Club, and Curtis was much closer with her younger brother, his namesake, who would join the police department five years later. Gayle didn’t have a complete idea of what the Shield Club had been up to at that point, or of how much it had shaped the situation she was walking into. Because of all the lawsuits, more than 40 percent of her classmates would be people of color and women. But the department they were entering was only 9 percent Black or Hispanic, and 2 percent women. For his part, Johnson stressed the struggle happening in the city to resist the change that Black women like Gayle represented. The academy was framed as a contentious environment controlled by people who were intent on destroying Gayle’s professional prospects and her spirit.

Despite the reforms that resulted from the Shield Club and the Women’s Law Fund cases, Gayle was still put through a series of tests, during which she could still be expunged. She had to meet with a psychiatrist, who asked her questions about her affiliations. Although this test had been revised thanks to the efforts of Fred Johnson and the Shield Club, it remained biased. As many of us conclude from a life living in this country run by White people, Gayle figured the best way to stick around was to hide herself. Her strategy was to answer every question like a White man of modest intellect.

In the 1970s, Gayle had spent a few years in the Nation of Islam. Although she never really let go of Jesus, she converted aesthetically and culturally to satisfy the whims of her second husband. She traded her hot pants for conservative flowing dresses. And instead of sweet potato pie, she started baking bean pies. When she did make a Polish Boy, she did it with beef sausage. She even traveled to Chicago once for Saviours’ Day to see the honorable Elijah Muhammad with her own eyes. But she put all that behind her when she found out that her proud Muslim husband was sleeping with a fellow “sister.” By the time she took the psych test to become a police officer, she’d gone back to straightening her hair and listening to gospel music. But some of the political knowledge she gained from the Nation, especially its perspective on America, stuck with her. She understood things differently than most—like the “riots” that happened in Hough and Glenville. She saw them as a natural reaction to the way her people had been done in this city and done in America. To her, the people who stormed the streets weren’t criminal. The crimes being committed were by the landlords renting rat-infested apartments and the Board of Education shoving kids into overcrowded schools and businesses charging a premium for rancid meat. She had a lot of ideas about these sorts of things, but none of them could feed her kids or free her from her marriage. And so she kept them to herself during her psych test.

The new hires were also required to do a complete physical examination. This was especially humiliating for Gayle. The whole ordeal was a perverse take on the idea that if women want to be in the academy, if women want to do what the men do, then they have to go through the exact same processes. For the physical exam, this meant standing around nearly nude to be ogled by their peers. “They made us stand up there in paper gowns and these guys were trying to catch glimpses at us. And they make you do stuff in the gowns so the gowns get all torn up. My breasts and everything were just hanging out,” Gayle recalled. She was so thoroughly humiliated that a fellow female in the academy came to her with some Scotch tape to try to cover her up. “They did that kind of thing because they wanted us to quit. The guys didn’t want us, their wives didn’t want us, it was terrible. They treated us like new meat, picking out which one they were going to take.” 

Fred Johnson made himself available to all the Blacks in the academy because he was prepared for the city to try to find excuses to fail them. Gayle didn’t think she’d have a problem. She was voted the vice president of the academy class and consistently scored high on all of the interstitial tests. Those high scores were attained by studying alongside her new girlfriend. But when they both got good grades on a test with similar answers, they were accused of cheating and threatened with expulsion from the academy. Fred Johnson had to step in and help them prove that they’d arrived at the same answers because they’d been preparing together.

After passing the academy, but before they could be sworn in as officers, they were also required to take a qualification test administered by the State of Ohio that evaluated their skills. Cadets could fly through the academy with high marks and still get disqualified to be a police officer. Although policewomen in Cleveland had been in the academy before the 1970s, they weren’t required to take the qualification test because officers in the women’s bureau didn’t carry guns. Anticipating that they would do whatever they could to disqualify her, Gayle prepared for the test with the desperate intensity of a woman fighting for her life. “To prepare for the running test, I used to run up and down the steps whenever I’d put the kids down for nap,” she told me. To make her qualifying time, she outran some Vietnam veterans, who threw up before they crossed the finish line. The state also required people to do a series of chin-ups and push-ups and dips that demanded upper body strength that seemed to favor the male physique, but Gayle fought her way through those. When she finally had to take her shooting test, the last phase, it was 19 degrees below zero. In 1977, Cleveland was in the midst of one of its coldest winters ever. But one of the essential rules of the academy was that it never canceled or postponed qualification tests for any reason, in an effort to help simulate what it’s like to be a police officer and have to work when everyone else gets the day off. And so Gayle stood at the outdoor range with the soft skin of her red-nailed fingers sticking to the ice-cold metal of her gun, her body involuntarily shivering, hoping the icy air didn’t tank her shot.

The first night Patrolwoman Gayle Smith reported to the Fifth District of the Cleveland Division of Police in the winter of 1977, her supervisor showed her two things: the coffee machine and the broom. It was expected that she would be the shift’s glorified janitor. But she bucked back. “I did not go through all that training to do no housekeeping. I came here to be a police officer,” she remembers saying to him, surprised by her own candor. Ridiculous as it seems now, perhaps this kind of insult by her male colleagues should have been expected. After all of the efforts by the Women’s Law Fund and Jean Clayton to break down the formal barriers in the CDP, women still constituted only 2.3 percent of the police force when Gayle started. The assholes she was working with had almost no experience working alongside women as equals and little incentive to see them as such. Gayle was basically a guinea pig. Ironically, it was because of Jean Clayton, Gayle’s initial inspiration to become a lady cop, that the women’s bureau was dissolved and lady cops ceased to exist. Although Gayle had been intent on following Clayton’s path, she found herself involved in something entirely new.

While most of the male cops were unhappy with the gender integration of the department, a lot of the women officers were displeased, too. They were especially pissed at Jean Clayton and her damn lawsuit. These were women who had no interest in being partnered with men and participating in a form of policing that oriented itself around violence and punishment. There were certainly fair criticisms of the women’s bureau, from its troubling focus on purity to the fact that its diversion efforts and empathy weren’t as equally distributed to Black suspects as they were to Whites. But I wonder if the department would be less lethal and repressive today if the men on the Cleveland Police Department had become more like the women and their women’s bureau. Instead, the women became more like the men. After the women’s bureau closed, some of its important work, such as sex crimes, was shamefully ignored or mishandled. Gayle would see this firsthand. But first she needed to get out of coffee duty.

It took some convincing, but eventually Gayle got her first assignment outside the district. After roll call, she would be taken to White City Beach, a former park on Lake Erie that in the 1940s was home to attractions like Bonavita the lion trainer, along with fishing and a yacht club. After natural disasters hurt the park and desegregation saw the City of Cleveland give up on supporting community spaces shared by both Blacks and Whites, White City Beach went the way of Euclid Beach. By the 1970s, it became a dumping ground for garbage and a place where the city parked vehicles that were towed to clear the streets for snowplows or as the result of car wrecks. That year, it was overflowing with gnarled automobiles. It had been the coldest Cleveland winter of the century, complete with “superbomb” blizzards and scores of days that were more than 20 degrees below zero. There were more than one thousand cars down there at White City Beach, but not another soul in sight.

“They dropped me off at White City Beach every night and stuck me in a shell of a car that was up on bricks and cinder blocks, with a wire heater inside of it. There was no bathroom. They’d leave me there all night and they’d come back and get me in the morning. I was just down there by myself in pitch blackness and cold. Even if I had wanted to get out, I couldn’t go nowhere. If someone had tried to steal the cars down there, there is nothing I could have done about it. It was demoralizing.”

Mom told me this in the kitchen, where I’d often heard her talk about the bad early days on the job. I’m not sure whether this was the first time I was really listening, or if she was telling it differently. Usually, her stories were never this detailed and specific. It was just “racism” and “men being nasty.” Perhaps because I was taking a real interest, she started accessing parts of the story she had often left untouched in her recounting.

There is a feeling of humiliation that stings long after an event has passed. It doesn’t just hurt because of what was done, it hurts because you feel as though you had some agency in the matter. That you let it happen. When she started telling me what it was like, I could feel her own surprise at the disregard she had endured. In the zone car with White partners, she was beneath speaking to. These were men who would greet a dog if they saw it on the street, but wouldn’t say one word to her. In this sense, despite the lawsuit and the consent decree, not much had changed on the job since the late 1950s, when White officers would “throw a shoe” to avoid being paired up with Curtis and Fred Johnson.

“When they finally had two guys take me out, they put me in the back seat where a prisoner would sit. And they didn’t let me touch the radio. They were supposed to show me some things. But instead, they got out of the car and went to eat. They just left me locked in the back of that car without saying anything. I’m just beating on the door and everything.”

It wasn’t until an old, White, Catholic officer who looked like Santa Claus decided to take Gayle under his wing that she finally got to learn a bit about real policing. The rotund veteran with snow-white hair explained to Gayle the first time she got in the car with him exactly why he was willing to teach her. It wasn’t that he was pleased about working with Blacks or with women. He simply realized the futility of resistance: “If we get rid of her, they will just send another one of them down here.”

“It was crazy to have me on the job that length of time and nobody taught me nothing except what I learned in the academy,” she remembered of her time wasted on frivolous assignments. “When he took me out, the first thing he ever told me was this: He said, ‘Okay, kid, what time is it?’ I looked for my watch. He said, ‘That is the first rule. Don’t you ever take your eye off anybody. If they ask what time it is, say you don’t know or your watch is broke. But you don’t look down.’”

It was with Santa Claus that she got to see how the men handled sex crimes now that the women’s bureau was closed. The first rape call that they ever responded to together involved a White woman. The lady had walked three doors over from where she lived to bum a cigarette from her neighbor. Before she could get back home, three men had grabbed her off the street, dragged her into a car, and took turns raping her. While Gayle was wrenched by the story, calling back to her own experiences of sexual abuse, the veteran was incredulous. “He talked to that girl so bad, I felt sorry for her,” she remembered. “He asked her, ‘What were you wearing?’ ‘Why were you out at that time of night?’ ‘What did you expect was going to happen?’ It was horrible . . . I will never forget it. That girl ended up not even filing.”

It was also alongside Santa Claus that she finally proved she could be real police, like the men. The call was a robbery at a drugstore that drew several cars to the scene. The suspect was a young Black man who managed to run out the back door. To show her tenacity, Gayle took off after him ahead of the rest of the cops, moving just as she had when she was training for the department’s entrance exam, going up and down those steps. Santa, who was heavy and plodding with bad knees, couldn’t keep up as Gayle tailed this man through an alleyway. And then from behind her, a shot rang out.

When a police shooting happens, officers come together to get their story straight. Although this was an era when it was still legal for officers in Cleveland to shoot fleeing felons, all the patrolmen made sure they agreed on what took place. After they were finished, they looked over at Gayle to see if she saw it the same way they did. Forget the police academy. The offensive rape call was a pop quiz, and this shooting was the final exam of real police shit. And Gayle passed with flying colors. “After that, I started having people to work with,” she told me. “It didn’t feel good, but I had a demon behind me.”

Browse Wilbert L. Cooper’s book-related events and appearances or buy the book today:

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Wilbert L. Cooper grew up in the suburbs of Cleveland, Ohio. He studied journalism at Ohio University and earned a master’s degree in publishing at New York University. He has written for outlets such as The Guardian, The New York Times, The Marshall Project, and The Wall Street Journal. His Vice documentary The Cleveland Strangler was nominated for a National Magazine Award. In 2024, he was the recipient of the Richard J. Margolis Award. The Black Shield is his first book.

Hannah Engler Harvey | Longreads | July 30, 2026 | 3,927 words (14 minutes)

In the long, slow days of August, Christmas comes. The halls are decked with vintage glass holiday towns in two colorways, Pastel and Traditional. They are lit by a wall of electric candles whose realistic dancing flames were designed by Disney Imagineers. (Inventory is getting low in Beige, but consider the White as an alternative; Plum could pull double duty for Halloween.) Smiling people wear sweaters embellished with stars and snowflakes. They moan with pleasure as they sample handmade caramel marshmallows and defrosted barbecue ribs and special-edition three-and-a-half pound cheesecakes, on sale for $56.00 or three easy payments of $18.67. (But move fast: There are fewer than 750 left in Strawberry.)

It’s nice here, safe as a daydream. In the pretend kitchen, with the make-believe food and the fireless flames, there is something for everyone.

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The first thing to know about QVC, the most important thing, is that it is always on. 

My best friend Lizzie and I are couch potatoes, dedicated ones; our friendship set, like a custard, in front of the television. At first it was The Real Housewives and 30 Rock, then Difficult People and Dancing with the Stars. When we first moved in together, when we were both 24, we resolved, initially, to shake ourselves out of this instinct. I had just gone through my first adult breakup. She had finally had enough of her roommates and of Brooklyn. It was early 2020, the year of broken leases.

We found a place in a neighborhood we both loved, and ignored the fact that the door of the bathroom could not open past the toilet, and that Lizzie had to climb over her bed to get to her closet. It didn’t matter that it was small, we reasoned. We would never be there. 

Two weeks after we moved in, the city shut down, and we started paying for cable. 

What it boiled down to was this: If you watch enough television, you eventually get sick of deciding what to watch. The beauty of TV, for the true couch potato, is when it comes and finds you: the sick-day marathons of Intervention, the late-night reruns of Frasier and The Nanny, the reliable Sunday-afternoon showing of the movie Backdraft. This is what Lizzie and I had loved about television growing up, and this is what the prestige-TV era had taken from us. We were sick of ordering à la carte. We wanted a buffet. 

So, there on our pink Drew-Barrymore-for-Walmart sectional, balancing takeout containers on our laps, we watched. 

We watched old episodes of Match Game and Three’s Company; we watched Live with Kelly and Ryan and the movie channels and sports, if we were desperate. 

But there were times—the true couch potato always finds times—when the only thing to watch was QVC. 

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QVC (which stands for Quality, Value, Convenience) was founded in 1986 by the businessman Joseph Segel and still airs 24 hours of programming a day, approximately 20 hours of which are live broadcasts. The broadcasts are simple in structure. A host demonstrates products in an unscripted, conversational way, speaking directly to the audience from a set that looks like a living room. Sometimes, the host banters with a cohost. Along the way, they are joined by a rotating cast of brand representatives who are there to assist in selling their wares.

And this tactic has worked, at least on some tranche of the population. For the 40 years it has been around, QVC’s core demographic—women over 50—has held steady, and the channel has a remarkable ability to inspire loyalty. According to a 2021 article in Main Line Today, the newspaper local to West Chester, Pennsylvania, where QVC is headquartered, “Ninety percent of QVC customers are of the repeat variety.”

The personalities are the point. In a 2006 article in Studies in Popular Culture, Jennifer Courtney and Gabriel Wettach wrote that QVC’s innovation, as well as its biggest challenge, was to make its advertisements seem less like corporate directives and more like recommendations from friends or peers. “To create and maintain credibility with the audience,” they write, “QVC hosts must emphasize roles that convey authenticity, such as mother, beauty expert, or bargain hunter. . . . viewers must be able to trust or ‘relate to’ the host; invoking trusted personas creates a welcoming and reassuring environment.”

We are all living inside the world that QVC made, the commingling of identity and acquisition.

Twenty years later, this insight about the power of QVC hosts could be applied to far greater swaths of the consumer economy. Today’s Instagram influencers talk about how and when they use certain products in the same relatable way the hosts on QVC do. Shopping is integrated into most online and IRL experiences. We are asked to place things in context, imagine the lives we would have and the people we would be if we could only own the right items.

When I talk about QVC, people are baffled by my interest in it. To them, it seems like a relic, something whose relevance is shriveling up. On the contrary: We are all living inside the world that QVC made, the commingling of identity and acquisition. We occupy our homes like amnesiacs, trying to figure out who we are by looking around at what we own.

For me, QVC applies an unexpected salve to the wound it caused. I am too young for bladder-leak underwear or anti-crepe elbow cream; I have no lawn for ornaments or freezer space for a four-pound bag of pot stickers. Like most people my age, conditioned to view themselves from a distance, I have spent a lot of time curating my life: my physical space, my wardrobe, my media diet. All my algorithms are tuned to perfection. In other words, I spend so much time within a prison of my own preferences that it has become a relief to be offered things I would never want.

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To talk about what QVC is does very little to illustrate the experience of watching QVC, which is altogether more difficult to pin down. The sets are vividly lit, the people arranged like pints of ice cream in an illuminated freezer. For as long as I’ve been watching, the main set has been dressed with a bright yellow couch, glossy gray-brown laminate floors, and faux windows that look out onto a digital lawn. The artifice of the environment is in charming tension with flickers of helpless realism: a rep from Roberta’s Unique Gardens who struggles to lift a planter full of SunPatiens; a host whose Barefoot Dreams cardigan keeps rubbing against her mic. There is a hallucinatory quality to it: The brightness is the same at 8 in the morning and 11 at night. There seems to be no rhyme or reason to when they present certain products, whether they’re selling perennial plants or seasonal decorations or Beekman 1802’s goat milk skin care. (The reps from Beekman often bring a flock of real baby goats with them.) But there is also a groundedness, a kind of ruthless maternal practicality: Faroe Islands salmon is full of Omega-3s, which reduce triglycerides, crucial as we approach middle age. Elastic-waist pants are a godsend if you fluctuate sizes.

The presentations follow predictable, elliptical patterns; they are designed to be half-watched, for viewers who are flipping channels, or maybe falling asleep. The hosts repeat themselves—they must—revisiting colors, sizes, quantities, and prices every couple of minutes, the repetition contained within the steady stream of good-natured patter. The consistency of this patter is remarkable; to be able to just keep talking, no matter how boring the topic or useless the product, can be downright impressive to watch. A host might say all of these things and more during the course of an hour-long presentation on espadrille sandals: The weather is getting warmer, those outdoor barbecues are around the corner, days are getting longer, patio dining is here, summer is showing its face, it’s iced coffee season, it’s frozen margarita season, it’s baseball season, the weather is warming up. Sometimes it devolves into silliness. “Belts are really trending right now,” said designer Susan Graver on QVC3 the other morning. “Oh, I love to put one on.”

At first, we entered this world like anthropologists, observing the bizarre habits of the native species. But we soon became attached to its familiar rhythms. Lizzie developed a habit of turning it on in the morning and keeping it on in the background through a day of working from home or cleaning the house, and this routine lingered long after the acute phase of the pandemic began to wane. Certain things about our lives had changed for good. Never again would we go into the office five days a week, and never again would a day pass without the ambient, almost meditative thrum of QVC—not exactly white noise, but maybe ecru, or eggshell. 

In other homes, in other cities, we learned, other women were doing the same thing. Longtime QVC customer Arlyn David—a 62-year-old resident of Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania—told Main Line Today in 2021: “If I’m home, I have it on.”

All my algorithms are tuned to perfection. In other words, I spend so much time within a prison of my own preferences that it has become a relief to be offered things I would never want.

QVC pioneered a new type of television programming, shopping and entertainment churned together in one comfortable swirl. But the entertainment is of a specific type: It provides something that Lizzie and I sometimes call “The Voices.” The Voices could come from a podcast, or from scrolling on TikTok; the point is that they give a restless mind something to do between bouts of more concentrated thought, like psychological chewing gum.

I have spent the last few years learning about how my generation’s attention spans have been torched by social media and smartphones and how our minds now require constant stimulation in order to function. But Arlyn David and her ilk are proof that the desire for The Voices predates millennial dopamine addiction by decades at least. What does the everpresence of QVC do for them?

Whenever I ponder this, I think of the house I grew up in, set back into trees at the end of a cul-de-sac, in an American suburb that thundered with silence. Perhaps The Voices answer a deeper, more basic human desire: the urge to fill a quiet house with conversation, no matter how inane.

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Like friendship, QVC has its own vernacular, formed over years and opaque to outsiders. For example: Weighty, substantial fabrics are sometimes referred to by hosts as “beefy.” Host Leah Williams was, by her own account, the first person to use this term. Then QVC stalwart Isaac Mizrahi borrowed it, and then his reps started using it when they went on for their presentations, spreading it back to the hosts. So everyone calls things “beefy” now, usually crepe pants or wool-acrylic blend sweaters. Another one: Cotton has “a dry hand.” This means that when you run your hand over the fabric, it feels dry to the touch, not slick and smooth like a synthetic blend. Fabrics that have a dry hand are cooler and less clingy on the body.

The colors on QVC have beautiful and evocative names, like Butter Rum, Flame, Celebration Pink, Nantucket Blue. Sometimes, when color names are too highfalutin, conflict occurs. The brand rep from the QVC brand Denim & Co. is always going at it with host Amy Stran over this. “This one is called Heather,” he’ll say, and Amy will rush in to offer an alternative: “But it’s really not gray at all, more like a beautiful smoky purple, a lavender.” Then, next time they go through colors, she’ll say, “This one is called Heather, but remember, think lavender.” Amy is very serious about colors. It really pisses her off when brands call black “onyx” or gray “silver.” She probably assumes it will confuse the customers. She is probably right. Whenever these tiffs would happen, Lizzie and I would lean forward over our knees, eager to see the two of them go at it.

If you watch enough, you start to notice these tensions; you become a scholar of them. Lizzie and I are fandom members of the country’s longest-running reality show. The faces of the hosts unfurl themselves under our unrelenting gaze, revealing an ill-advised spray tan, an early pregnancy, plastic surgery, dead teeth. QVC has deepened the language we share with each other, created a shared set of references, in the same way that going to college together did, or the time when we were both AMC A-Listers. It has become more than brainless viewing. It is a hobby.

We have the festering snobbishness of transplants. New York City is our home, but our impossible aspiration is to have never lived anywhere else.

There is even a subreddit dedicated to making fun of QVC personalities and their quirks: r/QVC_Snark. It is a community of insiders. The Redditors attack with the vicious specificity that only intimacy can produce. “Why is her head a literal box?” asks a recent poster, sharing a photo they took of host Courtney Khondabi on their TV screen. Or, of host Rick Domeier: “Rick has been wearing the same jeans for weeks now!” They make fun of the prices, usually during the food presentations ($100 hot dogs, $11 per 6 oz. piece of salmon) and the clothing segments (LOGO by Lori Goldstein is a popular punching bag: “All this needs is some lace and a ‘wide load’ banner across the ass”).

During the three years we lived together, Lizzie and I spent countless evenings performing QVC-themed comedy routines for an audience of one, doing spittakes with our wine, high on the feeling of being clever and understood. But we only discovered r/QVC_Snark later, after we were living on opposite sides of Manhattan. All this time, here were our people! One night I sent her a series of posts I collected during a lurking session, wishing I could see her reaction. After a few seconds, she responded: “Nothing but you has made me laugh this hard since I was a kid.” 

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Redditors will be Redditors, but look, we are all supposed to be in this together. The hosts and reps are wives and mothers too (or the gay best friends of wives and mothers, or at least the closeted neighbor of wives and mothers). They are wearing the sweaters, using the hand cream, planting the perennials, or at least, they say they are. Part of QVC’s structure—a crucial part, in some readings—is the connection between hosts and viewers, not theoretical, but literal. Almost every live broadcast has a call-in element that allows viewers to speak on-air to their favorite hosts, to ask questions about the product, or, more frequently, praise it and announce their intention to buy more.

“Speaking with a host is, for many callers, a meaningful, seemingly priceless exchange,” write Courtney and Wettach. “Callers frequently divulge personal information, telling the host about illnesses, financial status, and family matters.”

It’s true; I have seen it. A recent caller told QVC personality Kim Gravel, in a voice thick with tears, that she had gotten used to “not feeling part of the world,” due to her weight, but that Kim’s clothing line had given her the confidence to participate in life. “That is your ministry,” said the caller.

I looked up. Ministry! It was such an extreme word, and even odder applied to Kim Gravel. (Boisterous! Brassy! The onetime host of a Lifetime reality show called Kim of Queens where she ruthlessly prepared young girls for beauty pageants!) The longer I thought about it, the more I found myself relenting. Anyone who denies the therapeutic value of clothes that fit has never had the experience of not being able to find them.

This is, perhaps, at the heart of my ambivalence toward QVC, or more accurately, my inability to see my engagement with it as pure ridicule or even a hate-watch. Every so often, I am startled with a reminder of who else is out there watching. Skechers presents a pair of sandals with hands-free slip-on technology, so that you don’t have to bend over to put them on. On the Over 50 & Fabulous program, the women from Breezies sell underwear designed to withstand hot flashes and bladder leaks. Where else can these items be reliably purchased, or so frankly and cheerfully discussed?

Onscreen, listening to the caller’s praise, Kim was nodding. She was clearly touched, or at least, she looked like it.

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I sometimes imagine the person I would be if I took them all up on it. If, one day, a tower of packages arrived on my doorstep, containing Women With Control stretch denim, IHKWIP quilted tote bags, Clarks Cloudsteppers shoes, and silicon Cool Grippers pot-holder tongs. How would my life be arranged around these items? I imagine I would measure out the years in landscaping projects. My afternoons would be taken up by long car journeys, ferrying children to softball tournaments or play rehearsals, going to the grocery store and the nail salon.

I know women like this; I grew up with them. So did Lizzie. We have the festering snobbishness of transplants. New York City is our home, but our impossible aspiration is to have never lived anywhere else. We turn up our noses at the strip malls of our youth, and share our faltering moments only with each other: the secret joy of a Target where deodorant isn’t locked behind plexiglass, the frustrated desire to place groceries in the trunk of a car, the fizzy hedonism of a 44-ounce Diet Coke from a fountain. This, too, unites us: our aborted suburban futures, the secret panic that they may have only been deferred. Do we watch QVC to indulge these sublimated cravings for peace and comfort, taking furtive bites of soccer-momdom to keep us going when the subway is delayed and the rent is due? Or do we watch it to set ourselves apart, to reassure ourselves that we will never give in?

What happened within me when I cringed at the caller on the Kim Gravel broadcast? Why was my initial instinct an abstracted pity? Do I think I will never get there—never find a source of unexpected divinity, never be moved to tears by something ridiculous, that the material conditions of my life will never become more complex or more banal? Do I think I will never grow old?

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It’s not true that QVC has nothing to offer me. I order my mascara from there, almost exclusively, three tubes for $40 when a single tube of the same mascara at Sephora is $28. Lizzie and I went halfsies on a MacKenzie-Childs teakettle (in the limited-edition Tattoo design) that we gave to a friend for her birthday. They have great prices on Dyson products. And some of the purses are cute.

We do not call in, of course. We order online, like we do everything else.

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In April 2026, the QVC Group (which operates the three QVC channels as well as HSN, the Home Shopping Network) filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, announcing that the company would be significantly restructured in an effort to reduce its debt (a process which included increasing CEO David Rawlinson II’s total compensation by 70% as they braced for impact). The shopping channels, they insist, will proceed as usual. Despite layoffs of over 900 employees in March 2025, the company says there are no plans for further cuts, and there will be no disruption to the flow of content upon which my fellow QVC-nuts and I have come to rely.

Still, there is danger on the horizon. Change is coming, and has been for a while. The 2000s have not been kind to the networks. There have been lawsuits: In 2000, the Federal Trade Commission barred QVC from making unverified claims about weight-loss products, such as the claim that Lite Bites items like granola bars and shakes enable customers to lose up to 125 pounds, and that Lipofactor Cellulite Target Lotion “causes measurable inch loss from users’ arms, thighs, and abdomens, without the need for a restricted calorie diet or increased exercise.” QVC violated the order, and the government sued in 2004. In 2024, QVC recalled 1.1 million pairs of Temp-tations oven gloves after customers reported burns caused by insufficient heat protection. The 2025 layoffs were preceded by staff reductions in 2023, and in 2020 during the pandemic, when the network also eliminated live programming on QVC2. Something has got to give.

Wouldn’t it be better for QVC to die with dignity, rather than contort itself to chase audiences it will surely never get?

The rumor on Reddit, at least, is that QVC will continue to invest in its social media platforms, working with fresh-faced TikTok creators while their seasoned hosts languish on cable, tailoring their product pitches to a richer, more sophisticated audience. The transformation has already begun. You can see it in the jewelry presentations (5-stone diamond eternity bands for $8,500), the beauty products (10-pouch boxes of ELEMIS Cellutox Herbal Bath Synergy bath salts for $262), and even the food (lobster tails, filet mignon tips, or 3 lb. of shrimp cocktail for $133). Hosts now talk about the lack of “chemicals” in their bagels, or the importance of building “hair health” with Dyson blow dryers.

Will this work? It seems unlikely. Lizzie and I are the only people we know who watch QVC, let alone shop there. When I brought up the topic to a group of women my age, half of them had never even heard of it. Wouldn’t it be better for QVC to die with dignity, rather than contort itself to chase audiences it will surely never get?

It turns out I am tender. I do not want QVC to change. There has been too much change already. A couple of years ago, I moved out of the apartment with the pink couch and into a place 13 blocks uptown, with a man who became my husband. Lizzie found a rent-stabilized one-bedroom on the other side of the park. I went back to school and made new friends; Lizzie started spending more time in London with her sister. For the first few months in my new home, I tried to watch QVC, but it made me sad: The Voices were still there, but the only voice I wanted to hear was a 30-minute subway ride away. 

We reached that inflection point, that warped and curved surface upon which women friendships sometimes teeter. We are at the age where everything gets ruined. Still, we talk all day long, an unending commentary on whatever is in front of us. Our enduring closeness is an anachronism, but a beautiful one. We should not still be here, the way we are, but we are. 

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I suppose it’s a lesson: Whatever will come will come. For now, it’s August, and Christmas, and there is still so much to do. The flameless candles have sold out in Beige. The man from Bethlehem Lights is here to present his pre-lit trees, stately faux spruces twinkling with proprietary Color Prism illumination technology, 81 color and light combinations, the best time to purchase is now. Why limit this glittering joy to the festive season? Many customers keep their Bethlehem Lights boughs decked all year long: red or orange lights for Harvest Time; red, white, and blue for the Fourth of July.

But you have to act soon. At the end of the broadcast, the eight-and-a-half-foot tree (“their most popular height,” according to the rep) will double in price. Under the bright overhead lights, in their living-room diorama, the people onscreen peer out at me, concern on their made-up faces.

They are worried, but they can’t seem too worried; they want me to pick up the phone, but not panic. This is the beauty of it—of all of it, in fact; this not-urgent urgency, this solvable problem. This is why we watch. The deals are going away, but there is no such thing as an ending. Tomorrow it will be Christmas again.

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Hannah Engler Harvey holds an MA in journalism from New York University. Her work has appeared in Longreads, Evergreen Review, Talk Vomit, among other places. She lives in Manhattan.

Editor and fact-checker: Cheri Lucas Rowlands
Copyeditor: Krista Stevens