gay media invisibility: representations of our own (gay genre) vs queering the text (slash)

[cimorene]

My dad, on the lookout for me as always: "Looking for SF or fantasy w [gay] characters in which 'Oh God, I'm gay,' angst isn't a significant plot device."
Some dude also active in the field: "Hm, I'm not sure I know that trope."

LOL. Not know that trope? Seriously? When the gay and lesbian characters on tv are still pretty much universally evil or dead? When there are still more "officially unofficially" gay stars in Hollywood than openly out & proud ones? When the term Sweeps Lesbians actually has meaningful reality and applies more than once every year and those appearances outnumber the entire rest of the year's put together?

I am invisible in the fictional worlds of mainstream media.

Except in slash. Slash fiction, whatever else it may be, is incontrovertibly at least somewhat gay. (The line for people who think it's just about straight women's straight sex fantasies forms in the 1980s. Please contact a male academic for your time machine.)

Now, slash is a "subversive" reading: usually not the one intended, or even foreseen. And the problem with that is that, while it makes me feel a bit better about gay invisibility in media canons (by giving me something else to look at), the entire need for such a subversive reading is the result of that overwhelming, heart-sickening, enraging invisibility in the first place. This is why slash goggles aren't enough - because it's not enough for it to be visible to slashers; we need to be visible to everybody (I firmly believe visibility is going to be a necessary part of our fight for civil rights, and that the increase in visibility is related to the increasing number of states' legalization of gay marriage).

So sometimes I want to consume some media where the gay content was actually the creator's explicit intent - mainstream media is pretty clear about not wanting us, and sometimes you are sick of that. And Wax and I do have a small collection of hard-won gay films, but they're pretty much all An Issue Movie and they usually involve HIV and/or unhappy endings. Until last month I'd actually never seen a lesbian romance film with a happy ending.The thing is that that genre is almost entirely hidden from the mainstream.

This genre fiction may be the Out and Proud of gay representations, but the out and proud lesbians and gay men - the visible ones - aren't the majority in reality. Even when you're not in the closet, a lot of times you pass. What about all the invisible gay people, the percentage of the ordinary people you pass by at school and work and in the grocery store who are gay? Where are they? Well - they're hidden in the mainstream canon, arguably.

Is it any more "subversive" to conjecture that a fictional character from CSI or Dollhouse or Star Trek is gay than to conjecture that I am straight, as no doubt happens every time I step out in public? Some percentage - and it's hard to calculate in reality, but definitely higher than 2 - of people are gay; if the show doesn't show us who they are, well, what if it were these two? What if they weren't evil? What if they weren't dead? What if they were the protagonist, instead of just a sidekick?

So one way to look at it is that the mainstream media is an oppressive institution that needs a dose of subverting. Another way is that we're tired of waiting for other people to hand us the last piece of representation and are taking our own piece instead. "Subversion" should perhaps mean something more radical than "bringing in line with reality".

And that's why slash goggles are necessary, why by-us-for-us isn't enough, and why slash can be so much more satisfying than simply consuming a rare text that already acknowledged our existence in the first place: it's the media world that, dammit, we live in too, and we just want to take a piece of it back.

Comments

[harpers_child]

i still fondly remember my senior year of high school when willow first met tara and my friends and i declaring "they should totally be girlfriends. it'd be cute." then it happened.

[cimorene]

Yeah. That would have been nice to live through, fandom-wise. Unfortunately, no show I've been watching has done it outside of Sweeps Lesbians, except Torchwood.

[isilya]

For all its failings, Dark Angel was waaaay ahead of its time in regards to race, gender and sexuality. I think Original Cindy was the first black lesbian character I'd ever seen -- all these years later, and off the top of my head, I can still only think of The Wire for black and biracial gays and lesbians.

Is it any more "subversive" to conjecture that a fictional character from CSI or Dollhouse or Star Trek is gay than to conjecture that I am straight, as no doubt happens every time I step out in public?

It's also interesting to consider this in light of JKR's post-textual revelation of Dumbledore's homosexuality. If one character is gay, not textually, but because character's have backstories and inner lives not portrayed in the text, then why can't they all have gay, trans or bisexual off-text back stories and inner lives?

I am sorry about your invisibility.

[isilya]

For what it's worth, I'm also enraged that Parminder Nagra excised the onscreen, textual gay from Bend It Like Beckham.

[cesare]

Until last month I'd actually never seen a lesbian romance film with a happy ending.

Wow. What was it?

This is making me wrack my brain for every movie with a lesbian relationship that ends well that I've seen. The Incredible True Story of Two Girls In Love, that one's not perfect, but it's sweet. Also, I watched Being John Malkovich again the other day, and it ends a little ominously, but on a happy note for the f/f couple.

God, is that it? D:

While I'm throwing out titles, The Hanging Garden is a fantastic little Canadian film about a hugely dysfunctional family as seen through the eyes of the gay brother who got the hell out and reluctantly comes back. It has a happy ending right out of slash; you'll know what I mean if you see it.

[torachan]

I don't know if it's the film Cim was referring to, but Imagine Me & You is adorable.

[perhael]

Amen to all of this.

[bluesbell]

And the problem with that is that, while it makes me feel a bit better about gay invisibility in media canons (by giving me something else to look at), the entire need for such a subversive reading is the result of that overwhelming, heart-sickening, enraging invisibility in the first place.

YES. This is what has made me so annoyed lately- the growing awareness that while slashing things provides me with a happy distraction, the need for the distraction is caused by the near total absence of canon gay romances.

(Re-posted to correct a typo. Sorry!)

[pineapplechild]

Word.

[redbrickrose]

Yes. YES. This.

THIS, times a million.

[puritybrown]

I think I love you for writing this.

I remember explaining to my friends why I wasn't going to see Troy: I'd heard about the bowdlerisation of the relationship between Achilles and Patroclus, and it pissed me off. "Well, you can read between the lines!" said a friend who'd seen the movie. Yeah, I said, I could read between the lines, but I shouldn't have to. Especially when I'm watching a movie about two characters who were THE paradigm of faithful lovers in Ancient Greek culture. There's even a passage in Plato's Symposium where Phaedrus makes an argument about which one of them was the erastes and which one the eromenos: probably the world's first recorded "who tops?" debate.

(And I hated the ending of Kissing Jessica Stein too. It was going so well up until the obvious chickening out.)

Re lesbian movies with happy endings: do you want recs? Because I have a bunch. I've been watching out for gay and lesbian films since I was 14.

Re: THIS, times a million.

[pineapplechild]

even if she doesn't, i want recs. particularly the lesbians. because i no longer have to watch my glbt movies on my laptop, in my room, with the headphones on.

[jain]

So sometimes I want to consume some media where the gay content was actually the creator's explicit intent - mainstream media is pretty clear about not wanting us, and sometimes you are sick of that.

Yes, this, exactly. I've read and watched a lot of books, movies, drama series, etc. with queer content, and the number of times I've ended up depressed as my favorite characters died or ended up alone and miserable or whatever is just ridiculous. (Especially with regard to movies, I guess because the options there are Hollywood movies that do happy films, and the very, very occasional queer film, but never mix the two, or indie movies that pretty much don't do happy films for anyone.)

Anyway, thanks for articulating the problem so clearly, and for giving me the impetus to try to do something about it: gay_also_means_happy, a community for queer media recommendations without the suicidal angst.

[lobelia321]

Amen to everything, and none of what you write above makes me want to watch any more than the one hour television a week I currently watch. And that only to socialise with t'sons. Meh. I'll stick to the fanon. I always suspected it was the real thing and the canon just fodder.

Huh.

[iamnaiad]

This is a really interesting post and made me think a lot (in conjunction with a friend's comment that lesbian representation on TV has decreased); thank you for writing it.

I'm sorry that it's so hard for you to find representation.

And as an aside, did you see the most recent season of Skins? There was a lesbian romance that I thought was very sweet and had a happy ending.

[cimorene]

I've heard about it, but we haven't watched Skins. It's not a genre I've ever been into, but it's still possible I'll watch for the sake of the lesbians.

[vass]

Until last month I'd actually never seen a lesbian romance film with a happy ending.

Two more for you:

Show Me Love (Swedish title Fucking Åmål)
Very sweet high school romance. A real date movie. Mild suicide triggers in the middle, but it ends happy. My icon's from this film.

But I'm A Cheerleader
You might find its depiction of an ex-gay camp so unrealistic as to be offensive. Or you might find the lesbian stereotypes offensive (Meghan's family and friends run an intervention for her because she's a vegetarian, listens to Sinead O'Connor, you get the idea.) If you can get around that, it *does* have a happy lesbian ending.

[cimorene]

I've heard about But I'm A Cheerleader, of course. I didn't realize it had a happy ending, though! I really didn't expect that - I know lesbians are ALWAYS evil or dead! That makes me much more curious.

[cupidsbow]

I don't have much to add to your manifesto, except yes.

Instead, I bring a couple of recs, in case you haven't found them yet.

First, the Aussie film Love and Other Catastrophes is a romantic comedy about a pair of thesis-crossed lovers. It's adorable! The couple just happen to be women, two fantastic young women going about their lives. There's no, "Oh, I'm gay," and no, "Oh, you're evil, now die." Also it is witty and funny and well acted! I highly recommend it.

Second, my latest fandom is Torchwood, which you probably already know about. And while it is by no means perfect, the characters just get on with saving the world while shagging pretty much anything. I have to say, I'm a bit stunned at how much of a relief this is to me after all that slash goggling and military repression inherent in SGA. I really love my big openly-gay heroes and their ridiculous exploits.

If only there were a few thousand more movies and shows like this, maybe we'd be getting somewhere.

[cimorene]

Oh, cool! Thanks for the rec.

[impertinence]

I would agree with this, except I find myself catching on the "we live in it too" part. Slash fandom largely portrays white males; it often erases even the women who play a significant role in the source canon. I'm not sure how this resolves itself - slash can be a representation of people more like me, but it isn't a representation of me. Additionally, slash fandom itself has issues with performatively queer behavior and actually being queer; in bandom, for example, people occasionally make really offensive comments about someone behaving in a feminine way, and how that makes them necessarily a gay male.

[cimorene]

These are clearly not negligible issues. For me, being gay and being a woman are two perhaps equally important parts of my identity, but I find it much easier to make up for the overwhelming preponderance of men in the mainstream media because there's actually an easily accessible supply of media about women - which has its own issues that tend to piss me off even when I find myself watching it just because I want to see something new that passes the Bechdel test. If I venture outside of mainstream TV and blockbuster films, though, it's not even difficult to find good feminist role models and books about women. I was raised on books with strong heroines - in fact, I probably read a lot more of them than books about men. So although I do frequently feel really pissed off about this aspect of slash, it's not the kind of, well, despair that I feel about the non-representation of my queer identity. Women's rights and visibility have made far more progress than gay people's have.

And although its focus on men is at times exasperating and offensive and certainly problematic, fandom is still a homosocial space where I'm surrounded by women. Also, while slash literally presents mostly male characters, I'd argue that it in part does represent us.

But as for people making offensive and homophobic remarks about how things are omgsogay, yeah, that's just people being stupid (and assholes). There's no such thing as a space free from assholes unless you're standing at the door with an asshole screener keeping almost everybody out.

[sineala]

Here via, uh, metafandom's delicious. Hi. Um. You write a lot of really excellent stories and I am a little intimidated to be commenting at all.

I would like to say, in defense of lesbian cinema, that there were actually happy endings in the 1980s, even. Whatever else you might want to say about Desert Hearts, it does have a happy ending. And that's 1985. (I think it may have been the first one.)

And moving right along, there's Claire of the Moon (1992), which is very pretty and very stridently lesbian-feminist. I think it's awesome, but I think I'm the only one who likes it. Happy ending! Very happy ending! Mmm.

In case you, y'know, needed any more recs. :)

[cimorene]

Cool! I have a feeling it might be difficult to find any movies that old, but the recs are appreciated nonetheless. I miss gaytorrents a lot. :(

[wishfulclicking]

I haven't seen this mentioned yet but Saving Face was a really good movie; and it ended happily for the characters.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0384504/

[cimorene]

Ooh, thanks!

Here from metafandom

[rotaryphones.livejournal.com]

Absolutely agreed on the importance of visibility. Subversion and queer-ifying media is actually one of the things that drew me to slash in the first place.

All my lesbian movie recs have been taken (darn!), but there's one more that I don't think has been mentioned:
Itty Bitty Titty Committee (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0496328/)
It's sort of a silly teenage lesbian feminist romp. One of the things I like about it is that the lesbianism is already an established fact when the film starts, so there's no angsting about it.

Re: Here from metafandom

[cimorene]

Haha, thanks. That one looks really fun!

Via Metafandom

[ten]

Is it any more "subversive" to conjecture that a fictional character from CSI or Dollhouse or Star Trek is gay than to conjecture that I am straight, as no doubt happens every time I step out in public?

It's such simple, and yet such profound logic, isn't it? I'm glad someone finally said it.

[noracharles]

A Soap: Charlotte has just gotten out of a relationship with a man, when she meets her new downstairs neighbor Veronika, who is a mtf transssexual. Angsty, but with a happy ending. I haven't seen it yet, so I don't know if it has any "oh my god, I'm gay" angst, or only "oh my god I'm transsexual" angst. Language: Danish, available on amazon.com.

Little Soldier: Lotte is a recently returned Iraq vet, who struggles with depression. Her dad gives her a job as driver/bodyguard for his prostitutes. Lotte forms a special connection to a call girl called Lily, and is forced to face the realities of human trafficking. It's not a romance movie, but it is excellent, and I enjoyed the bi protagonist. No "oh my god, I'm gay" angst. The ending is better for Lotte and Lily than the situation they started out in, but their problems aren't all magically solved by the power of love. Language: mainly English, but also some Danish, will be released in American cinemas in June.

[cimorene]

Thanks for the recs - although these both sound like Issue Movies, which are lower down my list of likes. It might actually be possible to get them in Finland, though, without ordering from the UK... .

[noracharles]

Oh, and m/m not f/f: Shake it a very funny, feel-good romantic comedy. Jacob and Jørgen are getting married, but Jacob has commitment issues he wasn't even aware of, and "accidentally" kisses a female friend at the engagement party. Is Jacob bisexual, and does he need to explore that, or does he just have cold feet? Can he win Jørgen back? Happy ending. Language: Danish, available in region 2 version.

[cimorene]

Wow, that sounds awesome!

[dybji.livejournal.com]

(Here from Metafandom.)

Thank you very much for this -- I think you make a lot of good points, especially about visibility and the movie problem (have you seen "Saving Face"? It's a fantastically funny movie in its own right, and the "Oh God I'm gay" plotline has about as much weight as the "Oh God I'm Chinese" one ;) ).

To be fair, I do think the objections to fandom do tend more toward "these people are appropriating texts/characters/stories to which they don't have rights" versus "these people are gaying texts up."

In that sense, it's as subversive to make Random Redshirt a main character or to bring him back to life or make him a secret judo expert as it would be to make him gay.

Then again, every 90s article on HP fandom that I have found did throw out the "and fandom makes them gay!" factor as an implicit proof of fandom's bizarreness. Part of that may be because slash really may be the single biggest fandom trope, but part of it may be driven by the assumption that gayness would strike a "bizarre" note in the reader's head in a way judo-ness and main-character-ness would not. So I think you still have a point. Objections to fandom certainly may not be as sensible in real life and between the lines as I think. Sorry, just thinking aloud.

[chosenmortal]

the "Oh God I'm gay" plotline has about as much weight as the "Oh God I'm Chinese" one

AHAHAHA YES, THIS. and that's how it SHOULD be, you know? like characters in most movies don't wake up every day and go OH GOD I HAVE BROWN HAIR. WHAT AM I GONNA DO. and while the whole coming out process is important, and the falling-in-love thing is certainly worthwhile... like, okay, life for a gay person doesn't stop being interesting after you realize you're gay. you can still have a story after that. and it's those stories that i want to see-- that i think we all want to see. and we don't get them most places, so we write them ourselves.

[chosenmortal]

i can't even tell you how much this post means to me. i think this all the time and have never really been able to articulate it as well as you just did.

why slash can be so much more satisfying than simply consuming a rare text that already acknowledged our existence in the first place

this might sound silly, but it occurred to me when i was in the theater for the new trek movie-- in fifty or a hundred years, we might have a movie where it wouldn't be considered subversive or taboo for The Studly Captain and His Stalwart First Officer to be each other's romantic interests-- that someday there'll be just as many movies depicting gay characters as there are straight ones. That someday we could actually have a genre movie with a gay protagonist where "OMG He's Gay" wouldn't take over the entire movie.

i don't think it's a coincidence that i discovered fandom and slash right around the time i was starting to realize i'm not straight. there is something comforting about a space, even a virtual one, where people don't bat an eye at someone being gay/bi/trans/pansexual anymore than they would at someone having green eyes. and as people said in your Not An Issue Movie post, it's really awesome to be able to read stories of gay people falling in love while also being chased by zombies or flying through space or fighting duels with magic. >.>;;;;

i've actually been thinking/planning for a long time, that when i'm done with my novel i would really like to put together a book of essays or stories on this topic-- fanfic, why slash is important, treatment of gay in media, et cetera. cus srsly, this needs to be talked about. the discussion needs visibility as well as the people having the discussion, yanno?

thanks for posting. :)

[cimorene]

but it occurred to me when i was in the theater for the new trek movie-- in fifty or a hundred years, we might have a movie where it wouldn't be considered subversive or taboo for The Studly Captain and His Stalwart First Officer to be each other's romantic interests

I think what's sad is that even though I wrote this post, that thought has never even occurred to me.

Like you, I discovered slash around the time I realized I was gay. I think slash helped my process of discovery and my thoughts along and also explains why I latched onto it so fiercely.

[niennah]

This is an argument I'm perpetually trying to articulate, and now you've put it so well that I shall probably quote you in discussions for some time to come.

There are some interesting shows in which slashy readings are not subversive in that they do not go against the grain of authorial intent; House is one (one of the producers has stated that Wilson is a viable romantic potential for House - though they are totally guilty of the Sweeps Lesbian trope), and Buffy and Angel, Stargate: SG1, Smallville. But the fact is that it's all still subtextual, and it's very easy for non-slash-goggle-wearers to handwave away any homoerotic reading of the text (which they do all the time). Until there is clear and unequivocal visibility of gay characters, that handwaving option will always be there. And I agree, I think that the (lack of) visibility of gay characters on television has real political effect.

[alafaye]

I'm glad this has been written. It needed to be said and is a very valid point. While being a slash fan is fun and inspires many discussions--often late into the night--about who's gay and who isn't and why, etc, we shouldn't have to do it.

I'm unsure if you've seen the series, but there was a particularly good point in one episode of Queer as Folk. One of the characters was given a time slot on a news show, but as another character pointed out, they (the news producers) had made him into a dickless fag.

Now, at present, it's finally okay to have gay characters and even show them having a loving relationship in the public eye. They can share a loving kiss and hold hands, etc. But to show them in the bedroom, pre or post sex? Unless it's cable, nope. And as you have pointed out (now that I got a bit off topic), there aren't even that many of them. It's okay to be gay, but we're still a side show, pretty much forgotten in the main stream.

We're also still a separate culture. When it's mixed, they're an awareness among the group that there are gay people present. And funnily enough, there really isn't a difference. Okay, we still are fighting for a few our human rights, but...we're the same as them. There shouldn't even be an awareness of the difference (that this person is straight and that one is gay).

But because there is...there exists fandom and slash fans. Which shouldn't exist at all.

...sorry for the rant...I totally agree with you...and sorry if I got off topic...

[cupidsbow]

I know, right? And the retcon! The whole thing makes me laugh, and I'm seriously jonesing (pun very much intended :) to write mpreg, which is not an urge I've often had in other fandoms.