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

[liviapenn]

Really? I always got the exact opposite sense. I mean, there's the short skirts that the DEBS wear, but apart from that (I know, it's kinda hard to get "apart from that" when that's pretty much all that 80% of the cast wears for the entire movie, but still) I felt like there wasn't a lot of exploitative/creepy camera work, and kinda chalked that up to the writer/director being a woman...