So minor incoherent rant about something that’s been annoying me for quite a while now.. which is pretty much the old argument about gays in the media, particularly television. Why is it that shows that are ‘branching out’ with new ‘alternative storylines’ of the gay variety are only doing it with gay men, not women? Arguably this means lesbians won’t be suffering the same kind of stereotyping from television that the gays boys are getting, but I actually think there has been so many attempts at male gay characters now that the ‘types’ of gay are branching out. Check out the current state of Wisteria Lane, not a camp queen in sight, but there are three homosexual guys there.. Which I suppose has something to do with them showing life from a surburban hetero female point of view, a lesbian presence might just bring their whole world crashing down.. That being said, there are rumours of a ‘lesbian’ storyline, so we shall wait and see whether that pans out. I doubt it, but here’s hoping.
Back to the rant, Skins for example (which if wanna argue about how crap that has been, see my previous note.. http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=15033404275) did something relatively simple but not often carried out in it’s selection of characters. It threw together a bunch of teens with varied interests and of different backgrounds and managed to remember to throw a gay and an ethnic minority or two in there as well.. Much more realistic to life, well as far as you can call living in Bristol ‘life’ anyway. But apart from Cassie’s random lesbian moment (“Tell Sid I’ve discovered the power of the pussy..”) no genuine attempt was made to even have a minor gay female character. Poor show Channel 4. For a channel that only appeals to youth, Northerners and gays, they are not playing to their target audience. Just hurry up and get Sugar Rush Series 3.
But bringing up Sugar Rush I suppose makes and obvious point. That’s an entire show about a lesbian girl, does this completely invalidate my bedtime rant? Well, er no. Because although it’s great to have a show that is based around the spec: ‘well there’s this girl, and she’s gay, and she loves her straight best friend’ cue opening credits, in terms of casual characters on shows passing as ‘normal’ (bear with me here..) as in that the character is not there BECAUSE of their sexuality is needed for the storyline, lesbians are sadly lacking.
Feel free to argue with me, but I can count the number of lesbian recurring characters on major shows on one hand, but I need a tally chart for the gay boys.
Monday, April 21st, 2008, 12:28AM
by shinyalex
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