Eredien's Journal

I don't really engage in many fandoms, and what engagement I do is generally literary- or costume-based, rather than TV- or movie-based.

However, after having read a discussion in rm's blog, I find that there's an important theoretical and artistic point lurking within her recent critique of the lack of gay characters in a new TV show.

After watching the pilot of a show, rm basically said that she couldn't tell if the heterosexual relationship in the pilot would be relevant to the plot--but I bet that before she even watched the pilot, she knew that any heterosexual relationships in the show probably wouldn't be very relevant to her personal romantic interests, as a self-described queer person.

This got me thinking about craft and the failure to entertain as related to craft and audience.

Tere are two main ways that a romance plot can hold an audience's interest:
- it can be personally, romantically relevant.
- it can be artistically relevant (plot-relevant, artistically portrayed, wittily written, etc.)

Modern media privileges depictions of straight people's romantic interactions in a way that queer romantic interactions are rarely privileged: through enabling straight people to ignore bad writing in a way that queer people cannot.

Straight people might forgive a straight romantic subplot's irrelevance to the plot due to the fact that they can take a personal interest in the relationship portrayed. But, for many queer persons, artistic interest is usually the only interesting thing that a straight romantic interaction has going for it. (Note: people who define as bi- or pan-sexual may also find heterosexual romantic relationships interesting on a personal and an artistic level, but even then I believe that many bi- or pan-sexual people may find the portrayal of straight gender roles and sexual roles problematic. I'm pan-sexual, and I know I and my boyfriend find many such portrayals problematic!)

Creators are required to entertain media consumers.
Audiences 'require' entertainment.

If creators focus on the "personal interest" side of a straight romantic relationship to the extent that there seems to be no artistic element to the relationship, that means that, for whatever reason, creators assumed that audiences' "personal interest" in the relationship would be all that was needed to entertain viewers.

That is an incorrect assumption. By making it, they left all audiences who do not have such an interest, and/or those who have that interest and find it problematic, and/or those who do not have that interest and find it problematic, out of their calculations.

Here's the worst part--the creators probably didn't even realize they were making that assumption, because they probably didn't even realize that they had that audience to alienate. Even if did realize, they might not care that they were alienating that audience.

When a queer person finds themselves in that situation (which is common), stating, "gee, I was worried that this particular show wouldn't be entertaining for me, because I couldn't be entertained on a personal level and the creators made no effort to entertain me on an artistic level," isn't strange. It's saying "this show didn't entertain me, its audience. The creators didn't do their job, in terms of craft, in terms of entertaining the audience of which I am a part. Do they care about this portion of their audience? It would be nice if they showed that they did, by entertaining me."

When the queer person goes on to say, "I wish more creators would consider the fact that there are many people out there who are not going to be entertained by portrayals of straight romances solely because they are straight romances--maybe there should be something more there, even for those straight people who are entertained by the fact that straight romances are straight romances," that's not crazy.

When they say, "the fact that Hollywood can make the assumption that everyone in their audience will care about straight romances as straight romances (if nothing else), and even cater to that assumption without realizing it, shows that our media still has a long way to go in making media entertaining for everyone," that's a pretty basic summation of the problem, with a lot left unsaid.

I find that a lot of straight people have huge problems with media that features even one gay character (the "Dumbledore didn't need to be gay!" problem), saying that now they can't relate to that character.

Welcome to reading or watching TV or movies as a queer person, where you can't relate to 90% of fictional characters' romantic relationships, and grow up thinking that's normal!

If you're a straight teenager and you're left without real-life role models, or are actively deprived of real-life role models, you need only watch television to see that your emotional desires and sexual needs are normal, should be made available to you, and are endorsed by the culture around you.

If you're a queer teenager and you're left without real-life role models, or are actively deprived of real-life role models--both of which are quite likely to happen by accidents of birth and deliberate mechanations of religion/politics, if nothing else--you need only watch television to see that your emotional desires and sexual needs are not represented anywhere--or are represented as quirky, disturbing, evil, controversial or depressing abnormalities. You see that people are working to make sure that your emotional desires and sexual needs should not be made public, much less available to you, or anyone else. You see that your emotional desires and sexual needs are not widely endorsed, and are in fact mocked or villified, by the culture around you.

So, Dumbledore's gay. Asking, "does a story need to be queer?" misses the point: real queer people need to be queer, and part of the way they are queer is by telling and listening to stories about themselves.
In that sense, it's good to know that Dumbledore is in my corner--not because I think he's particularly hot (my money is on Snape or Tonks), but because his fictional sexuality is a creator's acknowledgment that the very real sexuality of people like me should exist, and needs to exist, in both the fictional and non-fictional worlds. (It's even nicer to see queer characters having romantic and sexual lives.)

What is it like when creators don't acknowledge that people like you should exist in their creative works?

Here's a selection of sobering mass media moments (these are familiar to people of any marginalized group, I suspect):
- Realizing that you have never seen a representation of someone like you on television or other media, despite having consumed media for 15 or 20 years.
- Realizing that the first time you saw media representing someone like you, they were a comic character, an inoffensive nobody, or a cliched and offensive stereotype.
- Realizing that the first time the media represented someone like you who wasn't a caricature, people stopped watching the show because they were offended that people like you were represented, or said that they couldn't relate to you or care about you.
- Realizing that it is considered prime-time, CNN-worthy news when important or popular creators decide to feature a fictional representation of someone like you.
- Realizing that a lot of people find it offensive when creators decide to feature a fictional representation of someone like you, and mobilize to make the creators stop representing you.

Fictions are the stories we tell ourselves about who we are. When we exclude queer people, or people of color, or people who don't speak our language or pray to our God from our fictions, especially our mainstream, mass-media fictions, we tell ourselves false, impoverished stories.

If people we meet only tell us stories we already know, we are not going to know what to do when we meet people whose stories are different from the ones we know. We might ignore their story, or we might try and fit them into our story, or we might outlaw their story--but all of those options are, in the long run, generally unworkable.

More importantly, if people we meet only tell us stories we already know, we are not going to know what to do when we are the people whose stories are different from the ones we know. We are not going to know what stories to tell ourselves. We are not going to know what stories to tell others about ourselves. We are going to have people telling us it's better for us that we don't have our own stories to tell. We are going to have people telling us that it's better for them that we don't have our own stories to tell. We are going to have to learn to speak again--and when we learn to speak, when we have stories to tell, we are going to have to learn the necessity of speaking loudly, because when we speak, we are going to have to do it despite the many powerful voices telling us that we shouldn't be allowed to speak at all.

Fiction can help us speak; fiction is necessary for us to learn how to speak for ourselves; but to the extent that the creators of fiction do not recognize that we are even there to be entertained, we and fiction are both worse off for it.