On Representation, In Light Of Recent Events

misterbadguy159:

A common excuse when people discuss “queerbaiting” is “well, the show isn’t really ABOUT that stuff. It would just be distracting to make that about a romance.” Which is entirely fair, really. Not every story needs to have a gay romance. Sometimes it wouldn’t work tonally or there’s no real place for it to go. Sometimes the story’s characters and setting are antiseptic to any kind of happy romance. There’s also the worry that featuring too many romances would result in the story being bogged down in dumbass relationship drama.

Doom, for instance; you couldn’t fit a queer romance into the plot of Doom because the only romance in that story is the poly relationship between Doomguy and his many weapons. This is also why It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia hasn’t confirmed Mac and Dennis to be together, because much of their characters lean on the idea that any potential romance would be hideously toxic and likely end in one of them skinning the other.

But that’s the thing – not a story needs to have a gay romance, because not every story needs to have a romance, period. And that is where the problem lies. Because stories have no problem stuffing their gills with straight romances or straight displays of affection or straight pairings, even if they have nothing to do with the overall narrative.

In Mike Stoklasa’s review of Star Trek ‘09, he coined the term “A Case of the Not-Gays”, which honestly is shameful in that it hasn’t entered the common parlance (and Mike Stoklasa fucks up a lot, but he was on the money here). He referred to the fact that seemingly every major character was in some way confirmed to be attracted to the opposite gender. (For the sake of this exercise, assume you are a dumbass Hollywood filmmaker and therefore a bisexual is some kind of highway.) 

Spock and Uhura getting paired up is an odd subplot, but not unreasonable; maybe they wanted to throw the audience for a loop. Kirk sleeping with a green woman is a Kirk signature (it’s not a thing he actually did, but that’s another topic), so of course they did it. Our intro to Bones is him grumbling about his ex-wife, okay, that’s a pattern, but not out-there, Bones was the actual horndog of the TOS crew. But then you have Nero dropping out of nowhere in one scene that one of the people to die in the destruction of Romulus was his wife – seems a bit conspicuous, since he’s apparently spent the last few decades cooped up in a dank spaceship with his leather-clad muscular subordinates. Oh, and Scotty makes a joke about wanting to grab the Enterprise’s boobs. 

Sulu being confirmed gay in Beyond is cool, but it’s worth noting that he was one of the only two members of the crew who even could be gay at that point. And like a lot of things in critical analysis, “The Not-Gays” is one of those things that you start to see everywhere when you realize it exists.

Here’s an example. In the original Harry Potter books, not counting characters who are parents at the start of the story (they kinda have to be), the following characters are confirmed to be at least attracted to the opposite gender: Harry Potter, Ron Weasley, Hermione Granger, Draco Malfoy, Ginny Weasley, Neville Longbottom, Severus Snape, Sirius Black, Remus Lupin, Nymphadora Tonks, Bellatrix Lestrange, Percy Weasley, Bill Weasley, Fred and George Weasley, Viktor Krum, Fleur Delacour, Rubeus Hagrid, Olympe Maxime, Cedric Diggory, Cho Chang, Pansy Parkinson, Lavender Brown, Parvati and Padma Patil, Seamus Finnegan, Dean Thomas, Hannah Abbott, Teddy Lupin, Victoire Weasley. 

This looks extensive, but it’s almost certainly missing a good number. Add interviews, Fantastic Beasts, Pottermore, and Cursed Child into the mix, and it only grows larger – Luna Lovegood, Minerva McGonagall, Jacob Kowalski, Queenie Goldstein, Lord Voldemort, Scorpius Malfoy, Rose Potter.

By contrast, the list of characters confirmed to be attracted to the same gender has been holding steady at “Albus Dumbledore and Gellert Grindelwald” since a single interview a decade ago. Though, to be fair, it’s double the size of the list of characters implied in an interview to have fucked a goat. 

Which is exactly the problem. People tend to act like “but the story’s not about that” means that a story can only have a single central focus and anything not involving that is window dressing, when stories diverge off from that central focus all the dang time. There are countless stories about war, but so many of them still dedicate time to characters bonding or talking about who’s waiting for them at home. Stories about adventure tend to include bits of character development or wacky asides. And that’s especially true in the sort of longform works where the audience can get invested in a pairing and then get angry when it doesn’t happen.

And of course, there’s romance. Romantic subplots have been a part of… I’m going to say, nearly every single thing ever. And when they aren’t, it still goes on. Look at Dragon Ball, a series as antiseptic to the concept of romance as any you’ll ever find, where the main character has more onscreen interactions with most villains than he does with his wife – and yet, he’s married, and so are plenty of his friends, usually in a romance that developed entirely offscreen during a timeskip. And this approach really isn’t uncommon in shounen. It happens so often, characters getting paired up at the end, even if almost no development has occurred – almost as if it’s unimportant how they get paired up, only that they show off their case of the Not-Gays to the world.

So let’s bring this back to queer representation.

The problem is not that the entire story is about not about a gay relationship. The story doesn’t have to be about a gay relationship. The problem is that not being about straight relationships has never stopped stories from having them. But how many war movies have the soldier go home to his husband? How many shounen epilogues have the hero and his rival raising their kid together? There are plenty of stories where nearly the entire named female cast ends up with someone; how many of those stories have at least two of that female cast ending up with each other?

Not many. For it is one thing for there to be not many stories focused on gay romance; it is another for them to not be given the perfunctory nods that straight romances receive every minute, if only to prove to the audience that they exist.

Not every story must be about a gay relationship. Not every story must have one, even. But when a story can fit countless straight relationships, and countless oglings, and countless trysts, and countless future children, and not even a drip of serious same-sex attraction, the reason is not that the writer thinks a romance would be bad for the story. It’s that they think that kind of romance would be bad for the story. And that is the problem.