Queering the screen

blinktumble:

The Hollywood Code was introduced more than 80 years ago. Every prohibition in that code has been abolished, except the one that remains more or less explicit to this day: the treatment of queerness as a perversion that inevitably brings with it the homophobic lesson of grief, punishment or death.

We have seen this time and again. In the previous two years, as the film and tv industry noticed that there was a market for queer rep, the numbers of queer characters increased onscreen but the implicit recourse to homophobia didn’t abate all that much. So, in 2016 – which parts of fandom have called The Year of the Great Gay Massacre – we not only had more queer characters, we also endured more deaths, bashings, vilification, poor treatment along the way. It’s been rough, to say the least. And it’s been painful watching people try and justify the continuation of the byg trope and variations on that theme – the “I don’t see sexuality” being the latest bit of bullshit from a showrunner who should have known better but is fast disappearing up their own overinflated ego.

So where are we now?

I’ve been curious about the ease with which many of us, myself included, have slipped into either/both being fearful or apprehensive that a queer ship might become canon because we have learned to expect a bad outcome, and saying that if it was going to be handled poorly we’d rather it wasn’t canon at all.

I totally get all of that, and I’ve said it more than once.

But at the same time, it makes me angry when I think about the implications of this. Because what this means is that we’re being trained to accept invisibility and the closet for fear of violence. Think about that. It’s one thing for individuals irl to have the freedom to make decisions about their own safety – that’s everyone’s prerogative, because only they know their circumstances.

But what we’re talking about here is pushing queerness back into the closet at the level of a social imagination and as a kind of policy setting of the tv/film industry. We saw it explicitly with the network prohibition on Ghostbusters. And we’ve begun to internalize that prohibition when we accept that it might be better to not have queer rep than run the risk of having queer rep handled poorly or badly.

I’m not really interested in another article on byg, or another panel at another con. I’m not interested in reducing the movement into a platform for a few people, or getting bogged down in skirmishes over who represents the movement. None of you do if you don’t make a difference.

As for how people are feeling, here’s the thing: the onus isn’t on queer fans to push their feelings under and leave the field for homophobes to range freely. The onus is on the media industry to do better, act responsibly, even if that just means failing better next time, hearing people out, taking the criticisms on the chin and fixing it without another round or pearl-clutching poor-me-victim rubbish from powerful people who have been otherwise happy to exploit fans’ desire for better rep.

And the onus isn’t on queer fandom to explain, justify or persuade the industry to give us decent rep. No one really expects or demands that of straight relationships onscreen.

The onus should now be on that industry to explain to us why they’re not giving us decent rep.

Please tell us why there isn’t decent rep onscreen, because we want to hear you fabricate a series of lame-ass excuses before you’re eventually forced to confront your own prejudices. We see you, we see your bullshit, and we’re not so fearful that we’ll go away and hide this time or the next. And in the process, we’ll all become better people, make a better world.

“Our lives are not our own. From womb to tomb, we are bound to others.
Past and present. And by each crime and every kindness, we birth our
future.”

– Sonmi, Cloud Atlas.