I have learned a lot this year about the power of art and our responsibilities as artists. And yes, I’m talking about #Lexa.
I resolve to do better going forward, to try harder each and every day, and I hope and trust that my work will be proof of that.
As artists, we can always listen and learn and grow, and we must keep pushing ourselves to create important work in disheartening times.
It feels like we all need powerful, challenging, empathetic art now more than before.
Problem: not one of those ‘in charge’ with this programme, especially those who openly and knowingly participated in the manipulation of an at-risk audience has shown the slightest bit of public concern for what happened to them. No matter the potential legal or publicity ramifications: when Javier Grillo-Marxuach looked us in the eye, he connected. His example was a caring and honourable one.
When the shoe dropped and you were all called out for your behaviour, everyone ran to ground and hid instead of (like JGM) facing it and engaging with the people you hurt. It would have gone a long way to helping a lot of young people heal and move on. These were kids who DID self-harm and suffered with suicidal thoughts and depression. Many now deal with a kind of PTSD – they can’t heal from it. They’re still suffering depression and loss. It was too much. Not that any of you have taken any kind of responsibility – as adults in authority – for your actions. Your ‘art’ comes first and whatever havoc it wrecks – you stand apart as if it has nothing to do with you at all.
It’s nice that you’ve figured out something for yourself – about ‘Lexa’ – but it isn’t about Lexa anymore. It’s about the kids you took advantage of. The audience you recklessly and sickeningly manipulated. It’s about your behaviour in the aftermath. How they don’t matter to you. And no one is particularly impressed with ‘what you’ve learned.’ Your show isn’t art. It’s a hack job at best and those in charge of it have proven themselves greedy and irresponsible in their need for fame and acknowledgement. It isn’t art. It’s commercial manipulation. All your post is – framing yourself out of an honest historical context.
Until the entire production team engages with what they did – engages with the people they did it to – and no, not ten years down the line on a special Oprah – you deserve nothing, and your words mean nothing. Even in this post they are hardly original. And they show no real contrition. I find it disturbing as well that you speak of creating important work ‘in disheartening times.’ Are you so unaware of the impact of what you produce? You don’t see your part in creating these ‘disheartening times?’
Tell me, are you aware that programmes like The 100 that show a stylised post-apocalyptic future where there are white heroes aplenty is the sort of programming admired by racists? Are you aware of the number of openly bigoted fans your show has? Not just the homophobic ones, no. Your ‘apology’ sounds unnervingly naive.
Self-importance is a bit of an issue in Hollywood. So is being disconnected from reality. If one good thing emerged from the Lexa debacle: there is a generation of youth who will not be had by such arrogance again. They see it for what it is and won’t let it stand.
Want to be a better person and not another male who benefits from rape culture politics (you know, where a powerful male authority figure can harm a group of disadvantaged people, a minority even, and get away with it, protected by his powerful male bosses)? Stand in front of those you harmed and apologise. No excuses. No hiding behind ‘the art.’
We know you’re not likely to let it happen again. Most of you will be too afraid to attempt to ever include another lesbian character in anything you do again. Look at Joss Whedon. After he killed Tara (and the outrage that caused – how lucky he was we didn’t have Twitter back then), he’s never included an explicitly queer character in anything else he’s done. It’s just as well – I doubt anyone would accept it from him. We don’t have enough queer writers telling our own stories (in Hollywood and elsewhere) as it is. Writers rooms are not known for their diversity. It’s not something we see too many stand up for, either.
It feels like we all need powerful, challenging, empathetic art now more than before.
Does this mean you would stand up for more minority writers telling their stories? Would you make sure any writer’s room you are a part of from here on will include queer writers and POC writers and more women? Can you explain why ‘now’ is more important than ‘before?’
The Lexa debacle will be talked about for years to come and your show will never escape being associated with it. Anyone associated with the show will never escape it, either, no matter what successes (or failures) you may have down the road.
So good for you and your late-breaking epiphany – but it looks like you’re still missing a lot. This is a shame. You work in a powerful medium and we know what comes with great power, right? Your team failed to respect that. Instead of recycling trite sentiments, dig a little deeper. There’s always more to it.
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.”
Folks have come to me seeking my opinion on several occasions lately, so here goes:
I have said from the beginning that working with other fandoms, str8 allies, and industry professionals is key. We will never achieve our goals as fans on our own. Any type of us-them mentality, especially regarding other LGBTQ-centric fandoms and media allies, will lead to our demise.
I didn’t fully understand the Layne/Ben thing a week or so ago, for instance. I certainly saw Layne’s point, but the whole thing felt out of left field and ultimately counterproductive. Tbf there’s probably a context that I was not privy to. In sum, they are both important and have important contributions to make to the movement. Neither should be demonized or alienated. We can’t afford to lose them.
Meanwhile there are several prominent but divisive entities within the fandom itself who seem more interested in a personal / small group power agenda than actually helping the movement. That is fatal. There is no room for personal agendas here.
The LGBTFDB / LGBTVDB split is a good example. It’s a classic philosophical difference of fostering change from the outside vs inside (the inside being the “system” aka the TV industry in this case). In fact, both groups could be working in tandem if LGBTV weren’t so paranoid that LGBTF is somehow trying to commandeer the movement, as if that were possible. I attribute part of this to poor outreach on the part of LGBTF. The dialogue there just failed from the outset. Not sure why. But from my perspective, it was like watching a slow-motion social media car wreck.
On the fan side, part of the problem is also that we lack a longitudinal view of how movements can function. At least in the US, there has been no effective model for consensus-based work in 20-30 years. Most young fans have only ever seen division and internal nitpicking in the larger political/cultural arena. There are just no current models for effective consensus-based movements. We need to dig into history for that.
Likewise some fans seem actively interested in inciting drama within the movement rather than having us accomplish anything. Like drama either for pure entertainment or – much more insidious – the kind of petty bullshit that plagues the entire millennial left right now: tearing each other apart over (relatively) minor differences in opinion or philosophy and quibbling over arbitrary semantic differences.
The insistence that everybody has to agree on every little thing is just unrealistic. We need to focus on our common interests, aka the larger issues at stake. Again, historically speaking, we older folks have let our political culture devolve into a bunch of talking heads sniping at one another and jockeying for power, so our generation at large is partly culpable in terms of the example we’ve set, or rather not set.
All this combined with people’s kneejerk internet emotional reactions and the compulsion to “call someone out” over any conceivable “offense” often leads to ranting, division, hurt feelings, and on a larger scale, ultimately alienating potential allies from our fandom / the larger movement. There are several loose cannons who seem especially adept at this type of alienation, and some have pretty large followings. Sadly those are exactly the type people who won’t step off for a minute and give others a voice, despite their continual insistence that they’re being silenced.
We as a movement were at our best when we were articulating our case in a rational manner to a wide audience, sometimes through allies like Mo Ryan & Ben, sometimes through direct outreach to the press, and I think stuff like the billboards is a great impulse. Those were very effective in terms of visibility.
We are also at our best when we manage to keep a sense of humor even in the face of such a daunting, serious underlying problem (I.e., institutionalized discrimination / homophobia in the media and culture at large). Yes, it is possible to be effective and still keep a sense of humor.
I won’t even get into the whole ship wars bullshit. It wouldn’t exist if people didn’t respond to the bait from the hateful wing of the “those” fans – seriously, their idiotic opinions deserve zero attention. Engaging in this in any manner makes our whole fandom seem petty and stupid. What if a group incited a ship war, and the other group just didn’t show up? No ship war.
Twitter trends and polls are basically exhausted at this point, or will be by the end of the summer with the end of the current TV cycle. We need to get back to wider goals.
Several fans have approached me about my opinion, so here it is:
We need to get a solid, unified message out there through as many channels as possible.
In order to do this, and instead of quibbling over nothing, we need to remember that we are all fighting for the same 2-3 things:
1) that the public learns about and understands the danger of BYG for real LGBTQ people’s lives, and that this trope intersects for POC in especially devastating ways,
2) that the industry understands that they are under scrutiny and absolutely must take responsibility when representing a vulnerable, persecuted largely young population, and
3) more generally, we have to convey the message that homophobia & ignorance still dominate, and that individuals, professionals, and the collective tendencies of the larger media landscape can counter those destructive narratives and can actually save real people’s lives.
We can continue to make Lexa’s death mean something by having real impact. But we have to adopt a “blood must not have blood” philosophy amongst ourselves and unify in order to do that.
Lots of good sense being made in this post. Thanks fro writing!!!
The Doctor Is Out 