Recently the Decider polled LGBTQ entertainment professionals to
create a list of the 50 Most Important LGBTQ TV Characters of All-Time. Decider staffer Brett White tweeted his own top 25,
which has helpfully been gathered as a moment:
Brett's list included
guest characters, and he referenced Jean from the "Isn't It Romantic"
episode of The Golden Girls. That is an excellent episode.
I never saw it back then
(1986), but I have seen it many times now. They do a beautiful job of handling
the issue sensitively and balancing it with humor and playing to the characters'
strengths. Someone being homosexual was often a punch line back then, in
general and even sometimes on The Golden Girls, but
not that episode.
(When I watch "Sick
and Tired" where they address Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and think maybe
they shouldn't have bothered trying to address special issues ever, "Isn't
It Romantic" and "Have Yourself A Very Little Christmas" remind
me that it can be done.)
It started me thinking
about when I had first seen LGBT characters on television. It was the "Big
Disease With a Little Name" episode of 21 Jump Street (1988).
I have only seen it once, but I remembered it as
being well done. Hanson's assignment was to protect a teen with hemophilia who
had contracted AIDS and who people did not want at school because of their fear
of the disease. Naturally, other students assumed Harley was gay, and so that
when Hanson was hanging out with Harley that they were dating, and you saw a
lot of prejudice. Later we learned that Harley was gay; his parents made him
blame it on hemophilia because they wanted to avoid the judgment that came with
that. (That didn't really pan out.)
Looking back I am sure that there were things that
weren't portrayed accurately. Harley died during the episode, not long after he
had been attending school and riding his motorcycle. I'm just not sure it would
have happened that fast. At the same time, the treatment that he faced (surely
inspired by Ryan White), the fear to be open about his sexuality, Hanson's
reluctance to drink from an unopened milk carton that Harley had touched (and
how much that hurt Harley), and Harley thinking about killing himself instead
of letting the disease take its course all felt pretty real. In the last scene,
when Harley's mother called Hanson to tell him that Harley had died, and that
Harley had said to tell him it was okay about the milk, that was pretty
devastating.
I started wondering if other people had remembered
it and been affected. I did find one post on it, but the writer spent a lot of
time on the prejudice people with hemophilia face. A commenter asked whether
she'd missed that he was gay, and the writer was really mad about that. She thought
they took the easy way out.
I disagree with her characterization of it as the
easy way out, but it only reinforces the point about representation. It had
meant something to her to see parts of her struggle there, and then it felt
like they took it away. It has become somewhat easier for LGBTQ people to find
their stories, but it's still not that easy. I left off the IA because there is
not much representation for them at all. That doesn't mean that if you are
straight but have a dangerous disease or disability that the straightness is
enough to feel included.
That goes back to what I wrote yesterday about
needing many different movies with many different stories being told. It's
important for us to see stories that are not like ours to have empathy, but it
is also important to see stories that are like ours to know that we are not
alone. It's not even necessarily representation for a small group, because what
if there are lots of people who have the same struggle but they are all scared
to talk about it? Or can't get anyone to listen?
Let me take one more side trip, and then I am going
to circle back to Monday's post too, with the Pirates of the Caribbean ride.
Recently on The Talk they were talking about
Shonda Rhimes, regarding her recent weight loss and her saying she was
invisible before.
Guest host Carnie Wilson kind of contradicted her. Even
though she admitted that people treat you differently when you are fat, Carnie
said she has always had boyfriends and men interested in her. It kind of seemed
that she wanted to make sure that was known. And yes, that is true, there are
men who don't worry about that, or like it, or are at least willing to consider
it, though certainly having a famous parent and some amount of fame helps.
Back to the ride. I am a straight white woman, and I
am also fat. Fat women are used as a punch line a lot. The original version has
a fat woman being auctioned off. Although the more conventionally attractive
women are scared or sad, the fat women appears to be good with it. Still, none
of the pirates want to bid on her, so when the other women are running away
from pirates she is chasing one who is scared of her.
That was just one more reminder that I could never be
sexually desirable. Plenty of other entertainment messages backed that up, so I
closed myself off to that. It was not always effective, and there were some
ways in which it was freeing, but there was damage from it.
It was also not the only possible true story, as
Carnie Wilson and others have pointed out, but it was the most common and I
bought it.
What we see has an effect on what we can imagine and
how we feel. We should be making room for everyone in that.
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