Resurrect Your Gays!! (Zombie Gay Army!!)


 I'm really interested to see what everybody's reaction is to the historical story presented in The Celluloid Closet. One of the lines that keeps coming back to me in the narration is Richard Dyer saying “Your ideas about who you are don’t just come from inside you, they come from the culture- and from this culture, it comes from the movies,”

To what extent do you, in your current generation, learn how to be a man or a woman from movies and tv? What messages do you get about sexuality--what's that like and how it works? If you are trans, genderfluid, genderqueer, asexual--who and what are your mirrors?

Celluloid Closet was made in 1995, and things were changing. Pride parades had been around since the '70s, and were pretty wonderful. ACT UP  Leather and BD/SM communities were hugely visible in the larger cities, The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence was very much a presence, The "B" was rapidly making its way into the identity alphabet soup (I think we were saying LGBQ by then) and "trans" was well on the way by the end of the decade. 

But representation still wasn't great. Buffy the Vampire Slayer was one of the very first shows to have a lesbian couple--Willow and Tara--as the main characters (Willow was bisexual. She had a boyfriend before Willow, but Bisexual Erasure is a topic for another day.) 


They were never depicted as doing anything much more than rubbing noses (there might have been a chaste kiss or two). Even in 1999, when you could show sympathetic queer characters, they couldn't go be having sex and frighten the horses. Instead, they did "magic" and made each other literally float. 

Which was all very well, if coy and irritating. But what happened was, they killed Tara off. Horribly. 

You can have happy, not criminal or miserable queer people on tv and in movies now, but to this day, they're not necessarily allowed to live for very long. This is the phenomenon that the site TV Tropes calls "Bury Your Gays." It's been a real problem for decades, While the enormous fan backlash after the death of Lexa in The 100 in 2016 at least brought attention to the issue, the problem hasn't really gone away.

If you like fantasy shows with good LGBTQ representation and showrunners committed to not killing off their characters, I strongly recommend two Canadian series--Wynonna Ryder, which is finishing up its 4th season, and Lost Girl. Both of them ran on SYFY, and share some of the same actors. 

We've come a long way, but we still have a very long way to go. 


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