In the background
So I was rewatching the 2006 Doctor Who Christmas Special, “The Runaway Bride”, and I noticed something that left me feeling strangely happy and loving the show all the more.
There’s a scene that begins with the camera briefly gliding through a room full of guests at a wedding party - sitting at their tables, dancing, doing the stuff you do at those parties. Now, just for second there, you see those two guys dancing with each other. They’re not important, neither of them has even so much as a single line of dialogue, and you never get a clear view of their faces. They’re not a plot point. You see them again only once, again in the background, again just for a few seconds, when Donna is talking to the Doctor after the wedding has been crashed by ugly Santa Claus robots with alien guns (…nevermind that). While Donna is talking, you see one of the two guys helping the other one get up.
So why am I so agitated about those two? They are not important, after all. Maybe they’re a couple, maybe they’ve just met - we’ll never know. We just get the idea that they’re definitely not just buddies.
Well, you see, while gay characters aren’t all that unusual on TV anymore, they’re usually a plot point. In soap operas, you sometimes get the impression that they’re actually meant to bring in some controversy; in cheesy romantic movies, it’s the guy whom we thought to be the protagonist’s rival in his quest for the heart of The Wonderful Girl, but, as we eventually find out, that supposed rival is not interested in The Girl - or any girls - in that special kind of way.
Okay. I’m all for gay characters. However, in all those shows and movies, they are an exception - it seems to go without saying that all the “normal people out on the street” are straight.
…See what I’m getting at? By showing a gay couple just somewhere in the background, they’re accepted as a piece of reality, a piece of normality. It’s nothing to make a big fuss about. And for that, my already great respect for Doctor Who’s writers and directors has just increased a hundredfold.