"I'm glad you're here, Merlin."
So, I'm in the process of re-watching/catching-up with Merlin, listening to all the series 1 & 2 commentaries, and watching nearly every damn wonderful interview/behind-the-scenes feature/video diary (a.k.a. The Bradley & Colin Show), from the snuggly adorable giggling that is Tony Head to Katie McGrath: the most fabulous not-so-secret Arthur/Merlin & Morgana/Morgause fangirl ever. Merlin gives me some of the most happymaking cast interactions I've fangirled in a long time, plus a canon that, despite all its flaws and frustrations, hasn't yet stopped letting me have a thoroughly enjoyable experience with it most of the time. But the thing is, I'm getting tired of only having subtext in canon. And with Pride coming up next weekend in the Twin Cities, I thought it was the perfect time to write through this particular rant of mine that's been building and try to make it as articulate as I can right now. (Warning: it's still probably going to be a mess. Bear with me in my process. Please share your thoughts. Challenge me. I could use some attempts at a debate right now, but I could also use some empathy in equal measure.)
This past week I was re-visiting bookshop's post from last year on homoerotic subtext vs text in pop culture and fandom, and it remains one of my favourite bits of meta I've read from anyone in fandom, because in many ways it is vital. (Seriously, go read that post if you still haven't because it is much more focused and articulate than my following rambles will probably turn out to be.) Too often I forget just how subversive it is being a slasher at all, how we are a subculture built on beliefs that mainstream culture only winks at or denies. Now, I know not all slashers are the same, not at all really, and it still baffles me how many are still not advocates of LGBTQ rights outside of their predilections for reading/writing about two people of the same sex bonking and/or falling in love. And I do wish we'd fail better sometimes at our handling of women in m/m fic and in not slashing enough ladies. (I do not exclude myself from these flaws.) But by and large, slash subculture is important, I think, because we take what pop culture tells us is the norm and we say, "Nope! Actually, it goes like this!" and, in the hands of the best fic writers, turn something like, say, the multi-problematic writing of Stargate: Atlantis into something complex and beautiful and fascinating, starring women in charge, strong POCs, and oh yeah, two dudes falling in love and saving the galaxy.
What I'm tired of is pretty much what bookshop writes about, though: How we spend so much of our time twisting text to suit our desires, while also wishing so very badly that the text would just have the guts to fit those desires in the first place.
Okay, wait, let me digress with something I feel is necessary to understand where I'm coming from with the rest of my rant: As far as my own sexual identity, the closest label that I identify with is "bisexual," but while I declared myself as such in high school when I widely came out, I haven't identified as bisexual for several years. More often than not, when it comes up, I say things like "I like dudes and ladies" or, if I'm a bit tipsy, start rambling about how gender is just one facet of what makes me attracted to someone, how when I'm into someone it's more about their kindness or feminist sensibilities or ability to make me feel at ease and laughing so hard my face hurts, and their gender is sort of not the point. Anyways, "bisexual," to me, has always felt like a label that implies a certain place in the LGBTQ community, and that is a place where I've never truly felt a part of. (Not for any lack of pride or rage -- I just think that has a lot more to do with my own history of rarely ever feeling quite at home in any community, so I think that's a whole other issue going on that's not directly related to the bisexual aspect of me.)
On the other hand, part of me really wants to feel like I'm part of some, albeit nebulous, bisexual community because I want to share more in the frustration I feel about how bisexuality is represented in pop culture. It looks to me like it's only ever shown as either as an experimental phase, as a gay man or lesbian performing their sexuality as "wrong" somehow (hi there, Queer as Folk writers and Lindsay in season four!), or as invisible entirely. I mean, seriously, try to think of one openly bisexual/omnisexual character in television that isn't Captain Jack Harkness. No, really, please do, because if there is one I'm not aware of, I want to know! Who am I forgetting and/or who am I not watching?
Speaking of Jack, I do want to say this: If there is one genre of storytelling that I expect more from when it comes to the sort of progressive storytelling I'm looking for, it's science fiction. So why are we still lacking in main characters who are out and proud? Is there really only Torchwood? Well, also to some extent Doctor Who. Yes, here is one of the few positive things I will ever say about Steve Moffatt: He has rather elegantly carried on with Russell T Davies's so-called "gay agenda" into his own time as showrunner. The thing that is so heartening about queer characters on DW since 2005 has been the fact that they aren't treated any differently from the straight characters. There are characters who are same-sex married couples and even interspecies same-sex couples, and they are all presented in such a way that its straight characters do not even comment on it, because their love and lifestyles are just as much the norm as the love and lifestyles of a couple comprised of a human man and woman. I want more of this in television, so very badly. And I want Jack to be only the beginning of more sexually fluid characters in television.
Okay, but I need to point out another recent sci-fi adventure, one which I would like to expect more from but know is prettymuch hopeless: Star Trek reboot. I love reboot just as much as any fangirl in the past two years, really I do. But if the future of Star Fleet really is a culture based in equality so that we can have women and POCs on the deck of the Enterprise, why can we not also have Kirk/Spock subtext -- arguably the pioneer pairing of all modern fandom -- become text this time around? Also, and I know this is a whole different argument, but: Why couldn't we have made Uhura a strong, intelligent, badass female character in her own right without tacking on a romance with Spock?
Subtext is never going to be enough if we don't get more text, dammit. I'm really searching my memory here, but the only recent show I can think of that actually had a main character who was out and proud and not all of the storylines were just about him being gay was the wonderful (awfully underrated) ABC's Greek. Certainly Greek wasn't always perfect, but the things it failed at, it failed at a whole lot better than a lot of other shows I can think of, and in the meantime we got things like an amazing eight-person ensemble cast that included two ladies of colour being BFFs and a black gay dude interacting with his own sexuality and the queer community in ways I hadn't seen on television before. I'll always remember this one episode where Ashleigh is trying to get Calvin to go to a gay film festival with his much more queer community-involved new boyfriend, and she's thinks the movies will be sort of like The Devil Wears Prada, and he's like, No, it's going to be more like an "earnest coming-of-age film about some kid in Idaho, cutting himself while listening to Erasure." And I'm like, OH GOD THAT IS LIKE EVERY QUEER TEEN MOVIE I WATCHED IN HIGH SCHOOL WHEN I WAS COMING TO TERMS WITH MY OWN SEXUALITY. And you know what? Those films are important, yes, for a lot of people, but I always felt that for me, something was missing: a whole bunch of experiences that had less to do with the struggle to be accepted and more to do with the struggle of just finding someone to love. As Calvin added, "Why does everything have to be about being gay when you're gay? I'd rather just go see a homoerotic action movie with the [fraternity] brothers."
Which brings me back to my subtext point, because it's not that I want homoerotic subtext to go away. Oh god no! I have been reading and writing fic and looking for the subtext in canon and RL relationships for going on ten years now, and I don't think I'll ever tire of it being there. I just wish there were more text alongside it in pop culture. I look at what I believe are two of the greatest sitcoms on television right now, each in their own unique ways -- Parks & Recreation and Community -- and I hope like hell those are the beginnings of a more feminist and racially diverse future for smart, creative sitcoms, but I still feel something missing, because where are the queer characters? I take heart in the fact that at least they give us the rich femmeslash pairing of Leslie/Ann and the equally as rich slash pairing of Troy/Abed, but where's the text, apart from the admittedly hilarious Dean Pelton in Community, but he is a problem in himself because he's such a gay caricature half the time. What I really want is for Dan Harmon to make good on his rumors and sexual tension and adorable co-dependent friendship and develop Troy & Abed into an actual queer romance. I fully believe that if any showrunner would do that right now, it'd be Dan Harmon, and I fully believe that if any comedic actors could portray that romance in a real, unique way against stereotypes it could be Donald Glover and Danny Pudi.
Which, in a roundabout way, brings me back to Merlin, and the way that show's cast and crew talk about the "buddy movie," "homoerotic subtext of epic tales," and the "intense relationship" of Arthur & Merlin. On the one hand, you have moments where Bradley says he takes people's readings of their relationship as a compliment to his and Colin's acting arcs, and you have Katie & Angel pointing out their chemistry every chance they get, but then you have moments where Katie's like, "Awww, look at them, watching out for each other!" and other members of cast and crew essentially go, "Ugh, Katie, not again," and she has to be all, "Oh, I'm going to get in trouble for fueling this even more, aren't I?" and I'm like, "NOOO, KATIE, NEVER STOP POINTING IT OUT." I know it's more than I can ask of a children's show -- that if we can't even get complex & out queer main characters in adult shows, then we've an even further way to go with having them on children's shows -- but I maintain: Why the hell not? One of the fun things about Merlin to begin with is its playful disregard for historical accuracy and its twisting of a legend that has been twisted so many times, why not play with it even more? Not that issues of race and class and sexuality are equatable in their struggles, but it's still worth pointing out because these are unexpected ways of altering the legend: If they can make Guinevere a black servant, why can't they make Merlin and Arthur bisexual and give them a love story in the midst of uniting Albion? If Gwen can love and be torn between two men equally, why can't Arthur too love and be torn between a man and a woman equally?
Still, although I want more than anything to see the fluidity of sexuality portrayed in pop culture, we're not even going to get there if we can't first portray gay characters in a nuanced way and in leading roles. Every time a straight girl friend tells me that watching Doctor Who made her get a legitimate crush on Billie Piper, or a straight guy friend tells me that watching & reading Sherlock Holmes stories has made him legitimately want them to be a couple, I know I can't be wrong in still sticking by that old theory that every straight or gay person has their 1%, the part of them that is capable of being attracted to someone who hadn't previously fit their sexual identity. And I want more movies like Imagine Me & You, where we meet a woman who's never had to question her sexuality before, because she's always loved her best male friend, but then she meets one particular woman, and she's her 1%, she's the one who alters her world and her view of what falling in love can mean. God, okay, I love that movie so much. Plus: Tony Head being adorable and Piper Perabo being gorgeous.
Ahhh okay this post became a lot longer than I meant for it to be, so I'm going to wind down now, and hope that even though my points are a bit disjointed, that at least some of it makes sense. One more thing though: Part of me wants to say, Calm down a bit and be optimistic: we have made enormous progress over the past few decades, of course we have, in making LGBTQ people more visible and more positively portrayed in pop culture. Even just the fact of Torchwood alone is huge progress. But I think sometimes that sort of optimistic viewpoint can be dangerous, can make us a bit complacent. Because when it feels like for each step forward we take with queer rights, our culture takes several steps backward, our work is not done. Mainstream culture is still rank with so much prejudice and lack of acceptance that, hell, I'll even settle for tolerance from some people at this point.
I think that what it comes down to is this: Turning more homoerotic subtext into text is important in the fight for queer rights because in a lot of ways that sort of activism is just as important as more blatant forms of activism. Because pop television (and film and literature) should be more of an attempt to reflect our lives in all their diversity, and it does influence our lives, in sneaking ways we don't immediately notice and in larger ways we do. I think it's one of the most socially and politically important things a writer can do: write our stories with nuanced characters from different backgrounds, making visible and breaking stereotypes of sexuality, race, gender, and class, and letting this gradually change our culture into one that is less divided, less whitewashed, less heteronormative, less patriarchal. These are all separate battles in many ways, but they all have a fight for equality at their center, and they're all important, and I find that I can't write about one of them without thinking about the rest, so. Er. Now I'll just trail off here and get on with my day.
♥
This past week I was re-visiting bookshop's post from last year on homoerotic subtext vs text in pop culture and fandom, and it remains one of my favourite bits of meta I've read from anyone in fandom, because in many ways it is vital. (Seriously, go read that post if you still haven't because it is much more focused and articulate than my following rambles will probably turn out to be.) Too often I forget just how subversive it is being a slasher at all, how we are a subculture built on beliefs that mainstream culture only winks at or denies. Now, I know not all slashers are the same, not at all really, and it still baffles me how many are still not advocates of LGBTQ rights outside of their predilections for reading/writing about two people of the same sex bonking and/or falling in love. And I do wish we'd fail better sometimes at our handling of women in m/m fic and in not slashing enough ladies. (I do not exclude myself from these flaws.) But by and large, slash subculture is important, I think, because we take what pop culture tells us is the norm and we say, "Nope! Actually, it goes like this!" and, in the hands of the best fic writers, turn something like, say, the multi-problematic writing of Stargate: Atlantis into something complex and beautiful and fascinating, starring women in charge, strong POCs, and oh yeah, two dudes falling in love and saving the galaxy.
What I'm tired of is pretty much what bookshop writes about, though: How we spend so much of our time twisting text to suit our desires, while also wishing so very badly that the text would just have the guts to fit those desires in the first place.
Okay, wait, let me digress with something I feel is necessary to understand where I'm coming from with the rest of my rant: As far as my own sexual identity, the closest label that I identify with is "bisexual," but while I declared myself as such in high school when I widely came out, I haven't identified as bisexual for several years. More often than not, when it comes up, I say things like "I like dudes and ladies" or, if I'm a bit tipsy, start rambling about how gender is just one facet of what makes me attracted to someone, how when I'm into someone it's more about their kindness or feminist sensibilities or ability to make me feel at ease and laughing so hard my face hurts, and their gender is sort of not the point. Anyways, "bisexual," to me, has always felt like a label that implies a certain place in the LGBTQ community, and that is a place where I've never truly felt a part of. (Not for any lack of pride or rage -- I just think that has a lot more to do with my own history of rarely ever feeling quite at home in any community, so I think that's a whole other issue going on that's not directly related to the bisexual aspect of me.)
On the other hand, part of me really wants to feel like I'm part of some, albeit nebulous, bisexual community because I want to share more in the frustration I feel about how bisexuality is represented in pop culture. It looks to me like it's only ever shown as either as an experimental phase, as a gay man or lesbian performing their sexuality as "wrong" somehow (hi there, Queer as Folk writers and Lindsay in season four!), or as invisible entirely. I mean, seriously, try to think of one openly bisexual/omnisexual character in television that isn't Captain Jack Harkness. No, really, please do, because if there is one I'm not aware of, I want to know! Who am I forgetting and/or who am I not watching?
Speaking of Jack, I do want to say this: If there is one genre of storytelling that I expect more from when it comes to the sort of progressive storytelling I'm looking for, it's science fiction. So why are we still lacking in main characters who are out and proud? Is there really only Torchwood? Well, also to some extent Doctor Who. Yes, here is one of the few positive things I will ever say about Steve Moffatt: He has rather elegantly carried on with Russell T Davies's so-called "gay agenda" into his own time as showrunner. The thing that is so heartening about queer characters on DW since 2005 has been the fact that they aren't treated any differently from the straight characters. There are characters who are same-sex married couples and even interspecies same-sex couples, and they are all presented in such a way that its straight characters do not even comment on it, because their love and lifestyles are just as much the norm as the love and lifestyles of a couple comprised of a human man and woman. I want more of this in television, so very badly. And I want Jack to be only the beginning of more sexually fluid characters in television.
Okay, but I need to point out another recent sci-fi adventure, one which I would like to expect more from but know is prettymuch hopeless: Star Trek reboot. I love reboot just as much as any fangirl in the past two years, really I do. But if the future of Star Fleet really is a culture based in equality so that we can have women and POCs on the deck of the Enterprise, why can we not also have Kirk/Spock subtext -- arguably the pioneer pairing of all modern fandom -- become text this time around? Also, and I know this is a whole different argument, but: Why couldn't we have made Uhura a strong, intelligent, badass female character in her own right without tacking on a romance with Spock?
Subtext is never going to be enough if we don't get more text, dammit. I'm really searching my memory here, but the only recent show I can think of that actually had a main character who was out and proud and not all of the storylines were just about him being gay was the wonderful (awfully underrated) ABC's Greek. Certainly Greek wasn't always perfect, but the things it failed at, it failed at a whole lot better than a lot of other shows I can think of, and in the meantime we got things like an amazing eight-person ensemble cast that included two ladies of colour being BFFs and a black gay dude interacting with his own sexuality and the queer community in ways I hadn't seen on television before. I'll always remember this one episode where Ashleigh is trying to get Calvin to go to a gay film festival with his much more queer community-involved new boyfriend, and she's thinks the movies will be sort of like The Devil Wears Prada, and he's like, No, it's going to be more like an "earnest coming-of-age film about some kid in Idaho, cutting himself while listening to Erasure." And I'm like, OH GOD THAT IS LIKE EVERY QUEER TEEN MOVIE I WATCHED IN HIGH SCHOOL WHEN I WAS COMING TO TERMS WITH MY OWN SEXUALITY. And you know what? Those films are important, yes, for a lot of people, but I always felt that for me, something was missing: a whole bunch of experiences that had less to do with the struggle to be accepted and more to do with the struggle of just finding someone to love. As Calvin added, "Why does everything have to be about being gay when you're gay? I'd rather just go see a homoerotic action movie with the [fraternity] brothers."
Which brings me back to my subtext point, because it's not that I want homoerotic subtext to go away. Oh god no! I have been reading and writing fic and looking for the subtext in canon and RL relationships for going on ten years now, and I don't think I'll ever tire of it being there. I just wish there were more text alongside it in pop culture. I look at what I believe are two of the greatest sitcoms on television right now, each in their own unique ways -- Parks & Recreation and Community -- and I hope like hell those are the beginnings of a more feminist and racially diverse future for smart, creative sitcoms, but I still feel something missing, because where are the queer characters? I take heart in the fact that at least they give us the rich femmeslash pairing of Leslie/Ann and the equally as rich slash pairing of Troy/Abed, but where's the text, apart from the admittedly hilarious Dean Pelton in Community, but he is a problem in himself because he's such a gay caricature half the time. What I really want is for Dan Harmon to make good on his rumors and sexual tension and adorable co-dependent friendship and develop Troy & Abed into an actual queer romance. I fully believe that if any showrunner would do that right now, it'd be Dan Harmon, and I fully believe that if any comedic actors could portray that romance in a real, unique way against stereotypes it could be Donald Glover and Danny Pudi.
Which, in a roundabout way, brings me back to Merlin, and the way that show's cast and crew talk about the "buddy movie," "homoerotic subtext of epic tales," and the "intense relationship" of Arthur & Merlin. On the one hand, you have moments where Bradley says he takes people's readings of their relationship as a compliment to his and Colin's acting arcs, and you have Katie & Angel pointing out their chemistry every chance they get, but then you have moments where Katie's like, "Awww, look at them, watching out for each other!" and other members of cast and crew essentially go, "Ugh, Katie, not again," and she has to be all, "Oh, I'm going to get in trouble for fueling this even more, aren't I?" and I'm like, "NOOO, KATIE, NEVER STOP POINTING IT OUT." I know it's more than I can ask of a children's show -- that if we can't even get complex & out queer main characters in adult shows, then we've an even further way to go with having them on children's shows -- but I maintain: Why the hell not? One of the fun things about Merlin to begin with is its playful disregard for historical accuracy and its twisting of a legend that has been twisted so many times, why not play with it even more? Not that issues of race and class and sexuality are equatable in their struggles, but it's still worth pointing out because these are unexpected ways of altering the legend: If they can make Guinevere a black servant, why can't they make Merlin and Arthur bisexual and give them a love story in the midst of uniting Albion? If Gwen can love and be torn between two men equally, why can't Arthur too love and be torn between a man and a woman equally?
Still, although I want more than anything to see the fluidity of sexuality portrayed in pop culture, we're not even going to get there if we can't first portray gay characters in a nuanced way and in leading roles. Every time a straight girl friend tells me that watching Doctor Who made her get a legitimate crush on Billie Piper, or a straight guy friend tells me that watching & reading Sherlock Holmes stories has made him legitimately want them to be a couple, I know I can't be wrong in still sticking by that old theory that every straight or gay person has their 1%, the part of them that is capable of being attracted to someone who hadn't previously fit their sexual identity. And I want more movies like Imagine Me & You, where we meet a woman who's never had to question her sexuality before, because she's always loved her best male friend, but then she meets one particular woman, and she's her 1%, she's the one who alters her world and her view of what falling in love can mean. God, okay, I love that movie so much. Plus: Tony Head being adorable and Piper Perabo being gorgeous.
Ahhh okay this post became a lot longer than I meant for it to be, so I'm going to wind down now, and hope that even though my points are a bit disjointed, that at least some of it makes sense. One more thing though: Part of me wants to say, Calm down a bit and be optimistic: we have made enormous progress over the past few decades, of course we have, in making LGBTQ people more visible and more positively portrayed in pop culture. Even just the fact of Torchwood alone is huge progress. But I think sometimes that sort of optimistic viewpoint can be dangerous, can make us a bit complacent. Because when it feels like for each step forward we take with queer rights, our culture takes several steps backward, our work is not done. Mainstream culture is still rank with so much prejudice and lack of acceptance that, hell, I'll even settle for tolerance from some people at this point.
I think that what it comes down to is this: Turning more homoerotic subtext into text is important in the fight for queer rights because in a lot of ways that sort of activism is just as important as more blatant forms of activism. Because pop television (and film and literature) should be more of an attempt to reflect our lives in all their diversity, and it does influence our lives, in sneaking ways we don't immediately notice and in larger ways we do. I think it's one of the most socially and politically important things a writer can do: write our stories with nuanced characters from different backgrounds, making visible and breaking stereotypes of sexuality, race, gender, and class, and letting this gradually change our culture into one that is less divided, less whitewashed, less heteronormative, less patriarchal. These are all separate battles in many ways, but they all have a fight for equality at their center, and they're all important, and I find that I can't write about one of them without thinking about the rest, so. Er. Now I'll just trail off here and get on with my day.
♥