June 19, 2022

Happy Pride Month, my friends! June is a good time to do many things, but especially to reflect on the resilience and awesomeness of the LGBTQ+ community - as well as the question of why they still have to take so much shit from the world.

This blog is not specifically about LGBTQ+ issues, and yet...

When you set out to examine sexism in media, you also get whacked in the face with an awful lot of heterosexism, transphobia, bi erasure, queer-baiting, villainization of LGBTQ people, and Absurdly Cis & Straight Stupidity (ACSS, for short, and give it a soft c like cell).

Although this blog's usual focus is on heterosexual relationships in fiction (see: its title), as a frequently erased bi woman and dedicated opponent of ACSS in all its forms, I would be remiss if I didn't at least acknowledge that my contestant franchises all have:

An ACSS Problem

The precise nature of this problem varies by franchise, and by era within the franchise, and yet somehow, there's always something. Mainstream media franchises seem unable to accept the LGBTQIA+ spectrum in all its glory without somehow, inevitably, exposing their own ACSS. For instance:

Star Trek

Star Trek: The Original Series has the notable honor of having inspired the invention of slash fiction, in which canonically heterosexual characters are written as homosexual in fan fiction. This means that for nearly half a century there has been a dedicated collection of fans who want to talk about whether Captain Kirk and Spock are in a sexual relationship; a romantic relationship; both; or a polyamorous arrangement with Dr. McCoy. 

It also means that Star Trek fans deserve some credit for the New York Times needing to publish this headline, even though Supernatural fans were the proximate cause.

And the slash fans are pretty much legion. If you want to be a Trekker or a Trekkie or any variant thereof, you must play on the turf of the slash-ers.

How is that a problem?

It's not! Or at least, it wouldn't be, if the various authors and copyright holders of Star Trek could set their homophobia aside long enough to appreciate the benefits of having die-hard fans who still watch their show notwithstanding that it was canceled during the Nixon administration. "So what if they wish my characters were less heterosexual?" an open-minded studio might think. "If it sells tickets, I don't care."

And yet.

Until recently, Star Trek was simply not OK with the existence of slash fiction. Nor was it interested in LGBTQ+ representation. Take, for example, the 2009-present reboot movie series, which went out of its way to:

• reaffirm Dr. McCoy's straightness with a vaguely misogynistic throwaway line about how his ex-wife "took the whole damn planet in the divorce;"
• shoehorn in a heteroromantic relationship for Spock and his subordinate officer Uhura, even though Spock is - in theory - 1) a married man and 2) a better boss than that;
• demonstrate that Captain Kirk boinks female-presenting aliens; and
• pretend to throw the LGBTQ community a bone in the form of making Sulu gay, simply because George Takei is, even though his homosexuality added nothing to the character, they cut his only kiss scene, and his on-screen husband doesn't have a speaking part.

Eesh. They might as well hang up a sign that says "slash fic makes us uncomfortable, please stop writing it, no really stoppit we don't like it!"

Careful there, Paramount. Your ACSS is showing.

What about James Bond?

The James Bond of slash fiction is a prolific lover of Q, his quartermaster. In last year's No Time to Die, a blink-and-you'll-miss-it reference did establish that Q (currently played by Ben Whishaw) dates men, so there's at least a sliver of support for the idea that Eon Productions is OK with same-sex relationships existing within their cinematic universe.

Sadly, besides this most recent Q, Bond has only met 3 non-straight people ever. Two of them are hitmen in a romantic relationship whose cologne is compared to "a tart's handkerchief."

The third is an ambiguously bi turncoat who effectively starts a game of gay chicken with 007, who successfully unnerves him by leaning into it.

Silva: What's the regulation to cover this? First time for everything.

Bond: What makes you think this is my first time?

-Skyfall (2012)

Later on, 007 kills said ambiguously bi turncoat by coming up behind him and sticking a knife in the man, which made one Cracked author hasten to add "he throws the knife from a distance just to make sure you don't think he's that way."

At least there are some LGBTQ+ representatives on-screen, though?

Not so fast! The 007 movie franchise erased a lesbian from one of the books. The infamous Bond-girl name Pussy Galore was originally a nom de guerre adopted by the head of a lesbian cat-burgling gang. (Please remember that I don't make things up.) Over the course of the novel Goldfinger, it's revealed that Ms. Galore is actually interested in both men and women, but has been abused sexually by men in the past, and therefore adopted a militant-lesbian persona in self-defense. In the end, though, she comes to like James Bond because he treats her well, and is therefore willing to turn on the bad guys and help him.

Doesn't that make her bisexual?

We'd likely call her that today, but Ian Fleming didn't then, possibly because he didn't know how to. Although the word "bisexual" existed in 1958, it originally meant "having the organs of both sexes," which we today call intersex.

Language is fun.

So what did they do for the movie?

They cut:

• the part where she's the head of a lesbian cat-burgling gang;
• the part where "Pussy" is not her real name;
• any hint that she's a reluctant participant in the villain's scheme; and
• the nuance of why she comes to like James Bond.

In lieu of characterization, they heavily imply that she turns on the villains because Bond beats her up and dominates her in bed - and she's into that, apparently.

Blecch. You can see better bi representation on network sitcoms!

Wasn't it against The Rules to have a sympathetically portrayed lesbian in the movies in those days?

Yes, actually. The Hays Office had forbidden it. But that doesn't mean they had no options whatsoever. I mean, they could've:

• Changed her name;
• Changed her backstory;
• Given her some sort of independent character motivation; or
• Kept the lesbian part and made her less sympathetic.

That last one would've been icky, too, but my point is: writers have choices. And when it comes to dropping the one sympathetic LGBTQ individual from the canon, and then inventing 3 gay bad guys that they could mock - well, those are each choices that Eon Productions has made.

It's gonna take more than one date between Q and an unseen dude to make up for the ACSS, Eon.

Are you gonna talk about the queerbaiting in Supernatural?

If you think I've forgotten it, you must not follow me on Twitter.

For those of you just joining us: Supernatural is somehow still queer-baiting despite being off the air for 18 months.

Turns out the queer-baiting is as undead as the monsters were. https://t.co/sOzX7UU9HG

— Dead Fictional Girlfriends Research Report (@DeadFGReport) April 25, 2022

However, far better scholars than I have smashed their keyboards about it, so let me keep this brief. If your show has straight male characters, in this case Dean and Castiel, who've become the stars of a lot of slash fiction, you have a couple of options.

1. Ignore it, because you are writing the canon, and fanon is not that important to you.
2. Make some winking, self-aware allusions to it, but continue to write the characters' relationship as strictly platonic.
3. Spend multiple seasons shading their relationship with so much queer subtext that one of them actually dies while confessing his love for the other. Then, loudly and frequently insist that he didn't mean that kind of love, OK, because English is just conveniently vague that way, even though the Spanish dub used the word for romantic love and had the other guy reciprocate.

Word to the wise: don't pick 3. People will say you want to keep LGBTQ people interested in your show, but also don't want to represent them too explicitly, lest you lose ad revenue and/or fans due to other people's ACSS.

In other words, people will say you're queerbaiting, and you can deny it if you will, but they'll have the truth on their side. 

But you don't need me to tell you this, because the ACSS of Supernatural is already infamously poorly hidden.

What can you tell us that we don't know?

Let me bring your attention to one example of ACSS that the world appears to have forgotten:

MacGyver, Murdoc, and Masculinity

Our newest contestant franchise hit the air in 1985, which was to say the least, a complicated time for gay rights in the United States. In the 1970s, LGBTQ activists had won a few battles such as getting homosexuality un-designated as a mental illness. However, matters were complicated when HIV/AIDS burst into the headlines in 1983. AIDS was initially seen as a gay disease, with the first New York Times story about it headlined "Rare Cancer Seen in 41 Homosexuals." It got called gay plague & gay-related immunodeficiency (GRID). This association led the FDA to ban gay men from donating blood, which had the joint effects of not helping blood donation rates, and not helping gay men. It also led to bisexual men being blamed whenever a straight woman caught HIV, which was often, because - spoiler alert! - HIV doesn't care about your sexual orientation. But many people weren't talking about that, in the 1980s.

As a result of the HIV/AIDS pandemic, lots of people started talking about gay rights who had never mentioned them before. Gay man Rock Hudson came out of a multi-decade closet to acknowledge his AIDS diagnosis. So did bisexual man Freddie Mercury, a few years later. By the late 80s,  Princess Diana, the FDA, and even the actual United Nations were all talking about HIV and homosexuality. Meanwhile, various activist groups set out to ensure the world would not lose sight of the human cost of the pandemic: ACT UP, the AIDS Memorial Quilt, World AIDS Day, etc. As a result, just about everyone was talking about gay rights.

Including MacGyver, that 80s social justice warrior show?

Nope. MacGyver was totally silent on the subject of both gay rights and HIV/AIDs. Please note that MacGyver has a Season 6 episode that manages to be simultaneously about:

• environmentalism
• lack of urban green space
• drug addiction
• gun control
• racial profiling
• the legacy of the Robert Kennedy assassination, and
• peace in the Middle East.

MacGyver doesn't simply forget to mention LGBTQ issues; it mentions absolutely everything else but those.

Why?

They were afraid you'd think MacGyver was "that way." See, this show was very committed to showing its hero as a sensitive, thinking man. In addition to his respect for women, Mac hates guns, doesn't drink alcohol, eats vegetarian, cares about environmental causes, and volunteers with the handicapped. While promoting the show, RDA later told People Weekly, “[MacGyver]’s not one of those super macho guys with their shirts unbuttoned to their navels, who bounce bullets off their chests and wear 400 tons of gold." (Take that, A-Team!) But if you remember anything about the other TV shows that were popular in 1985, you can probably guess that it was impossible to have such a goody-two-shoes guy on TV without people questioning his masculinity. The writers addressed this by writing in counterexamples of men who weren't like Mac, and were worse off for it. 

Which brings us to the only man on the show who might be anything other than straight and cis:

MacGyver's Murderous Undead Queer-coded Nemesis, Murdoc.

I say "undead" because Murdoc always dies at the end of a fight with MacGyver, but turns up fine later on. And I say "coded as queer" because:

• Murdoc cross-dresses and uses a feminine alter ego, "Sara." (He passes well enough that MacGyver met him by trying to save Sara from a mugger.)
• Murdoc is a sissy who once jumped onto MacGyver's shoulders because he saw a snake.
• In one of his many fake identities, Murdoc poses as a divaish musical theater director, who casts Penny Parker in the rock opera about Cleopatra that he has written, composed, and choreographed entirely by himself - all as a convoluted plan to lure MacGyver into the theater where he can kill him.
• At one point, Murdoc surprises Mac with flowers and a candlelit dinner featuring home-cooked vegetarian food (and then tries to kill him with a booby-trapped Cupid statuette.)

Murdoc and Mac are not in a relationship, but at one point Mac dreams about him, and he's wearing a bedazzled leather cowboy outfit.

Meaning that MacGyver's subconscious dresses his mortal enemy like this.

To make this even worse (from a feminist blogger's perspective) or better (from the screenwriters' apparent point of view), Murdoc is one nasty, scary dude.

MacGyver: Murdoc's mined the whole road going out.

Nikki: Mines?! He carries around mines with him?!

• "The Widowmaker" (aired 11/16/1987)

If you're keeping score, here's a scoreboard:

Coding one's villains as queer was, of course, a long and proud cinematic tradition by the 1980s. But considering that this show was being produced during an era in which gay rights activists were making international news, it does seem odd that the only role for a queer-coded character in this universe involves him being both campy, and homicidally insane.

And by "odd," I mean homophobic, and possibly also transphobic, depending on how you read the Murdoc/Sara thing.

While this blog is mainly concerned with how disposable female characters get used to remind the audience of the hero's heterosexuality, it's absolutely not any better to use a non-heterosexual male character for the same purpose. Particularly not if you violently kill him off **checks notes** six separate times.

Psst. Your ACSS is showing.

Takeaways

Why, you may ask, is the DFGRR so concerned?

Because if you look at the decisions these showrunners and screenwriters have made about LGBTQIA representation, next to the decisions they've made about how to treat women, you'll notice an alarming parallel. See, hardly anybody has ever said that they kill off their protagonist's love interests because they, personally, don't like women. It's always because "the audience didn't like her" or "she didn't fit the dynamic of the show" or "our protagonist just isn't the happily-ever-after type, and the fans wouldn't buy him being in a relationship." In other words, "I can't keep a woman on screen because you, the audience, is sexist."

A similar range of excuses is pulled out to justify ACSS like queer-baiting Dean and Cas, straightwashing Pussy Galore, jossing Kirk/Spock/McCoy fans, or building up MacGyver's masculinity by tearing down Murdoc's. Some screenwriters do say that LGBTQIA people don't belong on screen, but fewer and fewer say that all the time. Nowadays, they say things like "it'll get us banned in some countries, we have to make it cut-able" or "it might cost us advertisers" or "it's just not in our vision for the show." But those are all different ways of saying "I can't represent the LGBTQIA community in my fiction because I'm afraid of upsetting the people who don't like that." In other words, they're deferring to the ACSS-holes of the world.

That, my friends, is unfair, and it's nonsense. We, the audiences, deserve better.

Pride Month Actions

Before you go, if you care about what real-world ACSS-holes are trying to do to the LGBTQIA+ community - outlaw participation in sports, accuse them of pedophilia, deny them healthcare, etc. - I recommend you support some of the following:

Human Rights Campaign

Equality Ohio: Fight the Safe Act

ACLU

National Center for Transgender Equality

Or, look up your local state's equivalent.

Keep your sexy lamps burning, and remember, LGBTQIA rights are human rights.