MEDIA STUDIES: REPRESENTATION AND SEXUALITY

An interesting take on this issue from Sue Perkins writing at  the Queerty Website.

If Gay TV Characters Weren’t So Stereotypical, How Would We Recognize Them? / Queerty

 

If Gay TV Characters Weren’t So Stereotypical, How Would We Recognize Them?

Sue Perkins, the lesbian British comedian who is not related in any way to Tony Perkins, read all 226 pages of the BBC’s report on the portrayal of gay characters on television, and she’s got a suggestion: it’s the soap operas that need to start offering up more accurate representations of ‘mos if any minds are going to change.
The report, which made our radar for revealing how many straight Brits have a problem with the way gays look on the tube, also showed gay audiences were a bit fed up with the stereotypical characters they usually see under the LGBT banner. Which is the problem Perkins — who was outed in 2002 on I’m A Celebrity…Get Me Out Of Here! by ex-girlfriend Rhona Cameron — has. Writing ina Guardian op-ed:

Although the BBC and Channel 4 fare well in this report, there is much left to do. The responsibility must fall on the biggest hitters – soap operas. Watched by millions of middle Englanders week after week, they could change the perception of gay people where it matters most. In 1987, EastEnders’ Barry and Colin shared a chaste mouth-graze. In 1994, Brookside’s Beth and Margaret locked lips. Coronation Street discovered lesbians this year. If gay history had evolved as slowly and timidly as television portrayed it, then the first drag queen would be tiptoeing out of the primordial ooze around about now.
What saddens me is that the same issues keep arising. For gay men, it’s the predominance of the camp cliche. For lesbians, despair at the outdated butch-femme stereotypes. Gay women generally are under-represented, unless you count the number of times the word “lesbian” or “dyke” features as a lazy comic’s punchline.

There’s no real mystery that television writers are “lazy” and network execs “dumb things down,” because that is how the industry works, at least according to some antiquated model that says viewers will only tune in if we give them caricatures. Which is why we’re usually presented with the gay BFF, always there to shop or gossip.

When gay characters stop cat-hoarding, scatter-cushion throwing and compulsively shagging — when we’re just sitting around paying bills like Average Jos – then middle England, and the Queer Nation, will be happy.

And as we all know, Average Jos are themselves accurately represented by the over-sexed, money-obsessed, impossibly-thin characters also seen on television.

MEDIA STUDIES: REPRESENTATION AND SEXUALITY

Gay roles on television need to be real

• Sue Perkins

The up-coming BBC 3 series, Lip Service. Photograph: BBC/Kudos/BBC / KudosLast week saw the publication of the Corporation’s “Portrayal of Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual People on the BBC”, a document only marginally more anticipated than the local phone directory. It runs at a mammoth 226 pages and, having read all of it, I can say with certainty that this is one dossier no one could be accused of “sexing up”.
Let me begin by saying that whatever conclusions I draw, they will be incorrect. I will have said the wrong thing, sold out, screwed over the sisterhood or dissed my brothers. I’m simply not capable of representing the diverse and dizzyingly rich panorama of gay existence, and neither, it transpires, is television.
Although the BBC and Channel 4 fare well in this report, there is much left to do. The responsibility must fall on the biggest hitters – soap operas. Watched by millions of middle Englanders week after week, they could change the perception of gay people where it matters most. In 1987, EastEnders’ Barry and Colin shared a chaste mouth-graze. In 1994, Brookside’s Beth and Margaret locked lips.Coronation Street discovered lesbians this year. If gay history had evolved as slowly and timidly as television portrayed it, then the first drag queen would be tiptoeing out of the primordial ooze around about now.
What saddens me is that the same issues keep arising. For gay men, it’s the predominance of the camp cliche. For lesbians, despair at the outdated butch-femme stereotypes. Gay women generally are under-represented, unless you count the number of times the word “lesbian” or “dyke” features as a lazy comic’s punchline.
As compensation we have gay-centric dramas; the excellent Sugar Rush and the groundbreaking Queer as Folk. Maybe the up-and-coming Lip Service on BBC3 will join those ranks. But surely, in order for true ground to break, there has to be a middle way – something between the tepid sexlessness of the soaps’ queer couplings and the separatist universe of the US show The L Word, in which the characters are like something out of the Barbie Lesbian Range: the tennis pro with detachable miniskirt, the hairdresser with blow-drier.
For me the solution is less “L” word than “I” word. Issues. Gay characters are a gift because they can deliver the shock value that soap operas are hardwired to. But surely, by normalising rather than pathologising gay culture you please not only gay respondents, but the 19% of heterosexual viewers that the report reveals are still squeamish about our presence on their screens.
When gay characters stop cat-hoarding, scatter-cushion throwing and compulsively shagging — when we’re just sitting around paying bills like Average Jos – then middle England, and the Queer Nation, will be happy.

The fee for this article has been donated to Families Together, providing information and support for families with LGBT children.

Related articles

• How Well Does The BBC Do Lesbians? [Video] (jezebel.com)
• TV's Perkins: Make gay roles more realistic (pinkbananaworld.com)
• Lip Service is groundbreaking - whatever its star says | Claudia Cahalane (guardian.co.uk)
• BBC reports 1 in 5 “uncomfortable” with homosexuality on television (pinkbananaworld.com)
• If Gay TV Characters Weren't So Stereotypical, How Would We Recognize Them? (queerty.com)