A Stride Toward Televised Pride

When you’ve grown up in a television- obsessed household, no series ever escapes your radar. From my adolescence through to my adulthood, I was exposed to weekly episodes of classic series such Friends, Sabrina the Teenage Witch and The Nanny. I grew up watching these series and idolising these characters and their worlds. I was consumed with following the lives and relationships as they played out between all the heterosexual characters and couldn’t wait to spend more time with them. However, there was never a time I asked myself this simple question: Where are the queer people?

If you’re like me, you long for a more colourful representation of the queer community in television. It wasn’t until I reached my 20s that I looked back on those series that painted my childhood and realises what kind of message they’d displayed.

Harmfull tropes directed towards the queer community were slung around from show to show like a basketball. The 'Bury Your Gays' trope became a cornerstone of queer representation, with series like Buffy the Vampire Slayer—credited with one of the first on-screen lesbian relationships—damning its queer relationships to a miserable end. 'Bury Your Gays' became a reigning factor within our story. Queer people were seen as the help, a way to further the story of the heterosexual cis leads, before a swift demise propelled them to a new frontier. We were a plot point. And throughout my life I believed that this might be all we’d ever be—that this is the only ending we could have. That happiness was harder to achieve because of my queerness. You never truly understand the lasting effects of visibility until it damages your own view on how your life could play out.

As time passed, queer representation began to grow without ever really changing. The 'Bury Your Gays' trope was still hovering over the heads of every LGBTQIA+ character on television like a guillotine. Characters that were overtly queer were written in a way that heightened our stereotypes to the point that they became cartoonish. As a child, I always found myself relating the most to the female characters that were written to be the mean girl stereotype, as this was the closest thing I had to any sort of queer character. The mean girls and the gay characters were written in a way that made them hardly discernible. What was the difference between Stanford Blatch and Cordelia Chase? Besides age and gender, there’s not much else. There was never any dimension given to the lives of the LGBTQIA+ people we were seeing on screen. More often than not, if there was ever a moment for them to stand in the sun, it was to be the butt of the joke. Our lives were nothing other than a source of comedy.

Then came the teen years. This featured the writers’ favourite (and for a time, only) queer storyline: the coming out story. Coming out is a very important moment of a queer individual’s life. It feels as though you’re shedding your skin and revealing the true self that you’ve kept hidden underneath. It’s a time when we are at our most vulnerable. Coming out is something that needs to be documented in lm and television. Young audiences who watch these shows can be inspired to nd the courage inside them to take this step forward.

However, as time has gone on, the same story has been told on repeat. A story synonymous with struggle. A struggle to be accepted, to be who we really are without the threat of ridicule. There are many different experiences out there to be told, but rarely would a series break away from the original trope. Pretty Little Liars, Dawson’s Creek, 90210 and many others would manufacture the same story over and over again, feeding into the idea that coming out was the beginning of a life of hardships within your family and close friends. While this is true for many people in the real world, at some point there needs to be a story of hope. A story that shows the positives to revealing this aspect of your life to those closest to you. How coming out enriches your life, rather than condemning it.

In the current climate, television and film have found a way to adjust to the complexities of the queer experience. Writers have finally turned to other storylines and more developed characters in which to represent the community at large. However, this hasn’t halted queer tropes from plaguing media. There is a newly heightened focus on queer- baiting—a trope that allows writers to try and attract an LGBTQIA+ audience by hinting at or highlighting queer undertones within the heterosexual characters or relationships. It’s a way of trying to satisfy the queer audience without giving us the representation that we need. As an audience member, we’ll watch these shows in the hopes that they’ll pull the trigger and nally give in to the undertones that have been placed.

It’s a cheap ploy that continues to underscore several of the dynamics within the heterosexual cis characters in written work, to this day. While queer-baiting has become a nuisance we’ve dealt with, it serves to highlight just how much the queer community strives to see ourselves represented within media. We’ll try, however we can, to nd ourselves—or any characters that relate to our own experience—in lm and television.

As an adult observing queer representation in current written media, I’ve come to realise it still isn’t perfect. However, we’ve come a long way in nding our stories better presented. With series such as Grey’s Anatomy, Pose, Orange is the New Black, Please Like Me and many others, we’re seeing the rise of writers who see us for more than just the sassy sidekick or the troubled teenager struggling to come out of the closet. The rise of writers who have been striving for better representation.

I’m proud to see our lives are evolving on screen. During my adolescence, all I ever wanted was to see characters like myself going through real world issues just like that of the heterosexual characters on screen. I wanted to see romantic relationships between queer people have the same happy ending that many of the heterosexual characters would receive. At last we’re beginning to explore this. We’re nally seeing trans and non-binary characters be themselves on screen without being relegated to being the joke, and without being victimised because of their gender. We’re seeing queer relationships be highlighted and treated with the respect that they deserve.

While we still have a long way to go in terms of abolishing harmful tropes and fully delving into the issues and identity of queer individuals, the necessary steps towards better representation have been laid. It’s with this groundwork that I hope future generations will find themselves in these queer characters and be inspired to be true to themselves and continue these stories.

This article was originally featured in The EWF Gazette.