Hey, welcome to my first ever blog post, if you’re seeing this, you’re either family or friend, or I’ve made it big and you’re just here to see where the legends began. For starters, some ground rules, everything I say is my opinion and I will be making use of jokes and satire without labeling it, so with that out of the way, let's begin.
As you may have noticed the topic of this blog screams “CLICKBAIT” and you are partially correct, no better way to gain traction than to feed the sorry carcass of cancel culture with some fodder. But I will tell you exactly why having an agenda while making a movie is terrible for the LGBTQ community, the movie industry, the viewers, and overarching society.
For starters let’s try to comprehend what exactly the movie producers are trying to achieve, they want to show a progressive audience that their demands for a more diverse casting are being met, and so they do that, all they do is write a secondary or tertiary character who just so happens to be gay and makes their entire set of instructions as “BE GAY!!!”. With this, they try to achieve a loud prominent voice saying “look people we have gay characters in the movies, GIVE US YOUR MONEY” This is the most blatantly stupid form of representation in the entire film industry. A shining example of this is the character of ser Loras Tyrell in game of thrones. In the books, as written by George R.R. Martin, Loras was a brilliant fighter, smart, brave, and overall a well-developed character who btw is gay. In the show poor Loras doesn’t get a single war after season 2, doesn’t receive a single scene where he is portrayed as the brilliant member of the king’s guard as he is in the book. No sir, in the show Loras Tyrel likes dudes, he likes to be gay, his interests include being gay, his hobbies are homosexuality and btw he’s gay. The show's writers took a well-developed character and put him through the meat grinder of reductionism. This ultimately portrays the members of the LGBTQ community in a bad light, portrays the shows writers as shallow minded people, unable to write a character handed to them on a silver platter, and it makes the whole experience a sorry affair for the viewers, and I don’t think I need to justify my claim any further after what happened to the show in season 8.
They could go on to make a lead character gay which should in theory solve the issue of the character being one dimensional, but if the entirety of the character is defined by their sexuality, you’re still making it a terrible situation for yourself, sure a movie about a gay character overcoming the obstacles set in place for them just cause they are gay would be fun, but you can’t use that as the only conflict in the movie, the first thing you need to consider while writing a script is the relatability of the characters themselves, right? Well, if the characters’ only conflict is being gay you’ve just lost relatability to 90% of the worlds demographic, you end up with a one-dimensional character who is unrelatable and just impacts everyone rightly. Take Bohemian Rhapsody for example, an instant classic, GOD IT’S SUCH A GREAT MOVIE!!!!, it made us aware if the fact the Freddie Mercury was gay but his obstacles were so diverse, the movie displayed him as a man with real challenges, problems, talents and opportunities who was gay. And then there’s also whatever the hell J.K. Rowling is doing with Dumbledore but that’s best left for another day.
So what? Is it impossible to write a gay character that people like? NO!!!!!
There are loads of characters and shows and movies that do it so beautifully, Leslie Chang form the hangover is Bi and he’s one of my characters of all time. His character doesn’t constantly remind you that he’s Bi, but its just something you know about him. Or Mitchell and Cam from Modern Family, sure they are gay, and yeah, it’s made abundantly clear to us that they are over the course of 10 years, but their problems that they face in their day-to-day life, along with the interactions they have with the rest of the family make them just as fleshed out as any other character. Or best of all Captain Raymond Holt from Brooklyn 99 if you’ve seen the show, you know exactly why I think he’s a fabulously written character, and if you haven’t, go watch it now.
It also doesn’t necessarily mean that you can’t write tasteful jokes about the LGBTQ characters if a show like Family Guy can write a closeted homosexual character in Stewie Griffin, or a Transgendered character in Ida Quagmire while keeping its humor fresh and boisterous as always with the genius of Seth MacFarlane, other shows can do it to, there will always be differing opinions on matters like these, but they put out a message of acceptance with humor that people are willing to absorb like sponges, it puts all sexualities on a level playing field showing that a person’s sexuality is the last thing should have to be worried about.
All said and done, creativity is a gift given to us all, and writing good characters made to fit in such a socially heated society is hard, at some point, there will always be someone to point an issue with whatever it is that is happening. There will always be people with an unchanging victim mentality, there will be directors like Patty Jenkins who make bad movies featuring a pro-social
agenda, the failure of which she’ll blame on straight men ( she actually did that when she made the Charlie’s Angels movie, she’s a great director, she made the first Wonder Woman, but it isn’t fair to use social norms as an excuse for the flop that Charlie’s Angels was) and there will always be writers like Michael Shur who will write fantastic characters and not gloat in their achievements. But that’s the sad truth of where the world is right now, everyone is a little wrong and everyone is a little right, so the best way to go about any of this would be to write a character for furthering the plot and making them gay instead of writing a character for being the gay character.
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