Queering and Unqueering in Popular Media

An intrinsic part of writing an ongoing character is character revision.  Very few characters emerge fully-formed from the head of Zeus.

It's a fraught exercise.  Since characters, unlike humans, have no independent existence outside of the mind of the observer, they face backlash, hatred, rejection at every corner.  We know about them only through third parties - someone says "This is who Superman is" and if we don't like it we can get very upset indeed.

Because I understand myself through these characters.  Because "queer erasure" erases me.  It took me forty years to reach even this basic simple point in my life because humans don't come fully-formed from Zeus either, because from birth we have all been told who we can and can't be.

Queerness, then, is a particularly fraught form of character revision, a battle fought over and over on every media front.  Do I exaggerate to call it a life and death battle?  I'm alive.  I have friends that aren't.  Of course the world is complicated but my experience is that it's really hard to be happy and functional without also being able to be who one genuinely is.

That's a pretty heavy introduction and what I'm trying to talk about is a little bit lighter than that.  I want to talk about accidents, people stumbling around blindly in the dark trying to express a truth they don't quite understand, horrible mistakes like Silence of the Lambs, Roxy and Poison in Final Fight, that awful mid-'70s episode of that doctor show time has forgotten where Dr. Kildare or Marcus Welby or some asshole like that convinced a man he wasn't _really_ gay, and mistakes I rather like, like "Lola" by the Kinks.  I want to talk about that old character in the Legion of Super Heroes, I don't remember the name, who was written as implicitly gay and then when they panicked and tried to straighten him out the only way they could think to do so was by making him trans instead.

I'm not quite up to doing that well today, so instead I'll leave you with this thumbnail sketch.  If I'm going to write about something today, I feel like it needs to be something at least somewhat important.  I can't come on here today and just talk about the three different live videos of "Ladytron" from when Eno was in the band, to do so seems trivial and insulting.  Another time perhaps.