Why did they have to shoehorn a straight into this comic
I had a conversation with a guy at a gay bar years ago and we chatted about hearing these comments a lot because we didn’t act camp or have “that voice”, and weren’t seen as LGBT at all by a lot of people unless it came up. Turned out he was the owner of the place and had been active in setting up the LGBT+ scene there for decades but still had this happen.
Is that a bad thing? Knowing if you’re gay or not in casual conversation is weird. It just means you guys are normal ass dudes who happen to have a different sexual preference, it isn’t like some crazy defining factor or your life.
I think media pushes this narrative that unless you’re covered in rainbow shit 24/7 and acting flamboyant you’re secretly ashamed or something, which is total bullshit.
My mom is 73 and just married a woman 3 months ago, after being married to my dad for 25 years and being single for like 15 years. She definitely isn’t ashamed because people don’t instantly know she’s gay, nor does she care. She owns a few pride things and that’s about it. Because she’s a normal woman who happens to have a different sexual preference. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with being “normal” and gay.
Its hard to take off a mask youve been wearing for decades.
I watched a bunch of older action movies like Top Gun, Point Break, and Commando, and the fact that those aren’t gay characters is the most confounding thing about them. At this point, I want there to be a movie that in every way is like one of those classic action movies, with gun fights and car chases and hot dudes flexing hard muscles… and then have it be exactly as gay as it seems. Big guy blows something up with a rocket launcher, delivers a one-liner, then turns to his boyfriend, kisses him, and they ride off into the sunset on a speed boat.
Truly, if you watch some of the action movies from the 80s and 90s, that would be a more tonally consistent ending for quite a few of them.
I’m not a huuuuge fan of romance + action, but the lack of gayness feels pretty noticeable at this point. It’s like a loud silence
The director’s other cut is the whole gay subplot going along in the moments you don’t see between scene changes.
The real reason so many conversations go “There’s no time to explain!” then cut to 30 minutes later driving and delivering the next line? All. Out. Boning.I mean obviously
I’m pretty sure there’s a gay campfire orgy in 300, with half of the Athenian contigent sitting and watching.
Umm I think you may have been watching the porn parady 😂🤣.
Well, probably because society has been crowbaring gays out of everything for so long.
Men who complain about gay representation have a fragile masculinity.
Nah.
It’s a tribalism impulse, most of the time. They’re parroting what some influencer or other jerk said.
You’re thinking of the distinct “I’m definitely hetero, bro,” which is the fragile masculinity thing.
I don’t think it has anything to do with masculinity, women say it too.
I think It is 100% envy. There is something that they are repressing because they have been told it is bad, and they see gay people, who they have also been taught are bad, “getting away with it”, even flaunting it.
The penis cape! 🤣🤣🤣
Nice tesselation.
Most gay characters I see in media aren’t stereotypes. It’s the flamboyant ones that usually make the pearl-clutchers upset because they don’t understand and that makes them uncomfortable. Hollywood needs to focus more on the character, who happens to be gay, than the fact that the character is gay.
Gustavo Fring, my legend.
I think Daniel Levy has done a nice job of portraying the gay regular dude. Probably has a little help, considering he is an actual gay dude. But he reminds me a lot of my actual gay brother, not at all flamboyant (except when he gets mad he gets a little extra gay), just as regular (probably not a great word to use) as they come, and happens to like dudes. And he’s had friends who fit the whole spectrum of gayness, and some of them were really annoying, some of them really cool, almost like the rest of society.
It’s so telling when people see diversity and think of it as “forced” like no one making things would actually want to see that.
I get why representation is important, but I think it’s also important that it not be incredibly clumsy.
World of Warcraft does quite a bit of representation and I didn’t even notice it until I really thought about it. It’s a fairly violent setting with lots of people having terrible things done to them, so people with disabilities, people in wheelchairs, blind people, etc all just seem like they fit the setting.
There’s an issue with sexual orientation, though: WoW has basically zero romance, relationships or sexual content. Even the in-game Valentines Day event is about alchemists controlling people with drugged perfume.
So the three or four gay couples in the Dragonflight expansion were the only characters in any sort of relationship in that expansion, and made up probably half of the characters that have ever been mentioned being in a relationship in WoW’s entire 22 year run.
Warcraft is one of those settings where the creators could declare half of the characters are gay and it wouldn’t change anything. But a character has to be seen to count for representation, and sexuality in WoW isn’t seen.
So you’re saying 90% of the population is ace. Baced.
Based ace race?
Hardly anyone in WoW even has parents. Characters just turn up. Maybe they’re stitched together out of spare parts, I think the undead do that.
Secret lore of wow. Everyone was Isekaid there
One of the hardest questions; is it better to have clumsy representation, or less representation? Because no matter what, a greater effort requirement amounts to a higher barrier of entry. We don’t owe an artist anything, but at the same time should we say “If you don’t understand a group of people well enough to represent them, you shouldn’t be doing art.”?
JRR Tolkien notoriously has very few very impressively represented women, which kind of just gets a shrug from the fandom. But you can only tolerate so much of that before you just have a small selection of archetypes on pedestals. You get the sense from so much media produced by men, that they think women only (should) make up <25% of society. If they don’t matter to a male protagonist then they don’t matter. I think it should be fine to clumsily represent a group, as long as it expands representation rather than restricting it. And continuation should be dependent on an expectation to grow.
Case in point; The Apu Problem. Despite Apu from The Simpsons being the worst of both worlds, by virtue of originality he was acceptable at conception. Failure to grow with the franchise’s popularity, however, means that he established his own stereotype and by extension The Simpsons created it’s own racism. By the boiling frog effect, The Simpsons creators just get to dismiss is it as a product of it’s time “Oh you know things that weren’t racist are suddenly racist now shrug what’re you supposed to do?” But they’ve had the power to do better for a long time, if they were willing to face the problem long enough to learn and address it permanently.
The USA still hasn’t had a (official) female president despite multiple opportunities, because women in America don’t want “that kind of representation”. Society can keep representation from slacking, without letting the perfect be the enemy of the good.
Apu is kind of the exception that proves the rule in a way, and ends up being quite an interesting case study. You have the same problem with speedy Gonzales in the sense that most of the stereotypes being conveyed are neutral to positive, and those characters actually tend to be favored within the group they represent. So when we make fun of, say European stereotypes, we get away with a lot more because the power dynamics flow in the other direction. In a weird way, the entire thing can kind of circle back on itself such that Apu or speedy being accepted as a stereotype actually demonstrates exactly the kind of multicultural integration we want to see. Also, about 90% of the controversy was that the voice was done by a white guy.
In that sense, clumsy representation kind of does the opposite - it embodies the way marginalized groups are bracketed on both sides by conflict with their native culture and host culture. This is why, eg, something like Modern Family was such a step gain for LGBT representation, because they actually leaned into full characterization without feeling like they needed to walk on eggshells. In contrast, having some lesbian smurfs share one on screen kiss and then never revisiting the topic feels like being invited to a party where you don’t know anyone and everyone is actively avoiding you.
If the clumsy representation is just rainbow-washing then you wind up with some sanitized corporate gayness and when that starts influencing impressional young gay people then it removes a lot of the self-determinism that was a pillar of gay counterculture for decades or even centuries.
Instead of formulating their own identities in small cohorts linked by a common identity, they start looking up to stereotypes as depicted in the media and emulating those. That’s not exclusive to gay people, it’s endemic to young people in general in this age of corporate and algorithmic media.
Maybe it depends on how bad the representation is. A setting where everybody is deaf and always has been isn’t a good place to do the struggles of deaf people in a mostly hearing society.
There absolutely is a limit on bad representation. Eg, when it crosses over into bigotry/discrimination it has gotten way past clumsy into evil. (Minstrel shows are most evil for being the limited “representation” of the time.)
I like the nuance of your example though; Because it doesn’t explore a most major facet of being deaf, does that mean the story shouldn’t be told? If there are already stories about being deaf in a mostly hearing society, then a story about an entirely deaf society explores another angle of being deaf or what it could mean to be deaf. Imho I think that should still count as valuable representation. While it’s fair to criticize it as not representative of the entire experience of being deaf, it’s not fair to criticize it as opposition to deaf interests. You can read/watch the two side by side and get greater perspective. Yet in a vacuum, it would be bad representation.
In contrast Menwritingwomen content gives an expression of how certain men perceive of women. Many of these men being perfectly amicable and good to women in their own life while harboring these toxic/bullshit perspectives we wouldn’t even know about. Despite that many even write some women well, they absolutely deserve to be criticized for opposing women’s interests. Some aren’t even useful for getting a perspective on how the author perceives women, being that individually they seem so normal until the overall writing reveals a pattern of bad representation. They all absolutely ought to be reconsidered for women writing women mediocrely in the same space wherever possible. Accepted for the representation (in context) they are otherwise. Excised, canceled, buycotted only when the work functions to explore & validate the author’s bigoted values.
On one side “Disney villain” has not crossed that threshold even if they aren’t the female representation (some) women want, at least they’re novel and diversify representation; whereas “There’s one woman and she’s cool and hot” has crossed the bad representation threshold even if she represents how every woman of that demographic wants to see herself. (Sorry I’m mostly referencing women’s representation in art, it’s an accessible example because there’s so much variety in failure for what should be statistically easy representation).
Yeah, but that’s his husband and he started that line of dialog cause he wants to see his man dressed up like that. He’s got an objective and he knows how to see it through.
You can tell by his face at the end
Honestly, I think overt and explicit sexuality is fine but I don’t think anybody enjoys watching actual sexual intercourse on TV in the living room with the family. The only reason it gets a pass these days is because we have the power to fast forward.
How does this relate to the comic?
The guy in the comic is complaining about explicit homosexuality in a bunch of media.
…You mean explicit gay sex scenes?
I don’t thing that’s what the comic meant by “shoehorn gays into everything.” The guy is complaining about “gays”; that doesn’t imply steamy sex scenes, to me.
And honestly, I can’t even think of the last M/M gay sex scene I’ve seen in a movie.
Kaos on Netflix had gay sex in a bar bathroom in like episode 1 or 2.
Also, the comic is about sexuality in general and my comment touches on how I don’t see that as a problem, but I do draw the line at actual intercourse not just for homosexuality but for any sexuality. Another example is Walter White fucking his wife in the car.
I think these things please certain demographics but are just generally very subtractive from the stories, and that Breaking Bad example actually did tie into the story, I just think we didn’t need to see the full act.
I don’t see how the comic complaint could possibly be interpreted as “there are too many explicit sex scenes.” Why would it use the word “gay” at all, then? If someone said that exact phrase to me, my immediate interpretation would be “homophobia,” not anything to do with visually depicted sex acts.
I sort of agree with your general sentiment, though. There are definitely shows like Game of Thrones that use sex to sell.
But at the same time, humans are generally horny, and I think it’s reasonable to see some depictions of that in R-rated stuff that’s graphic and explicit with everything else anyway, like violence and drugs.
I’m just discussing preferences and advocating for better stories, I’m not saying we should ban anything. I think a lot of GoT fans pretty frequently bemoan the fact that the episode one incest and rape lost a lot of potential viewers. Maybe I’m wrong, though, maybe GoT wouldn’t even have a following if it weren’t for the fucking.
I definitely understand why office worker A would have reservations, though.
That’s fair then.
Yeah, to be clear I generally agree. Sex is often used beyond any storytelling purpose.
But I will add that you’re getting downvoted because you appeared to be doing something worse.
A lot of bigots I knew say something hateful, and if they get away with it, they keep it going. If they get called out, they’ll pivot to say “oh, I didn’t mean it like that bro, I just don’t like sex scenes in stuff.”
I see this all the time in conservative media. They’ll obsess with some ancillary thing for plausible deniability, but the implication to anyone with half a brain is the simpler bigotry.
So that’s kinda what your original comment came off as, to me. It’s quite valid to argue “well, I don’t like gratuitous sex scenes in movies,” but it sounds like the way conservative influencers or an IRL jerks imply “I don’t like gays.”
No
This is what I’m seeing (ignore the header in the wrong spot, that’s just how screenshotting webpages works sometimes)
What are you seeing?
Where is the part with the “explicit sexual content”?
Somewhere between the banana hammock and the puppy-gimp, which hilariously is accidentally censored by the header being out of place lmao
PS Sexual Content does not equal Sexuality.
Sir, if you weren’t always autistic, you have to exchange a few "meow"s and "mrrp"s with the person you’re conversing with in order to start a random unrelated to anything topic as well as an “:3” when saying something that may sound diabolical to signify that you don’t mean ill but are just expressing yourself atypically
You don’t appear to practice what you preach
meow mrrp :3
ʕ•̀ω•́ʔ✧
![Ahem [TinyBaer]](https://slrpnk.net/pictrs/image/a37867aa-4f71-41c1-bfb9-99daf214539e.webp){kind=link}