The Rainbow Age of Television: an Opinionated History of Queer TV by Shayna Maci Warner
When it comes to the moral responsibility and likability of fictional characters, continuing to advocate for storytelling that prioritizes only the upright homosexual citizens of the world encourages even queer audience members to evaluate storytelling (and queer people) on the basis of box-checking. If avoidance of stereotype is the premier rubric, television loses its possibility to tell interesting stories with queer people at the cen-ter. The only real winners are the straight people who are uncomfortable with queer characters that diverge at all from widespread notions of an acceptable, largely harmless gay character or person. In many cases, writing that harmless queer character to improve the chance that straight viewers will accept them, and by proxy queer people, is an impossible benchmark anyway-just look at what happened to Ellen. ٨ ٨٥٧
I’ve been reading through this and this excerpt is so true. It reminds me that I should commit to the #darkwoke agenda
