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In this video by queer YouTubers, Rowan Ellis and Calum McSwiggan, they watch scenes from TV and movies that are heavily queer-baiting their audience and labelling it as representation.  The piece of media that they touch on the most is the TV show “Teen Wolf”.  On multiple occasions, both within the show and in promotional content for the show they heavily allude to one of the characters being queer but never having him actually end up being queer.  

This video is chocked full of examples of audiences being told there’s representation in what they’re watching, but it really being the most bare minimum example that possibly isn’t even actually queer, it just may read as queer subtext to a queer audience.  If only queer audiences can recognize something as queer, it is doing nothing to help our community because straight audiences are unable to recognize the queer coding.  

For example, they discuss the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it piece of “representation” in the live action “Beauty and the Beast” with LeFou doing a waltz with another man.  I could get into it again like I do in almost every post, but I’ll leave this one  with just this sentence, if Disney actually wanted queer representation, they would’ve cast a queer actor, not Josh Gad.  

Has anyone been keeping track of the brownie points all these productions have gotten for including some fake queer representation?

If you’ve seen the Netflix documentary “Disclosure”, I’m sure you’ll be familiar with what I’m talking about.  Max Sweeney was the first trans-man series regular character on TV.  Sounds great right? Eh, not so much.  Daniela Sea, who played Max, at the time identified as a cis woman.  Now they identify as nonbinary, so that isn’t necessarily where the issues lie.  

Max’s storyline, while revolutionary for TV at the time, was riddled with harmful stereotypes and misinformation.  Max’s life was portrayed as a living nightmare, with his female friends ostracizing him, his personality change to manic and aggressive after starting testosterone, and his concieving of a child and his being abandoned by his cheating boyfriend.  For actual trans men watching the show, this was a horrific depiction of how their lives could go, leading to fear and apprehension towards living their authentic lives.  This was the first time they were ever seeing themselves represented on TV, and THIS is how it was going? 

This depiction of trans life led to a lot of stigma from the cis audiences who saw Max’s storyline.  It only added to people believing that trans people’s lives are all sad stories of hardship, that trans men are aggressive because of their testosterone, and that they’ll face a life of shame because of who they are.  

Now, I can’t tell you if “costume-ification” is a real word, but I do know that it perfectly sums up how in our current world, transness is seen as a costume because of how it is shown in movies and television.  

We’ve all seen the countless examples out there of cis people playing trans roles.  Currently, there are more examples of that than there are of actual trans people playing trans roles.  The fact that all we see (aside from the few real examples like “Pose”, which I will never shut up about) of trans “representation” in media is cis people in a costume will never be right to me.  

In the wise words of world famous drag queens Trixie Mattel and Katya Zamolodchikova, “Gay girls are sort of the superior race because there’s nothing more punk rock and anti-patriarchy than [saying] ‘Not only do I not need no man, I like, DON’T need NO man.’”

Being a queer woman opens up all sorts of avenues for us within our own broader queer community.  Outside of that, though, we still face a lot of stigma from the straight world.  It’s generally okay that we are queer, but we are still expected to present femininely to the world.  If we present masc or butch we are seen as less than.  In an article for the New York Times, journalist Kerry Manders states, “There’s a prevalent assumption that we’re all fat, frumpy fashion disasters — our baseball caps and baggy pants suggest to others that we don’t care about self-presentation. But it’s not that we’re careless; it’s that unlike, say, the gay white men who have been given all too much credit for influencing contemporary visual culture, we’re simply not out to appease the male gaze. We disregard and reject the confines of a sexualized and commodified femininity.”  

In my own experience as a woman loving women, I have always felt drawn to masculine appearances and fashions, but also loved more feminine looks, mixing baggy pants and shirts with my long hair and love for makeup.  This sentement is echoed in that NYT article as well stating, “The codes have been tweaked and refined over the years, younger butches continue to take them in new and varied directions: They may experiment with their personas from day to day, switching fluidly between masculine and feminine presentation...Not every butch has short hair, can change a tire, desires a femme. Some butches are bottoms. Some butches are bi. Some butches are boys.”

We all know Elliot Page, Canada’s Trans Sweetheart, by now.  Whether we know him for his role in “Juno” (2007) or in Netflix’s “Umbrella Academy” (2019-) or something else somewhere in between, he’s been a hugely vocal member of the LGBTQ+ community since his first coming out in 2014.  

“Freeheld” is the true story of Laurel Hester and Stacie Andree.  Hester (played by Julianne Moore) is diagnosed with terminal cancer and her and Andree (Elliot Page) have to fight to have Hester’s pension benefits passed on to Andree as her domestic partner.  

Ryan Murphy’s “Pose” is one of, if not the best example of actual LGBTQ+ actors playing LGBTQ+ roles.  Every character from Elektra to Dr. Judy to Pray Tell and so on is played by an actor who actually is trans or lesbian or gay and can lend real-world experience to the role they play.  

It is far too common in Hollywood today to have a straight, cisgender man play a trans woman (i.e. Eddie Redmayne in “The Danish Girl”) or a straight woman playing a lesbian (i.e. Cate Blanchette in “Carol”).  This, though is getting better with the massive acclaim Pose recieved and how it brought the conversation about people within marginalized communities should be allowed to tell their own stories on-screen into the mainstream.  No longer was it just a few queer actors who dared to challenge the way things were spearheading that discussion, but instead people and audiences of all backgrounds accepting these true-to-life casting decisions across the board.  

“Queen & Slim” is a "stylish, provocative, and powerful” story which “tells a gripping fugitive story steeped in timely, thoughtful subtext”, as stated by the Rotten Tomatoes Critic Consensus.  Written by black, masc lesbian, writer, actor, and producer, Lena Waithe.  According to her interview with NPR, Waithe states this about her debut feature film: "The movie is sort of a result of every conversation that I've ever had with every black person I've ever met.  And also, it's an observation too, on our community: who we are, how beautiful we are, how complex we can be and how we are resilient. And sometimes we'll do whatever we have to do to survive.”  

Waithe was named OutMagazine’s Out100: Artist of the Year in 2017 and made history as the first Black woman to win an Emmy in the category of Outstanding Writing for a Comedy Series in the same year.  In terms of writing characters that reflect people that reflect herself, Waithe states, “I know how many women I see out in the world who are very much like myself. We exist. To me, the visibility of it was what was going to be so important and so exciting.”  

A musical, no matter its subject matter, is always inherently queer.  The act of breaking into song when the point could’ve easily been made in probably less words and time without it is inherently off-beat.  

Kids all over the country are accosted for being in Musical Theatre programs, even in the most liberal cities.  In my high school, I had a friend who was formerly a football player but left that behind to join our theatre program.  He always got made fun of by his former teammates for “switching sides”.  Luckily, he was able to brush them off and is now pursuing acting in college and is a phenomenal performer.  This exact situation was also presented to the world in High School Musical where Troy tried his best to hide his involvement and love for theatre from his athlete friends and teammates for fear of them thinking less of him.  In many places, theatre is seen as “gay” or a more feminine extra curricular activity in comparison to athletics.  For straight people, specifically straight men, participating in theatre, especially during the difficult years of high school, shows a certain comfortability with themselves despite social pressures of toxic masculinity and heteronormativity.  

In an essay posted to HowlRound by Ezra Brain titled, “Towards a Queer Reclamation”, the writer points out that while yes, there are a good few queer-centric plays, there are far too many barriers preventing them from being seen.  They suggest that in order to make queer stories more accessible, queer stories must be made into genres of theatre that are the most popular, musicals being one of them.  They state, “Queer artists should reclaim these genres as their own not just because queer art can exist in any genre, but because more popular genres are, by definition, more accessible to audiences. Through this reclamation, we can move from queer plays existing as a marginalized genre to a true mainstream theatrical culture.”  This is why queer representation in musical films is so important as well.  Film in our world today is so accessible, with a seemingly endless number of streaming platforms.  Musical films generally have a more family-centric audience, so that is just another way for younger queer kids to see themselves represented in the media they consume and for our world to be cultivated for those kids, so they don’t have to go through the same struggles most of us did.  

In terms of “Hedwig and the Angry Inch”, John Cameron Mitchell talks about how different it was for him at the time to be openly gay in the 2001 Chicago Tribune article, “Challenging Hollywood's identity crisis”. He states that in American culture the actor and the role they play are seen as synonymous, whereas in other places they’re wholly separate in the audience’s eyes.  Hearing this made me examine my own views of queer actors and their roles.  I first thought of Kristen Stewart and how I grew up obsessed with the Twilight films, but now I’m surprised when I see her in a heteronormative, non-outwardly-queer role.  I know I was never outwardly taught to think of an actor’s personal life in synchronicity with the characters they play, but it’s definitely something I have to learn to challenge and correct.

“Rent” is a musical which premiered on Broadway in 1996 that embraces our differences in a post-AIDS crisis world.  The show has characters of different genders, sexualities, and backgrounds all trying to make ends meet and navigate the struggles of life.  

Two of the main characters are HIV+ (Roger and Mimi) and two have AIDS (Collins and Angel).  This show puts characters both straight and queer together in a way that shows HIV/AIDS is not just a queer issue.  Roger and Mimi are both straight but got sick due to their drug addictions.  Roger’s still reeling from his girlfriend’s suicide after they found out they were HIV+.  Mimi is a sex worker who is still currently battling her substance abuse while being sick.   Collins is a professor with dreams of moving to Santa Fe and opening a restaurant where the struggles he faces in New York won’t matter anymore.  Angel is a performer and it is highly contested whether she is a drag queen, transgender woman, or genderfluid, but she is most often referred to with female pronouns.  

A few years before the world would get to know Billy Porter as the major standout he has become from shows like Pose and American Horror Story, he starred in a soon to be revolutionary show called “Kinky Boots” which opened on Broadway in 2013.  

Written by icons Harvey Fierstein and Cyndi Lauper, the story of “Kinky Boots” follows Charlie (Stark Sands) who is dealing with the run down shoe factory his father left to him when he passed away.  He forms an unlikely partnership with a drag queen named Lola (Billy Porter) and they come up with the idea of producing a line of high-heeled boots that will be comfortable enough for men to perform in.  As their business partnership and subsequent friendship bloom, we learn the two have similarly complicated relationships with their fathers.  Lola was raised to become a boxer, but was disowned when she showed up to the match in drag.  The show as a whole examines what it means to become your own person and create your own legacy, despite the paths people, like parents, may have set up for you.  

There are countless stories of queer people being outcast from their families, and not all of them end like Lola’s does.  In the song provided, one originally sung by Lola with only a couple lines by Charlie, we hear her coming to terms and openly accepting that she isn’t the son her father wished she was and had pushed her to be.  It’s a teaching moment for her to be showing Charlie, who is still at war with himself over his father’s expectations for him to continue to run the family business.