So look. I agree there should be more queer folks involved in the creation of media, particularly mainstream media. (Other groups too but Iām speaking on queer folks right now.) Queer people are underrepresented and shoved to the side and poorly portrayed and that sucks, and there should be more of us involved, particularly when it comes to telling our stories.
Nothing good comes of the idea that ONLY queer folks should tell queer stories or portray queer characters, or that itās okay to critique and harass straight folks purely for telling queer stories.
1. Segregation is not going to work in our favor. We know howĀ āwell make your own, thenā plays out when the other group has the resources and institutional power. Especially if thereās no one even making them pay lip service to āseparate but equal.ā Itās not going to be any better if the segregation is self-imposed.
2. Saying straight folks canāt make queer media gives them a convenient excuse to simply not include any queer characters at all in the majority of stories, and I thought we hated that? I thought that was explicitly a bad thing? We WANT straight creators to be doing their best to write us well so weāll be represented in a full range of mainstream media. Saying they canāt do it right and shouldnāt try lets them off the hook.
3. It puts closeted queer creators in a bind. Either they stay closeted and be harassed by angry queer folks, they come out and expose themselves to harassment from bigots, or they simply never tell queer stories, their ownĀ stories. The world gets worse for some subset of queer folks and fewer authentic queer stories get told. Net loss.
4. It makes the small pool of out queer creators the arbiters of queer narratives, which sucks for people who donāt see themselves well represented. There is no single definitive queer narrative and the smaller the pool of Approved Creators the more we risk instating a false one.
5. It opens the door to further divisions within the community. If a straight person canāt possibly understand a trans person well enough to write about or act them, can a cis gay person? So should a cis gay man ONLY write characters who are cis gay men? Ridiculous. No, all queer people are not alike and do not have the same experiences. So either we need to overcome that to learn about and empathize with other people and stand in solidarity, or weāre all going to splinter off into our own little bubbles which, again, is explicitly bad for both our real-life community and our fiction.
We want people to write about others who arenāt like them.Ā We want people to write about others who arenāt like them. We also want people like us to have the opportunity to tell our stories but making it an exclusive privilege can only backfire.