Don’t you just love it when you’re lying on the couch, eating takeout and watching the newest hit, modern television show? Guaranteed it won’t be long before a romantic element comes into play and before you’ve finished your Dominos Two for Tuesday you’ve got yet another heterosexual couple making out on your screen. We’ve gotten so used to seeing it that we even have a whole genre of television shows centered around finding heterosexual people dates. Love Island, The Bachelor, even the dubious taste levels of Take Me Out attract prime time slots and scores of viewers. Have you ever stopped to think about our homosexual friends? Where is their reality on these reality TV shows? We get excited when we see LGBT+ representation on our television screens because it is different and so far removed from the ‘norm’. Does this mean that maybe homosexuality is still regarded as not being normal enough to show in almost every major television show? Or are our television producers living in the past?
Research conducted by GLAAD, an LGBT+ media advocacy organisation, found that a meagre 4.8% of the characters that were going to be found on primetime broadcast television would be LGBT+ in 2017. Yet we can’t really complain about these statistics, because the LGBT+ community has never had such high numbers on television before. But can it be said that all these non-heterosexual characters were shown to be in healthy relationships like so many of their heterosexual counterparts? No, it cannot.
Half the time, I’ll be watching TV, and up pops a gay character – fabulous, charismatic and entertaining – yet he never seems to have a boyfriend. Why not? I would much rather see a domestic, gay couple in a healthy and loving relationship rather than yet another straight, white couple who argue and cheat on each other constantly.
Let’s take ‘Shadowhunters’ as an example. In the two and a half seasons that have been aired on Netflix and Freeform we have seen an array of relationships: Clace, Rizzy, Saia, Climon. Yet the most popular couple since season one has been Malec, which is formed by Alec Lightwood, a formerly-closeted gay white man, and Magnus Bane, a bisexual Indonesian man. We watch their relationship unfold from Magnus helping Alec to come out to his homophobic family to the two settling into a very domestic and healthy relationship in which neither outshines the other. It is this positive representation of a biracial, homosexual couple and even helped the show win the GLAAD Outstanding Drama Series award in 2016.
But ‘Shadowhunters’ took a giant leap with this sort of representation. I remember seeing my first ever homosexual couple on FOX’s musical comedy-drama ‘Glee’ when Blaine Anderson and Kurt Hummel start to date in the second season. They stay together until season four where we learn that Blaine has cheated on Kurt, and even though (spoiler alert) the two end up getting married in the final season they have a lot of arguments and break ups in between. Is this a healthy and realistic relationship of an LGBT+ couple? Not entirely. Yes, there are couples like this in real life, but for teenagers at high school, these things tend not to happen. Most LGBT+ couples cannot relate to Klaine, this may be in part due to the fact that it has been found that homosexuals are more likely to stay in long term relationships than heterosexual couples. In a study of 200 homosexual people, only 19% had cheated on their partner, which is much lower than the national American average which was between 20% and 30% when the study was conducted.
But what about the queer women? Often lesbian or bisexual women in television are dubbed as slutty or even worse erased from the main storyline because they are just not as seen as important enough. There are shows, like ‘One Day At A Time’ which gave us Elena Alvarez and ‘Pretty Little Liars’ which gave us Emily Fields, both lesbian characters that also happen to be main characters. However, the number of lesbian/bisexual women couples in television is tiny, especially compared to the amount of gay male couples. It wouldn’t take more than one hand to count them all, if you’re lucky.
Will we ever actually do anything about it or will we all just sit here and keep watching ‘Love Island’ or some other heteronormative TV show the world has become accustomed to? Will we actually fight for more couples like Maggie Sawyer and Alex Danvers from ‘Supergirl’ or Connor Walsh and Oliver Hampton from ‘How To Get Away With Murder’? When will we stop being so excited about seeing LGBT+ couples represented on TV and just get used to seeing them? I hope it’s soon, for the sake of every LGBT+ child out there, I hope it’s soon.
by VANIA MARTIN
graphic THETVJUNKIES.COM
