Girls and gays on film
This video from feministfrequency.com (via boingboing) asks a question I’ve never considered before, about the portrayal of women in films.
It also makes me think about the report that Stonewall released today, Unseen On Screen. That came to the not very surprising (if methodologically flawed) conclusion that gay men and lesbians talking about gay and lesbian issues positively were under-represented on the TV programmes most watched by young people.
Hmmm, sure, but I wonder if that is the point. Just as the video above highlights the importance of women in films not only appearing, but being presented as whole people with whole lives, surely it’s not a question simply of the appearance or not of gay men and lesbians on TV. And certainly not that they appear to be talking about things which Stonewall thinks concern gay men and lesbians. Surely, a real test of whether gay men and lesbians are represented on TV appropriately, is that they can appear on all sorts of TV shows, and not talk about gay and lesbian issues. There are all sorts of examples of this every day, from the news to sports programmes, from drama to soaps, from reality shows to game shows.
I’m sure the teenagers interviewed were genuine in their belief that gay people on TV need to talk about gay things, but I wonder why Stonewall didn’t challenge this perception of what being gay means?
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