Of Homosexuality and Media

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Lately I’ve been watching more gay/lesbian media than I usually do, and I’ve stumbled upon a semi-annoying discovery. In both movies and TV it’s a lot easier to find gay (likable) men than women. The token gay best friend is always a guy. There’s a crazy difference in the amount of movies about gay men versus gay women – when looking at titles it’s like a sea of gays with the occasional lesbian thrown in for kicks. In said movies, they typically function like the hetero couples, just a bit more flamboyant. An easy tangent would be to talk about the clear stereotype for how a gay man functions in society, but I think we all know what that would be. For instance: shopping, superficiality, hair with frosted tips, and “Hey girl , heeeeyy.” Even so, the media seems to be far more comfortable with the idea of two men than two ladies – unless they are behaving as a sex symbol.

Lesbians are portrayed as either super butch, anti-men feminists, or high maintenance lipsticks. This is not to say that butch lesbians aren’t walking about or that women are always easy to be around, but they get placed on an extreme binary scale. When I do find the rare lesbian movie that sounds interesting, the woman almost always ends up with a guy in the end. And if by some miracle she doesn’t, she still messed around with one. Of course, clearly if she sees a penis she’s going to stick around – at least in the media. This is not to say that these aren’t good movies, The Kids Are Alright is wonderful, I own it, but it does fall into that mindset of needs a man. The films that don’t have the switching teams factor are typically low-budget indies with acting that’s either superb or painfully bad, there’s no middle ground. I’m sick of watching these romantic or dramatic movies just to have the couple you’re rooting for suddenly break up and retreat into a hetero normative world. I want to cheer on a lesbian couple and have them stick it out with that Hollywood romantic comedy happily ever after ending.  Straight couples and gay men get that all the time, it’s the ladies turn.

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