I am a fan of feministfrequency. She has the courage to
address social issues that she cares about in the face of a Web that is less
than welcoming to the passionate feminist. The Internet is, after all, still a
male-dominated sphere – with all the boobies, nerd in-jokes and banter one
could wish for. She is a refreshingly unapologetic about her opinions on how
women are portrayed in modern media and truly tickles my brain cells in a most
favourable way.
However, she is sometimes guilty of drawing too much out of
a particular trope, issue or experience – as is often the case when one has a
point to make. I usually let this slide, especially as I love the content she
makes – but as I have been working my way slowly through the back-log of her
videos, I came across this morsel that got my attention, uploaded in 2010.
I cannot tell you how happy it makes me that Caprica has a
prominent gay character that kicks arse in the form of Sam Adama. When I was
growing up, gay people in the media were only present in the Graham Norton
Show, Queer Eye for the Straight Guy and Will & Grace; gay characters in
Sci-Fi were light years off my radar. Torchwood wasn’t aired until later and
George Takei doesn’t count.
I especially love Caprica’s gay character precisely because
he is not portrayed as a gay character. He is a character that happens to be
gay. His sexuality is so subtly mentioned that it could be easily missed. As
someone who tries to announce their sexuality as a footnote in their personal
life, I would rather gay characters where presented in this way than in the,
“I’m here, I’m Queer” method of some other television shows. Glee, The New
Normal, Vicious, Queer as Folk and Will & Grace all have characters who are
gay first and personalities with quirks and flaws later.
Feministfrequency has an issue with the portrayal of this
character because he is a murderous bastard; literally, he is a bounty hunter. She
is critical of the fact that he kills his victims with phallic shaped objects.
Although the fact that most of our murderous weapons are long and pointy
probably does have something to do with society being more than a little
obsessed with a man’s dangly bits, I don’t think this has any significance in
this case. You work with what you’ve got and I don’t think the producers would
have been up for inventing a vagina-shaped weapon just for the series.
She also laments that they have created a character that
happens to be gay and then made him evil. It seems like she is
saying that because this gay man (sorry, man who happens to be gay) is a douche, the viewers are going to project that on all gay men they meet: this is the conclusion that she comes to that I am particularly disappointed with.
We should be moving
towards the normalisation of homosexuality and gay characters in the media. The
fact is, the world is full of people who are likeable, people who are dicks and
people who are bounty hunters; and gay people are going to fall into all of
those categories. We are not a lifestyle with specific traits, we are a
percentage of the population that can be found in all corners of society.
I don’t feel demonised or hated because a murderer in a TV
programme happens to be gay. His homosexuality is never used as a reasoning for
him being a killer. I want there to be main characters who can have storylines
that don’t revolve around their sexuality. TV in general, and especially SciFi,
should help us normalise people in the queer community by providing us with more characters like this.
