zlacker

>>GavCo+(OP)
I'm a gay man and I think we are going to far with this PC nonsense. I had a hard time growing up in the 90s knowing I was different and being tormented by my peers, so I'm happy to see gay "normalized" in current pop culture more because I think it teaches the younger generation to accept themselves and others. However I feel that it's going to far, for example I started reading a novel the other day but gave up a third of the way through because every character was some form of LGBT or interracial or something. It made the story seem fake and unrealistic. I think editing classic books is wrong even if it is covering up something like hate or bigotry. History forgotten is history bound to repeat itself.

>>double+ls1
Another gay man here.

To me it seems like we have this paradoxical situation where the media want to simultaneously present inclusivity and diversity, but don't dare present any of the real diversity for fear of stereotyping. The end result is some token LGBTQ+ characters who are heteronormative, which is disingenuous.

If it is a choice between no gay character and some gay character who is essentially 'straight acting', I'd choose the former every time.

>>morbia+wB1
I'm the opposite; and I think that there are way more overly dramatic feminine gay characters in media today than gay guys who are just regular dudes.

When we were written as a joke we were written overly femmy cause it was "funny". Now gay writers are writing characters a lot of the time they're also the stereotype/femmy gay.

As a short gay boi who is hella gay but is into tech & electronics & has never watched an episode of Ru Paul's Drag Race etc, I want more representation for guys like me; more of a regular dude who also happens to like dudes. Not "straight acting", just not a screaming, frothing at the mouth, overly dramatic yasssssss type gay; those are what society has always seen in our community, because they're the loudest, but they represent only a small % of gay archetypes.

>>fennec+YA4
I think you're sort of misinterpretting what I'm asking for, and I suspect our views actually align pretty well. I was not implying that we need more camp queens to represent gay men, I was referring more to presenting LGBTQ+ people in a heteronormative light which just comes across as totally unrealistic to those of us who are a member of the community.

Perhaps a concrete example would clarify my point. There is a character in Stranger Things who is a lesbian. Throughout the final series, she has a crush on another character. They have a scene at the end of the series where they are talking, the other character says they're lesbian/bisexual (I don't recall which now) and they hit it off.

The idea of your school crush happening to also have a same sex attraction, and also likes you, makes it such a vanishingly small probability that something like this could ever happen. It came across as a straight writer shoe-horning in a weak straight romance plot point, only replaced a man with a woman for LGBTQ+ brownie points.

If they wanted to cover this properly, why not show us how lesbians in the 80s really met? I assume though gay bars, being neither a lesbian nor around in the 80s I don't know and I am curious to find out. What I can say is that that scene was not a fair resprentation.

So my point is, be it dating, love, family or any other fact of LGBTQ+ life, there are statistically significant deviations from the average cis-gendered heterosexual experience. If you choose to cover LGBTQ+ life in your media of choice, do so authentically. Yes, I appreciate there is a fine line between this and stereotyping, but presenting gays as straights with one gender swapped is so unrealistic.

To use an analogy, representing all your female characters as good housewives who are subservient to men is enforcing a poor stereotype, analogous to the gay camp stereotype. Representing all your female characters as behaving precisely like men however is not the solution to the problem. You should represent women like women.