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1. morbia+(OP)[view] [source] 2023-02-21 17:30:12
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.

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