NOBULLSHIT: "We're normal, sane, rational people trying to tell you that this is wrong!"
"A vast
homosexual influence in popular shows."
"Considering be dramatic influx of homosexual themes in modern television,
It should come as no surprise that there might appear gay subtexts in a few TV shows...
even shows designed for children!"
"...further evidence that the creators of this series
Intended for the character to be a gay role model has surfaced."
"He's PURPLE, the gay pride color, and his antenna is shaped like a triangle
the gay pride symbol!"
"These
Subtle depictions are no doubt intentional and parents are warned to be alert to these elements of the series."
"Parents alert! tinky-winky comes out of the closet!"
Hello, I'm Mr. Saint I'm here to answer one very simple question
What is love? And what does it look like?
Well, so it goes that after suffering a childhood in the '90s and early 2000's,
the apparent peak of liberal Marxist homosexual propaganda,
We're left with a veritable slew of family programs with forced LGBTQ diversity
which of course explains why the world is now being flooded with the gays and
transgenders and
Communists... right?
I mean, that's what we heard all through that period, that the liberal culture war had gone too far,
that TV was being crammed full of this kind of dangerous pandering nonsense.
All this in mind, it stands to reason if I'm looking through my childhood programming of that '90s/2000s period of
Dexter's Lab, Johnny Bravo, Sponge Bob, Recess, and
Yvon of the Yukon, they'll have plenty of examples of this overt positive
LGBTQ representations have to worm my way through. Why, I'll hardly be able to fit it all in
The punchline is that, in spending the last week or so coming through this period in which my small
Impressionable child's mind was being corrupted by the influence of liberal media, it's actually
painfully difficult to find any examples of this stuff. For the apparent victory of the left in that period of the culture war,
Gay and transgender issues are basically just punch lines in near all every example I could find looking into the subject
YUSUKE: "It turns out our missus is a mister!"
It's like a bloke kissing another bloke and oh, that's so gross
And that's the joke or it's about dressing as a woman and then blokes find him attractive and oh, that's so gross
and that's the joke.
Is that what we've been confusing for genuine positive representation all this time?
Can't imagine how that kind of mix-up would affect people's mindsets in the present day
"Are traps gay?"
But hey
I figured since it seems to be a foregone conclusion
For so many that leftist children's media dominance is a massive factor in our modern political struggles,
It'd be worth a deeper look and I was able to identify
3 distinct categories worth looking at if we really want to answer the question:
Where was all this stuff that apparently brainwashed me?
So while it's hard to find specific examples of network rules blocking the depiction of gay/lesbian/bisexual/
trans/queer people in children's media in this era, the colloquial phrase "getting past the censors" was still pervasive throughout the period
And usually covered the more broad area of inoffense
For indeed, The Liberals may have won the culture war of the '90s and early 2000s,
but maybe not so much in the sense of pushing socially liberal views down our throats and
More in the sense that they wanted to cause as few people to be upset by anything as possible
It's not the conservative vanguard that brought about stuff like the Comics Code Authority which from the '50s to the '90s
specifically prevented any "sexual perversion" from being shown in comics
That means gay people
Instead, it's the liberal capitalist mindset of yeah, you can kind of do what you want to do
but if in might upset parents, upset the bottom line
feel free to quietly quash anything that might be remotely controversial like
putting in black people or gay people or
Kirby holding a chainsaw
And thus we get the vast majority of quote-unquote gay representation through this: the ambiguous gay
"Oh! Don't you look precious!"
And yes, it's pretty much exclusively going to be gay we're dealing with here
But what about trans stuff?
Yeah, I'm just still looking. So what is the ambiguous gay?
well, simply put it's any time a character is written in the show in such a way that they seem gay
Be it through a stereotypically camp demeanor,
SILVER SPOONER: "So, let the feast begin!"
A preference for "girl things", and the implication that maybe they're a little more interested in playing for "the home team"
Crucially, however, it's never actually said or shown that they're gay. The red guy and cow and chicken, the...
RED GUY: "Soon to be King and Queen of cheese."
Certainly seem to be playing on some classic archetypes
Eugene from Hey Arnold sure does love ponies, unicorns, ballet, and musicals
Carl from Johnny Bravo really seems to love pretending to be Johnny's wife and feeling up the goods
But, no, none of these characters are ever explicitly given a same-sex romantic partner
Nor declare themselves to really be what the writers are implying
Time Squad featured a full episode in which Larry 3000,
the effeminate robotic sidekick of team captain Todd Russell,
gets awful jealous on seeing the leader hit off with an old lover
"Don't touch me!
"Tonight you're sleeping on the sofa!"
Yet despite a few wink nods
None of this really goes beyond jokes at Larry's expense and future episodes continue to treat this relationship as a couple of love/hate bros
It's the kind of side-eye acknowledgment that usually at least manages to get angry parents off the network's back
although, hey spongebob was repeatedly protested as a kind of gay and docked relation for his apparent sissy demeanor and he's like
an asexual sponge.
In any case, you hopefully see what I'm getting at here.
If you saw a gay kid on a kids show in the '90s and 2000s
Doubtless it was going to be at best the kind of gay you could just play off as being different
far from the flood of diversity feared,
It was just lads like DD in Ed, Edd, and Eddy blowing kisses and writing Valentine's cards for his best pals the Eds
But haha, it's just a joke, and we'll give them an implied female love interest later on anyway
And everyone's radar was going off for this one
Now it's not unheard of for characters written like this to eventually transcend this trope, but it's always with caveats
Ren and Stimpy transitioned from "wink nod
haha gay joke" to an actual couple but only specifically in their adult-oriented special
and Steven Universe got a whole lot more overtly gay with its main cast over time
But you know that was like two years ago
And also got edited out in some countries
Now what's wrong with the ambiguous gay seems like the best of both worlds ay?
you get some pseudo gay representation but parents feel less like they're having an agenda forced down their throats
Well firstly, no,
It doesn't really stop the barrage of complaints about gay kid indoctrination
"And this has to do with making anyone who's opposed to homoerotic behavior into a bad guy
"The same way that Hollywood makes bad guys.
"I think a good illustration of this is Star Wars at Luke Skywalker is a sniveling lousy hero.
"He's a constant complainer.
"I mean, it's just he's a crybaby.
"Hollywood though. What did they do? How did they make you cheer for Luke Skywalker?
"Well, the opening scene of Darth Vader is him like force choking some guy to death for making a mistake.
"So by default,
"Luke is the hero and no matter how bad the other guy is
"Vilify every representation of
"Anyone of anybody
"Who disagrees with homosexual behavior."
As I said even explicitly asexual characters got a litany of concerned calls whenever they behaved in a way deemed "off"
In terms of typical heteronorm behavior
Remember the framework of this video that somehow this era was still seen as one of a liberal attack on sex and gender
But the main problem is the for the most part being a punchline does not good representation make
And the performance of queerness being played off this way almost exclusively for over a decade
Isn't really the kind of positive message
You might want to send to queer kids looking for something to make them feel less abnormal
In fact, quite to the contrary, the framing of behavior like this as innately comical or weird perpetuates just the opposite for youngsters
Reaffirming the playground notion of "gay behaviour"
as something to be mocked and derided
It's quite literally programming these kids to associate this group of people with this behavior and that behavior with, as I say, a punch line
Now the LGBTQ+ community has traditionally done a fantastic job co-opting these kinds of characters
throwing their energy and flamboyance into something impowering even if it comes from a place of mockery
But this doesn't quite melt away the inherent issues of this being the only way this group got to be presented to young audiences
for long periods of time
"Weirdo"
Lindsay Ellis did a good video about this by the way
Reframing gay from being something internal to simply a behavior
also helps push that whole "it's just a choice" thing and I can't help notice that it was this exact period that phrases like
"That's gay" "Stop acting gay"
Were being fired back and forth all through youth groups at the time
The ambiguous gay in essence cultivates an idea of gay as a performance,
Not simply, well, having romantic interest in people of the same sex
And while again the performance is something that can be reclaimed could even be used to create a unifying empowering group identity
"A flame that lights the night. A flame that shatters the darkness"
It's observable the harm it can do to queer kids when this is pretty much all they get
Well, except for that one other thing.
"Hey you know Hagrid?"
"Uh, yeah?"
"He's actually transgender"
This lady,
this man,
this fellow,
this wizard,
This talking alien robot
What do they all have in common?
Yes, that's right, they're all flaming homosexuals
The word of gay is and other means of getting past those pesky parents as ingenious as it is
Completely missing the point of why representation matters
Again, the priority here is making sure that in watching these shows
These kids are made to feel less like "others" in society and more a part of it.
As over time we've learned that queerness isn't just a choice you could discourage people away from
The game instead is to acknowledge in media that these groups are a fact of society
We do need to live amongst each other and that doesn't need to be an antagonistic relationship
If the ambiguous gay isn't the solution
Pigeonholing gays to a single aesthetic punchline while still being too overt for parents
"Judy Garland! Where?"
Then how about this? The character doesn't necessarily act "too gay" and we still won't say they're gay in the story itself
But we will say, off the record, that they are secretly gay
Most famous example of this is probably Albus Dumbledore in the Harry Potter novels
A character author J K Rowling had supposedly planned from the start to be homosexual
But apparently due to an archaic rule in UK law blocking novels with gay characters from being in school libraries
How's that for the liberal culture war
Sort of let that one slip by until after the books had been published
This is actually a surprisingly common tactic
Paul Dini, co-creator of the Batman character Harley Quinn, has long been open about the character being bisexual
Despite that never being made overt in the animated series
And Jem creator Kristy Marx stating several of the characters had been planned to have a gay reveal down the line
I think her recent reboot fixes this
I'm not sure
Now you can kind of see where they're coming from here. It almost seems kind of progressive, right?
Look at that, turns out gay people are just people after all
It's not about "acting gay", you might not even know they're gay if they don't specifically say so
and I'm sure it's certainly more appealing to the kind of people that
Say "I don't hate gay people. I just don't want them shoved in my face"
so the question arrives: what part of a character explicitly having romantic preference is "shoving it in your face?"
Is it shoving it in your face when a TV show shows a boy having a crush on a girl?
Eric Taxxon did a good video about this by the way
The principle of "just don't shove it in my face"
relies on the presumption that being gay is abnormal not just in terms of being statistically rare but being
qualitatively different from being straight
Simply put, nobody says foreigners are being shoved in their face
When a German kid shows up in Bart Simpson's classroom
Even though that's easily as rare as a gay kid showing up
Now, if that kid is explicitly a Muslim or a Mexican immigrant
well
Then some people start to take issue and is for the same reason people get upset when a character is stated to be gay
Because they're not uncomfortable with featuring gays as statistical minorities
They don't want it to be normalized and that's why the word of gay isn't really enough because it normalizes nothing
Having a character who's gay/bi/pan or whatever else only by the word of the creators is
Fundamentally the same as just having them be straight. You're portraying queerness is something to be hidden something
That doesn't get to be in the open like a normal romantic preference
It's still "othered" just in a less overt way than with the "gay as punchline"
Now as with the ambiguous gay, I don't necessarily think every example of this is negative and I do see the positives in having non explicit portrayals of sexuality
But it again isn't a replacement for actual representation
Whether it be gays, lesbians, transgender people, or anything else you can't normalize something unless you directly acknowledge it
What about trans stuff?
If a gay falls in the woods and no one's there to hear it
When shows of this era did decide to really push the boat out and directly acknowledge the gay epidemic
It was usually through what we might call the "issue episode"
"Well let's see. Tuesday is leather night
"So it's probably some sort of shoe outlet."
Of the three types of representation I've gone into it's probably the most helpful
Like it does directly acknowledge the existence of queer people, but it still comes with it a fair few problems
"No, Mark's gay."
This was also easily the rarest to encounter as a young '90s lad, so to really discuss it
I have to push more into the territory of stuff that wasn't technically for kids
But you probably watched as a kid anyway. Case in point, the Simpsons.
"Listen carefully. John is a ho
"mo (right)
"sexual"
This episode, "Homer Phobia,"
is symbolic of most of the benefits and problems of the queer issue episode
The show starts with Bart accidentally busting the gas line forcing the family to pinch some pennies together to pay for a replacement
They head to a collectible store
Hoping to sell off some of Marge's old family heirlooms and there they meet John
John is a fun charismatic employee of the store and him and Homer hit it off immediately
Until, shock horror, it turns out John is a "fruit" Homer who apparently is homophobic
Homer, who apparently is homophobic, thereby declares John is no longer welcome in the house
And the rest of the episode is about Homer dealing with his own
Irrational fears of gay people as well as realizing John isn't so bad after all
The episode is actually more about Homer dealing with his own fragile sense of masculinity rather than about gay people
Which incidentally is how most of these queer issue episodes go
Hey, did you know the gay guy in this episode was played by Dan Castellaneta, the same person who does the voice for Homer?
I don't really have a point here, I just thought it was a funny coincidence
Now good points to the angle adopted by episodes like this one:
In directly confronting the issue of homophobia, it's a lot harder to ignore the positive message
The show is trying to communicate and if you are a queer kid watching then you know
This is a message of acceptance for you. And you're not just a punchline
This does also parents a lot more riled up of course, but that's why it's mostly exclusive to more adult-oriented shows
Disadvantages, well the framework of the issue episode in itself presents some problems
because it essentially compartmentalizes queer people
Putting them in this box in which they can be dealt with and quickly discarded
John never appeared in The Simpsons episode prior to this one and had only a couple background cameos following it
His existence is essentially compartmentalized within the framing of an episode about gay people
Not just acknowledging him as a gay person
But having him be defined entirely by that and while it's hardly rare for Simpson's side characters to be
Defined by singular character traits, in John's case his quirk means he'll never really get to be integrated into this town
Despite in-universe living there
John's is a walking PSA that the Simpsons is okay with openly gay people... in small amounts.
It's kind of a weird meta joke moment when halfway into this episode John has an awkward encounter with the other Simpsons gay,
Smithers.
A character granted a place as an uncontroversial mainstay of the cast by his sexual ambiguity at the time
And don't you Simpsons casuals tell me him being gay was already explicit
The writers specifically said that he was a "Burns-sexual"
Until showing him to be gay in season 22 episode 11 and they're not actually having him come out the closet
until season 27 nearly 20 years after this episode
Sheesh
And so it goes that gay people in these shows are essentially treated like, I don't know, drug PSAs
"Yes I can! I'm so excited! I"m so excited"
They show up
There's a pithy platitude about acceptance and togetherness and then they're put back in the box like a particularly garish Christmas decoration
As we move forward we do start to finally see more mainstream
examples of openly gay primary cast members in shows most famously Jack from Will & Grace and Ellen from
Ellen
But they're rare to find and at this point we're moving well outside of the kids show focus and also
Shows I've actually watched
So yea, it's time
It's time for me to address that question that's been playing on your minds the entire time the thing that's made you go
Why does he keep saying LGBTQ+ when he's only talking about gay stuff?
It's finally time to reveal, in all my research, was there ever a real
explicit
Positive mainstream kid's show episode about transgender people?
...Kinda?
"And who are we to deny him surgery that will make him feel better about himself?" *DOLPHIN NOISES*
No, no fuckin
God no
I don't expect most of you to remember much from this early 2000s Disney Channel show by Recess creator
Joe Ansolabehere and Paul Germain a modestly successful show that ran for four seasons before an abrupt cancellation
Their previous show kind of stole the thunder and yeah, it was also a great show, but
Man, this is a good show
Bunch of weird, cool alien species
They opted to make one of those weird aliens the main character instead of just the boring human
They seemed to basically live on a commune guided by a strong female ship captain mom and it's got fair few good moral lessons
More people should talk about Lloyd in Space while we're at it talk more about Fillmore! too
What was I saying?
All right
Lloyd in Space is the first good example of gender issues
Handling kids television in my childhood and maybe the reason why I somewhat understood gender fluidity from a fairly young age
So while most episodes of Lloyd in Space deal with the titular Lloyd and his three friends getting in various hijinks and drama aboard their space station home,
Season 2 episode 9, Neither Boy Nor Girl, is a pretty special case
Lloyd and company are enjoying lunch time and a new rock CD when they get into a spat with their girl classmate counterparts over musical tastes
Girls are listening to a (way better) song, but they fight about it
Which is better anyway and decides to call in an impartial observer
New exchange student Zoid
Zoid, on being asked, is indecisive
recognizing the emotional vulnerability of the girl's song and the raw power of the boy's and then leaving
Then, this happens:
"Aha! See? He like our music better"
"He? What are you talking about? Zoid isn't a boy"
"And she liked our music better"
"Whoa whoa wait one second. Not a boy? What, you think he's a girl?"
"Well isn't it obvious?"
Things sort of develop from there with the boys and the girls
Tailing Zoid to see if they can note down anything to determine their gender all to no avail
They give up and decide to just buy Zoid a big gulp and check which bathroom they go into
Turns out Zoid don't work that way and they spill the beans that they just need to answer the gender question
Zoid laughs and reveals
"That? I thought you know? I'm neither!"
It turns out Zoid's race's culture doesn't have an assigned gender
They get to choose whatever they want to be once they hit puberty and Zoid's birthday isn't until the following week
While Zoid is completely indifferent to the apparent gravity of this choice it weighs heavily on the minds of the boys and girls
They each decide they want -nay, need- to win Zoid over to their respective genders
With a series of increasingly arbitrary, stereotypical gendered activities
Eventually enough is enough and Zoid confronts the groups over trying to manipulate them like this
Zoid storms off and Lloyd and company try to make up for it by getting Zoid an apology gift
Still not quite getting the point
They gives Zoid some "girl gifts" to show that they don't want to pressure them to be a boy if they don't want
While the girls make the exact same fumble and gets Zoid some..
"boy stuff"
Zoid steps away and educate some shitlords
"Pushing me and pulling me back and forth 'Be a boy!' 'Be a girl!' Well I've had it!"
"We were only trying to help you make the right decision"
"The right decision for you maybe, but what about me?
"It'll be the toughest decision of my life, but it's my decision, not yours
"And if you guys really are my friends, it shouldn't matter to you if I'm a girl or a boy
"Because either way I'll still be me
"See ya tomorrow"
Zoid leaves and a day later, it's finally time to decide what they want to be
After all the dramatic build-up, Zoid finally reveals:
"I've decided I'm not telling"
"What?! But why not?"
"Because it's none of your business"
So there we have it a 2002 Disney Channel kids show managed to get a full 20 minutes on gender politics and fluidity
It's not only genuinely the only good example of this stuff really openly being discussed
But he actually holds up better than you'd think for the time
At least a basic introduction to the notion of gender as something other than a fixed predetermined role
It was pretty valuable to me as a kid who had never personally dealt with any of these kinds of issues before
And the episode firmly takes Zoid's side, doesn't present them as unstable,
Confused, or misguided like issues of gender would continue to be shown in popular media and they're not a punchline
They're just a regular likeable kid
and in fact
It's the obsession with the gender binary shown by Lloyd and company that's made out to be the problem here
Now is it perfect?
Fuck no
This shit's two decades old and comes from a Disney Channel show
It unequivocally associates particular activities as inherently male or female coded
Zoid doesn't even particularly humor the notion of something that exists outside of man and woman and
It has just the same problem as The Simpsons episode in that Zoid pops up as an issue to be confronted and never turns
Up again to my knowledge
Yet still as a
stepping stone as a first glimpse at a whole range of
Discussion that I wouldn't have really find myself involved in again until my late teens
It was a pretty valuable thing for me to stumble upon
It doesn't even directly deal with transgender issues specifically
Zoid doesn't transition but is only shown as fluid, but it still
Presented me as an 8 year old with that initial knowledge that helped me fill in the gaps when I was suddenly forced to deal
With it as I grew older
Fuck if my family was really equipped to discuss that stuff or if the school system was going to touch that topic of a ten-foot pole
And remembering this, not only because there isn't really any talk of it online, is what first inspired me to make this video
because
Look, man, you can call it "liberal brainwashing". You can call it pandering or shoving politics into kids shows
indoctrination or whatever else
But I've hopefully demonstrated pretty definitively that
No, this was not a period of some flood of positive of LGBT youth representation
It was actually in many ways just
As misguided as the previous decade or so in how it handled any of this stuff for young people
But what was there, what did manage to directly acknowledge these issues, was actually pretty valuable
Look, I'm not pinning everything or parents here. Most of them were barely educated on this stuff themselves
School boards were hesitant to address more than they absolutely had to and were biting a bullet even doing that
Now I don't think media by any stretch should be a replacement for real education on a subject
But the fact is so many kids were lost during this period and at least getting these concepts really
Openly introduced to them in some of their early popular media may have helped some of these kids out there feel a little less alone
A little less utterly confused about themselves and those around them
The fact is, for me, I'm a straight cisgender dude. I've done a lot of soul-searching
I think I'm comfortable being sure about that
so I know that in my heart I will never truly understand many of these struggles
And if I wasn't explicitly educated about it one way or another
I was never even going to begin to "get it".
Now class, I actually was working class, very, so I feel like that's an experience I can speak to you personally
But for sexuality, for gender, for that
I rely on what I'm told and why I consume and I'm here to say:
No, I didn't gain this basic understanding through some seedy queer children indoctrination
I got it in spite of anything even beginning to resemble that almost exclusively
Because what ever imagined flood of representation apparently swept across the '90s and 2000's, I must have missed it
And apparently I'm not alone because none of the people around my age I asked had many examples
beyond those I've discussed either
And the fact that we're only just starting to get there now
after decades of increased understanding about these topics and the reality that they can't just be these
boogeyman problems we can hide from kids
That's pretty depressing
The fact that Dumbledore in the new fantastic beasts film is still not going to be explicitly gay for one reason or another
Or the fact that it's only now we're getting an on straight main cast member in a Disney movie
That's not the best
But I guess at least this stuff is happening
Now at least now we're getting stuff like Adventure Time and Steven universe and Summer Camp Island
There's showing this stuff to not be this shameful thing that needs to be hidden or treated like a punch line
I guess it's encouraging to see us step in the right direction
Just
Let's not start acting as if this was always the case as it becomes more of a norm, right?
because when we were kids
This was our "propaganda"
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