marsza:

It’s so irritating to me that people in the online queer scene, but I suppose more particularly on tumblr, have this mentality that we can only have one queer narrative. We can’t have shows like Killing Eve and Hannibal because they equate queerness with violence/wickedness/evil characters! But we also can’t have shows like Dirk Gently because it woobifies queer experiences as some sort of monolith of cheeriness and hope and pays no respect to the suffering and melancholy of real queer experiences! It’s either all grit or all joy and goddamn any media that doesn’t fall on the polar end we want it to! We can’t have Brokeback Mountain or 120 BPM because queer characters die! We can’t have Love, Simon because it’s too idealistic! We can’t have Moonlight because it sanitizes queer desire too much. We can’t have The Handmaiden because it sexualizes queer desire too much. Queer stories shouldn’t be sad because that’s damaging. Queer stories shouldn’t be happy because it’s inauthentic. And so it goes.

In truth, there is no queer media that stands above criticism; no film or show or book will do everything  perfectly or be exactly what every queer consumer needs or yearns for. Still, I think there is a major problem with behaving as though every queer narrative should be one particular thing, have one specific tone, only exist in one specific fashion- in reality, the proverbial table is big enough (or perhaps it ought to be) for every iteration of queer representation. 

We should have our heartbreaking stories, our idealistic stories, our romantic comedies, our thrillers, our stories where queerness isn’t a narrative focus, our stories where the sole subject matter is queerness. We deserve our hapless trans heroes, our delightful gay villains, our stories that pay homage to suffering, our stories that foretell of all the glorious hope in a long, queer life. There is space at the table for every queer story and every queer character. Absolutely, there are histories in which queer narratives were largely- but not entirely- bent to a specific angle because of heternormative influences and powers. But Wilde writing a complicated, melancholic, gothic queerness is not the same as Hitchcock using queerness as a form of atrocity or grotesqueness in ways that may read similarly. Woolf writing lesbian desire does not look, feel, function the same as when Abdellatif Kechiche acts like a fucking parasite to fetishize lesbianism on film. And guess what? Even the act of a queer person consuming something that is queer-coded and problematic is not the same engagement as the heteronormative, oppressive, and prejudiced creator who created it in the first place. This includes authors, film-makers, and lameass showrunners who did not intend for their media to be consumed and reclaimed by a gay reader. So, when I as a reader embed myself and my lens into a queer reading of Sherlock Holmes or Dracula or you do that with Marvel comics, that in and of itself is a queer engagement that has a time and a place in queer culture and queer power. 

Anyways. This is a fucking ramble. Just let people enjoy what they enjoy. I can’t read stories where queer poc suffer violence and death because it wounds me, but maybe there is someone else out there who needs that catharsis, who needs to be able to see their suffering embodied into film. I can watch content involving the AIDS crisis, even if it means I’ll be crying buckets, but I know plenty of people who cannot. The reality is we all engage with art differently, especially when we are queer audiences seeking to engage with works that resound with our personhood and experiences. Find what you enjoy. Find what you can engage in. And then just let the person next to you do the same and have the decency to not bitch about it. Not your circus, not your monkeys.