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The thing that annoys me is that gay people basically have two storylines most of the time - one is a combination of 'coming out is hard' and 'how do I convince society OR MYSELF that I'm actually normal' and the other is 'crap I have AIDS and I'm going to die - how the fuck am I going to reconcile myself to that?'
There are in fact, very few people who spend any time at all on the bit in between coming out and dying of AIDS, a bit that I'm currently finding quite a lot of personal drama in. Now it's pretty clear to me that a dedicated series about the Midnighter actually has to appeal to straight men in a solid idenficatory way, and that maybe exploring things that are particularly interesting from a gay perspective - getting older in a culture designed for young people, watching your friends have kids, havingn access to relatively easy if often unfulfilling sex, having trouble dealing with your own difference, not meeting people in the office who you fancy, trying to work out when to bring up the whole thing in the office, etc. etc - isn't going to fit too well in such a periodical. I understand that. An actually gay midnighter comic might actually be only really of interest to gay people for all I know.
If that's the case then maybe don't do one. In the meantime, the treatment of gay characters in other media has improved enormously and is way more sophisticated. Watch a few episodes of the US Queer as Folk and you see characters going through drug problems, dealing with impotency, forming interesting relationship dynamics, meeting bug chasers, getting cancer, having weird and awkward relationships with their familes, running businesses, going clubbing, getting disillusioned with the scene, having sex in public, having tensions with other people in the same community who have a different political stance (assimilationists versus separatists, quiet traditional politicos versus street-based activists). And more generally questions like how to gay people stop looking like victims, or the existence of feminine straight men or scientific experiments to weed out gay fucking sheep - there's endless stuff here that could emerge out of a team member that could be enormously interesting and provide well-rounded insight, whether or not it be sympathetic.
So yeah, they're cyphers at the moment because they're trophies and spoofs - they're sort of one-dimensional joke characters designed to make Superman and Batman look stupid by intimating that they're gay - that have gone serious. They've been written, at least as far as I can tell, as if their sexuality is an issue to be debated or talked about endlessly, rather than as one aspect of their character that should help influence their reactions to things and occasionally motivate story. It's just a waste of some valuable storytelling possibilities, if you ask me. |
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