deep thoughts on Glee

[jmtorres]

Okay, so there's Kurt and Blaine, out and proud, both of them having tried girls (one for repression, the other for "maybe I'm bi?"), there's Karofsky the self-hating homophobe, there's Santana and Britney, recently conveniently labeled Lebaneselesbian and bi-curious, there's creepy Sandy the self-proclaimed "predatory gay," and though we've never met them, in the background there's Rachel's two dads.

It's a little ironic that at the beginning of Glee, Kurt felt like the only gay in town. Because at this point, depending on how you count the ensemble, I put queer characters at somewhere around a fifth or a quarter of the group, which is a) so much higher than standard television and b) higher than most statistics I've ever heard quoted for national average.

There are two things that are awesome about this:

1. Queers are part of the landscape. Sure, a lot of the time, they're lesson-fodder, the same way Mike and Tina's Asian identities or Artie or Becky having disabilities or Quinn's teen pregnancy was lesson-fodder, because it's that kind of a show, every week is an Aesop in song. But they're also just there, even when they're not being the Lesson of the Week. This is awesome.

2. Multiple portrayals of gay people mean that no single queer character is presented as the example of What It Is To Be Gay, All Gays Are This Way. We get lots of queer people, we get questioning and certainty and closeting and outness and denial and pride. This is amazing.

So yay.