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“Degrassi” Portrays Lesbian Relationship with Class

The Canadian teen drama Degrassi: The Next Generation just finished airing its sixth season in the United States last week on teen channel The N, and fortunately for AfterEllen.com readers, the second half of the season was all about “Palex,” the nickname for the pairing of Degrassi High’s former bad girl Alex Nunez (Deanna Casaluce) and popular rich girl Paige Michalchuk (Lauren Collins).

Paige and Alex’s relationship, developed over three seasons, has become one of the best portrayals of a lesbian teen relationship we’ve seen on American television.

Not that it has much competition – the only other series on American television to feature a recurring relationship between teen girls are Fox’s The O.C. and The N’s South of Nowhere,along with Buffy the Vampire Slayer (although it’s debatable whether Buffy even fits into this category, because although Willow and Tara are technically teenagers when they fall in love, their relationship, which deals with mature story lines about good vs. evil and the end of the world rather than school dances and failing classes, seems more like an adult one). The CW’s One Tree Hill also featured a bisexual teenage girl in a regular role in its second season, but she never has a relationship with another girl.

In this review, I grade Degrassi in six areas as they relate to Paige and Alex’s story arc: class issues, character development, labels, dialogue, the relationship itself and physical affection.

But first, a quick plot summary for those who haven’t seen the show (avid Degrassi fans should skip to the next page).

The Evolution of Palex First introduced in the third season, Alex gets off on the wrong foot with Paige in the fourth season when she runs against closeted gay classmate Marco (Adamo Ruggiero) in a school election and threatens to use his homosexuality against him to win.

But the two girls form an unexpected friendship later in the season when they are forced to work together at an after-school job, and in the fifth season, that friendship leads to something more when the two girls pretend to be romantically involved in order to get into a VIP party, only to find that they actually do share more than platonic feelings for each other.

Paige immediately freaks out after their first kiss and avoids Alex for a while, denying she has any feelings for her. She eventually gets over it – after some advice from filmmaker Kevin Smith (in a guest-starring role as himself) – and Paige and Alex begin dating. They break up toward the end of the season, however, over differences about their future plans. Both graduating seniors, Paige is headed to college at the prestigious Banting University, while Alex doesn’t see college in the cards for her. Alex, struggling to get over Paige, comes out as a lesbian, and by the end of Season 5, Alex and Paige are friends again.

In the sixth season, Alex decides to go back to Degrassi High to earn college credit toward becoming a physiotherapist, and tries to reform her bad-girl image along the way. The effort pays off – Alex finds a girlfriend (Carla, who only shows up in a few scenes), drops the attitude (mostly), and starts excelling in school.

Things don’t go so well for Paige, who finds she can’t handle the workload or the pressure at Banting and drops out. She comes back home to Degrassi and unexpectedly finds herself growing close to Alex again, even as Alex starts setting her up with guys – just as Alex begins having serious problems at home. Her mom has lost all their money to a deadbeat boyfriend, and mother and daughter are faced with eviction if they don’t come up with rent money.

Trying to save them from having to live in a women’s shelter, Alex takes a job waitressing at a local strip club, where she eventually becomes an exotic dancer because the money is just too good to resist. She loathes it – and herself – and desperately doesn’t want anyone to find out, especially Paige.

Things came to a head in last week’s season finale when Paige finally accepts that her feelings for Alex are more than platonic, then promptly dumps her when she finds out Alex started stripping after turning down Paige’s offer to help.

In the end, Alex realizes – motivated in part by her mother’s decision to use Alex’s hard-earned money to bail the deadbeat boyfriend out of jail instead of paying the rent – that she can’t keep on stripping. So she swallows her pride, goes to the school dance to find Paige, and asks for help, saying, “I’ve screwed up a lot. But if I let you go, it’ll be the biggest screw-up of my life.” The season ends with the two dancing happily together among other Degrassi couples.

Now, on to the grades …

Class Issues In a May 2007 interview with Degrassi.tv, Deanna Casaluce described Palex as “a great example of how young adults, when they fall in love with somebody, it’s really for who that person is and not where they are from or how much money they make. They fall in love with that personality.”

The economic and lifestyle differences between Paige and Alex are present and pervasive from the beginning of their relationship. From Alex’s ongoing assumption that going to college isn’t financially possible for her, to Paige’s horror at seeing Alex knocked over by her mother’s drunk boyfriend, to Paige’s friend Hazel (Andrea Lewis) making a snide remark about Alex not being able to afford clothes on a shopping trip, viewers are constantly reminded that these girls lead very different lives.

The class differences are illuminated even further when their relationship takes a romantic turn, with Paige telling Alex the day after their first kiss, “I’m not even supposed to like people like you.” She goes on to say that she means “people who wear black with navy, and hate everything and everyone,” but the unspoken implication is that “people like you” is also a stand-in for “poor people.” Class differences take center stage in the sixth season, when Paige is forced to admit she can’t live up to her wealthy, successful parents’ expectations, and Alex turns to stripping in order to pay off the mountain of debt her mother’s boyfriend got them into. Paige frequently offers to lend Alex money or help out in some other way, but Alex always turns her down out of pride, once telling a friend, “Paige looks a lot better off than she really is, not that I’d ever ask.”

When Paige finally discovers in the finale of Season 6 that Alex is stripping, she asks, “How bad is it that you have to do this?” Alex replies, “I’m doing what I have to do!”

Later, Paige tells her to “swallow your stupid pride and accept help when it’s offered,” but Alex reiterates, “My mom and I are this close to being evicted. I do this because I have to.”

When Paige asks, “When does it stop?” Alex retorts, “Maybe when I make enough for tuition or when I get my mommy’s magic credit card, like yours. This is my reality, Paige, and if you can’t be there for me, we have no future.” Alex eventually does ask for Paige’s help, and Paige quite happily gives it, but it doesn’t appear that Paige ever really understands what her girlfriend is going through.

The O.C. broached class issues when it introduced bisexual Alex (Olivia Wilde), who clearly didn’t have the income to match her new girlfriend’s. But The O.C. didn’t do much with this beyond establishing it as a fact and referencing it in an amusing episode where Marissa (Mischa Barton) moves in with Alex and is introduced to the wonders of doing your own laundry and taking out the trash.

By focusing on class differences as the primary wedge between the two girls in the sixth season as Buffy focused on Willow’s addiction to magic – Degrassi took the focus off their sexuality and made them just like any other couple.

Grade = A

Character Development In addition to their journey toward becoming a couple, Paige and Alex have had their own individual roads to travel. Paige’s challenges have centered principally on coming to terms with her attraction to Alex, as well as her inability to live up to her parents’ expectations. Interestingly, Paige’s character arc has not so far included developing empathy for her girlfriend’s dire financial situation. While she offers to help Alex with money and a job, she remains extremely judgmental (albeit forgiving) of Alex’s decision to become a stripper.

Although Alex does initially struggle with coming out as a lesbian, that was just one roadblock on the path to gaining more self-confidence, embracing optimism, drawing boundaries with her mother and knowing when to ask for help.

The feminization of Alex over the season has also been interesting to watch. When she first joins the series, Alex is most likely to be found wearing white tank tops, minimal makeup, and an F-you attitude that preceded her by a mile. By the end of the sixth season, when she’s fully out as a lesbian and finally realizing her scholastic potential, she’s wearing makeup, dressing a little classier, and her hair, while never short, has gotten progressively longer and more styled. Here’s a then-and-now shot: At least the hoop earrings have stayed the same.

I have mixed feelings about this development – on the one hand, most girls have fashion problems in high school and develop a better or different sense of style over time as they gain more confidence. And Alex’s transformation seems as much about no longer feeling like she has something to prove as it is about coming out as a lesbian.

But while I like the new look, I liked the old one, too, and it’s no coincidence that Alex has become more conventionally attractive (i.e., less butch) as she has come out as a lesbian, because on television, only straight women are allowed to appropriate traditionally masculine clothing or style of dress. Even in Canada, apparently, lesbianism must be packaged in femininity to make it less threatening.

Grade = A-

Sexual Orientation Alex and Paige engage in a fairly sophisticated discussion (for television) of labels and sexual orientation throughout the evolution of their relationship. The writers don’t seem to shy away from this at all, as even the show’s official recap of the fifth-season episode “Lexicon of Love, Part I,” which features Alex and Paige’s first kiss, addresses the issue:

Paige wakes Alex up in her bed – Paige spent the night on the floor – and as the two girls awkwardly prepare for school, they try to avoid the elephant in the room. As in, that they KISSED last night. What happened? That kiss … does it make them lesbians? Bisexuals? Alex shrugs it off. She doesn’t know what they are or what that kiss meant. All she knows is that she’s not freaked. Paige is. She is not supposed to be into women but Kevin reminds her – neither is Alex. He convinces Paige to be true to herself – and to her feelings. Are they lesbians? Are they bisexual? Who cares. They’re together.
Later, in the fifth season, Alex tells a friend: “I’m not bi, I’m not confused. I’m a lesbian. An actual lesbian. Who just broke up with her first girlfriend, and it sucks.”

In the sixth season, Paige’s friend Hazel tells Alex accusingly, “Paige used to be straight, until you came along and made her gay.”

It takes Paige a full two seasons to come to terms with her sexuality, and even then, she never does put a label on it. When Paige tells Alex in the middle of the sixth season, “Look, you’re cool with being a lesbian, but I don’t know what I am,” Alex responds, “The word is “bisexual,” Paige, and it’s just a label, who cares?”

When Paige finally accepts her feelings for Alex in the sixth-season finale, she tells Alex: “I thought about what you said, about labels. Straight, bi, lesbian, whatever. I really, really care about you, and I’ve decided to try and get over my fears.” Given her (apparently genuine) romantic feelings for boys in the past, Paige is probably bisexual, but we don’t know. Nor are we really supposed to care – the show’s attitude toward this topic is best summed up in Paige’s statement, “Straight, lesbian, bi, whatever.”

Grade = A

Dialogue The repeated use by both girls of shortened words such as “cash” for “casual” sometimes sounds forced and as if the show’s writers are trying a little too hard to sound hip, but overall, the dialogue on Degrassi is fairly realistic.

The dialogue between the two girls vacillates between funny, honest, sarcastic and sweet (sometimes too much so). Paige is particularly guilty of the latter, frequently using the words “sweetheart” and “hon.” For example, she has apologized to Alex with “extra ‘I’m sorry’ whip, and ‘I would never intentionally play with your feelings’ strawberries.” After she and Alex get back together, she drops off “a little post-exam gift for my belle.”

At least this is consistent with her character, as Paige tends to view the world through rose-colored glasses (when she’s not having a panic attack at Banting). While very cute at times – as in the finale when she asks Alex, “Will you be my sweetheart?” – it occasionally teeters on grating.

Alex’s lines tend to be more blunt, less sugar-coated and more serious. “Paige likes to decide what’s best for people … and jam it down their throats,” she remarks bitterly in the fifth season after Paige convinces her to sign up for the college fair.

In Season 6, after Paige wavers yet again on her sexuality, Alex tells her, “You don’t get to break my heart and comfort me too.” When the two are finally back together, Alex tells a customer at the strip club, “The thing is, my partner wants me to quit working here, and it’s getting harder to find reasons not to.”

There’s not much to criticize about Alex’s dialogue – she pretty much tells it like it is, and that’s what makes her character both strong and endearing. Both girls occasionally have very funny lines. Referring to Alex working at the strip club, Paige says, “The thought of you wearing a parka in that place gives me an emotional boil.” Later, when she discovers Alex is actually stripping, she says sarcastically, “Well I thought I’d just drop in, check out some naked chicks, and surprise, one of them was you!”

But the season’s funniest (and best) line has to be Alex screaming at Paige in an alley, “Because I love you, you idiot! So much it scares the crap out of me!” when Paige asks why she keeps setting her up with guys. Nothing encapsulates the angst of teen love and the coming-out process more perfectly than that.

Grade = B

The Relationship On most teen shows in America, lesbian/bi characters and relationships last only a single episode (think Tru Calling, Veronica Mars, etc.), so they never have a chance to develop the way Paige and Alex’s has on Degrassi – with the notable exception of the lesbian relationships on South of Nowhere and Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

The difference between Degrassi‘s lesbian relationship and those on Buffy and South of Nowhere, however, is that on Degrassi, the relationship develops over several seasons between two existing characters who are not initially friends (and in fact were even enemies, of sorts) and neither of whom is out, even to themselves. On Buffy, South of Nowhere and The O.C., at least one of the characters is already out to begin with, and each couple’s relationship is romantic – or obviously trending in that direction – from the first time they meet.

But one of the similarities Degrassi‘s lesbian relationship shares with those on South of Nowhere and Buffy is its realistic “two steps forward, one step back” pacing. Over Seasons 5 and 6, Alex and Paige alternately fight, get together or almost get together, break up, then start all over again. Some of this is due to Paige’s unwillingness to accept that she might be something other than heterosexual. When she unexpectedly kisses Alex in the middle of Season 6, Alex asks, “Why do you keep doing this to me?” Paige responds that she thought “the door was kinda open.”

Alex retorts: “Yeah, it’s been open for weeks. The problem is you keep opening it and closing it, and opening it and closing it. Make up your mind!” But there are other obstacles to their relationship, too, including Alex’s pride and reluctance to embrace the future.

Whether it’s grappling with labels, dealing with parents’ expectations, or exploring class differences, Degrassi has gone beyond the usual coming-out angst to portray two lesbian/bi teens whose biggest issues ultimately aren’t their sexuality.

Grade = A+

Lesbian Sex The sexual aspect of Paige and Alex’s relationship is a complicated one. The girls have kissed more frequently than most teens in a lesbian relationship on TV have – three times in Season 5 and at least four times in the sixth season. By comparison, Willow and Tara kissed only four times on Buffy; Alex and Marissa kissed twice on The O.C., and Spencer and Ashley kissed once in the first season and only a few more times in the second season on South of Nowhere (although if previews for SON’s third season, which starts this Friday, are any indication, Degrassi may find itself surpassed in this department in fairly short order).

But unlike the other shows, Degrassi has avoided implying that the girls are doing anything more than that. South of Nowhere‘s Spencer and Ashley clearly discuss having had sex in the second season, The O.C.‘s Alex and Marissa head to the bedroom to have sex in one scene at Alex’s apartment, and Buffy‘s Willow and Tara are actually shown naked in bed together. The Degrassi writers never go there, save for Paige’s freaked-out comment, “I have a girl in my bed!” the morning after their first kiss (Paige slept on the floor).

Story lines involving the heterosexual characters on Degrassi in the sixth season, meanwhile, have included a boy in a wheelchair worried about his ability to have sex with his girlfriend, as well as a pregnancy scare for one of the straight teen girls. This suggests that Degrassi‘s writers are less comfortable showing, discussing or even implying lesbian sex on the show than they are with heterosexual sex.

But it would be a mistake to assume that this means Degrassi‘s lesbian relationship is devoid of sexual undertones, or that the couple comes across as just good friends (the way Spencer and Ashley sometimes do on South of Nowhere). The show is not shy about showing sexual tension between Paige and Alex, as in this scene in the fifth season when the two girls are dancing together at the VIP party: The casual way in which Paige and Alex are physically affectionate, both when alone and (occasionally) around other people, is refreshing and subversive in the way it blends in with the other characters. This isn’t a show that shows a lot of skin, in general, so the relative chasteness of the girls’ relationship doesn’t stand out – if anything, there is actually more physical affection between Paige and Alex in the second half of the sixth season than between any other (heterosexual) characters. Overall, Degrassi scores pretty well on portraying lesbian teenagers as neither oversexed nor undersexed compared to their heterosexual teen counterparts.

South of Nowhere might tackle sex more frankly, but there has been far less physical affection shown between Spencer and Ashley in general. And while there was some physical affection on The O.C., there was far less development of the relationship between the two girls.

As far as comparisons to Buffy go, well, at least neither Alex nor Paige has been killed or turned evil.

But there’s always Season 7.

Grade: B+

Final Report Card Check out Paige-Alex.com and MySpace.com/PalexisLove for more info, visit The N to catch Degrassi repeats or download the latest episodes on iTunes.

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