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One Tree Hill’s Latina Lesbian?

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Is the WB teen drama One Tree Hill (Tuesdays, 9 P.M.) introducing the first new lesbian character on network TV this season? All the signs seem to point that way after the show’s November 30th episode (“Don’t Take Me For Granted”).

A nighttime soap revolving around the relationship of two teenage half-brothers and their friends and family, One Tree Hill slowly built an audience after it debuted last season, and has become a solid hit for The WB in its second season. Although there are already more characters than most viewers can keep up with, two new recurring ones were introduced this season, as well: Anna (Daniella Alonso) and Felix (Michael Copon), siblings and cheerleader Brooke’s (Sophia Bush) new next-door neighbors. Felix and Brooke quickly become involved in a “friends with benefits” relationship, while Anna begins to date the show’s star Lucas (Chad Michael Murray), and everyone else continues to sleep with, break up with, and betray everyone else.

The writers began setting up the lesbian subplot in the previous episode (“The Trick is to Keep Breathing”), when Anna’s brother Felix makes a suggestive comment at the school formal about Peyton (Hilarie Burton) playing with Anna’s hair, and Anna freaks out, telling Peyton to “not be so gay.” Anna subsequently drowns her guilt with too many beers and throws herself on Lucas, who makes her feel worse by turning down her sexual overtures because he wants to get to know her first.

Anna’s behavior is straight out of the TV writer’s manual for creating The Gay Teen In Denial, which requires that characters exhibit some combination of these three behavioral characteristics: an extremely negative reaction to gay or gay-suggestive comments; aggressive and blatant attempts to hit on a member of the opposite sex (to prove to themselves or others that they’re straight); and/or the consumption of large quantities of alcohol.

This formula is most often applied to secondary characters who only appear in a few episodes, rather than regular characters like Willow on Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Jack on Dawson’s Creek. Examples include closeted gay jock Larry on Season 3 of Buffy, who aggressively hits on all the girls in his class, until finally admitting he’s gay; Eric on the fourth season of Dawson’s Creek, who spreads a rumor around the frat house that openly gay Jack tried to kiss him and gets Jack kicked out of the house, before finally admitting he’s gay; and teenager Vanessa on the first season of Nip/Tuck, who seduces her boyfriend Matt to smother her feelings for another cheerleader.

The formula is occasionally applied to more prominent characters, as well. On All My Children this year, the questioning Maggie throws herself into the arms of Jamie to convince herself that she wasn’t attracted to Bianca. On the second season of Once and Again, Jessie starts spending time with Tad to block out her growing attraction to Katie. In the coming-out episode out in the fourth season of Ellen DeGeneres’s sitcom Ellen, her character reacted to her attraction to another woman by throwing herself at her ex-boyfriend.

After Anna engages in all three of these activities in the previous episode, One Tree Hill kicks it up a notch by hyping the lesbian subplot in the ad (above) for last night’s episode, which shows the two girls with the tagline “It was just a sleepover…right?” The tagline is a reference to the fact that Anna crashed at Peyton’s house after their school formal, but in the best tradition of sweeps weeks, this was just teaser text designed to drum up ratings: the sleepover wasn’t even mentioned in the episode except for a brief moment when Felix learns about it and says something to the effect of “Mom and Dad won’t be happy about that” and “are we going to have to leave town again?”

The day after the formal, Peyton goes to school and finds the word “dyke” inexplicably spray-painted on her locker in red letters, and is shunned by the other students for the rest of the day. But Peyton’s close friends stick by her, because they all know what we know: Peyton’s not gay. She has a drug problem and is in love with a teenager who left town to raise his infant daughter, and characters in ensemble casts are never allowed to have more than two issues at one time.

Peyton also actually says, “I’m not gay” in the episode, and insists on standing up for those who are by wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the word “dyke” to protest those who would try to shame her with the label. This action, and her impassioned speech to the school principal about the importance of taking a stand against tyranny, gets her suspended, but she still refuses to be cowed. “I could laugh this off,” she tells Anna, “but what about the girl who can’t? Who’s gonna help her?”

Her behavior is in sharp contrast to Anna’s, who physically keeps her distance from Peyton at school lest she be painted with the same brush. After school, Anna arrives at Peyton’s to apologize and makes the confession we’ve all been waiting for: she was forced to leave her last school because of escalating rumors about “my relationship with another girl.” When Peyton asks, “But those are just rumors, right?” Anna turns away and hedges, “It doesn’t matter if they are, you know how high school is. They might as well have been true.”

In other words, Anna doesn’t outright deny it, another telltale TV sign of the gay-teen-in-waiting.

Anna’s coming-out couldn’t come at a better time. Although the number of lesbian and bisexual characters on cable have increased dramatically in the last year, lesbians have all but disappeared on network TV this season, with only Bianca on All My Children and Dr. Kerry Weaver on ER remaining (with very little screen time devoted to their personal lives). This is a significant decline in both the quality and number of lesbian and bisexual women on network TV from only a few years ago.

Anna would not only be the first new lesbian character on network TV this season, but the only lesbian character of color; the actress is actually of Peruvian, Puerto Rican, Japanese and Indian descent. There have only been two Latina lesbian characters on network and cable TV, in fact?Weaver’s now-dead partner Sandy (played by Lisa Vidal) on ER and Willow’s girlfriend Kennedy (Iyari Limon) on Buffy.

But as welcome as a new lesbian character would be, since Anna will be the only lesbian character on an already-crowded ensemble series which revolves largely around romantic and familial relationships, it’s hard to see how she will have any kind of prominent storyline after she comes out. (There’s more hope for her future storylines if she comes out as bisexual, but that’s unlikely to happen given that bisexuality is still a major taboo on network television.)

We won’t learn anything more definitive about Anna’s sexuality until at least January 25th, when the series comes back from hiatus. In Anna’s final scene in last night’s episode, she tries to tell Peyton she was inspired by Peyton’s decision to wear the “dyke” T-shirt to school, but Peyton turns her away in anger before Anna can finish her sentence. Now Peyton, and the viewers, will just have to wait to find out where Anna’s inspiration takes her.

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