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Are we too tough on gay TV teens?

A few weeks ago Entertainment Weekly suggested that we are living in the middle of “TV’s gay-teen revolution,” and while I think it’s a little premature to to call it a queer coup d’état, I do get the sense that something about television is shifting. Right now, TV has a record number of high-profile lesbian, gay and bisexual teen characters: Kurt, Blaine, Brittany and Santana on Glee; Emily on Pretty Little Liars; Tea on Skins; Teddy on 90210; Marshall on The United States of Tara. We could also throw half a dozen supporting gay teen characters into the mix.

This week in my Pretty Little Liars recap, a reader posted a link to something I never thought I’d see. On Monday night, we all had a giggle when Paige’s dad burst into the cafeteria and accused Rosewood High of having a gay agenda, but after the show, several IMDB message board posters echoed him.

Oh, boy, Paige now? LOL. This SHOW has a gay agenda – Now it’s just getting ridiculous. I suppose we’ll see Spencer, Hanna, and Aria coming out of the closet next. I can understand pushing an agenda, but this is getting ridiculous. I mean, it’s laughable.

(To clarify, Emily took Paige’s spot on the swim team. Paige’s dad had a homophobic fit. Paige, however, had a homosexual revelation. She hopped into Emily’s car and snogged her silly.)

I cannot imagine a conversation five years ago in which anyone would have suggested that a gay teen TV character was getting preferential treatment. Maybe we really are in the throes of a revolution. But if that’s true, why are so many lesbian, gay and bisexual viewers are so stinkin’ mad at these lesbian, gay and bisexual characters – and the people who write them?

When Ryan Murphy hinted at a Brittany and Santana hook-up during Glee‘s off-season, but didn’t fully deliver, many lesbian viewers shouldered their pitchforks. Later, when Brad Falchuk indicated that Brittany and Santana’s relationship was “on,” some of those same viewers hoisted their weapons even higher. When Skins‘ lesbian character, Tea, began expressing confusion over her feelings for Tony, buckets of tar and feathers were aimed at creator Bryan Elsley. And even Marlene King, lesbian showrunner and writer of Pretty Little Liars, found herself at the end of a lance when she introduced a new love interest into Emily’s life.

But outrage isn’t directed only at writers and showrunners. Actors, fellow viewers, random Tweeters and even really nice TV recappers – hem, hem – often get caught in the line of fire.

Why do so many people in the gay community have such extreme reactions to gay teenage characters? One reason, I think, is that despite all this talk of revolution, we are still desperately underrepresented on TV.

If Bones stops pinging your Mulder/Scully Meter, you can replace it with Castle. If The Office stops making you laugh, you can replace it with Parks and Recreation. If V starts making you doze, you can replace it with Fringe. There are millions of channels on your TV; if you’re not getting what you want from one network, you’ll just get it from another one. Unless what you want are authentic, well-rounded, positive portrayals of lesbian and bisexual characters.

If your favorite lesbian character stops resonating with you, you can’t just channel-flip until you find another one. Nothing is scarier or more enraging than feeling like your own reflection is being smudged or stripped away.

Another possible reason for the hostility is that our TV-viewing experience now extends far beyond our televisions. Every show has its own fandom, and every fandom includes forums and fan fiction and inside-jokes and debates and alternative narratives. Every fandom also includes shipping wars. If Brittany and Santana fill your heart with joy, but Brittany spends a whole episode bonking Artie, it will probably bum you out. So you turn off your TV and teleport back into fandom, where you go from bummed to livid in a matter of seconds when you encounter the neener-neener-neeners from Artie/Brittany shippers.

Then, of course, there are our bygone times with lesbian and bisexual teens on TV. It’s hard to be optimistic when you live inside our historical frame of reference. Skins may be trying to examine sexual fluidity in an honest, authentic way. But when we see Tea eying Tony, our mind jumps to Alex going nutso-bananas on The O.C., Gia acting completely out of character and cheating on Adrianna on 90210, and Melrose Place trotting out Ella’s bisexuality for Sweeps week. And then: All of them, back to men.

Finally, maybe we’re so hard on TV teenagers because we forget that the characters are meant to be teenagers. It is the most natural thing in the world to project your own hopes and fears and dreams and desires onto fictional characters. Stories have always added structure to people’s lives. (Why do you think the Christian Bible is 90 percent narrative?) The danger of doing that with teenage characters, though, is that we’re often projecting the wisdom of adulthood onto characters who are still learning to navigate the world.

Here’s a pretty interesting tidbit from The Adolescent Brain: A Work in Progress:

The greatest changes to the parts of the brain that are responsible for impulse-control, judgement, decision-making, planning, organization and involved in other functions like emotion, occur in adolescence. This area of the brain (the prefrontal cortex) does not reach full maturity until around age 25.

“Lack of impulse control” could be New Directions’ tagline.

I was in my mid-twenties before I finally had a good grasp on my own sexuality. So it’s not really fair of me to project my 31-year-old knowledge onto 16-year-old Tea. (That’s not to say you can’t know you’re a lesbian when you’re an adolescent. Certainly you can. But many teenagers wrestle with their sexual identities well into their grown-up years.) Similarly, I’ve been in and out of love dozens of times in my life. So it’s not really fair of me to expect that 17-year-old Emily Fields would stay with her first girlfriend forever. And I still am not sure I know what it takes to make a lasting romantic relationship work, so how in the world can I expect Brittany and Santana to just get it together?

Add up all of that stuff and the sum is quite a conundrum. We need authentic lesbian and bisexual teenage characters to validate our own sexuality, to bolster tolerance, to increase visibility and ensure equality. And dammit, we need to win a shipping war every now and then!

If we really are in the middle of TV’s gay-teen revolution, we have to use these characters as a springboard for dialogue. The problem is, we’re living in a culture that doesn’t reward rational, benevolent, intelligent conversation. The political climate is unchecked rage and talking points. And the internet has created a cesspool of caustic commentary. It’s hard to have a nice chat with someone who is pointing a pitchfork at your neck.

But what if the gay community could lead a revolution in more ways than one? What if we understood why we feel the way we feel about gay TV teens? And then what if we used our words to explain it instead of our fists? What if we stopped shouting long enough to listen? What if we demanded better from TV writers by actually being better?

Maybe Brittany S. Pierce was onto something. Maybe it’s time for us to stop the violence.

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