Arthur and Indoctrination
When I was six years old in 1982 the idea of a children’s cartoon prominently featuring a wedding between two men would have been utterly inconceivable to me.
That’s because legal gay marriage did not exist back in the early days of the Reagan administration. As far as television, movies and the rest of pop culture were concerned, homosexuality didn’t really exist either.
If gay people were represented onscreen, which was infrequently, it was seldom explicitly established that they were, in fact, gay. But if they were depicted as openly gay they almost invariably fell into one of three stereotypes.
Most poisonously, there was the archetype of the gay man or woman as villains, flamboyant, larger-than-life heavies. A lot of Disney villains growing up were coded as gay, like Ursula the Sea Witch (famously modeled on Divine) from The Little Mermaid and Scar from The Lion King.
If queer people were not depicted as outright villainous, they were seen as clownish and ridiculous, sassy comic relief on hand to dispense sassy advice to the heroine and contribute a never-ending stream of bitchy one-liners.
When gay people were not depicted as bad guys or jesters they were portrayed as paper saints, asexual exemplars of stoic nobility who taught us all how to suffer with dignity as they uncomplainingly died of AIDS.
When I was a small child, gay characters never occupied central roles in pop culture. They were kooky caricatures on the fringes, broad stereotypes on hand to lend color and comedy to the proceedings.
When it came to pop culture, the LGTBQ community was largely invisible back then and when it was visible, it was often in an unflattering, reductive and de-humanizing way. Trans characters were represented onscreen even less often, and even less sensitively.
My generation, and the generations that came before us, were consequently conditioned to be homophobic and transphobic by pop culture and the culture at large, to see the queer community not as eclectic and vast and complicated but rather through a very narrow prism.
So when conservatives complain about queer OVER-representation in pop culture, particularly in entertainment directed at children, it makes my brain want to explode because throughout my childhood the gay community was damn near invisible.
I grew up with non-representation, under-representation and negative representation of gay people in movies, television and books. So the notion that having a minor supporting character in a Pixar or Disney movie be gay somehow qualifies as over-representation strikes me as utterly absurd.
I’m overjoyed that my children are growing up in a much different world than the one that I inhabited as a boy when it comes to queer representation in pop culture.
When it comes to representation of the LGTBQ community it gets better!
Recently my six year old son Declan watched a controversial episode of Arthur where the title anteater’s teacher gets married to another man.
It was the kind of episode that could never have aired when I was Declan’s age but Declan saw absolutely nothing at all unusual or noteworthy about the fact that a male anthropomorphic animal married a male, rather than a female anthropomorphic animal.
For Declan, it was the furthest thing from a big deal. It wasn’t even worth commenting on. Declan is lucky to grow up in a time where it is widely accepted that sometimes children have a mom and a dad, and sometimes they have two dads or two moms and there’s nothing at all weird or wrong or even unusual about it.
Of course there is a furious conservative backlash against queer representation in pop culture, as well as positive, central depictions of women and people of color in entertainment. They angrily insist that the Commies and perverts who run the entertainment industry are brain-washing our children into embracing the LGTBQ agenda, that they are being indoctrinated into a radical socialist/queer agenda.
That’s not brain-washing. That’s not conditioning. Brain-washing is a hundred different movies and TV shows with the consistent message that being gay is sinister and wrong and something to be ashamed of. Indoctrination is growing up with very few positive, non-stereotypical portrayals of homosexuality and lots of negative ones.
I was brain-washed as a child with the racism and sexism and homophobia of the society that I grew up in. I’ve had to unlearn that ugly programming as an adult so I am grateful that my children will grow up in a more enlightened era even if that cultural progress enrages reactionary folks who would love nothing better than to drag our culture kicking and screaming back into the ugly days of our recent past.
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