Thursday
and Friday afternoons, Canada’s youngsters can
turn on their television sets and see something that is still
rare on the small screen: a regular lesbian character on a network
(not cable or pay) TV show. Even more unusual, she’s not
white.
CBC’s
Edgemont is an afternoon soap opera about a high school
located in the middle-class Vancouver suburb
of Edgemont in British Columbia. Its ensemble cast includes Grace
Park, one of the older and more seasoned actresses on the show.
Park plays serious student and socially-conscious “good
girl” Shannon.
Shannon
is a loyal friend and wants to have fun like any other teen, although
she also considers herself Christian and a good daughter. These
many facets to her personality clash as she comes to terms with
her sexuality. She’s just an ordinary Chinese-Canadian high
school girl who wants to get good grades and fit in at school.
There
were hints that Shannon might not be straight
by the end of the first season, when we see her
daydreaming about the beautiful new girl Laurel (played by popular
newcomer and current Smallville
star Kristin Kreuk), who has just moved to Edgemont from the big
city of Toronto. Although Shannon started dating a nice boy named
Craig, they broke up by the third season.
And
at the end of this season, Shannon’s sexuality finally became
clear to a few people at school who read a poem she wrote which
said something along the lines of “we always see boy and
girl but what if in our minds we see girl and girl? Confusion.”
Annika,
self-appointed style arbiter at the school and Shannon’s
rival for Class President, wanted to use the poem to out her as
a lesbian, but was thwarted at the last minute by a boy in love
with Shannon’s best friend Jen. Shannon decided that she
had enough on her plate this year anyway, and gracefully allowed
Annika to try her hand at being Student Council President.
Shannon’s
sexuality is a fact that she’s only now coming
to terms with herself and, like many gay teens,
she can only barely discuss it even with her closest friends.
While most of her classmates are tackling first love and Physics
finals, she’s also grappling with coming-out issues and
how that affects her friendships and future.
Factor
in the added stress of conservative Asian parents who expect straight
A's, impose early curfews and
who would more than likely not approve of a lesbian daughter,
and the series offers a realistic portrayal of what many young
lesbians face as they deal with their sexuality and worry about
other people’s reactions to the news.
The
only other lesbian teenager on network TV in
North America right now is Bianca on ABC’s All
My Children. Unlike Bianca, however, Shannon has never
had an explicit love interest--but this is normal for a young
person still struggling with her sexual identity. Hopefully,
Shannon won’t have to wait as long as Bianca did to find
romance--and if she does, it’s highly unlikely that the
Edgemont writers would resort to such a lurid plot device
as rape to create dramatic conflict.
There
has also never been a teenage lesbian of Asian descent on television
in North America.
Although
Edgemont features teenagers, it is clearly
aimed at a teen AND pre-adolescent TV audience. Although the series
was originally shown during primetime, struggling ratings in the
first season caused the network to move Edgemont to an
afternoon time slot. But the move may have been prescient, for
it
seemed to help the show attract more teen viewers--in its first
season, 75% to 80% percent of the viewing audience was over 18,
but teens now comprise around 50% of viewers.
Because
it comes on after school when most children are allowed to watch
television, and at a time when parents are less likely to watch
for and censor their viewing, it promotes lesbian visibility among
a much younger crowd.
Which
means that although Shannon is only
one out of many characters portrayed on this rather short program,
her storyline has the potential to influence and help Canadian
teens--gay and straight--become more comfortable with lesbians.
It provides young lesbians with a role model so that even girls
in remote parts of Canada don’t grow up feeling like they
are the only ones who are “different"--which
may ultimately prove to be Edgemont's most important
legacy.
October
2003 Update:
Season 4 of Edgemont premiered on Thursday, October 16th,
and picked up at the beginning of a new school year. In this season's
first episode, and it was revealed that Shannon came out to her
parents over the summer. It apparently didn't go very well, since
Shannon is no longer living at home (she's now living with a cousin
instead), and she didn't attend church camp during the summer
like she normally does. Coming-out appears to have had a positive
effect on Shannon's self-confidance, however, as she is now sporting
a trendier, slightly sexier look and dropping all the classes
she had only been taking to please her parents.
