Showtime's
hit series Queer
as Folk has never been accused
of playing it safe, and Season
Four, with its storylines of bug chasers, straight-bashing
gays, and teen hustlers, is no exception. The series strives
to continually expand the boundaries of acceptable television,
and it often succeeds--at least, with its male characters.
The
same cannot be said of the show's lesbian characters, however,
which have consistently been saddled with cliched
and boring storylines that have even veered on sexist at
times. This season, QAF attempts to reverse this trend
by exploring the controversial topic of lesbians who sleep with
men, but ends up only recycling a well-worn plot device that
has been showcased in more movies than anyone can count (most
recently seen in Gigli
and the upcoming Spike Lee movie She Hate Me)--and
worse, doing it badly.
Lindsay
(Thea Gill) meets famous-artist Sam (Robin Thomas)
midway through the season, and over the course of the next few
episodes an attraction begins to develop between them as she
prepares to show his work at her gallery, and he inspires her
to start drawing again. In Episode
4.10, when Lindsay has sex with Melanie (Michelle Clunie),
her partner of eight years, Lindsay is uninspired--until Melanie
uses a sex toy at Lindsay's request that we're clearly meant
to understand is a phallic replacement. Later that episode,
after Lindsay's big gallery opening, she and Sam have sudden,
frantic sex against a wall in the empty, darkened gallery. Afterwards,
Lindsay returns home to a sleeping Melanie and guiltily slips
into bed after showering.
In
the next episode, Lindsay refuses to return Sam's phone calls,
telling him sex was a mistake and bidding him goodbye as he
drives off into the wild blue yonder. But Melanie suspects the
truth about Sam and Lindsay's tryst and confronts Lindsay, who
doesn't deny it and insists it "reconfirmed for me that
this is who I am. That my life is with you and Gus. And the
baby. That I still choose you." To which Melanie responds
"I'm not so sure that I still choose you." In the
next episode, the issue is addressed through a handful of shouting
matches between the two as Melanie tells Lindsay that she can't
be a lesbian if she sleeps with men, and Lindsay alternately
protests and grovels for forgiveness.
The
issue comes to a head in the season finale airing next week, as
Lindsay finally tires of Melanie's anger and appears to be leaving,
in a cliffhanger ending of sorts.
The
concept of self-defined lesbians who sleep with men
is not in itself an unworthy topic to explore, if for no other
reason than that it is a major taboo within the gay community.
We all know women who have at one point identified as lesbians
who later sleep with, date, or even end up married to a man,
but we mostly try to ignore it, or pigeonhole these women as
latent bisexuals (the underlying assumption, of course, being
that you can't trust bisexual women, which is a whole other
problem).
But
television and film aimed at a mass market in which the lesbians
are very minor characters is not the place to explore this topic.
You cannot possibly do justice to such a complex and sensitive
subject in one or two minutes a week, which is about how much
screen time the lesbian characters get on Queer As Folk.
In real life, sleeping with a man for the first time would cause
most lesbians to re-examine their sexual orientation, even if
they ultimately determined that they still identified as a lesbian.
On QAF, it results in only a brief conversation between
Lindsay and Brian (in which Lindsay says that she doesn't consider
herself bisexual), and a handful of one-sided, simplistic, and
stereotypical rants by Melanie and one-line protests by Lindsay,
like this exchange in Episode 4.12:
MELANIE:
I know which team I play on. It's not a choice or a preference.
It's who I am. It's who I've always been. A rug muncher,
a muff diver, a cunt lapper, a bull, a lezzie, a dyke.
LINDSAY: What do you think I am?
MELANIE: Don't ask me to make up your mind for you. You
have to do that all by yourself.
LINDSAY: I'm a lesbian.
MELANIE: Not if your having sex with a man honey.
This
is pretty much the extent to which the issue is explored; even
in Melanie and Lindsay's conversations in the last two episodes
about whether they're going to stay together, Lindsay's motivation
for the affair is still never really discussed, just its consequences.
This
is TV, of course, where everything happens faster than
it does it real life--but a storyline that is both extremely
complicated and has the potential to reinforce such powerful
negative stereotypes deserves more than a few seconds of screen
time. If you can't explore it properly, than don't explore it
at all, or you'll just end up doing more damage than good--which
is exactly what QAF is doing with this storyline.
The
lesbian-who-sleeps-with-a-man plot device has been used so frequently
in entertainment that it dwarfs almost all other representations
of lesbians on screen (except perhaps the equally frustrating
lesbian-motherhood plot
device, which QAF also employs regularly), and gives
the impression that it occurs more frequently in real life than
it actually does--that in fact, most lesbians want
to sleep with men, rather than just a few. It also makes no
distinction between lesbians and bisexual women, and continues
to reinforce the notion that bisexual women will inevitably
betray lesbians for a man, as if infidelity is the particular
vice of one sexual orientation rather than cutting across all.
In
a recent article
in The Boston Globe, reporter Matthew Gilbert cited
this storyline as an example of a trend towards more sexual
fluidity on TV:
But
the most unexpected fence-jump came a few weeks ago from a lesbian
on Showtime's "Queer as Folk," Lindsay, who had an explosive
extra-relationship sexual experience with a man. Lindsay was as
surprised by her hetero dalliance as the show's viewers, who'd
experienced her as a "committed" lesbian and one of
little Gus's two mommies. Indeed, this kind of sexual ambiguity
asks more of viewers, who've grown comfortable with the sort of
gay-straight split embodied by "Will & Grace." We
can become disoriented watching a character's sexual dis-orientation.
While
Gilbert makes some interesting observations in the article and
correctly notes that sexual ambiguity is becoming more common
on television, he fails to differentiate between characters
who are truly sexually ambiguous or questioning, and characters
who momentarily switch sexual orientations with no real intention
by the show to actually explore the topic or provide any follow-through
in the future. Lumping Lindsay in with a character like The
L Word's Jenny (who is truly exploring her sexuality),
as Gilbert does in the article, is like saying that the ratings-stunt
lesbian kiss between Ally and Ling on Ally
McBeal is equivalent to Willow's season-long wrestling
with her feelings for Tara on Buffy.
Which
is exactly why a storyline like this is better left
to shows like The L Word, with lesbian or lesbian-friendly
writers, multiple lesbian characters, and enough screen time
to address the subject properly. Say what you will about how
annoying Jenny is, at least the writers are realistically exploring
her sexual orientation, not just dumping her in bed with a man
for shock value and then moving on after five minutes as if
it never happened.
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