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Australia’s “Kick” Features a Middle Eastern Lesbian Character

While most of the lesbians we see on television are white, new Australian dramedy series Kick has portrayed, for the first time on television, the journey of a Lebanese-Australian Muslim lesbian, Layla Salim (Nicole Chamoun). This is not a tokenistic gesture by the series, for in Kick, it is multiculturalism that is the norm. The series recently wrapped up its first season and is now available on DVD in Australia.

SBS, the free-to-air television network that produced and aired Kick, first began broadcasting in 1980 with the announcement, “Ladies and gentlemen, good evening and welcome to multicultural television.” Since then, SBS has continued its mission to provide Australia with multicultural television by showing foreign-language programming from around the world as well as Australian-made shows that reflect Australia’s cultural diversity.

This makes it a fairly unique television station, and so it is fitting that it features a character as unique as Layla, as representation of gays and lesbians from the Middle East has been very limited, particularly in popular culture. For Arabic or Muslim lesbians growing up in Australia, and potentially around the world, Layla provides someone to identify with as she struggles to find a balance between her lesbian desires and her responsibilities to her family and culture.

Kick centers on Greek-Australian aspiring actress and receptionist Miki Mavros (Zoe Ventoura) and her neighbors, including Layla and her family, who live on the aptly named Hope Street. The narrative loosely surrounds a soccer team in which Layla’s younger sister Taghred (Marisa Sabljak) plays, hence the title Kick, but the series stretches beyond this basic premise. Layla lives with her mother, two brothers and sister, and most of Layla’s time is spent either at home or at the fencing club at her university, where she meets her girlfriend, Jackie (Romi Trower).

Our first glimpse of Layla consists of two people entirely covered in white fencing gear in the middle of a bout. After the bout, the two remove their masks, revealing Layla and Jackie, still breathing heavily. Layla later goes back to the gym to seek out Jackie and meets her in the showers, where Jackie flirts with her and asks for her phone number. While Layla does not say anything about her desire for Jackie in the first few episodes, and she declines Jackie’s invitation to coffee, she looks at Jackie with open desire. It is clear to viewers that she is attracted to Jackie. She persistently seeks out Jackie and yet hesitates, advancing and then retreating in a way that many young women coming to terms with their lesbian desires may identify with.

While the lack of a concrete lesbian identity early in the show could be seen as an attempt by Kick‘s producers to have it both ways – presenting a character whom lesbians read as gay while flying under the radar for straight viewers – this is also the way the main character Miki’s feelings for her doctor-employer, Joe (Raji James), are presented.

Just in case you should miss the point, Kick‘s website includes “Layla’s Secret Blog,” in which she often writes about her desire for Jackie and her confusion as to how to proceed. Indeed, the lack of a clear announcement of Layla’s sexuality allows this relationship to appear much like any other relationship on the series, rather than becoming an issue to be addressed.

Despite Layla’s hesitations, she is not presented as a hapless heterosexual girl being seduced by the more experienced lesbian. It is Layla who initiates the couple’s first – and very sexy – kiss, and who initiates a more intimate encounter when they are finally given some time alone at fencing camp.

Because Kick is a romantic comedy rather than a more adult series, the scene is more suggestive than explicit, but this does not reflect a double standard in which heterosexual physical affection is shown while physical affection between lesbian characters is not. In Kick, sex is discussed and implied but kept largely off-screen, whether heterosexual or homosexual.

The complication is that Layla is due to enter into an arranged marriage with the kindly Sharif (Osamah Sami), and she doesn’t want to hurt him or disappoint their families. She keeps this a secret from Jackie while introducing Jackie to her family as a ‘friend,’ trying not to let either side discover the real situation. Much skulking around and surreptitiousness ensues, until Jackie finds out and eventually issues Layla an ultimatum.

Arab and Muslim characters on television are generally represented negatively, much as queer people have been in the past, and since Sept. 11 this has worsened, with Arab and Muslim characters often portrayed either as villains (24, Law & Order) or one-off lessons in tolerance (7th Heaven).

In Kick, the Salims are presented as ordinary people, with their religion and culture simply a part of their daily lives. The ordinariness of these characters may be due to the screenwriting methods employed by the producers. Kick creators Esben Storm and Adam Bowen interviewed around 100 people from non Anglo-Celtic backgrounds about their lives before selecting 12 of these stories on which to base their characters in Kick. Unlike shows such as The L Word, which has cast Persian-Spanish and Indian-Dutch actresses to play Latinas, the producers of Kick did their best to ensure race-appropriate casting. In an interview with the Brisbane Times, Bowen said: “I remember one of the first characters I wrote in [Australian soap opera] Neighbours was this sexy Spanish girl. They cast a Greek girl. When they showed me the rushes I went, ‘I can tell she’s Greek — everyone in Melbourne will know.'”

In recent years, the lid has begun to be lifted on the lives of Middle Eastern lesbians and gay men through documentaries such as I Exist (2003) and Dangerous Living: Coming Out in the Developing World (2003), or films such as Angelina Maccarone’s Unveiled (2005).

In the queer comic collection Juicy Mother, Lebanese-American lesbian cartoonist Jennifer Camper published a stand-alone comic strip, “Ramadan,” which compares homophobia to anti-Arab sentiments, following a lesbian couple through the religious holiday. And the first (and only) lesbian-centered novel published in Arabic, I Am You by Elham Mansour, will soon be published in English (translated by Samar Habib, author of Female Homosexuality in the Middle East).

There is still a long way to go, however, and the character of Layla forms an important step in the process of portraying Middle Eastern queer characters in popular culture. By the end of Kick‘s first season, Layla makes an important decision about the double life she has been living. While the somewhat ambiguous ending may be frustrating for some viewers, the season ends on a positive note, and allows room for further development of Layla’s story line in the second season.

Whether Kick will be renewed for a second season, however, is not at all certain. The amount of Australian-made television seen on Australian television screens is unfortunately quite low, as it is cheaper and less risky for networks to buy the rights to air U.S. or U.K. shows with proven popularity.

And while there are government quotas that require networks to air a certain number of hours of Australian-made programming, these quotas are often filled by multiple hours of the Australian edition of Big Brother or other reality-based programs, which are less expensive and generate higher ratings than edgy, local scripted comedies or dramas like Kick.

Because of these issues, few Australian drama and comedy series launched in the last few years have managed to survive beyond an opening season. Let’s hope that this will not be the case with Kick, and it will have a second season that will allow it to further explore this unique character who adds to the diversity of lesbian characters on our television screens.

For more on Kick, visit its official website.

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