Torchwood Isn't Gay Enough
Yeah, that's right, Torchwood, the show about sex-crazed alien hunters created by Russell T. Davies, the very gay man who also brought us the original Queer as Folk, is not very gay at all.
Let it be said that I am a huge fan of the new Doctor Who and Torchwood, despite all their flaws (of which there are many). And I do hold a special place in my heart for Torchwood, because I delight in how pretty much every interaction on that show manages to develop some kind of sexual undertone. I find it fun.
When I first started watching Torchwood, it seemed very much to me that this was going to be a show where our typical ideas of sexual orientation were, as Jack put it in the second episode, "quaint." I relished the idea of watching a world where people didn't identify themselves by and act according to sexual labels, but rather were just attracted to people for being... people (or aliens). (In general, it disappoints me when two people who are so right for each other aren't together because one or both happens to be the wrong gender.) If anything, it's the kind of idea that science fiction was practically invented to explore.
However, after watching (as of now) a season and a half of this show, it has become apparent that most of these characters are actually straight and act so. Not Jack, of course. He's from a future where anything goes, and that makes him almost alien. (And I'll get to him shortly.) I mean the human characters who are supposed to be more "relatable."
A handy-dandy little chart:
For the purposes of this post, let's presume that human sexuality is a sliding scale. Labels are somewhat clunky and inaccurate, and they don't reflect the little variations that people have. Gay, straight, bisexual - some people describe themselves in varying shades of these, and there's also the adage of "gay, straight, or lying" which throws out the middle category. But I'm not here to debate any of that, I'm just here to relate it to Torchwood.
By "standard deviation" I generally mean how people who identify as straight or gay can still display forms of attraction toward the non-preferred sex, be it admiring a well-sculpted ass to the whole "bicurious" designation. There seems to be a certain amount of behavior one can exhibit without having your orientation called into question (unless you're a teenage boy in a locker room). Even though Russell T. Davies once stated that everyone in Torchwood was going to have some sort of bisexual experience by the end of season 1, it hasn't really been anything special. Let's take this character-by-character.
Gwen:
Gwen is probably the most straight of the group - she has a boyfriend when the series begins and later becomes engaged to him. She cheats on him with Owen, and is (not so) secretly in love with Jack. Despite these "threats" to her relationship with Rhys, it doesn't look like he's going anywhere anytime soon. In fact, the relationship is actively encouraged by the other characters on the show and it seems, by the show itself, if you take into consideration how much screen time the two of them get.
Gwen's bisexual experience? She makes out with a girl possessed by an alien in episode 2, which was not voluntary (she was drawn in by pheromones or whatever) and she's quickly rejected for being the wrong gender.
It should be noted that Gwen was introduced to Torchwood in the first episode at the same time the audience was, which makes her the baseline "surrogate" character that we're supposed to identify with.
Owen:
So, Owen had an affair with Suzie, then repeated the pattern with Gwen, had an intense relationship with that lost pilot Diane and when she left he was messed up for the rest of the season (all three episodes of it). This season we've seen him flirt with Martha and in the "altered reality" that Adam created, he pined for Toshiko.
Owen was the first character (outside of Jack, of course) who we saw break out of the orientation mold. He steals an aphrodisiac spray from Torchwood and uses it to hit on women in a bar. When a girl's boyfriend accosts him, he shrugs and uses it on the guy as well. His casual manner about it certainly suggests that he's open, but the only reason he did it in the first place was because he was trying to get the girl.
Toshiko:
Of all the characters, Toshiko disappoints me the most. She spent a good chunk of season 1 making sad little puppy faces over Owen, but finally has a relationship with an alien woman named Mary. Unfortunately, it turns out that Mary was just using Tosh, who goes back to pining after Owen in season 2. That's all well and good, but we also see Tosh macking on the soldier from WWI and then hook up with him, and in the altered reality that Adam creates, Tosh is a confident and cruel woman dating Adam.
When you consider that Mary pretty much seduced poor, meek Tosh, it doesn't really look all that good for her. Owen finally agreed to go on a date with her, at least.
Ianto:
Honestly, Ianto is probably the closest thing we have to a true bisexual on Torchwood, which is why I've put him in the middle of the bar. For the first few episodes he's mostly an enigma, but we eventually find out it's because he's keeping his Cyberwoman girlfriend Lisa hidden in the basement. He's obsessed with fixing her, even though it's pretty hopeless, because he's that much in love with her. And when he finally loses her, he spends the rest of the season in a black, black funk (which Tosh picks up on using the telepathic amulet that Mary gave her).
At some point Jack hooks up with him (it's never clear exactly why, though one can presume that Jack was trying to cheer him up) and the two begin a relationship that has continued on the show until now. It was somewhat formalized at the start of season 2, with Jack offering to actually go out on dates with Ianto.
Judging by Ianto's little Brokeback Mountain moment in the season 1 finale, it seems that he's fallen for Jack hard, and that his relationship with Jack has the same weight as his prior relationship with Lisa. It's not a casual bisexual fling like the other characters have dabbled in. It has emotional weight behind it.
Now, as for Jack...
I can't put Jack on the scale, since he's not really a bisexual, he's a pansexual (or omnisexual). As John Barrowman once remarked, he'll shag "anything with a post code." After all, we're told that people in the 51st Century are pretty open and liberal when it comes to sexuality, that this is how humans came to populate the galaxy and intermingle their DNA with so many different species... we even have plant people over in Doctor Who.
So I made another little bar thingie:
Maybe it's not exactly accurate, but it's hard for me to position everything properly since we're talking about the entire range of sexuality in the universe, which undoubtedly includes perspectives I can't even imagine. It's like asking me to describe colors outside the human visual range. It can't be done.
But we have Jack somewhere toward one end, hitting on everything that smiles at him, and somewhere at the other end there's the Doctor, who's a perfectly nice person but has been generally portrayed as oblivious to feelings beyond friendship (even if at some point he may have been married and had kids).
Of course, since the new Doctor Who series began, we've seen the Doctor kissing the likes of Astrid and Madame de Pompadour, and of course there's whatever he had with Rose. I know some fans have had conniptions over the increased sexuality on the show, which is why Russell T. Davies' Doctor gets listed separately.
Personally, I'm a big fan of the Doctor being portrayed as asexual, mostly because romance tends to drag the story into cliché, and the idea of asexuality is equally as fascinating as anything else I've described here. It's a perfectly valid orientation for one to have, but isn't really explored in fiction too much (possibly because it's so hard for people to understand).
So that's about it. You are free to disagree with me, but personally I feel like Torchwood is a little bit of a letdown. Not just because the characters don't strike me as particularly bisexual, but because the show comes across as very one-sided. We have a bunch of essentially-straight people who are "a little bit gay," but we can't have a gay person who is "a little bit straight." Maybe it's because they're afraid of the conservatives who contend that homosexuality is a choice and don't want to reinforce that belief. I understand that. However, that's basically giving in to them anyway. I think it's important to get your own point across too. And to me, one of Torchwood's points is that sexuality is more open and diverse than many of us can imagine. It's science fiction, after all.
Let it be said that I am a huge fan of the new Doctor Who and Torchwood, despite all their flaws (of which there are many). And I do hold a special place in my heart for Torchwood, because I delight in how pretty much every interaction on that show manages to develop some kind of sexual undertone. I find it fun.
When I first started watching Torchwood, it seemed very much to me that this was going to be a show where our typical ideas of sexual orientation were, as Jack put it in the second episode, "quaint." I relished the idea of watching a world where people didn't identify themselves by and act according to sexual labels, but rather were just attracted to people for being... people (or aliens). (In general, it disappoints me when two people who are so right for each other aren't together because one or both happens to be the wrong gender.) If anything, it's the kind of idea that science fiction was practically invented to explore.
However, after watching (as of now) a season and a half of this show, it has become apparent that most of these characters are actually straight and act so. Not Jack, of course. He's from a future where anything goes, and that makes him almost alien. (And I'll get to him shortly.) I mean the human characters who are supposed to be more "relatable."
A handy-dandy little chart:
For the purposes of this post, let's presume that human sexuality is a sliding scale. Labels are somewhat clunky and inaccurate, and they don't reflect the little variations that people have. Gay, straight, bisexual - some people describe themselves in varying shades of these, and there's also the adage of "gay, straight, or lying" which throws out the middle category. But I'm not here to debate any of that, I'm just here to relate it to Torchwood.
By "standard deviation" I generally mean how people who identify as straight or gay can still display forms of attraction toward the non-preferred sex, be it admiring a well-sculpted ass to the whole "bicurious" designation. There seems to be a certain amount of behavior one can exhibit without having your orientation called into question (unless you're a teenage boy in a locker room). Even though Russell T. Davies once stated that everyone in Torchwood was going to have some sort of bisexual experience by the end of season 1, it hasn't really been anything special. Let's take this character-by-character.
Gwen:
Gwen is probably the most straight of the group - she has a boyfriend when the series begins and later becomes engaged to him. She cheats on him with Owen, and is (not so) secretly in love with Jack. Despite these "threats" to her relationship with Rhys, it doesn't look like he's going anywhere anytime soon. In fact, the relationship is actively encouraged by the other characters on the show and it seems, by the show itself, if you take into consideration how much screen time the two of them get.
Gwen's bisexual experience? She makes out with a girl possessed by an alien in episode 2, which was not voluntary (she was drawn in by pheromones or whatever) and she's quickly rejected for being the wrong gender.
It should be noted that Gwen was introduced to Torchwood in the first episode at the same time the audience was, which makes her the baseline "surrogate" character that we're supposed to identify with.
Owen:
So, Owen had an affair with Suzie, then repeated the pattern with Gwen, had an intense relationship with that lost pilot Diane and when she left he was messed up for the rest of the season (all three episodes of it). This season we've seen him flirt with Martha and in the "altered reality" that Adam created, he pined for Toshiko.
Owen was the first character (outside of Jack, of course) who we saw break out of the orientation mold. He steals an aphrodisiac spray from Torchwood and uses it to hit on women in a bar. When a girl's boyfriend accosts him, he shrugs and uses it on the guy as well. His casual manner about it certainly suggests that he's open, but the only reason he did it in the first place was because he was trying to get the girl.
Toshiko:
Of all the characters, Toshiko disappoints me the most. She spent a good chunk of season 1 making sad little puppy faces over Owen, but finally has a relationship with an alien woman named Mary. Unfortunately, it turns out that Mary was just using Tosh, who goes back to pining after Owen in season 2. That's all well and good, but we also see Tosh macking on the soldier from WWI and then hook up with him, and in the altered reality that Adam creates, Tosh is a confident and cruel woman dating Adam.
When you consider that Mary pretty much seduced poor, meek Tosh, it doesn't really look all that good for her. Owen finally agreed to go on a date with her, at least.
Ianto:
Honestly, Ianto is probably the closest thing we have to a true bisexual on Torchwood, which is why I've put him in the middle of the bar. For the first few episodes he's mostly an enigma, but we eventually find out it's because he's keeping his Cyberwoman girlfriend Lisa hidden in the basement. He's obsessed with fixing her, even though it's pretty hopeless, because he's that much in love with her. And when he finally loses her, he spends the rest of the season in a black, black funk (which Tosh picks up on using the telepathic amulet that Mary gave her).
At some point Jack hooks up with him (it's never clear exactly why, though one can presume that Jack was trying to cheer him up) and the two begin a relationship that has continued on the show until now. It was somewhat formalized at the start of season 2, with Jack offering to actually go out on dates with Ianto.
Judging by Ianto's little Brokeback Mountain moment in the season 1 finale, it seems that he's fallen for Jack hard, and that his relationship with Jack has the same weight as his prior relationship with Lisa. It's not a casual bisexual fling like the other characters have dabbled in. It has emotional weight behind it.
Now, as for Jack...
I can't put Jack on the scale, since he's not really a bisexual, he's a pansexual (or omnisexual). As John Barrowman once remarked, he'll shag "anything with a post code." After all, we're told that people in the 51st Century are pretty open and liberal when it comes to sexuality, that this is how humans came to populate the galaxy and intermingle their DNA with so many different species... we even have plant people over in Doctor Who.
So I made another little bar thingie:
Maybe it's not exactly accurate, but it's hard for me to position everything properly since we're talking about the entire range of sexuality in the universe, which undoubtedly includes perspectives I can't even imagine. It's like asking me to describe colors outside the human visual range. It can't be done.
But we have Jack somewhere toward one end, hitting on everything that smiles at him, and somewhere at the other end there's the Doctor, who's a perfectly nice person but has been generally portrayed as oblivious to feelings beyond friendship (even if at some point he may have been married and had kids).
Of course, since the new Doctor Who series began, we've seen the Doctor kissing the likes of Astrid and Madame de Pompadour, and of course there's whatever he had with Rose. I know some fans have had conniptions over the increased sexuality on the show, which is why Russell T. Davies' Doctor gets listed separately.
Personally, I'm a big fan of the Doctor being portrayed as asexual, mostly because romance tends to drag the story into cliché, and the idea of asexuality is equally as fascinating as anything else I've described here. It's a perfectly valid orientation for one to have, but isn't really explored in fiction too much (possibly because it's so hard for people to understand).
So that's about it. You are free to disagree with me, but personally I feel like Torchwood is a little bit of a letdown. Not just because the characters don't strike me as particularly bisexual, but because the show comes across as very one-sided. We have a bunch of essentially-straight people who are "a little bit gay," but we can't have a gay person who is "a little bit straight." Maybe it's because they're afraid of the conservatives who contend that homosexuality is a choice and don't want to reinforce that belief. I understand that. However, that's basically giving in to them anyway. I think it's important to get your own point across too. And to me, one of Torchwood's points is that sexuality is more open and diverse than many of us can imagine. It's science fiction, after all.