glorious leave, grey's anatomy, and queerness

[paranoid_monkey]

so i'm in taiwan, staying with my dad (who lives here), having taken a leave of absence from the school-place. there's all kinds of work i should be doing, and while i did spend a couple weeks recently working hard (copy-editing a friend's 250-page dissertation, writing a conference paper) - and ended up giving my first conference paper to the

Comments

[celesteh]

'i stopped quickly, because it was obvious that people were hearing "i'm bisexual" as "i'm a huge slut who might sleep with you

[paranoid_monkey]

well you gotta give me credit for never thinking you were trying to turn all the lesbians bi :-P i'm a little unclear actually on why this would be a bad thing even if it were true

[celesteh]

There might be some realism even if they go in an unfortunate direction. I mean, folks who are suddenly realizing that they're queer can be kind of (or very) confused at first. The character might suddenly declare herself a lesbian, but that could just indicate confusion on her part.

Also, there are plenty of lesbians (baby boomer academic types among others) who just declared themselves to be lesbians and placed themselves within that mold. I don't know how they make it work, but they do.

[paranoid_monkey]

that's a good point, about the confusion. i wouldn't object to that being portrayed. what i object to is that in the cases i've seen on tv, it never goes beyond "this character is now gay". it was to the point on buffy that willow, who had very clearly been very much in love with her boyfriend for two seasons, never mentioned him again and was given lines like "hello, gay now" whenever heterosexuality threatened. there was an episode where a spell made her fall in love with a boy, and she actually started to perform a spell to turn him into a girl, because she was so gay he had to be a girl. what the hell