Strange racists and homophobes on the internet seem to have access to an alternate way cooler version of TV than me. "every white character on TV is in an interracial relationship" "every show has a gay couple in it" "main characters keep having to secretly be bisexual and nonbinary" "every show has gratuitous full frontal nudity" like damn promise?? What channel???
as a black gay person real like where y'all be finding this stuff pass the name
for real though, those DO NOT WATCH OR YOU'LL CORRUPT YOUR CHILDREN lists put out by conservative christian family groups is where I find all the stellar tv shows. Like, shit I didn't know half of those existed, thanks for finding them for me, gonna go watch 30 hours of gay tv now!
I think I know how this works.
For personal context, before I went to the '98 Burning Man festival, one of the things I'd read from a couple different journalists was that "everybody" runs around naked. Which, fine by me, I'd already spent a lot of time in clothing-optional spaces, I'm not fanatic about it but it's nice.
So I got there early and set up a public shade structure on one of Black Rock City's main roads and spent most of each afternoon just watching the crowds go by. I don't remember seeing more than one actually naked person the whole week. I think a topless woman passed by my intersection maybe every half an hour, sometimes once an hour. So why in the hell were people, normally pretty smart and observant writers, coming away with the impression that everybody was naked?
Then I remembered an unrelated passage from Joel Garreau's great book about the history of the outer-ring suburbs, Edge City. Mall developers told him flat-out that they tried to keep the crowds in their malls less than 5% black. Not because they themselves were racist, but because they had determined, experimentally, that if more than 5% of the people in the mall are black, the median white shopper will wrongly describe the mall as at least half black, as mostly black. And not a few of them would describe it, at 6% black, as a mall where "only black people go." Why?
Because, emotionally, they were still upset over the last one when the next one came into view.
Same as the journalists describing Black Rock City as all naked. Same as the right-wing religious culture warriors describing television as entirely mixed-race and gender non-conforming. Not because it's even vaguely true, we know that, but because they haven't gotten over their discomfort over the last one by the time the next one comes along. The anger, not the stimulus, is the part that's continuous, so their mind lies to them that it's "all" the thing they can't get over.
Similar effect for the presence/proportion of women in things, by the way: https://health.howstuffworks.com/mental-health/human-nature/perception/how-17-equals-496-the-amazing-multiplying-women.htm
Whatās the solution then? Or if thereās no solution, should we make things even queerer and more diverse?
Adding this from a comment on Reddit:
"If there's no solution, should we just make things even queerer and more diverse?"
Unironically, yes. Edge City was written in 1991 - do you think 5% is still the threshold for the "median white shopper" to describe the mall as half black, 35 years later? I'd be very surprised if so.
Except for a small minority of extremely hateful people, things like outrage and discomfort can't be sustained. They fade with time and exposure. This is the same idea with the Overton Window, it's what we mean when we say "normalization".
For some people, and in some ways, that idea of "normalcy" is locked where it was in your childhood, but most people are more pliable than we like to think. Marketing and propaganda are massive industries for a reason - what we see affects how we act and how we see the world, often without us realizing and in ways that aren't comfortable to admit.
So yeah, making things more queer and more diverse isn't giving up on a solution, it IS the solution.
Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/CuratedTumblr/s/5k5VwmIZwR
