The Importance of Good Omens to an Old Queer
There are so many things about the whole Good Omens experience that make an old queer very happy:
In the story:
- It’s about a couple who love each other, who are by social standards definitely not supposed to love each other.
We exist.
- They have loved each other since before history/time began.
We have always existed.
- They needed to hide their love, even from themselves, for millennia, or risk death.
We hid.
- They come to a safe spot where they can acknowledge their love without fearing for their lives. They can expect to be treated like any other couple.
We don’t always need to hide now.
In the story of the story:
- The book was written in the’80’s, when Aziraphale’s and Crowley’s relationship simply could not be told as a love story if the goal was to have any real chance of popular success.
- It took almost 30 years for it to be adapted for the screen and in that time things had changed so much that it is unequivocably a love story, with huge popular success.
In reality:
- The author and the actors are outspoken supporters of LGBTQ+ rights.
- Michael and David clearly utterly adore each other, and freely show it. Just decades ago such open affection between two men would have caused rumors that could have ended their careers.
Finally, and this one kills me and makes me so, so happy:
- There are MANY younger fans for whom a lot of the above will absolutely not hit as hard.
They grew up in a different world than I did.
I’m always a little leery of saying “when I was your age” because a. It makes me feel like my bones have crumbled to powder and b. a lot of people once used that phrase to be condescending to me so I don’t want to do that to others.
but I need everyone here who’s in the 25-and-under category—hell, even probably 30 and under—to know that, for someone who just turned 41, this whole show is revolutionary.
I went to a liberal private school in a liberal, affluent area. Our enormous library had two books total on any sort of LGBT issues: Annie on my Mind and a short story collection called Am I Blue? That was it. What did we learn in sex ed? AIDS will kill you and it will hurt the whole time you’re dying and people will be glad about it. Here are all the ways not to get it. But it’s a gay people disease, mostly, so if you stay away from them you’ll be fine.
I told a teacher I might be gay. She confided in me that she had been with another woman for years and years. Somehow this got out. She got fired; I almost got expelled. I spent an extra decade in the closet, torn between fighting my way out or burrowing back in.
I have been dumped by my only serious partners because they felt they could not risk coming out to their parents and losing the financial support to continue school.
I spent the most formative years of my life hearing that I was either an aberration who would absolutely be rejected by family and society and who faced a very real threat of violence and murder if I decided to live openly, or that people like me were a punchline. That our very existence was hilarious because it was so weird and gross. (Shoutout to all my fellow queers who also had to endure fucken years and years of people talking about that shitty transphobic Ace Ventura movie, and South Park, and the cultural trope of Man In Dress Funny.)
the word “non-binary” as a descriptor of gender was not something I was aware of until my mid-thirties. the dominant cultural image of trans people—and this is coming from someone who had a liberal and privileged upbringing—was that it was almost always AMAB folks trying to transition to femme, and that they were always miserable, in pain, longing for something they could never and would never be. broken. you couldn’t be something in the middle. you didn’t live to be old and happy and beautiful if you were trans. or if you did, people didn’t know. kids especially didn’t know. won’t someone think of the children and all the terrible things they might learn while they’re young and impressionable?
so to have this show come out where these things about myself that I was told would bring me nothing but pain and exclusion are just treated as an everyday part of existence, with dozens of ordinary joys and endless opportunities for self-expression in a way that doesn’t provoke an immediate violent response?
to say it’s overwhelming is the most underwhelming way I could possibly describe it.
@mostlyjustgoose Wow! Reblogging my post with your comments because they need to be read too. I just turned 60 (bones definitely crumbling) and you’ve experienced far more hardship and discrimination than I did. I grew up in NYC, went to a very progressive high school which, IN THE ‘70’s, had a gay and bisexual club. Still, when I realized I was gay at 12 I thought ‘We’ll, this doesn’t feel sick, I think I’m OK, I’ll just never be able to tell a soul or ever act on it.” I managed to not tell anyone or do anything for over a decade. I still feel the loss of that decade.
One thing I wanted to add to my original post is how the way that angels/demons work in the Good Omens universe is SO ridiculously inclusive. Want to present as male or female or not exactly either this morning, fine, have at it. Want to have genitals, not have genitals, have all the genitals, fine, make an effort. Sexual preference, whatever, hit it. It’s basically the Build-a-Bear of gender and sexual identity. It’s awesome!
