Perfect10Liners ending its three stories with a coming-out narrative is really affecting me.
Maybe it’s the history major in me, maybe it’s my role as an educator for young students, maybe it’s the current state of politics in my country where leaders are attempting to defund and dismantle taken-for-granted institutions, maybe I’m just sensitive today lol. But as an audience of P10, we’ve just spent hours watching very gay storylines without questioning their right to exist. Now we have a character, Wine, walk into the picture for whom gay acceptance is a novelty.
Sometimes I see us QL fans, especially queer commentators and especially Euro-Americans, reviewing shows with a “march of progress” perspective; once one hurdle is leapt over, like the use of the word ‘gay’ or the first onscreen gay sex scene in the genre, we check the lgbt+ rights box and move onward to the next hurdle, failing to celebrate when other shows repeat that choice and on rare occasions treating them as regressive for not doing more.
But everything in the world requires maintenance to persist. New people come along and they might for any number of reasons need the first steps before they can get to the tenth step the experienced progressive folks are on. We could do better to find language and spaces in our hearts to celebrate a familiar approach done well.
I am not personally a New Siwaj stan by any stretch of the imagination, but I respect how insistent his shows are in faithfully tending the baby steps and introductions to queer media that people might need. They’re less sex-forward and make little social commentary about wealth or politics. We could accuse his work of lolly-gagging in the BL bubble, but then we’ll have a story like Wine’s to remind us why. Wine needs someone to sweep the front step so they can sit with him and tell him how warm and wonderful being gay can be. There will always be a reason to have these kind of stories. There’s always a reason to go back to the foundations and appreciate the way they hold everything up.
