healthy gay male relationships in which the characters involved kiss, have a sex life, go on dates, declare their love and affection for each other, share a bed, etc will ALWAYS be more revolutionary and necessary to portray than a relationship that’s “undoubtedly a love story but what kind is up to you! uwu why do you want to see them KISS or get some other actual confirmation of their love you disgusting homosexual!”
men being friends or in a relationship ~without labels~ comes second to representing gay men’s love. always.
You know what? No. No, and also, fuck this noise.
My aromantic ass is out here getting NO representation 90% of the time, and the one time, the ONE TIME I actually see a queer couple with what looks like a queerplatonic love story, and which is UNDENIABLY *some* kind of love story, that’s when y'all’re gonna go off about it not being gay enough? Fuck you. Take your alloromantic privilege and shove it.
my gay ass is over here risking getting literally murdered if i hold a man’s hand in public but sure, “alloromantic privilege”
you have alloromantic privilege. how often do you we see a queer couple? rarely. how often do we see romantic couples? way too fucking often. how often have you in your live seen a healthy male friendship that may or may not be a romantic relationship or a queerplatonic relationship? zero times, if not for headcannons. like sure everyone knows that captain america is banging the winter soldier and dean bottoms for his angel, but this, this right here. crowley, the demon, and aziraphale, the angel, who both transcend human ideas of relationship it’s this tiny little bit of representation that a-spec people are allowed to get.
popping back here on my old blog for this. alloromantic privilege (even if you only mean privilege in representation) does not exist. healthy lgbt relationships are not represented often or well enough in media to be considered a privilege. cishet romantic relationships are over represented, and exist in a position of privilege, but that cannot be called alloromantic privilege because that privilege does not extend to all people who experience romantic attraction. again, that privilege does not extend to lgbt relationships, therefore lgbt people do not have alloromantic privilege.
“healthy male friendships that may or may not be romantic” did you mean the countless instances of buddy films (ie. hot fuzz, and the entire genre that movie satirized) , the myriad of fantasy/sci-fi adventures (ala lord of the rings and star trek), or perhaps the numerous historical figures that were more than likely gay, but historians insist that they were merely friends who were symbolically married. which brings me to my next point.
there was a point in us history, where censorship of lgbt depictions ran rampant. in the 1930′s the united states supreme court ruled that films did not have first amendment protection. in order to curtail further censorship, film industry leaders created the motion picture production code which outlined things that could not be featured in flims. among other things, the code banned “sex perversion.” which i’m sure you can guess, included homosexuality. this doesn’t mean that gay people were not included in film, it simply means they weren’t explicitly included. this led to the proliferation of what we now call coding.
for the most part, characters couldn’t outright state they were gay, but there were certain mannerisms, phrases, and styles of dress that could be used to indicate they were gay without getting hung up by the production code. but this representation was not done out of any fondness for lgbt people, and was instead frequently used to vilify gay people. gay characters in media were frequently portrayed as villains or naive victims, and were almost always killed or punished in some way by the end of the film. this vilification and concurrent erasure continued throughout the 1960′s.
however, in 1962, there was a bit of a breakthrough. the film lawrence of arabia is widely considered to be one of the first box office hits without “an incredible amount of innuendo to disguise the homosexuality of the film.” it is important to note however, that lawrence’s sexuality is left ambiguous, and his relationship with a man is only implied.
for decades, even after the abandonment of the production code, gay characters were given little to no intimacy on screen. this meant little to no kissing, hand holding, hugging, etc. a perfect example of this is the show will and grace. even though two of the main characters are explicitly gay men, they are still very rarely shown to have any sort of romantic relationships. their main relationship in the show is their friendship with grace, their straight roommate. while the show was certainly revolutionary and groundbreaking for lgbt representation, it still held on to those age old hangups about same gender intimacy.
this is where i get frustrated. we have literal decades of gay characters being relegated to subtext, and even if being explicitly stated to be gay, their intimacy has been left off the screen for far too long. i take issue with people branding a decades old homophobic trope a good thing. if your representation comes at the expense of reinforcing age old homophobic attitudes, then your representation sucks.
all gay people are saying in posts like these is that we are tired. we are tired of being deemed to indecent to be shown on screen. we are tired of being subtext. and i guess, i just have to ask, aren’t you? if all the examples you have given exist only in headcannons or ambiguous non-answers, why are so satisfied with them? if you read good omens as ace or aro representation, then that’s awesome. congrats. but why are you satisfied with calling an unlabeled “maybe” representation? why do you get so angry and defensive at the mere suggestion that their relationship be named, whatever that relationship may be.
because the issue is, by not labeling it, show runners are piggybacking off of the desperation of lgbt folks without alienating their straight audiences, which is exactly what media producers have been doing for decades. why are you so satisfied with crumbs?
one last thing. i popped onto this old blog for a reason. i originally wrote the “i’m a lesbian, carl” post, and i am appalled that something i said in response to a homophobe at work is being used to further homophobic attitudes. so please, take it off your description :)
