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mearchy · 4 years ago

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Long post warning, but since I’m procrastinating on some important work, I think I want to talk candidly about my experience with the Van Speech.

I was thrilled when I saw the gay representation in TOG- I hadn’t known anything about the movie beforehand, but when they showed Joe and Nicky sleeping curled around each other on the train I was like “WOW!! AWESOME!! YES!” and like most (*cough* disney, marvel *cough*) action movies, I thought they were going to leave it there- an implied gay relationship between two characters. Good enough for me, I wasn’t expecting more. But they didn’t.

Now, I want to say that I had the same reaction other people describe on here, squeeing and being full of warm feelings when I saw Joe’s love declaration the first time, sitting alone on my couch at home. But when I first saw the Van Scene I just cringed through all my warm fuzzies. Really hard. And the first thought in my head was just a disappointed “Oh, they’ve ruined it, it’s too much.” My second thought was “No one is going to take this movie seriously now.” Next time I recommended the movie to people, I included the caveat that “its got some really cheesy scenes BUT it’s really good I promise just overlook that haha.”

And then every single person I knew of who also watched the movie- including the straight people, and clearly many, many people on the internet- liked it. The whole movie, including the van scene.

This forced me to take a step back and do some serious self reflection. I was an openly proud queer person, who advocated for representation all the time. So why was I so afraid to like the van scene? Why did I feel the need to cut it out of my assessment of the movie? Why was I so convinced other people would dislike it?

There’s a lot to unpack there, but I think what it boils down to is that people like me have always had to make ourselves less overtly gay/gnc in order to have our requests for representation accepted into mainstream action/superhero audience. I have never been able to give my honest opinion of the characters I ship or headcanon as LGBT to the majority of cishet action/superhero fans I know irl without throwing in tons of caveats and having tons of evidence and watering down my own investment in the idea. And god knows how many of the Redditor-type cishet fans of nerdy franchises will go on and on about how representation ruins a movie.

So I had gotten used to that attitude, and I’d internalized it. It took me three or four times of watching the van speech, on top of interacting with tons of TOG fans online who were just as excited about LGBT representation as I was, to just… chill out and enjoy it. To feel the thrill of a good love declaration and the urge to melt into a puddle when I heard it. To fall in love all over again with Joe and Nicky’s love. It makes me really sad that I couldn’t have that experience when viewing it the first time, because it does mean so much to me now.

But I’m glad I got there, and I am eternally grateful for all the wonderful people online in this fandom who so wholeheartedly embraced every aspect of this movie, so that I felt like I had a safe space to just love it, enjoy it, and get excited about it without having to always have my guard up, ready to apologize for its unapologetic gayness.

I could write an entire many-page essay, probably, on how this has made me think about the way other LGBT people and I have been forced to interact with media and representation, but I’ll just leave it here for now.

- mearchy (:

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