#given the socioeconomic position of most men compared to most women - while i don't think it's impossible to have a balanced and healthy

[hadesoftheladies]

it's a little funny, because the endpoint of femininity is being the perfect partner to a man. that's literally what femininity is for. that's why it exists. the beauty industry's entire focus is catering to male desire. you aren't taught from day one to be demure just for the sake. it's because you're supposed to be the wife of some man. yet on this site, we can criticize and be sceptical about heels and plastic surgery, but not the end-goal of that career: romantic partnerships with men.

[theviciouslily]

I'm coming at this from a UK media perspective rather than a US one, which is usually the presumed default when talking about Big Media, but I have a non-comprehensive list of other sociocultural factors that are potentially at play in the cultural gap between Big Media Gays and Fandom Queers:

I suspect that cis gay men of a certain age and socioeconomic status are less likely than Fandom Queers to have a sense of shared identity with those whose stripe of queerness differs from their own. Your Mileage May Vary, of course, but I when I look back at my own queer coming-of-age as a teenager in the early days of tumblr, one of the first things that I really absorbed was the sense of a community beyond one's specific label, even if efforts to put this into practice faltered for one reason or another. In contrast, looking back at the 1980s and 1990s in Britain, while Section 28 had consequences for the queer community in Britain as a whole, most of the political capital being spent was directed towards the AIDS crisis and the unequal age of consent for sex between men. If you're a cis gay man and you have that as a formative experience for your identity, I can see how, if left unchecked, that could lead to a bit of tunnel vision.

When it comes to Big Media, I think the footprint of cis lesbians is orders of magnitude smaller compared to cis gay men, particularly if we're talking about shows with these sorts characters as protagonists rather than supporting characters. Shows with cis lesbian or bi protagonists are vanishingly rare, and there's a lot less variation in subject matter compared to their male counterparts. I feel as though there period dramas or contemporary teen dramas and late-bloomer-lesbian stories, but almost nothing about modern cis queer women in their twenties and thirties who are at least out to themselves if not in general - Call My Agent! is the only example of this that I've seen so far, and that's not even in the Anglosphere.

The Gay-ry Stu feels like a logical extension of the shallowly-characterised queer supporting character. There's a great article on The Fandomentals that delves into the specific failures of queer tokenisation. That article posits that those failures arise partly as a result of straight creators feeling as though they've "done enough" when they have in fact done far too little. Instead of taking advantage of the lead status to give more dimension to a character's queerness than they would have if they were in a supporting role, it's the same playbook stretched out over a longer timespan. Instinct is the example that springs to mind based on what you've said about it on this blog. Vigil is the other example that I can think of, since it features a complex child custody situation where, given its setup, you would think that homophobia might be one of the complicating factors, only for this to be ignored by the writers in a way that feels unrealistic to me as a queer viewer.

I think, once you any initial attempts to play it for shock value or prurient curiosity, the gaybourhood is a less threatening idea to straight hegemony than the alternatives posited by fic, because it suggests that queer people will "stick to their own kind" when seeking a romantic partner. I can't speak for BL, but I think one of the things that fic often does well at expressing indirectly is what it's like to navigate a queer identity when you don't have an in-person queer social circle. I really struggle to think of any queer storyline intended for a mainstream audience that deals with character being uncertain about the orientation of their love interest. They either have impeccable gaydar, or their crush is unimpeachably straight and this is never meaningfully challenged by the narrative. I think this is because the idea of gay people doing gay things somewhere out of sight is less scary to the hypothetical conservative viewer than the idea that a queer person they know might develop a crush on them specifically.

If we're looking at influences that got us to this point, I'd highlight Russell T. Davies. Queer as Folk is pretty much ground zero for queer ensemble dramas like The L Word and Looking. The UK original show did have a will-they-won't-they arc, but by virtue of existing in this particular type of show it fits the description you mentioned. RTD was also well-known for his tenure on Doctor Who including characters who make "incidental" mentions of their queer relationships, although he wasn't always necessarily the person writing those sorts of lines in a given episode. As groundbreaking as that was in 2006, I think a lot of writers, regardless of their orientation, have fallen into the trap of seeing this approach where queerness is "not a big deal" as the pinnacle of good representation because it's easy to garner praise without really having to do a lot. It doesn't demand much in the way of reflection on one's own biases. That said, RTD has spoken out against transphobia and included trans characters in his more recent projects, so I wouldn't accuse him of the kind of coasting I'm describing here.

Speaking of horror, Mark Gatiss was one of the four writers on The League of Gentlemen, a horror-based sketch show that, while being typical for the turn-of-the-millennium period with some of its transphobic jokes, does a lot of stuff with gender and sexuality that feels experimental in a way that chimes with fandom sensibilities. While he wasn't the only creator on that show, it does stand in quite a sharp contrast to "The Final Problem" in Sherlock, which was written over fifteen years later but seemed much more visibly weighted down by regressive gender baggage when it came to its female antagonist.

so, what do queer people who work in big media (like Gatiss) generally view as representation? I imagine they might be less focused on romance than us queer shippers on tumblr and ao3, but what are other notable differences?

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Well, this is my own opinion, you understand, not some objective Truth, but I see a lot of more mainstream tastes, just gay.

There tends to be more focus on a lead character. Romance is in the form of the lead+love interest(s). If Representation™ is the aim, the focus is on what it means to be a cis gay man or cis lesbian in the real world.

Not only is fandom obsessed with ships rather than individual characters, but fandom also tends to be more interested in identities with unclear boundaries. Fandom tends to be better on bisexuality. Fandom is a trillion times more likely to play internalized homophobia for iddy hotness or to have a character whose real sexual proclivities are a surprise to either the audience or to themselves. Fandom loves pining and romance built on decades of friendship. (Strong demisexual vibes around these parts, if you ask me, though pining is a fave with all sorts.) There's that vibe like the art says it's about cis gay/bi men, but it's really about gender or it's really about transness. It's not that it's not queer, but it's much less literal and direct. (Drag is also like this, FWIW, but aside from reality tv, most mainstream queer art with a big budget is not about drag.)

It's certainly not a hard and fast division, especially between fandomy tastes and AFAB creators. It's just that some fans assume that cis gay men will naturally share AO3 fandom's BL-y tastes, and this is often not the case. What little I've seen of Hannibal seems a lot closer to fandomy stuff than usual with the unclear boundaries of identity and feelings. Some of the cable shows will have little moments, like Penny Dreadful springing the Ethan/Dorian scene on us. Frankly, I think horror tends to do queerness closer to how fandom does. A lot of the gap is between drama/litfic and horror/romance/genre as much as it is between one type of creator and another.

A certain amount of media by cis gay men is like "Here is the hero, Gay-ry Stu, going about his gay life in the gayborhood", which is just not what BL tends to look like.

Basically, I would expect creators like Gatiss to make gay art where there is a central gay man who we know is a gay man from the beginning of episode 1. I would expect that guy to have a love interest or a bad relationship or some people he sleeps with (depending on the genre) and for these other characters to have much less focus or be much less the POV.

I would not expect this type of creator to make an epic friendship show where both halves are really central and to then suddenly reveal that the feelings are romantic or sexual way far into the show. They might make Moonlighting-but-gay about a will-they-won't-they central lead pair if it was set up as that from the start, but I'm not holding my breath.

You know, the more I think about it, the more I think there's something interesting in that horror observation. As a genre, it tends to like messy boundaries and sudden personal revelations.