Comic Strips

I wouldn't call Mac coming out as gay in Always Sunny as a cheap character plot point. The dude made a whole ballet dance in the rain about it.

Is that a bad thing? Knowing if you're gay or not in casual conversation is weird. It just means you guys are normal ass dudes who happen to have a different sexual preference, it isn't like some crazy defining factor or your life.

I think media pushes this narrative that unless you're covered in rainbow shit 24/7 and acting flamboyant you're secretly ashamed or something, which is total bullshit.

My mom is 73 and just married a woman 3 months ago, after being married to my dad for 25 years and being single for like 15 years. She definitely isn't ashamed because people don't instantly know she's gay, nor does she care. She owns a few pride things and that's about it. Because she's a normal woman who happens to have a different sexual preference. There's absolutely nothing wrong with being "normal" and gay.

Its hard to take off a mask youve been wearing for decades.

Yeah, now that I think about it the closest I can think of to that is a lesbian spy movie. Y'all deserve some hypermasculine gay action movies! And not the "oh we decided to queer the genre" crap, no you deserve a "yeah we just kept always being surprised by movies in the genre where as a twist the guy who seems solely interested in the masculine side of life winds up with a woman, and so we decided not to do that."

I'm not a huuuuge fan of romance + action, but the lack of gayness feels pretty noticeable at this point. It's like a loud silence

I'm pretty sure there's a gay campfire orgy in 300, with half of the Athenian contigent sitting and watching.

Gustavo Fring, my legend.

I think Daniel Levy has done a nice job of portraying the gay regular dude. Probably has a little help, considering he is an actual gay dude. But he reminds me a lot of my actual gay brother, not at all flamboyant (except when he gets mad he gets a little extra gay), just as regular (probably not a great word to use) as they come, and happens to like dudes. And he's had friends who fit the whole spectrum of gayness, and some of them were really annoying, some of them really cool, almost like the rest of society.

So you're saying 90% of the population is ace. Baced.

One of the hardest questions; is it better to have clumsy representation, or less representation? Because no matter what, a greater effort requirement amounts to a higher barrier of entry. We don't owe an artist anything, but at the same time should we say "If you don't understand a group of people well enough to represent them, you shouldn't be doing art."?

JRR Tolkien notoriously has very few very impressively represented women, which kind of just gets a shrug from the fandom. But you can only tolerate so much of that before you just have a small selection of archetypes on pedestals. You get the sense from so much media produced by men, that they think women only (should) make up <25% of society. If they don't matter to a male protagonist then they don't matter. I think it should be fine to clumsily represent a group, as long as it expands representation rather than restricting it. And continuation should be dependent on an expectation to grow.

Case in point; The Apu Problem. Despite Apu from The Simpsons being the worst of both worlds, by virtue of originality he was acceptable at conception. Failure to grow with the franchise's popularity, however, means that he established his own stereotype and by extension The Simpsons created it's own racism. By the boiling frog effect, The Simpsons creators just get to dismiss is it as a product of it's time "Oh you know things that weren't racist are suddenly racist now shrug what're you supposed to do?" But they've had the power to do better for a long time, if they were willing to face the problem long enough to learn and address it permanently.

The USA still hasn't had a (official) female president despite multiple opportunities, because women in America don't want "that kind of representation". Society can keep representation from slacking, without letting the perfect be the enemy of the good.

OMG I didn't even see them until you pointed them out lol

Nice tesselation.

Nah.

It’s a tribalism impulse, most of the time. They’re parroting what some influencer or other jerk said.

You’re thinking of the distinct “I’m definitely hetero, bro,” which is the fragile masculinity thing.

I think it's more that they have a tenuous grasp on their own sexuality, and anything that makes them question (or realize that it CAN be a question) shakes their very concept of self. They define themselves by their sexuality and having that foundational part of themselves potentially called into question terrifies them.

Too many people are afraid of the fact that you can change. And that applies to all parts of yourself.

There's only one point in life when it's too late to change and that's when you're dead.

You can tell by his face at the end