@Sittinginthesand
I think it’s time for j and j to go, so much side by side dancing, and they don’t match. Their body shapes are so different it distracts from the mirroring, in a way that doesn’t happen with m/f partners. I find them going on about being so ‘ground breaking’ very tedious, I still don’t understand why being gay means john can’t dance with a member of the opposite sex. Does he not like women? Will he only dance with a potential date? And why the dance partners both have to be gay? The same sex pairing makes them hard to compare with the others, I also felt that the judges are massively over marking because of the narrative and they don’t dare not to. Completely different to when there was a female couple, who they seem to have forgotten all about! None of this is to say that I disprove of men dancing together, I don’t, but it isn’t the format on this particular show.
John doesn’t HAVE to dance with a man, gay people dance with opposite sex partners all the time (see Johannes every other series for example!). But equally why does dancing have to be male/female all the time. The whole set up is that there’s a man and a woman, and the man is strong and the woman is light and delicate, and half the romances they have to look romantic or sexual. There’s nothing wrong with breaking “the format” and showing another way to do things.
When I was a young teen, I used to sneak out of bed at 11pm to watch Sugar Rush on E4, in the dark with headphones plugged into the tv, because I was so so desperate to see queer teens represented as normal. There was a gay man introduced on Corrie around the same time and my dad used to yell “get off my screen you poofter” every scene he was in. This was about 15 years ago, not exactly the dark ages. My parents have softened a lot since then and I genuinely think that increased representation has helped a lot- seeing gay people as normal people who have lives just like everyone else and yes, occasionally want to dance with each other on a Saturday night show, just like straight people do all the goddamn time!