BBC series I Kissed a Boy decision "homophobic in the extreme" - LGB Alliance

[IwantToRetire]

We have written to Tim Davie, Director-General of the BBC, about the homophobia displayed in the casting of a trans identified female in their upcoming series of ‘I Kissed A Boy’.

By doing this they are telling young gay men watching the show that they must be attracted to women who are pretending to be male. This is regressive, insulting and ‘homophobic in the extreme.’

Read our letter here:

https://lgballiance.org.uk/bbc-series-homophobic-in-the-extreme/

(Sorry cant find a version of the letter that isn't text via a graphic.)

With our generation, girls read Jackie Collins and boys read Harold Robbins. There were tons of their books in the library and the second hand shops.

(This doesn't necessarily disprove your point. Harold Robbins was clearly a very strange man with some odd sexual preoccupations.)

Those books not being literature wasn't really the point. They were entertainment, which is a fine thing to be. But you wouldn't want kids to use them as a source of instruction about relationships.

I think this might be related to youth, and does settle down a bit as people get older. I'm not massively into fanfic this days - it's just too much effort to find something of decent quality, and I don't have the time for that - but if something does itch my brain, it tends to be more the "what if these miserable forty year olds gave it another go, though?" or "I wonder what this character's life would look like in twenty years?" And the type of writer you get for boring old characters like that, is often a fellow boring old and therefore refreshingly normal. And you don't have to interact with people whose brains are still cooking at all 😂

I'm a millennial, and I stick to my own kind or older, with this stuff. Not to tar all younger fans with the same brush! I'm sure there are some good eggs out there. But anyone who has a shaky sense of self or who seems a bit weird about the characters, I walk away from.

If you were a Harry Potter fan and you don't mind genre hopping, I've found the fandom for the Strike books to be refreshingly sane. They have fun, and you get some interesting analysis of the work, but it's all very relaxed. There's a good energy. I haven't explored the fanfic side of it, but there are podcasts and blogs, and everything I've seen has radiated good energy so far. There's some fancying of Strike that goes on, but purely in fun. It's all enhanced my enjoyment of the books, as a good fandom experience should, so I can recommend it

I don't want to alarm you, but AI has eaten Etsy's lunch on that one. There are already apps you can program to have the personality of your favourite fictional character, and be your boyfriend / girlfriend.

I think there was actually a disturbing case where an autistic boy killed himself because his AI girlfriend told him to. She was supposed to be Daenerys from Game of Thrones and the app glitched, I believe. I think the app was called Character AI?

So yes, this is already moving into disturbing new frontiers. People will be able to emotionally enmesh themselves with their favourite characters in ways that just weren't possible before. I don't think it's headed anywhere healthy.

I've observed this too. Boys tend to aspire, girls tend to relate. It's why the heroine of a romcom is often an absolute mess, and the lead in an action movie will often be a boring square jawed hunk with no discernable personality. It's studios taking these tendencies of their audience to extremes

Hmm, whilst I can understand the argument around the politics of this, I've gotta say I'm not sure how I feel about this recent tendency to try and police what roles actors are allowed to accept. For me it's about the end product and the more I can view them as the character rather than the actor the better the immersion is for me - this must be a fairly common view due to the way some actors become typecast and hence might struggle to give true suspension of disbelief in some roles (like I might struggle to take Danny Dyer seriously playing a thespian, for example).

I guess I might object in some instances. Like if it was a known racist/misogynist playing some kind of philanthropic hero character or something. It would just be too hard/contradictory to take seriously. So I guess it's impossible to always separate the actor from their role in some cases.

However, if a casting decision is made for 'political' or ideological reasons then that might be different. But at face value I don't think I have an issue with a trans individual playing any role if they play it well. Otherwise, where does it stop? For example, it could be seen as insensitive to people struggling in life to have a millionaire actor playing a hard up character.

I'm reading the above posts with interest. I've always enjoyed reading but until recently I'd never even heard of fanfic or fandoms. I have no idea what any of the terminology means. Slash?
Fanfic seems to be something very popular that completely passed me by. I thought perhaps it's because I'm Gen X in my fifties but I note that some pp mention fanfic of 30 years ago. Saying that, I didn't start using the Internet until 2005 and that was occasional use with crappy dial-up, but no, it's all new to me.

@SnoopyPajamas

"but if something does itch my brain, it tends to be more the "what if these miserable forty year olds gave it another go, though?" or "I wonder what this character's life would look like in twenty years?""

Yes!

"And the type of writer you get for boring old characters like that,"

You take that back 😛 ! Older characters have more life behind them, more struggles, more mistakes, more successes too, so how can they be boring!?

There are some surprisingly mature young writers - and some older writers who never seem to wisen up...

Thanks for the Stike rec! I'll see about giving the books a go, and see if I fall in love with them. It would be nice to get back into an active fandom.

Fanfic is an old, old thing. Long before the internet, it already existed in fanzines, good old paper magazines that fans put together and distributed among themselves. It scratches an itch in some readers/viewers but not everyone has that itch - though if you've ever wondered, "What would have happened if things had gone slightly differently at this point?" or "I could see Character A getting with Character C instead of Character B", then you have an inkling what the itch is about. As for slash, nowadays it's simply a fic centered around a same-sex relationship.

Maybe because I vaguely remember very old fanfic, it's interesting to me that there used to be a lot more hetero and even lesbian slash. It was just a natural offshoot of shipping discussions where you might say "I think Becky and Tom are a boring couple, Becky and Mike might be hotter."

Or it might be as I mentioned upthread, taking a show about a very close female friendship, adding in romance and making it a lesbian story.

The most notorious hetero version I know is Wanda and Pietro in Marvel comics, always being written in canon as incredibly close siblings as twins often are, and so many people in fandom riffed on the idea of them as an incestuous couple that it actually leaked into the Ultimate Universe comics.

I'm really interested though, and still don't quite understand, how it so overwhelmingly became straight girls writing canonically straight male characters in gay relationships (or their mental image thereof, which is very unlike gay male sexuality). There's something quite weird happening there.

I barely look at current comics - it's a dying industry and the product is pretty terrible - but I remember a couple of years back seeing an X-Men comic where... well, Cyclops and Wolverine were written for decades as romantic rivals, but in this one there was a very odd homoerotic vibe between them that didn't fit either character. The author was a youngish woman, and I bet she's heavily into fanfic.

So fanfic is about tv/film/book characters, where people imagine different story lines?

Like say I'm a huge fan of the X files and I start to write stories about how Mulder goes off to live with the aliens and Scully moves to Thailand and falls in love with a monk and sets up a monkey sanctuary

Am I in any way getting close ?

That's about it. Now imagine that 80% of Star Trek fanfic is straight girls writing about Kirk and Spock getting it on, and you've got the picture.

I remember years ago Xena and Gabrielle being made a couple by a section of their fans. That became a thing in the show although I doubt, from the way they danced around it, it was what the creators originally intended. There was probably a similar thing with Hercules and Iolaus. Which, if I recall my Greek myths correctly, would have been truer to the source material. I doubt the star of Hercules would have been keen on that though🤣.

I'm not a fan of romantasy, enemies to lovers type stuff. The stories, to me, often get broken in service to the relationships. I don't read fanfic but some of them do make it into print (I've seen a few Arthur and Lancelot). Then there are those self published on Amazon, which can catch you out if you buy ebooks. I accidentally read one that took a sudden turn into a homosexual relationship, illiterally from nowhere. Nothing explicit, when things progressed beyond loving glances, kisses and caresses it just faded into the paragraph break. Written by a woman.

I remember Xena/Gabrielle being a thing 😃

I think one thing about fanfic is, I compare it to romantic comedy which isn't just a genre, it's a very strict story form. It's a long time since I've seen Kissing Jessica Stein, but from memory, apart from the lesbian angle it's an extremely traditional romcom. It's got an endearing but hapless heroine who looks for love in the wrong places, then finds it where she didn't expect to. The only difference is that she ends up with a woman instead of a man.

I think that works. A lesbian romance isn't all that different from a female-POV hetero romance.

It doesn't work at all with gay men. I enjoyed In and Out on the strength of the comedy performances, but the romcom angle only works if you ignore that it bears zero resemblance to gay male sexuality. There is no way on earth that Kevin Kline's character would have reached middle age without knowing he was gay. And if you wrote him as being closeted rather than oblivious, that changes the story completely.

Where is the laugh reaction! 😂

I know nothing about fan fiction so can't contribute to that, but back on the original topic I was thinking about numbers...

If gay people are about 1 in 30 people and in the under 35 age group trans people are about 1 in 93 people, then that means that there are about 3 gay people for every 1 trans person.

Why is Lars the only trans person in this group?
If the BBC were genuinely concerned about representation then in a total group 10 contestants, shouldn't there be at least 3 trans men?

@SionnachRuadh

"I'm really interested though, and still don't quite understand, how it so overwhelmingly became straight girls writing canonically straight male characters in gay relationships (or their mental image thereof, which is very unlike gay male sexuality). There's something quite weird happening there."

I can think of a few reasons why straight girls would write slash rather than femslash or straight relationships.

There's the "one guy hot, two guys hotter" phenomenon. They are attracted to guys, so with a gay relationship, they get to write twice as much about how a man is hot.

Inversely, they don't have to write a female lover, which means no wondering what anyone would find hot in a woman.

Which in turn means no feeling bad for not measuring up to the female love interest(s), and in straight fics, no jealousy to be had that she was chosen by the male hero. With only guys, there's no direct comparison to fear.

This also brings a measure of distanciation from the characters being written, just by virtue of them being male while the authors and readers are female, so it's easier to deal with difficult topics. The identification with the characters is not so overwhelming.

And then there's the problem of how to write a female character who will be accepted and loved by the rest of the fandom - and basically? It's impossible. She'll be too aggressive for some, too weak for others, too much of a bitch if she stands her ground, too unrealistic if she's reasonably accomplished, and so on and so forth. Ship wars between two competing straight ships are sobering demonstrations of how vicious female fans can be to female characters, so it makes sense to me that so many just choose to ignore the female characters as potential love interests altogether.

So yeah, I can easily see why so many female fans turn to slash ships rather than straight or femslash ones.

There's lots of flavours of Mary-Sue I'm not even sure if there are any male equivalents.

They exist, under various nicknames such as Gary Stu or Marty Sue. But they are rarer, because authors usually just take a male canon character to write about, instead of creating an original one.

It's a generational thing. Fanfiction isn't new, but it exploded in popularity in the early 2000s, as the internet became more accessible to the masses, and as Harry Potter fandom exploded among teens. There was a real sense of community that built up as fans waited for each of the seven books to come out, and many turned to fanfiction as a way to stay connected with their fandom friends between books. There wasn't any new content to analyse in the years between books, but if you and your friends wrote stories imagining how it might go, that was something to talk about and keep the bonds alive.

I'm not saying Harry Potter invented fanfic, but it's hard to overstate just how huge the books were among my generation. Millions of kids worldwide, completely enraptured with this fictional world. It catapulted the whole concept of fandom into the mainstream, in a way I don't think could otherwise have happened. Trekkies have been mentioned by others, and they were dedicated, but still a niche. Most other fandoms pre-Potter were the same, as far as I know. Small communities of fan creators. Harry Potter is what brought the numbers to sites like LiveJournal and Fanfiction.net, and made them juggernauts. It's like you had a hundred people in a room and then suddenly you had a thousand. And most of the thousand were girls. It changed the landscape.

The Potter demarcation is why you often see quite a sharp cultural divide between Millennials / Gen Z, and anyone Gen X and above. The older generations will sometimes mock fanfiction as a strange childish hobby people ought to have "grown out of" by a certain age. Because they came of age at time when that kind of thing was only for nerds and anoraks. The younger generations, by contrast, view it the same way they view video games or graphic novels. It's a medium. A genre of content. There can be good and bad and immature content within that medium, but saying it's all bad is throwing the baby out with the bathwater, for us.

(This is a broad generalisation, of course. Obviously there are anomalies on both sides. I've known Gen Z's who wrinkle up their noses at the idea of fanfiction, and I've known women in their fifties writing thousands of words a week between chemotherapy sessions.)

It's a subculture, but one that has exploded in popularity to the point where it's no longer underground. Like K-pop, or superhero movies. It's becoming almost mainstream now.

Oh, I was speaking in jest 😂

I find that depth of character fascinating. But it tends not to appeal to teens. When you're a teen, usually, you're more drawn to stories where the main character is special (and told often by other characters how special they are) and has a grand destiny to save the day, and there's a fast pace and a lot of action propelling the story forward.

Whereas, when you get older, you feel more drawn to characters who are overlooked and a bit beaten down, trying to make the best of a bad lot. The sort of character who looks at themselves in the bathroom mirror occasionally at 3 in the morning and wonders what life is really about.

Those sorts of characters don't often appeal to teenagers, so it's a very different (more relaxed) environment. I cherish that 😂

I suspect the answer to this is that the BBC wanted to include a trans man, but only one who stood a chance of passing. And that's harder to find than you might think. Many of the more "passing" trans men were butch lesbians pre-transition, so they don't fit the bill. To find a trans man who is attracted to men and wants to be on a show like this is already a tall order, but when you add in that they had to be attractive enough to be on the telly and also not look like such an obvious woman in the line up of men?

I suspect the BBC were pulling from a very narrow pool of candidates. It may have been Lars and only Lars.

It really might just have been Lars.

I'm thinking of how it seems to be a requirement of this kind of show that it's always the camp, rather twinkish gay men who get cast. Nobody who brings to mind the rougher side of gay culture.

So if it's a transman who is attracted to gay men and passes well enough to look, at a glance, like a short and effeminate man...

...it really did have to be Lars. Who, to be fair, comes across as quite sweet, but that doesn't stop me being uncomfortable.

@SnoopyPajamas

I feel so old when you describe the HP fandom like that 😅Because I was there, right there when it took off - but I was in a group called "Harry Potter for grown-ups" 😛

"There wasn't any new content to analyse in the years between books"

Like that stopped us. Over-analysing the smallest details was the name of the game. Re-reading the books, again and again. Creating bazillions of theories based on everything and anything.

"I've known women in their fifties writing thousands of words a week between chemotherapy sessions."

I've known people in their 60s and 70s to write fanfic, even some of them taking to it in their later years. And I assume there must be people even older than that out there still doggedly enjoying the hobby that has given them so much pleasure over the decades. It makes me laugh so much when the kiddos these days are horrified that anyone over the ripe old age of 25 should still be writing fic 😂

I'm really interested though, and still don't quite understand, how it so overwhelmingly became straight girls writing canonically straight male characters in gay relationships (or their mental image thereof, which is very unlike gay male sexuality). There's something quite weird happening there.

This is a big complicated answer with a lot of factors, some of which have been touched on already in the thread.

But one of the biggest factors is Tumblr. Tumblr, for the uninitiated, is a microblogging platform that became a huge fandom outlet in the 2010s. People weren't writing fic directly on the platform, but there were a lot of visual edits. Playlists, moodboards, that sort of thing. And a lot of fandom discussion. Some of it was serious analysis, some just fun memes. One of the USPs of Tumblr was that it was an anonymous social media platform. People interacted with you, and built a persona around you, based on the things you chose to share. So you might not know someone's real name or face, but you'd know they made that piece of art you liked and posted about their crippling anxiety once, and you really related to that post. Creators gained followers not through looks, but through personality and fandom clout. Remember this. It will come into play later.

So it's the early 2010s, and gay rights are being pushed to the forefront of pop culture, as the civil rights fight of our time. Lady Gaga just put out Born This Way. Glee is inescapable. America has just legalised gay marriage. Modern Family is getting big. Ellen and Portia are beloved. Ellen Page has come out in a speech that was universally praised for its bravery. Macklemore has released Same Love, and taught the world the power of straight allyship. Gay is in.

Tumblr is a very progressive platform, so naturally, people start loudly declaring what great allies they are. Homosexuality is capturing the imagination of middle class American girls. It feels like the last true struggle for relationships, in the modern age. Girls really romanticise the idea of all that pain and suffering. The idea that society judges you and your family might disown you, but your love is so great you risk it anyway? What could be more romantic? The concept exerts a strong pull on fandom imagination, and it's around this time you see an explosion of gay ships in fanworks.

But of course, the best fanfics are written by gay people. They're the most authentic. Jealousies arise. Discourse begins, about whether or not it's appropriation for a straight person to write gay fanfiction. This all leads exactly where you might expect: to a sudden explosion of "queerness" in fandom circles. Suddenly, every creator is bisexual! Pansexual! Asexual! Demisexual! As long as you have a label that isn't straight, you're good to go.

Then around 2015, trans mania hit and being gay became yesterday's news. Being straight was still passé and the ultimate sin, but now that everyone was identifying as some flavour of the rainbow, being gay didn't get the attention it once did. So girls moved on to identifying as non-binary. A hardcore few, who had really swallowed the propaganda, followed this all the way through to transition. There's a breadcrumb trail that essentially leads from Born This Way to our friend Lars, and it leads through Tumblr. It is my honest opinion that you cannot separate the trans contagion of the 2010s from Tumblr. Tumblr was the crucible in which it was all forged.

I think a lot of people have just become stuck in the Tumblr cultural zeitgeist, and are writing slash fanfiction when they'd secretly much rather be writing hetero fanfiction. But they're stuck on the idea that being straight is boring and a little bit morally wrong, actually, and the way to get really big in fandom is to go gay. I do think we're reaching an oversaturation point though. The pendulum is probably due a swing back.

Slash fanfiction will always be popular with women - but you're right, there used to be more heterosexual pairings in the space. The cultural dominance of TQ in fandom is why the balance is out of wack today. But it'll shift. The TQ has been in ascendence too long. It's becoming something kids cringe at. In a few years I think the landscape will look more like it did in the past.

Yes, there's a definite sense that the gays can have a dating show, but only on the condition straight people would feel comfortable watching it.

It's the same reason lesbian dating show contestants are all high femme and look like they wandered off the set of The Bachelorette. With one token soft butch in the mix, who is permitted a short haircut