Text, Subtext, and Pieced-Together Lives – Angelia Sparrow

Angelia Sparrow has done something in this essay I wouldn’t have thought possible — she made me want to go back and rewatch X-Men 3.

As I look ahead to the last batch of guest posts, I’m trying to decide whether to take another break before posting the rest. There’s a lot to process and think about in these things … what do you think?

Once upon a time—all the best stories start that way—once upon a time, there were no gay people on TV, except Billy Crystal on “Soap,” and certainly no lesbians. I joke that lesbians weren’t invented until the 1990s, and for all our pop-culture representation, we might as well not have been.

I grew up in the 70s and 80s, not a great time to be gay to start with. The world was starting to acknowledge we were real, but the plague lay sore upon the land, and “Unclean” was not an atypical reaction. Pastors were preaching against gay people with the same vigor they had recently discovered for abortion after school segregation became a toxic issue with their congregations.

I’m a middle-aged married byke now, with four kids, two of whom are bisexual. I had no clue when I was six why I wanted to be Batgirl, other than the motorcycle and long red hair and librarian and apartment of her own. Lesbians weren’t even mentioned, except Billie Jean King, and I couldn’t be an athlete. Add in a lot of the aforementioned bad religion, and my generation learned to hide.

My daughters got subtext and the occasional relationship, but they still didn’t see much of themselves in media. Willow and Tara on “Buffy” were one of the first lesbian couples on TV, and certainly the first we watched with the kids. Seeing my approval of that relationship helped my oldest daughter, Victoria, come out to me in 2005. But Willow went from “I’m with Oz” straight to “I’m with Tara” gay without even acknowledging the possibility of bisexuality. And that hurt. It felt like a glaring omission, a negation.

Victoria went through the same media I had, twenty years before. And the problem movies and “dead in the third reel” stuff depressed her and bored her. Xena and Gabrielle were the only characters she saw having relationships with both men and women. She wanted to know if she was going to have to die young.

About this time, George Takei came out. Victoria had a huge Sulu crush to start with, and seeing him as an old man, older than her grandfather, and knowing he was gay, reassured her she did not have to die before thirty. We started looking for other, older media figures who were out, and found a few. But again, almost all were gay. Bisexuality was not an obvious thing, and something very few admitted to.

My youngest, Olivia, saw subtext before she could read. She loved Smallville and would lie on my tummy on the couch and watch it. We watched season 3, episode 2, when Lex gives the deed to the Kent farm over. Her eyes got big and she watched Clark and Lex, and then announced, “Clark love him, Mommy!”

In 2006, we saw X-Men 3. The movie gets a lot of scorn, but for us, it was a real turning point. Remember, this was the year after the Summer of Zach. We had joined with the local community to protest Love In Action, a reparative therapy center, because of Zach Stark, a teenager who had been forced into its program and left a list of the rules on his MySpace, exposing it. Our local movie critic called X3’s mutant cure “Love in Action in a syringe.” We had figured out a long time ago that the X-Men franchise wasn’t really about mutants. So we went. Victoria and I came from the movie with different takeaways, but we both saw exactly what was happening in the real world on the screen.

The cure. The ordinary humans fighting us (this was the same year eight states passed anti-marriage amendments). The radicalization of more marginalized factions. It was all there, with more explosions than necessary. We started getting more involved in the community. I volunteered at the Gay and Lesbian Community Center. Victoria became active in the local youth group. And my fundamentalist husband joined PFLAG.

Now, almost a decade later, we still piece together the existence of bisexuals in the margins of our media. There are gay characters in almost every genre, and they’re no longer limited to minstrelry or villainy. But bisexuals are rarer and almost always female. Irene Adler on the BBC Sherlock is presented as bisexual, Sarah Lance on Arrow. The very pansexual Jack Harkness, Brittany on Glee. They do, however, exist.

There are out media personalities, and some identify as bisexual. And this, too helps. My youngest, now in her teens, dates boys and girls alike. She listens to Lady Gaga, enjoys Misha Collins on Supernatural (the first out poly star), and knows they’re bisexual. Her media world is very different from mine, and hopefully a more welcoming one.

Angelia Sparrow is the queer pagan liberal that Pat Robertson warned you about. She has been writing professionally since 2004, when she sold her first short story, “Prey,” to Torquere Press’ Monsters anthology. Since then she has published a dozen novels, with everyone from Ellora’s Cave to Storm Moon Press, and over eighty short stories. She writes SF/F/H, often with a queer bent. 

Her work can be found at http://brooksandsparrow.com  and she can be found at valarltd on livejournal, Pintrest and Tumblr and Angelia Sparrow on facebook.