In fairness to DS9, they (to a value of 'they' being the creative team but seemingly not the producers) did try, and handled the Trill same-sex attraction storyline much better than the same theme done in TNG with Crusher.
Re: the bisexual men, thinking about this it's sort of what happens in 'Brideshead Revisited' and quite a lot of Dickens, Wilkie Collins albeit with less specifically defined male-male love as a starting point - young man has intense relationship with 'dear friend', young man meets nice woman (who, in many cases, it is made clear is not an intellectual equal like the man or even really 'friend' material, but probably pretty and vulnerable), young man 'grows up' and marries woman whilst also doing things like learning responsibility in business... [I just finished watching the BBC's version of 'Our Mutual Friend', which has such a friendship and whilst the BBC doesn't make the 'abandoned' half of it in any way explicitly queer, they very much present him as in love with his friend and left alone at the end when Sweeping Heterosexual Happiness has engulfed everyone else in all the plot lines. It's an intriguingly bittersweet choice. I suppose I'll have to read the book to see if it echoes Dickens, although I can't say I enjoyed the story much... full of highly creepy male behaviour that was never called out]
I find it very interesting that the 'gay agenda' complaints camp never seem to have anything to say about Thomas in Downton Abbey. I might speculate that this is becuase he is (a) broadly dislikeable (b) constantly 'punished' (c) never has a partner (d) unhappy and also many of the other, otherwise sympathetic, popular characters express a great deal of homophobia about him... But then if I were to start listing my issues with DA I'd run out of comment space.
I had a good conversation once with a boy who was confused as to why I thought there weren't enough women in 'House'. He pointed out that there were two (!), I pointed out that there were, at that time, five central male characters and asked him if he'd feel men were under-represented if the show had 2 men and 5 women. He told me he'd never thought about it like that before, and I had a point...
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2013-01-30 10:24 am (UTC)Re: the bisexual men, thinking about this it's sort of what happens in 'Brideshead Revisited' and quite a lot of Dickens, Wilkie Collins albeit with less specifically defined male-male love as a starting point - young man has intense relationship with 'dear friend', young man meets nice woman (who, in many cases, it is made clear is not an intellectual equal like the man or even really 'friend' material, but probably pretty and vulnerable), young man 'grows up' and marries woman whilst also doing things like learning responsibility in business... [I just finished watching the BBC's version of 'Our Mutual Friend', which has such a friendship and whilst the BBC doesn't make the 'abandoned' half of it in any way explicitly queer, they very much present him as in love with his friend and left alone at the end when Sweeping Heterosexual Happiness has engulfed everyone else in all the plot lines. It's an intriguingly bittersweet choice. I suppose I'll have to read the book to see if it echoes Dickens, although I can't say I enjoyed the story much... full of highly creepy male behaviour that was never called out]
I find it very interesting that the 'gay agenda' complaints camp never seem to have anything to say about Thomas in Downton Abbey. I might speculate that this is becuase he is (a) broadly dislikeable (b) constantly 'punished' (c) never has a partner (d) unhappy and also many of the other, otherwise sympathetic, popular characters express a great deal of homophobia about him... But then if I were to start listing my issues with DA I'd run out of comment space.
I had a good conversation once with a boy who was confused as to why I thought there weren't enough women in 'House'. He pointed out that there were two (!), I pointed out that there were, at that time, five central male characters and asked him if he'd feel men were under-represented if the show had 2 men and 5 women. He told me he'd never thought about it like that before, and I had a point...