Is it okay to be sick of gratuitous gayity?

In real life I’m okay with it, because most people keep their gender preferences under their hats. I know many people who i don’t have the slightest clue about whether they are gay or straight because I don’t ask, they don’t tell, and I don’t care. Be yourself and I might eventually put together the pieces, but it may take a while:

Me, looking through the mail: There’s a letter addressed to our oldest and a Stephanie. Who is Stephanie?

Wife: That’s Rob, who she’s lived with for two years.

Me: Oh. It explains the Jeep.

But TV keeps throwing it in my face. The new Dr Who companion is gay, as is a character in the spinoff, Class. It doesn’t need to be established in the first five minutes, unless it’s critical to the character’s development. Let it grow naturally, as it does IRL with people who aren’t nosy.

Yeesh, does anyone really care if I know who they fuck? FTR, no, I don’t.

Ah yes, the “I’m OK with people being gay, as long as they don’t do it in public” line. I thought that got retired in 2002 or so.

I think you greatly underestimate all the tiny ways straightness IS “in your face” because it’s the “default” sexuality and it’s your own sexual orientation as well.

An example is how I often hear that person x is “flaunting” their gayness when he mentions his boyfriend/husband (or she her girlfriend/wife). But it’s apparently not flaunting your straightness by referring to your wife when you’re a dude?

I like it established rather early. Helps me set up my shipping (I don’t ship straight characters with same sex characters or gay characters with opposite sex characters). No, I don’t have to ship right off - but I admit I often do. Not always, but often. I like shows about friendships without romance. But if there’s going to be romance, I like it set up early and couples stuck to (not a fan of triangles or date-every-other-character-on-show shows). Actual, already-married couples having romance is also nice in plot-heavy shows. The show only dies when UST gets resolved if the show has nothing else to offer.

This. So much this.

Sure, it’ll always be legal to be a homophobe. There will always be a need to have a living reflection of where we used to be in society, mired in ignorance and straight male privilege.
But it isn’t w/o consequences, so buckle up Buttercup.

This.

Hetero is the default so you don’t notice it constantly being show. Guy flirts with girl, guy checks out girl, guy mentions girlfriend are all things that you see extremely often in movies and shows without ever even noticing it.

But guy flirts with guy, guy checks out guy, guy mentions boyfriend are all exactly the same but end up being called “throwing their gayness in your face”.

Until it’s so common that you don’t even notice it, it will be accused of being “in your face”.

I’m pretty old, and it is still uncomfortable for me to refer to my husband instead of “spouse” or some other noncommittal word. So I force myself to do it, when it comes up. It’s hard for me to root out old prejudices (even when they are against myself). Perhaps it’s hard for the OP too.

By the way, OP, a gay person’s life is not all about who you have sex with, it’s about who you find attractive, whether you are more or less likely to have children (I was asked yesterday whether I had grandchildren), whether you’ve been married for only 2 years although you’ve been together for 25, about places where it’s dangerous for you to travel or streets you’d be better off not walking down, about whether you can hold your husband’s hand in public without feeling fear or shame, about “fags” being sprayed on your garage door, it’s about a hundred obvious and subtle differences between my life and the lives I see all around me most of the time. Please don’t grudge us a little accumulating normalcy.

Well the thing is that in a lot of TV shows etc. it is Such A Big Deal. Like, here is the guy’s mom, coming to visit him and his partner for the first time in years, because Dad Does Not Approve. And sure, that stuff happens. But some shows just treat it matter of factly. It’s not a big deal any more.

My mother came out as a lesbian when I was in high school. And, pardon the phrasing, she went though a phase when every.single. part. of her life was about being a lesbian. To a point that was excessive. And it got pretty old fast.

She didn’t get that new recipe for soup from a friend. She got it from a gay friend. She didn’t recommend a new dentist. She recommended a new lesbian dentist. Even my birthday cake came with rainbow frosting that year - and I had asked for chocolate cake with chocolate frosting since that is what I like.

Stuff that never had anything to do with gay/bi/straight at all suddenly was all about it. No, I don’t care that the waitress at the pizza place has a girlfriend. I already know that the guy who cut my hair all through my childhood is gay. And I just did not care.

It was those sorts of everyday things that had nothing to do with sexuality that became frustrating. And I could, and did, separate that from political activism she became involved with. I knew that sexual preference was an issue of importance there. And so I joined her in pride parades, and traveled with her to pride conventions. And I met quite a few leaders in the LGBT community during that time.

A few years later I saw similar expressions from just a few college classmates when they came out. It certainly wasn’t with all gay/lesbian/bi friends but just with a few. I think it was an outpouring of relief at no longer being under the constant prying eyes of family or neighbors who might disapprove. After a period of time things settled down and they started to realize that their sexuality was only a part of who they are. And that we had a friendship regardless of whether he wanted to date Sandy or Dave.

Aw, are the filthy homos getting their gayness all over your nice straight television? Actually the example you give is particularly telling, since Bill being gay isn’t even mentioned in the show, we never hear the words gay or lesbian or homosexual, we just see her fancying a girl at work and meeting another in a club. She never kisses a woman, or touches one, or does anything but meet and chat with one. The fact that you find even such an oblique depiction of a character’s sexuality confronting shows just how deep your tolerance runs: you’re fine with somebody being gay just as long as it is completely hidden, and anything else is rubbing it in your face.

See here in lies the issue, TV shows don’t have characters who happen to be gay they have a gay who happens to be a person. Everything about the character from moment one is about their sexuality and everything in their life revolves around it. BTW it is irritating when they do similar things with straight characters such as Charlie Sheen’s character from two and a half men or even James Bond. I don’t need to see you in bed with a naked woman to prove your manliness I actually think casual sleeping around to be a negitive trait rather than a manly one.

dropzone, I see that you gratuitously flaunt the fact that you have a wife in a recent thread about movies. Didn’t you know that most people keep their gender preferences under their hats? I know many people who I don’t have the slightest clue about whether they are gay or straight because I don’t ask, they don’t tell, and I don’t care. Be yourself and I might eventually put together the pieces, but it may take a while. But no, you have to parade your flamboyant straightness about for all to see, and I for one am sick of having it thrust in my face.

I think the OP is just saying unless he is interested in someone in a sexual way then it doesn’t matter to him whether or not someone is gay or straight or something else but people often make a case about what their sexual orientation is when it really doesn’t matter to the situation at hand.

Of course it’s okay to be sick of it. Things have gotten completely out of hand. Kids won’t even be back in school yet when Halloween decorations hit the stores, and then Christmas stuff will be waiting to move in on November first. Don’t get me wrong, I think holidays are great too, but there is definitely an excess of gaiety in today’s society, and most of it is designed to separate the consumer from his cash.

I don’t know how much TV you watch, but you’ve just named two gay characters. I’m guessing you know at least 20 TV characters who are not gay. It doesn’t seem like 2 out of 20 is “gratuitous”, given the proportion of gay folks in the population. And even if it were out of skew, so what? I don’t think there will be an epidemic of homosexuality in the population just because the audience sees more gay people on TV than in real life.

I don’t think there is anything wrong with noticing the greater prevalence of gay characters in film and TV and feeling “meh” about it. But “sick” is kind of strong. I mean, I get sick of sex scenes, romance stuff, and relationship talk in general, but that’s because I can’t relate to it. It’s incredibly boring to me, and it kind of takes me out of the story. But it doesn’t seem like having a gay character thrown into the storyline should be all THAT distracting given the fact that all characters are typically portrayed as having a sexuality.

Zweisamkeit’s post is pretty much the answer.

But also consider that in popular media it is important for there to be characters that are different than “the norm” so that not only can people who are part of “the norm” see different kinds of people doing both boring and extraordinary things in the same way that they do…but also for people who identify with the “other” to see themselves represented in popular media.

People love the X Men because that group of outsider kids are weirdo mutants and super heroes! Millions of housewives across America now “know” and accept a gay woman because Ellen is so frigging awesome.

Young people are DYING because they feel their different-ness is is not acceptable in their homes, communities or their country. They can be helped by having role models on tv and in movies who are like them. If a character is gay and accepted and spectacular that can save lives. For real.

You can’t establish you’re gay without some sort of demonstration or exhibition. You can’t tell by looking. Gay characters are important, and thus their “gayness” needs to be exposed somehow. This is what you’re “forced” to see.

It’s also important to see strong female characters, black, Asian and Latino characters. It’s important to see characters of different physical ability and different sizes and shapes. But most of that stuff can be determined by visual and audio clues. How do you show “gay” without gay relationships? They can’t and they don’t.

Imagine you had to consume a month of media that was only black people. Movies, tv, newspapers, radio, everything. How much would you feel a part of the world in that month? To never see another face on tv like yours.

Now imagine how it feels every day, for most of the lives of people who are not straight white people.

Ick.

That’s what I thought this thread would be about when I clicked on it.

Exactly, which is why the OP is offensive. He didn’t need to specify “wife.” He could have said “partner” and not rubbed his heterosexuality in everyone’s face.

This same phenomenon happened back in the 60s as it began to be possible to put a black character in a TV show playing and working amongst the otherwise 100% white cast.

Recall that the first interracial kiss on broadcast TV was Kirk & (IIRC) Uhuru in an episode where (IIRC) Kirk lost his mind to some alien love potion. It *barely *cleared the censors and only because that culturally unspeakable horror was portrayed as happening a safe 500-ish years in the future. This was 1965 and we were already well on our way to the Moon. This wasn’t 2 weeks after the end of the Civil War.

Lots of people at the time thought the networks were rubbing their nose in blackness. Fast forward into the 1990s and now lots of commercials for ordinary products have a white man, a vaguely oriental woman, and a black man. Usually with an improbable spread of ages to boot. Commercials today are still very much more of a UN meeting than are most people’s real lives. But it hardly looks out of place now. They’ve become more subtle and we’re far more used to the idea.
Bottom line: Historically TV has represented the dominant subset of American culture exclusively and ignored the rest. Over the last 50 years they’ve been slowly but surely moving towards representing more and more of the non-dominant part. Moving beyond the “fat part of the envelope” and including the “long tail”.

The OP is correct to notice a change in the last couple years. And to notice that gay is sorta the flavor du jour. He’s wrong to read too much into it or to be more than a smidgen discomfited by it.

The whole country has more variety in it than your real life does. The whole world has more variety than your whole country does. We expect TV to show us faraway mountains. It’s past time we get used to TV showing us faraway people. And nearby people who’ve been invisible mostly because we’ve had our eyes screwed shut.

Oh, but it’s okay to flaunt incomprehensibility in our faces? Used to be that we kept that shit hidden.