Positively Prime Time

I was just shy of sixteen. My best friend and I were talking about a show, Picket Fences. The previous night they had a scene where two high school girls kissed. One asked the other if she’d ever wondered what it would be like to kiss a girl. She hadn’t but she agreed to kiss her friend anyway. This was the first image of women kissing I remember seeing that wasn’t in my brother’s pornography collection.

As my friend and I talked about the episode, both of us nervously excited, I wondered what would happen if I asked her if she wanted to try kissing a girl. I didn’t ask her. Maybe it was fear. Maybe it was that despite the fact that I love my friend and she is gorgeous, I have never been attracted to her. Maybe I had just begun dating another woman. Maybe it was because I knew I was a lesbian and had known for years so the pressing need for exploration and validation of feelings and curiosity had already been satisfied.

Regardless of why we didn’t kiss, or why I didn’t take that moment to come out to her or she to me, that show was exciting. It allowed us to indirectly talk about our feelings, our curiosity, and to see two women our age kiss in a non-pornographic way. But that show was ultimately about experimenting and not about coming home to one’s sexual identity.

When I entered college, Ellen DeGeneres came out. A big crowd gathered in the main student common area to watch. There was hoopla throughout the nation. Gay bars everywhere watched the episode and conservatives everywhere tried to ban the show. I still have the cover of Time with Ellen that says “Yup I’m Gay”.

Will and Grace has survived in prime time for four seasons. Despite the fact that if you watched it without volume you may not know that Will is gay and he and Grace aren’t really a couple, it is still is a show with two gay characters and it has won several Emmy’s in 2000 and 2001 and has had relatively little opposition.

A show some might think would be fluffy and trivial on the matter, Buffy the Vampire Slayer actually explored many issues of a young woman coming out. The show explored her fear of her friends not being okay with her sexuality. Then the fear after she told them, wondering if her best friend really was okay with it or was just pretending. The show also dealt with issues of being in a relationship for the first time and the fear that many of us have had that we aren’t gay enough. That there is some indefinable number of women you must kiss before you can truly define yourself as bisexual or lesbian.

On cable, Queer as Folk provides a glimpse into the friendships of five gay men and two lesbians. They deal with issues like harassment in school, hate crimes, co-parenting and legal issues associated with it, HIV, both the fear of getting it and dating someone who has HIV and family reactions to being queer. There’s a lot of sex in the show and it probably glamorizes the lives of gay men, but it also deals with a lot of the issues that face queers in today’s society.

A couple of weeks ago, many of the issues concerning queer youth were talked about on Once and Again. One of the main characters, Grace helps set up the gay-straight alliance and gives a presentation to a school administrator about the importance of sponsoring a queer dance because it is critical to not only to protect queer youth from harassment but to also guard against the invisibility that leads to depression and suicide. Meanwhile her stepsister Jessie realizes her best friend Katie is gay and has a crush on her when Katie writes her a love letter. Katie comes over and they kiss and the show ends with Jessie lying on the bed after Katie leaves looking completely happy and love- struck.

As I watched this episode it brought me back to my high school days and that conversation with my friend and I couldn’t help but wonder how it might have been different for me had we had these examples to talk about. I wonder if I’d seen something like Buffy, Once and Again or the Queer as Folk episodes where Justin works on bringing a gay-straight alliance to his school what kind of impact it could have had on me and what kind of benefit it provides today’s queer youth.

I didn’t come out in high school, I’m not sure why, but I can’t help but wonder if I had seen these shows back then if I would have gotten involved then in the advocacy I’m involved in now. I can’t help but wonder if before I came out if I had been exposed to the facts about the impacts of homophobia on youth if I might have been able to find the strength to come out in comfort of a cause.

What I do know is that in the last eight years the quality of queer images in the media has improved and that two young women talking after Buffy, Once and Again or Queer as Folk will have so many more meaningful things to discuss than kissing out of curiosity. They now have something that can spur them into discussions about how homosexuality is addressed in their schools and what it would be like to be openly gay.

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