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A show in 2012 with a large teen audience and a proportionately large gay audience will find itself dealing with the issue of gay teenagers generally and anti-gay bullying specifically at some point. We would have expected no less from Glee and we support the show’s efforts to consider the lives of young gays and help educate other people as to what those lives are really like. But – and we are hoping our brothers of a certain age will back us up here – there comes a point when the effort to educate and be respectful of a group of disenfranchised people tips over into inadvertently redefining them in a new way: victim.
Remember, my brothers? Remember that ten-year period when the mass media definition of “gay man” was “noble, diseased victim?” Is this new trope of gays as noble, weepy, child victims really a step in the right direction? Because just as in the eighties and nineties, when the majority of gay men were not dying of AIDS; the majority of young gay people today are doing relatively okay for themselves. Does this mean there’s no problem to be addressed? Of course not. As we said, we support the show’s efforts, but THREE painful coming out stories in little over a year, each one progressively more dramatic than the next (Kurt: full love and support from all of creation; Santana: public humiliation and estrangement from family members; Dave: suicide attempt) is overkill of the worst degree. And by making each story progressively more damaging to the person who comes out, what the hell is the message they’re trying to send anyway?
And since we’re stepping in it, we may as well grind our feet into the mess a little: kids only get so much out of “It Gets Better.” You know why? Kids, by their very natures, are not forward-looking; everything is RIGHT NOW and of the HIGHEST IMPORTANCE. We can’t think of any message from an adult more condescending to a teenager than “Shh. It’s okay. Just dream of ten years from now.” Especially since the message of “It Gets Better” pretty much accepts anti-gay bullying as an inevitability; something for the kid to just hunker down and get through. In other words: the message of “It Gets Better,” whether it intends it or not (and obviously, it didn’t) is that the victims of anti-gay bullying have to do the work of dealing with it, but no one else does. “You’re on your own, kid. Chin up. The good news is, you might be happy in a decade.