There’s no ‘one size fits all’ when it comes to representation, you cannot create the perfect queer character that represents everyone, it’s simply not possible. Besides the issue of intersecting forms of oppression (i.e. sex, race, class, disability and sexuality), there’s also the fact that people are just different. People have different personalities, interests, talents, styles and so on. There is no single character that everyone can relate to completely.
In some internet circles a strange dichotomy of queer representation (which I will be focusing on as it’s what applies to me and what appears to stir the most discourse) has been created. Some people have decried many characters as problematic representation, and those who like these characters, and have begun to uphold a new ideal for queer representation. This new style of approved representation creates a character that is relatable to a very narrow range of queer people, they’re often young, usually white, their issues either have nothing to do with their queerness or is exclusively their queerness, though their queerness is often treated as nothing more than a personality quirk. These characters are uncomplicated and their queerness is palatable to a mass audience. And though it’s the most often referenced movie in his sphere, I’ve not seen Love, Simon, but I have seen Easy A, Clueless, The Old Guard, Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Pride, A Single Man, Mean Girls and many others.
While I enjoyed every single one of these movies and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with these characters and their stories existing, I just don’t think that they’re the only representation that should exist.
Some argue that characters like the one Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays in Mysterious Skin, Neil, are problematic because of their complicated feelings, actions and the things that are depicted happening to him. The fact that the book was written by a gay man and was adapted into a movie by another gay man is somehow irrelevant to this argument. And while I agree that Neil is a transgressive and complicated character, problematic is a loaded term that has almost no fixed meaning besides ‘something that is personally upsetting to me’ which of course is different things to different people. And while there are many things within Mysterious Skin that are upsetting, it depicts things that really happen to real people and it touched me deeply. As many have begun to say ‘depiction is not endorsement’ and these stories are important to tell, they may be problematic or upsetting but so is life.
This isn’t to dismiss the worries and concerns that surround the representation of marginalised people. There are too many outright offensive depictions out there to even begin to count, the predatory gay man, the masculinised ‘ugly’ man-hating lesbian, the promiscuous and unfaithful bisexual, the deceptive transgender woman, and I could go on and on. I want to clarify that I’m not out here say that these representations have a right to exist. No one, hopefully, is arguing that Dressed to Kill or Sleepaway Camp or Ace Ventura were important, accurate or good depictions of the transgender experience.
What I am talking about are the flawed and complicated characters that feel like real people, people I can relate to as someone who is also flawed and complicated. And this is why I enjoy and usually prefer these so called problematic characters, characters such as Hedwig of Hedwig and the Angry Inch.
Hedwig, the movie and the character therein, is another transgressive story and character that touched me deeply. And while it’s important to note that this is the story of a transgender person (possibly non-binary though this wasn’t a widely used term at the time of the movie’s creation) was written, directed and acted by two cisgender gay men, which has the effect of the depiction being clumsy and somewhat ignorant while also well intentioned. As a messy non-binary person who hasn’t always treated those around them with the greatest kindness or care, I found Hedwig validating and the movie allowed me to consider myself and my own actions from another perspective. Hedwig does and says some pretty awful things in the pursuit of her goal, she withholds the passports of her band members, is continuously awful to her current husband, gets entangled in a brawl, stalks and harasses her ex Tommy and the people who work for him. And that’s not to mention to contentious relationship between her and the teenaged Tommy which is a part of the movie that I do have criticisms of, while her sexual grooming of Tommy is detestable and disgusting, her grooming of him to become her ideal of a rockstar and lover is interesting and important to Hedwig and Tommy’s characters. It’s a story about someone who looks for love everywhere else but within themselves and when she finally looks within, giving up on her obsessions and vain attempts to regain something she never really had, she lets go of all these toxic beliefs and that allows her to grow as a person and to begin to right her wrongs. Without much of the things that make her imperfect and problematic, Hedwig’s story would not be half as impactful.
One character does not represent a whole community, they cannot and they should not. This phenomenon of needing a character to be a paragon of whatever identity they’re representing has only come about because of a severe lack of diverse characters in media to date. While this is getting better there’s still a long way to go.
The goal of diverse representation is not to create the one prefect representation of a specific identity and to stop there, it is instead to have as many varying characters of all kinds of people as there have historically been for able-bodied, straight, white, cisgender men. It’s important that people are able to see how different we are, to have experiences of people who are different from them, and arguably more important that people are able to see themselves in fiction too.
The Captive Returns 