It's a Straight, Straight, Queer Universe

This article was originally published in Happiness Patrol Episode One back in about 1996. It used to be up on the website, but now that Geocities is no more (well, just about) you're sadly not going to be able to find too much of that online anymore. End of an era that.

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The game is this. Take a TV show. Any one will do. And pick the character you'd most like to be the same sexuality as you. (Straights need not play for the simple reason that most characters out there are straight, but be welcome to stretch your imagination a bit and play with the idea that some may be gay, or even bisexual, or straight and open to experimentation...) All of a sudden, those winks between Kira and Dax have new meaning, or Ace and Shou Yuing's youthful hi-jinks, or Garak and Dr Bashir... and this is the basis for slash fiction.

I was going to write about an activity that we engage in all the time when watching TV or movies. Something that popped up in my head while watching the first and second episodes of season two of Star Trek: Voyager (well, many times before that, but it hadn't made itself so urgently felt before) and that's the way we sexualise the relationships in a show that is so fucking coy about sex!

Episode one, called "the 37s", I think, deals with our intrepid crew landing the Voyager on a planet and finding a bunch of frozen abductees (as Mulder would call them). The bunch include Amelia Earhart, the aviator who disappeared in 1937 near New Guinea. Well, the looks between her and Capt Janeway were amazing! It was as if Janeway joined Star Fleet because she was in love with this woman!

I was going to write only about "queering" straight TV, but this is more important.

Some months ago I was at a dinner party with some close friends. One of them said something that ended up really disturbing me. I was too sloshed at the time (as was everyone else) to say something but mumble a polite response. Who wants to fight over identity politics when you're amongst friends? But, it has kept at me, festering and making me feel quite angry.

Context: there were six of us-three women, three men, five gay. The odd one out in the sexuality stakes was the one who made the comment: they were pleased to have had a recent holiday amongst heterosexuals. They needed a break from people going on and on and on about ABBA, disco, drag, queer politics, etc.

Fair comment. At times that ceaseless talk on those topics can be demanding. As a dyke, I find it a bit trying at times to be trapped in a room full of people (gay and straight) gabbing about the sexual attractiveness of men.

But-

What has niggled at me was that this is a straight world. All a straight person has to do to escape gay talk (should they be in the unusual situation of ever being trapped amongst too many gays) is turn on the TV or radio, look at a mainstream paper or magazine, go to their work or place of study, or even just walk down an average street and go into a pub (though not in some suburbs, of course, like Darlinghurst, Erskineville, Newtown or Leichhardt in Sydney). For a gay person, it's different. We have to seek out our own to talk about things that matter to us. I still find it odd to be able to sit in a pub with a group of friends and watch attractive women walk past. It's odd because I have never, until recently, been able to pander to my natural predilection.

We're human, and like any human we have this drive to seek out those who have things in common. It's a simple communication thing. It's easier to talk to people when you have terms of reference in common. We're all Doctor Who fans, and though some of us have a problem with that label, we still all gravitate towards people who share our love of that series. A fair proportion of us also ended up being gay, and it's natural that we constantly go on about that other thing we have in common.

Work anecdote: One of my colleagues got married in a quiet civil service at about the same time as my then girlfriend and I signed the contract for our house--it's the closest thing to legal togetherness as we'll get unless the law changes. Other work colleagues know that, but who do you think got the cake and special morning tea?

Another anecdote: I read as widely as possible, and like to read the weekend papers for their arts pages and try to keep up with their wacky headlines. Besides, I like the feeling of getting angry at stupid things. Like sex, it lets me know that I am indeed still alive. Anyway, something that keeps pulling me up and giving me that whack-in-the-face feeling is the number of times I've recently read things like the following: Article on female supermodels, accentuating their sexual allure, with comment; "You can tell this was written by a man." Oh yeah? kathryn dawn lang could've written some of those lines about Cindy Crawford. It really is a big (and wrong) assumption to claim that all men are sexually interested in women, and all women are attracted to men. And yet it persists, even in recent academic work.

Another anecdote. During the Olympic Games in Atlanta there were comments about athletes' partners being there to help cheer them on and congratulate them when they won a medal... but only if they were straight. The gay ones remained mysteriously single and alone.

But, you all know that. They are just examples of how straight the world is.

Queering straight TV/film/whatever annoys the hell out of even the most tolerant straights. I am imagining significant looks between two cute female leads, but so what. When you live in a world that has popular culture soaked in a puritan sexuality, and sex that has a result in the old (some say natural, I say prevalent) boybeing-meets-girlbeing and has babybeing formula, it's only natural to want to subvert that dominant paradigm when reality is different. As someone quoted in Alexander Doty's It's All Perfectly Queer (1993) says, "We're so starved, we go see anything because something is better than nothing." Queering straight culture--seeing two guys or two girls' look at each other in that way--is a result of that starvation.

But, hey, haven't I got it okay? I mean, there's been a huge number of TV shows and movies with gay characters in it recently, I live in a city (Sydney, Australia) where I can buy a home with my girl, and party at three major gay and lesbian events each year.

If it does sound like a big inconsequential whinge, then you must be straight and therefore not able to notice (or really care) about the discrimination that does exist. I live in a city where the major daily newspaper regularly slags of gays at every opportunity. They even blamed gays for the famous death of a teenager last year. She took ecstasy and died. Gays hold the most successful dance parties, ecstasy is taken by some gays, so therefore gays "led the way" to her death (according to Sydney's Daily Telegraph).

Yeah, this is a whinge, but it's a valid whinge. I enjoy queering the TV shows and movies that I watch for two reasons. One, it's fun, and two, it's a matter of staying sane. I need to talk queer-talk, I need to queer-up the straight world in which I live because it ain't queer enough.

In the words of the chips ad that stars "Elaine" from Seinfeld, "Stuff 'em!" if anyone says that queering the straight is wrong.