TV’s stuck in legitimising gay couples

Actor Jordan Gavaris, who is gay in real life, feels television content is “preoccupied with legitimising being gay”, and says he would like to see more stories with gay protagonists. He feels the focus of such stories should not be on the sexuality.“I think we are still stuck and preoccupied with legitimizing being gay on television, or legitimizing gay couples. There’s still a lot of coming-out stories. There’s still a lot about a struggle with what it means to be gay in a homophobic world. There’s nothing wrong with those stories. I love those stories, but we need other stories, too. I’m really interested in stories, like mysteries, for example, with gay protagonists. Why not? Theirpreoccupation is not with their coming out. The story is not about their sexuality,” vulture.com quoted Gavaris as saying.

Gavaris plays Felix Dawkins, who is also gay, in Orphan Black. The actor, who revealed that he came out to his family at 19, was shocked when the interviewer asked whether he was gay or not. “Nobody ever asks me. I’ve never been asked. Like, the whole course of the series,” he said. He hopes for a world where there is no need to “politicise your sexuality any more than someone needs to politicise their race. I hope that one day, the world gets to a place where you don’t need to politicise your sexuality any more than someone needs to politicise their race - that we can just act and we can exist in this Zeitgeist, telling stories about one another. And that no one’s afraid, maybe, to come out. But also that no one’s really hyper obsessed with knowing whether or not someone’s gay. That would be an amazing world to live in, where people don’t feel the need to protect themselves and other people don’t feel the need to launch an inquisition.”