About time! Kids’ TV sees first lesbian kiss
MY DAUGHTER is two. She has taken to telling anyone who will listen that ‘Mummy and Mama love each other.’ It’s very sweet, but when she says it in a shop or playground, it outs us as a family in a way she has no concept of. Having two mums is completely normal as far as she is concerned. She’s too young to have had anyone try to make her believe otherwise.
I was pleased to see CBBC recently air a gay kiss on teen dance drama The Next Step. It represented a turning point in the network’s efforts to improve diversity. Yet news of the 100-plus complaints it drew left me fearing that one day soon my daughter might come across the kind of bigoted parents (because it is the parents, not their children) who are ‘shocked, saddened and appalled’ by two women kissing.
‘This is an important part of our mission to make sure every child feels like they belong, that they are safe and they can be who they want to be,’ was Children’s BBC’S pitch-perfect response to the complaints. And indeed CBBC and Cbeebies are brilliant at representing families of different races and abilities. But, like most childcentric entertainment, they still have a long way to go in their depiction of gay people.
We have found several picture books that feature families that look like ours, and my daughter loves them and relates to them. But most focus on kids who have a ‘mum’ and ‘dad’. It’s also frustrating that, in the average picture book, human dad is dismissive: telling the child not to do something or coming home and wondering why a tiger has drunk all his beer. (Dads, gay and straight, could campaign for more diverse representation in children’s media.) My friend Stu, who has three adopted kids with his husband, refuses to let his fouryear-old watch Peppa Pig because Daddy Pig is often depicted as incompetent.
I prefer Hey Duggee, a cartoon where a crocodile has an elephant as a mum, a mouse is brought up by a single dad and the grandparents are all bad-asses.
Gay parents can self-select and censor but, once children are of school age, it’s harder to control what they are exposed to, and how they will feel if they rarely see people like their parents.
When I was young it was inconceivable that a children’s programme or book would reference anything other than the most traditional of families and relationships, though we are talking about the early ’80s, when a wooden spoon who travelled in a tin of beans to a button moon was the extent of my formative Tv-watching experience.
We’ve come a long way since then – one of the characters in CBBC football drama Jamie Johnson came out as gay this season, while Will Young read Two Dads as part of its bedtime story series. But each instance was seen as exceptional enough to make the news, and ‘controversial’ enough to warrant moral uproar.
On Some Families, the LGBTQ+ parenting podcast that I co-host, we’ve interviewed a number of children with gay parents and each one told us that they felt nothing but love and pride for their family. But it shouldn’t just be up to queer parents and queer kids to do the work in seeking out diverse representation. Yes, we need more books and more TV shows depicting people like us but, in the meantime, talking to our children about same-sex relationships and families is all of our responsibility. My daughter recently informed me that ‘Some daddies have two mummies,’ and I figured, my work as a parent is done.
Lotte Jeffs co-hosts the Some Families podcast