Going beyond The L Word
Lesbian-driven entertainment flourishes online as primetime underwhelms
From such primetime standbys as Grey’s Anatomy and Glee to the new Ellen DeGeneres-produced sitcom One Big Happy, it may seem like there’s an awful lot of women who are attracted to other women on television. Yet GLAAD’s annual roundup of LGBT representation on TV found that just 3.9% of regular characters on American series shown on primetime broadcast networks in the 2014-15 season are gay, lesbian or bisexual — a total of just 32 characters. That’s down from the record high of 4.4% in 2012.
However, most of those characters are gay men, and the lesbian and bisexual female characters that do exist easily fall into familiar tropes. Like the lesbian who falls for her (typically straight) best friend. Or the “sweeps week” lesbian who has a bi-curious tr yst just long enough to squeeze in some titillating scenes and get the ratings up before returning to men. Or the girl-on-girl relationship that ends in some sort of drawn-out tragedy.
That’s not to say these aren’t scenarios that don’t play out in real life, but it seems a rarity to find a lesbian character whose sexuality is a legitimate character trait rather than a plot device. In the absence of wellrounded lesbian and bisexual women in mainstream entertainment, online and independent projects are finding a foothold with an audience hungry for authentic representation.
In November 2012, Sarah Rotella and Adrianna DiLonardo created the YouTube video “Lesbians Will Marry Your Boyfriends.”
The joke was that if more U.S. states didn’ t legalize same-sex marriage, lesbians would use their love of sports and video games to steal away straight dudes. It quickly went viral.
Two years later, “The Gay Women Channel” has garnered more than 34 million views and nearly 212,000 subscribers, and Rotella and DiLonardo put out two or three videos a week focusing on lesbian culture. “Most film and television lesbian roles are just literally about their sexuality” DiLonardo says. “I know there’s Orphan Black and Orange Is The New Black, kind of the first shows to show ...”
“... lesbians and bisexuals and trans people are people,” finishes Rotella.
With their sights now set on producing a feature-length film, the Toronto-based duo, both 28, turned to Kickstarter for funding, and the response was overwhelming, having more than doubled
Queer audiences will watch a show even if it’s bad just because there’s lesbian characters in it
their initial $40,000 goal. With $92,000 and counting raised, Almost Adults will start filming in May and tells the story of two best friends in their last year of college — one straight, one gay.
“I didn’t want to make the film another lesbian cliché, because there’s so many movies about two best friends and one’s straight and one’s gay and they fall in love,” says DiLonardo, who wrote the film’s script.
“As much as that actually does happen in real life, there’s also a lot of friends where one’s straight and one’s gay and they do not like each other at all. They will never fall in love. They’re like sisters.”
The lead of Almost Adults wil l be played by El is e Bauman, a Canadian actress who also starred in Carmilla, a web series about a girl and her vampire roommate with LGBT characters and an intensely active fan base. The series aired on the YouTube channel of Vervegirl magazine and received funding from tampon maker U by Kotex — and the first season has more than 13.4 million combined views.
Like the Gay Women Channel, Carmilla tapped into an audience of young lesbian and bisexual women seeking both a sense of community and representation in entertainment. Carmilla’s creators tapped into that fan base proactively, interacting with fans on social media and sharing art and fan-fiction made by their viewers. It’s that same sort of interactivity that DiLonardo and Rotella attribute to the response to their own work.
“Queer audiences [are] a particular kind of audience. Very savvy on one hand but on other hand sort of desperate — desperate to see queer characters but at the same time they’re never good enough for us, and for good reason,” says Marusya Bociurkiw, an associate professor of media theory at Ryerson University and co-director of The Studio for Media Activism and Critical Thought.
“We will watch a show even if it’s sh---y just because there’s lesbian characters in it. And we’re invested in coming back just for that relationship,” Rotella says.
It’s a phenomenon that stretches back to The L Word, a scripted drama series that followed a glamorous group of lesbians in Los Angeles. Even though it’s been off the air for six years, it has still retained a particular status among many lesbians, whether they loved it or loved to hate it.
“The L Word was famously appointment viewing, and people have gatherings and parties and so on and there was change to go, ‘Oh, my God, that’s so stupid’ or, ‘ Oh, wow, she’s so hot,’ ” says Bociurkiw.
That, however, has changed over time, according to Bociurkiw. Younger generations no longer wait for underwhelming shows to appear in their designated cable time slot and can seek out more diverse representations in digital platforms, like YouTube or other streaming services.
Break-out hits like Orange Is The New Black or Transparent, which only aired on Netflix and Amazon Prime, respectively.
With crowdfunded initiatives in particular, Bociurkiw says, “There’s a kind of community ownership of the film that happens.”