LGBTQ+ Representation in Children's Media - A Video Essay

in february 2005 the pbs show postcards from buster struck a chord within the united states because of an episode that planned to air in the first week of that month the episode was pulled from over 300 pbs stations got thousands of letters in backlash and was condemned by the us government a single episode of one children's television show enveloped the entire country in a culture war why you ask because the episode in question featured a queer couple in a children's television show cut to 15 years later it's 2020. she-ra and the princesses of power just finished a five-season long run on netflix children's broadcast networks like nickelodeon and cartoon network have all featured some forms of queer representation in the past and have talks about plans to do more in the future so what changed during these 15 years for children's television and what happened before 2005 to set up the stage for all of this so i'm an adult who loves children's television it has a formula the power of love usually wins in the end and it's just the best but i'm also a really huge believer in the idea that just because the media is meant for kids doesn't mean that it shouldn't be good children's television deserves good characterization good plot lines interesting characters and more but another thing that children's tv deserves is representation especially queer representation historically queer representation in children's tv has faced a lot of backlash for example let's take a look at that postcards from buster episode i mentioned earlier so if you didn't know postcards from buster was a pbs spin-off show of arthur the show about the talking aardvark family yes arthur and his family were aardvarks the whole time not bears not mice aardvarks for reference this is a real-life artwork this is arthur's family looks about right anyways the show was about arthur's friend buster making video postcards while he traveled across north america and the world with his dad along the way buster meets new people and new families and runs into new cultures the historic 2005 episode was basically just more of that buster visits a town in vermont learns about maple sugar and meets a few kids while he's there hey you must be buster involved hi buster i'm gillian hi gillian hi you wanna come on in come on karen those kids happen to have two moms who are a couple and that's really it at the time vermont was one of the few states in the u.s to legalize civil unions for same-sex couples so it's not like this episode did not fit with the overall theme for postcards from buster buster goes to new places meets different people sees how they live and then moves on to the next place but that didn't stop pbs from getting an overwhelming amount of backlash that backlash was amplified when margaret spellings the u.s education secretary at the time demanded that pbs return any and all federal funding that was used to produce the episode her reasoning parents shouldn't have their kids exposed to the lesbian queer lifestyles in the programming that they expect to be safe spelling's rationale is bad plain and simple but let's actually break down why it's wrong because it highlights one of the main reasons why queer representation is so hard to come by in children's television a lot of anti-lgbtq propaganda revolves around the myth of queer sexual deviancy queer people are more likely to do inappropriate sexual activity queer people are more likely to spread stis queer people are more likely to be sexual predators that sort of thing once you equate all of this with being queer then it makes queer representation inappropriate for kids to consume alongside this there is the additional myth that if you introduce lgbtq identities to young people they'll become confused about their own sexuality and gender which obviously isn't true if a person is queer then they're queer the faster and less stressfully they're able to figure that out is a welcome gift and representation can help with that this is the real reason why people like margaret spellings argue that positive queer representation is wrong for young people it's all about a fear of normalization when queer people are depicted without being demonized stereotyped or hypersexualized the more their existence becomes typical normalization matters for both queer and non-queer kids queer kids deserve to see their identities represented and respected on screen and oftentimes they need to have their existences normalized for themselves at the same time non-queer kids are more likely to be geared toward accepting queer identities if they see them represented on screen last year the lgbtq class media monitoring organization glaad released the results of a study about queer rep and non-queer americans they found that people who aren't queer but are exposed to queer media images are increasingly accepting of and more comfortable around lgbtq plus people okay so positively depicting queer identities on screen is good for queer kids because they deserve representation it's good for non-queer kids because they also deserve to see representation but why else is representation good for media especially for kids media because to be honest adults consume more of it than they think whether you're a parent an older sibling a person who takes care of kids for a living or maybe you just really like watching content for kids you are indirectly and directly consuming the messaging in children's media all the time even if you don't fully realize it and that normalization effect on kids it affects adults too okay so now we understand why queer representation matters for children's media but let's create a timeline together and delve into the history of how queer representation has been done in the past and how that's changed over time [Music] so some of the earliest youth accessible examples of queer representation were in after-school special type programs after-school specials were essentially a genre that often times dealt with topical social issues relevant to teenagers so think substance abuse divorce bullying sexual assault teen pregnancy distracted driving that sort of thing don't do drugs if you're doing it stop it get some help back in the 70s 80s and early 90s cbs nbc and abc all had their own anthology programs that fulfilled this genre usually focusing on a different issue each episode the shows usually aired in the afternoon when school was finished for the day hence the name after school special unless you count shows like degrassi which i take is just a long series of after school specials this genre died out for the most part it's easy for us now to look back at some of these after-school specials and laugh but they did have an impact on people growing up and they were a huge part of what it meant to be a young person growing up pre-internet the specials that talk about queerness frame it in the same way as episodes focusing on topics like drug addiction suicide and more which let's be clear being queer isn't the same as any of that it's not a behavior you can control like distracted driving and it's not a health problem like alcoholism it's just a part of life these specials would represent queerness as something that causes unwarranted negativity for young people the overall message would be that you shouldn't ever mistreat someone for their sexual orientation but that doesn't necessarily mean that it's a positive representation of queerness being queer in these films is oftentimes vilified and it's the problem of the premise it's a happy ending as long as no one gets too hurt or dies you can probably still track down these specials on old dvd box sets but plenty of them have been uploaded to the internet over the years so let's take a look at a few of them the first is the truth about alex which was released in 1986 and then premiered on hbo the following year it's not technically an after-school special it's actually a made-for-tv movie that was based on a novel published in 1981 but it has the same vibe and fulfills the same role in people's memory that after school specials do the movie focuses on the story of alex prager a popular high school football player and aspiring pianist until he comes out as gay after that his school and the town turn against him now if you had to guess who the main character is did you guess alex well you'd be wrong about that because the main character is actually alex's straight best friend scott the tagline for the movie is literally what does a guy do when he's straight and finds out that his best friend isn't another one of these specials is what if i'm gay which let's be real if you clicked on this video at some point in your teen years you googled this phrase the episode titled what if i'm gay came out in 1987 and it was part of the cbs after school special series it was about a teenaged boy named todd who's very macho and traditionally masculine his straight guy friends figure out that he's closeted when they stumble upon a gay porn magazine hidden in his room he tells them that he bought it because there was a great weightlifting article inside but i don't think the excuse fooled anyone because news soon gets around school and then todd is stuck dealing with the homophobic backlash alex and todd's stories both represent empathetic views towards queer people they ask for tolerance which is pretty fitting for the time but it's not exactly the positive queer youth story that we're searching for nowadays instead of focusing on the boy's internal struggles navigating their sexuality we instead focus on the consequences of coming out the issue with heteronormative backlash basically what it's like to be queer through the eyes of straight people one example is the 1993 special other mothers which is about two women who are romantic partners and are raising a son together when they move to a new place their son will transfers to a new school and the story divides up between him and his mom's will pretends for a while to his peers that he is a father at home while the moms run into problems with the other school parents who don't see their relationship as legitimate mostly because they're gay but also because they're unmarried which hey it's not like that was actually legal at this point in time but okay there's also another element to this linda is will's birth mom so the other parents see her as a real parent but not her partner paula because paula legally can't be will's stepmom even though she's been parenting will for almost his entire life alongside linda in their eyes paula is not a real mom she's just one of those other mothers the last queer after school special we're going to talk about is titled more than friends it focuses on two teenage girls who find out that they're attracted to one another and fall in love as a result of that they end up having to deal with homophobic backlash from their families and their community that backlash ends up becoming more tangible when one of the girls is beat up and sent to the hospital but like i said before in these films it's considered a happy ending as long as no one gets too hurt or dies like the stories about queer men other mothers and more than friends focus on tolerance rather than acceptance which again is pretty appropriate for the time i will say more than friends have these cute moments of levity where there's this one scene the girls go to get clothes for prom because they're like we're going to go to prom we're going to be out as a couple it's going to be great and one of the girls is like hey i want to wear a suit and the man who works at the suit clothing store or whatever he like dresses them up and then some people pass by who know that they're queer together and they're like you know they insult them you some vote slurs whatever and then the man who's like measuring them for their jackets and stuff i think he originally assumed it was for a costume or something but then he's just like like they're thinking like oh he's gonna be mean and kick us out of the store and be a butt face but he's like so you want to have your jacket be cut a little higher you know to suit the ladies body and everything because you know we'll make the shoulder pads look good and she's like oh this is kind of sweet gay baby's pursuit however there's also something to be said about how the depictions of queer men in these films tend to zone in on making repercussions for sexual desire remember todd gets found out when his friends find his gay porn magazine alex is outed when a man tries to initiate a non-consensual sexual encounter with him in a public restroom it comes across in the narrative that alex deserves some sort of punishment for being perceived as gay in comparison the stories focused on queer women are far more sanitized the girls in more than friends never explicitly talk about queer sexual desire and neither does other mothers the stories of women's sexuality is laundered while the stories about queer men are keyed into sexual desire which let's be clear there's nothing wrong with that but when we consider how the myth of sexual deviancy was and is extremely prevalent for queer men the gendered storytelling becomes worth thinking about even though these films were reasonably progressive for their time let's be real it takes more to be a positive representation of queerness than just to say hey maybe the gays deserve to not die but the focus of these films isn't really on queer representation it's about the heteronormative perspective on queer people and that perspective doesn't really extend past the consequences of coming out and the backlash you can get even in other mothers where the queer ladies are older and have been publicly together for more than a decade we still have to watch them do the baseline coming out to their school community which yes this is a reality for queer people to just kind of constantly have to come out to others but god forbid we focus on the life of a well-adjusted older queer person who's doing all right so then the 90s roll around and the after-school special genre kind of dies out but then we start to see some sprinklings of queer representation in things outside of the special genre i already mentioned the queer women that were featured in the postcards from buster episodes back in 2005. pbs planned to air the episode they got backlash and so they pulled back public support this is basically the formula of events for showing positive queer rep on mainstream tv at the time something is positive enough but the backlash is ultimately what is remembered the most about those glimpses of representation a few years earlier nickelodeon also got backlash for a segment in its program nicknews special edition the segment was called my family is different and it was about children who were raised by queer parents having discussions with kids who were raised in households that opposed same-sex marriage so this was a thing it's certainly a youth accessible version of queerness but it's not exactly a positive representation by any means because it's not actually about queer people or being queer it's about the opposition to queer love queer life and queer families but for the time it sort of makes sense conservative organizations launched angry campaigns at nickelodeon about the segment but journalist linda ellerby who hosted the nicknews program reminded people at the outset that this segment wasn't about sex or sexuality it was about tolerance nicknews was a program that delivered news to kids and that sometimes meant tackling mature topics after bill clinton's sex scandal nick news did a segment explaining it to kids ellerbee actually said she came up with the my family is different episode after learning that the f word was a pretty common slur in schools at the time essentially bullying others because of anti-lgbtq plus sentiment was a topic relevant to kids so they made a segment about it so is it the best example of queer rap i don't know man it was 2002. i guess queer representation doesn't get to be fun and light-hearted at this point in time except that's where you're wrong at least on mainstream television in 2007 dottie's magic pockets was released on dvd it wasn't on broadcast television so it got way less attention but it was one of the first available shows for children about queer families the show is about dottie and her gang of friends they sing songs go on adventures and just have fun characters have families with two moms or two dads and that's fine and dandy in the dottie verse [Music] so if you're thinking hey i would have liked to see this queer family-friendly show back in 2007. here's the thing dottie's magic pockets had a very very very low distribution um the first way that it actually got out to the public was because there was a queer family cruise line and dottie's magic pockets was given out as dvds on there it was important i think the la times written an article about it back in the day but it didn't garner that mainstream public attention that postcards from buster did when postcards from buster only had one episode featuring queer people when in daddy's magic pockets they have whole songs devoted to it sure is the quality a little bit less because it's essentially an indie dvd project yeah but it was doing queer family-friendly rep back in the day as we move away from the 2000s and start inching towards the 2010s we start seeing more examples of queer representations start to pop up especially in animation part of this starts with the legend of korra series on nickelodeon which was a sequel series to avatar the last airbender in the last two seasons of the show the main character cora and her friend asami have some varying degree of friendly-ish slightly romantic tension toward one another but it's never actually explicit in the finale of the show the two walk off into the distance together holding hands in a scene that looks super romantic but again isn't explicitly so so here's where things get tricky immediately after the finale aired the show's co-creators confirmed on their personal tumblr accounts that the final scene was supposed to be interpreted as romantic our intention with the last scene was to make it as clear as possible that yes korra and asami have romantic feelings for one another in case people were still questioning what happened in the last scene i wanted to make a clear verbal statement to complement the show's visual one co-creator brian knitzko was even more frank about it writing that korrasami is canon you can celebrate it embrace it accept it get over it or whatever you feel the need to do but there is no denying it konitsko mentions in the post how he and the other writers never really thought that they could get away with showing a same-sex relationship on a kid's network when they started the show back in 2010 but they felt like a romance organically blossomed between the characters in the writers room and so they decided to allude to it in the final scene they made the characters look into each other's eyes hold one another in their arms and made the music in the scene tender and romantic and if the queer ending still seemed out of the blue to you knitzko had another message i think a second viewing of the last two seasons would show that perhaps you were looking at it only through a hetero lens but at the same time kinisco acknowledges that this wasn't exactly a full stop win for queerness on kids tv was it a slam dunk victory for queer representation i think it falls short of that but hopefully it is a somewhat inching forward honestly this really captures how i felt about queer representation in the legend of korra at the time it's there it's alluded to but it's not totally fulfilling but i do understand it's an important landmark when considering the landscape of children's television it also marked a new pattern for how queer representation functioned in the 2010s on mainstream tv as opposed to the 2000s in the 2000s you showed a brief glimpse of queerness and immediately get backlash but in the 2010s you can allude to it and then maybe your creators can hop onto their personal social media platform whether it's twitter tumblr or anything else and they can confirm it for you but that's still not the same as full stop representation the legend of chord creators were proactive and good at verifying immediately that yes you were supposed to interpret that ending as queer but it says something about the quality of queer representation at the time that you can't have it explicitly confirmed in show ensure legend of korra has follow-up comics that explore korra and asami's relationship more explicitly but those comics reach a way smaller audience in comparison and nickelodeon doesn't actually need to have courage to take the heat for airing it but at the same time i can't give the legend of korra too much flack for this it was 2014 which made korra effectively the first out lgbtq character to lead a children's cartoon nickelodeon saw as a risk and they were right but that doesn't mean that nickelodeon deserves any praise for how much queerness they did explicitly allow the legend of korra season 4 didn't even air on tv it only aired online and yeah nickelodeon says it had other reasons for doing so like uh some of the later plot lines were just a bit too dark for the kids but that sort of makes my point for me doesn't it avatar and the legend of korra were both shows that seriously considered and focused on topics like genocide war refugees and poverty it took those topics with this seriousness and gravity that not all children's television does but somehow showing two girls kissing was too questionable and risque for the kids but hey that hasn't stopped nickelodeon from propping up cora six years later for that juicy pride month rainbow bragging when we think about queer representation in the latter half of the 2010s a lot of titles come to mind she-ra and the princesses of power adventure time danger and eggs steven universe andy mack and the owl house most of the shows i just mentioned have queer characters front and center and a couple of them have even taken some important milestones adventure time started airing on cartoon network in 2010 four years before that fateful legend of korra finale there was queer subtext that was alluded to during the show's eight season run between the characters marceline and bubblegum a lot of that had to do with the writers and storyboarders behind the scenes who were pushing for explicit queerness in the show and that push mattered because explicit queerness eventually happened in the show's final season marceline and bubblegum kiss and there are actually follow-up movies for adventure time that explore their romantic relationship in even greater detail there's a reason why shows like adventure time got to have a little bit more freedom and show queerness more explicitly on screen it's because legend of korra already bit the bullet and took the first hit nickelodeon took the big risk first so that cartoon network didn't have to but also another big event happened in the middle of the 2010s that changed the course of how we talk about lgbtq plus media marriage equality in 2015 the us supreme court declared that same-sex marriage was legal in all 50 states and it was a huge win for activists marriage equality also served as a marker for how much the opinion on lgbtq plus folks had changed over the years at the time public support for queer people was the highest it had ever been i'm not saying that the days of harmful queer rhetoric are over they weren't over then and they certainly aren't over now but after marriage equality it was just a little bit easier to start including representation in your media projects so the legend of korra's first big step and marriage equality obviously made it easier for queer representation to take hold in children's media but a huge part of this stems from the artists writers and storyboarders who work on these shows a number of them were pushing behind the scenes for adventure time to have that final queer kiss in its last season even though cartoon network was still hesitant about showing it because of the potential blowback they might get by the way one of those writers who was pushing for this was rebecca sugar sugar used to work on adventure time but left around 2013 because they were going to be heading the show steven universe for cartoon network steven universe has a bunch of queer themes and a lot of that stems from the fact that sugar is non-binary and bisexual they are queer they work in children's animation and storytelling so naturally they really wanted to tell stories in their medium that reflected queerness front and center she-ra on netflix was made by another queer creator noelle stevenson the she-ra universe also featured queerness out in the open two of its characters adora and catra have a tumultuous relationship that changes and shifts over the course of the entire show until spoilers they get together and kiss in the finale this is one of the examples of how queerness has been tackled differently in the children's tv of the 2010s compared to the 2000s in shows like she-ra queerness doesn't exist in the same way as it does in our world characters don't use labels like non-binary gay or bisexual they are just queer and live their lives it's a version of a different world where queerness is just sort of the default the live-action show andy mack also featured a queer character named cyrus he became the first disney channel character to come out as gay what's more he's a main character not just a side or recurring character basically his storyline is one that you don't get to pretend isn't happening which is kind of big for disney there's something very vulnerable about pursuing a central gay romance like this it's odd there's always this self-doubt in your mind that's like am i just being self-indulgent here i think everybody loves shipping everybody loves having fun with the characters and the relationships between the characters but this is not just a side plot this is the plot of the entire show there is plenty of children's media where a heterosexual romance is a core of the main plot but you're labeled an agenda pusher if you as a creator want to make queer romance a part of your main plot postcards from buster was labeled as this back in the day just for featuring a lesbian couple and legend of korra got similar criticisms for doing a queer romance and spinali but why at the time vermont had legal civil unions within the state avatar the last airbender had multiple heterosexual romances in the show that were a part of the main plots so what's wrong with legend of korra doing the same and yeah are creators like stevenson and sugar and others technically pushing a queer agenda of course they are they're queer they like clear representation but what's so wrong with having intentionality towards that right now there is real change that's happening with queer representation but that doesn't mean there aren't still some issues sugar and stevenson both had to negotiate with their respective networks about how explicit they were allowed to be with depicting queerness just like the legend of korra creators had to do a few years ago but just because sugar and stevenson got more of what they wanted and deserved doesn't mean that that isn't still a problem if a heterosexual romance could be brought onto the show without any argument then why shouldn't the same be expected for queer romance i've talked quite a bit up until this point about queer representation but it would be remiss of me if i didn't focus specifically in on trans characters non-binary characters and in general just gender non-conforming characters again the same argument applies if you would have cisgender characters appear without argument then what's so wrong with having characters who aren't the children's show danger and eggs is an amazon original that actually has trans and non-binary characters of color and it was actually co-created by shady petoskey who is a trans comic creator and tv showrunner unfortunately it only got one season which sort of represents the dilemma here regardless of the reasons that it didn't have more episodes it was one of the few representation options out there in children's media so now that it's gone that's one less available option for ongoing queer rep considering where we are as a country right now in terms of trans visibility and trance rights this is going to be an ongoing topic and it's honestly probably the new frontier for challenging the norms around queer rep and yes i know that the gem characters in steven universe are non-binary but i wanted to spotlight danger and eggs here because i think it's a show that far fewer people have heard of personally it hadn't really appeared on my radar until i started researching this topic so what's coming next for children's media well likely we're going to see some of the same stuff that we've seen before creators having to negotiate for queer representation one of the places where we can watch this happening in real time is on disney disney is currently airing the animated show the owl house which has a huge amount of subtext that two women characters are romantically involved the series creator dana terrace is bisexual and confirmed on her personal twitter account that this relationship is indeed queer but she's also mentioned that she's had to fight for this since disney leadership was initially opposed to the idea in development i was very open about my intention to put queer kids in the main cast i'm a horrible liar so sneaking it in would have been hard haha when we were greenlit i was told by certain disney leadership that i could not represent any form of bi or gay relationship on the channel luckily my stubbornness paid off and now i am very supported by current disney leadership it's good that terrace was stubborn and fought for what she wanted and apparently got it but it shows an underlying problem here that creators are still having to fight for what non-queer characters are able to have outright explicit confirmation of who they are and worthy story lines that reflect that the owl house is still airing now so hopefully this subtextual romance will become even more explicit as time goes on but it represents some of the challenges that are going to still be present in this medium people want more than just subtextual references hinted queer plotlines they want clear depictions and they deserve that and while we can totally criticize other children's content networks i think there's a special place of criticism for disney disney is unafraid of having subtle queer moments in the background of its works and it's certainly willing to pat itself on the back for doing so but they seem to get cold feet whenever it comes to centering queerness and queer characters it's queer visibility that feels performative by the network rather than actually representative because it comes with this hidden statement we'll show queerness on screen as long as no one has to look at it for too long [Music] some people might ask as we begin the 2020s why it's still so necessary to advocate for queer representation in children's media after all young people these days are more and more involved in new media spaces on their own like twitter tumblr tick tock and more where they can find queer people speaking honestly and openly about their queer identities and existences being queer so if that's already available why does it matter whether we have queer characters in children's media well remember again it's about normalization queer young people deserve to see characters that reflect them in the media that's targeted towards them but also the same goes for non-queer people this generation is quite possibly going to be the most openly queer one yet so non-queer young people deserve to see their world as it is reflected accurately in the media that's targeted to them also just a reminder queer people do go into the field of creating children's media so why the heck shouldn't they be allowed to create storylines and worlds that reflect their own existence something else to keep in mind is that children's television for better or for worse is regulated in a way that new media spaces are not parents and educators or guardians have a right to be worried about what sort of things their children can get up to when on the web lastly remember that just because media is technically for children doesn't mean that adults can't enjoy it too i think sometimes it's a little bit easier to think of these things as youth accessible rather than youth exclusive good children's storytelling is just good storytelling it's just also suited for younger audiences and plenty of the shows that i've talked about today are ones that have huge older teen and adult followings some of them are queer some of these people are not but a lot of them are here for the fact that they didn't really have access to this kind of representation when they were younger so next time you're looking for a new tv show with queer representation try turning your head towards the children's section thanks so much for watching and happy pride month we put a lot of effort into this project so we hope you enjoyed it and if you want to see more of this stuff in the future then please hit subscribe

Channel: night owls

Views: 61,438

Keywords: LGBTQ+, Queer, Cartoons, Children's Media, Animation, Video Essay, Commentary

Id: zPN3VPUERJ8

Length: 39min 50sec (2390 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 20 2021