Yesterday, Twitter was buzzing with dirision aimed at J.J. Abrams and Disney for their coy teasers about the possibility of a forthcoming Star Wars franchise film having an “openly gay” character. The dynamic of powerful media P.R. machines queerbaiting is nothing knew, and it’s a bullshit move. It’s cheap, and also actively anti-queer. I wrote a thread about why, and I’m posting it here in slightly tidied-up form because I’ll no doubt need it again. 

This shit’s exhausting. That’s where I’m at.

The wages, the human cost, of this shit is to create and sustain a general public that finds queer people either unimaginable or only acceptable if you must be told they were queer (usually in retrospect, usually by straight people) because there is literally no other way to know.

Queer people, as a group, are EXTREMELY GOOD at excavating queer content from source material that looks super cisheteronormative. Why? Because for most of the 20th century, legally and culturally, that’s all we were allowed to publicly create and enjoy. So we’re incredibly dedicated and skilled at filling absences with rainbows. I mean, for fuck’s sake, how many explicitly queer fanworks are deliberately shaped to fill the cracks between scenes, episodes, seasons? Bajillions. Continue reading →