Greetings and salutations. It is I, Graham.

So Scarlett Johansson can play every race under the sun, Hollywood can whitewash role after role after role, but a black Ariel is one step too far? Needless to say, today we are going to talk about representation. Primarily, is it really as important as some on social media claim.

This is a debate that I have had several times with my roommate, one of my best friends. Through no fault of his own, he is a straight, white male. He has stated many times in the past that he doesn’t understand the debate of representation, that he simply sees, for example, a superhero, and unless it is somehow directly tied to the plot, he never asks if they are gay or straight. It doesn’t bother him if they are shown to be gay, he just doesn’t think about it or care. He used to get frustrated when I would care, and make a big deal out of a movie like Luca, where the writers and even the director intended it to be a gay coming-of-age story, but Disney ensured everything about that aspect of the story was cut.

To my roommate, needing to hear the sexuality of a character was just as pointless and annoying as a gratuitous make-out or sex scene being thrown into a movie. On the one hand, I can see his point. To an extent. But it took a while for him to come to understand mine. He has representation. He always has. Just as I have always had “white male” representation. But why does it matter? Representation matters, because it tells you that you matter. It allows you the ability to look up and go, “Look! They are just like me!”

I remember reading a story when Guardians of the Galaxy came first came out, about an autistic boy seeing Drax, and identifying with the character so much, because he displayed so many autistic characteristics. And in 2012, a 4 year old boy in Salem, NH, needed a hearing aid but refused to wear it because, “Superheroes don’t wear hearing aids!” His mother wrote to Marvel about his claim, and they wrote back, telling the boy and his mother about Hawkeye, who is 80% deaf and (at least in the comics, FU movies) wears hearing aids. But when that wasn’t enough, they created a special character named Blue Ear, just for him. Representation can actually mean feeling like you have permission to exist.

While I don’t watch too much horror, the two things that I love about what Jordan Peele is doing is bringing a fresh voice to the genre, but also, he’s giving us movies with black characters, where the point is not that they are black. They are just normal people, who happen to also be not-white. I still remember all the flack that Into the Spiderverse got, and that character was exactly what was presented in the comic: Miles Morales. The same thing happened just recently with Sandman.

Even as an adult, I need to see healthy, normal people onscreen who just happen to be gay. It needs to not be a big deal, and not necessarily even be part of the plot. If it is central to the plot, then it is not being normalized, it makes it feel like the homosexuality is part of the problem, not just a part of life. It is the same reason that we have been pushing for decades to see more women onscreen, and more people of color. My childhood, my high school years, hell, my life now, would have been so different, if I and the people around me had grown up seeing normal, random gay characters in our TV shows and movies. LGBT should not be a story genre. It should be a normal, randomized happenstance.

Does it have to be a big deal, and thrown in your face? Absolutely not. It can be as simple as seeing the female boss in her office, and see a photo of her and her wife on her desk. It can be as simple as the casual line in ParaNorman, where the jock football player gets asked out to a movie by the girl, and he exclaims, “Excellent! My boyfriend loves chick flicks.” Or the scene in Disney’s Frozen, which I can’t believe got released, where the shopkeeper mentions his family, and waves to the little window looking into a sauna, and we see another man with some kids, implying they are his family. All easily done, all taking almost no screen time. And yet, all meaning so much to me, just as a special comic meant so much to a 4 year old.

Don’t forget to love one another,

Graham