What a Difference a Decade Makes

Some idle thoughts for this week; we've come a long way with LGBT representation.

I know. Shocker, right? With marriage equality being passed in several states and with popular opinion being solidly egalitarian, that statement is fairly obvious. However, watching some older media recently, I realized how quickly the change has occurred.

Farscape (pretty much the best TV show ever, really) aired from 1999-2003 on the SciFi channel (that's basic cable for you non-USAians). During that time, it played with some pretty complex themes and edgy material. It was certainly implied that non-hetero aliens existed out in the universe. And yet, we never really saw them. There weren't any out and proud examples of gay Nebari or lesbian Peacekeepers, though we did get plenty of same-sex tension.

It wasn't until an episode called Twice Shy that we get our first lesbian kiss. Even then, I'm not sure it counts, as the kisser is being sort of mind controlled by the kissee. But it's presented as a heightening of that character's primary emotion -- sexual desire -- so we can assume that, yes, she does really want it. Anyway, the point is that I have to suspect this was pretty shocking at the time, 2003. Well, perhaps not shocking, but surprising and hard to get away with, even on basic cable. Now, of course, we've seen same-sex kissing on network TV plenty of times (though Modern Family somewhat controversially has only recently shown a kiss between the two gay dads). That's 10 years from "Omg, gay people on TV! And they put their lips together!" to "Uh, so what?"

If we spread our scope even farther, you can find some other hilarious examples. For instance, Queer as Folk, which started airing in 2000 on Showtime, was pretty risque and groundbreaking in its frank portrayal of queer sex. Now we've got Looking on HBO, which is similarly groundbreaking for its frank depiction of how boring and mundane queer life is. Which isn't to say it's a bad show, or that queer people as lame. It's saying that, hey, gay people live pretty much like straight people do. They have interpersonal drama and workplace problems, but mostly it's just getting along day by day. 14 years from "GAY PEOPLE ON TV???" to "I'm glad the rimjob scene is nice distraction from them talking about taxes or whatever."

And of course, before I go, I have to give a shout out to Ellen, whose show aired from 1993-1998, and whose coming out paved the way for a ton of LGBT visibility. Plenty of shows had gay characters before, even on networks -- I remember Roseanne in particular. But Ellen was one of the first, if not the first, to have its main character be gay as opposed to a quirky queer stereotype. She will always have my respect for that.

The Line Between Safety and Fantasy

Erotica is a lot like porn. Okay, it is porn. Just in literary form. Sometimes people try to pretend that it's a higher art form, and I guess there *is* erotica in which the actual sex acts take a backseat (in the backseat? BOOM!) to the story. But for most of it, the intention is to get the reader off. Which is great!

One of the things that's talked a lot about in porn, though, and only sometimes in erotica, is the line between granting fantasy and portraying safe, sex-positive interactions.

Dan Savage addressed this in a recent podcast concerning the depictions of condoms in erotica. On the one hand, we should be striving to make safe sex just as sexy and sought after as barebacking. That's the responsible thing to do, right? On the other hand, a lot of people go to erotica to escape the dangerous, unsexy realities of the real world. To be able to experience crazy, thrilling, caution-to-the-wind fucking without having to worry about destroying lives, relationships or body parts. And contrary to the efforts of safe-sex advocates everywhere, condomless fucking is simply sexier to a vast majority of people, likely owing to the simple fact that it's by definition more intimate and more dangerous, both of which tend to get people's cranks turning.

And after all, there are plenty of far more dangerous, problematic fantasies in the pages of erotica than screwing without protection. Rape is a hugely common subject, but we've sort of come to terms with that because a) It's a fantasy that a lot of people, men and women, legitimately have, and b) it allows us to experience that fantasy, to scratch that itch, while still recognizing that a real-world manifestation of such a thing is awful, abhorrent and forbidden. There are plenty of other topics we can throw in here: incest, bestiality (how many copies did Dinosaur Porn sell?), hell, I've even seen pedophilia in mainstream published erotica anthologies.

So does that mean we say 'fuck it?' Make everything as sexy as possible for our readers, social responsibility be damned? Well ... perhaps not quite. I think there's a way we can have our cake and eat it too. We don't necessarily need to shove our politics and morals down a reader's throat -- there are plenty of other great things to shove down there. But maybe we can play with subtly, treat safety like it's No Big Thang, and see how it goes.

In my latest work, I've got a small little reference to a condom. A one-line thing. Enough that it might stick in your mind even while you're jillin' it, but small enough that if you're one of the people for whom the condom REALLY destroys the fantasy, you can easily ignore it and keep going. There's no focus on it. It's not slipping off, being adjusted. There's no breakage followed by a race to the Walgreens to get some Plan B. Just a short, sweet, "she slipped a condom on" and then away we go.

What do you all think? Should we ignore the threats of the real world and focus solely on fantasy? Is there a responsibility on the part of erotica writers or porn producers to at least pay lip service to safe sex?