Gay Slayer!

Jane Espenson rocks my world, again!






Billy, the Vampire Slayer

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Updated On: 9/12/12 at 06:16 PM

I have no problem telling a story about a boy who’s always felt more comfortable identifying with what society tells him is more of a feminine role. So much crap gets heaped upon us as gay men — crap from straight people and, frankly, crap from other gay people — about how it’s important to be masculine in this world, how your value is determined by your ability to fit into masculine norms prescribed by heterosexual society and, sadly, co-opted by gay society as a way to further disenfranchise and bully those who don’t meet those norms…And those attitudes are a reflection of not just our own internalized homophobia, but of our misogyny, too, and that’s something I’ve never understood.

All of this.

She really is brilliant. I know back when she wrote Torchwood: Miracle Day, her blog for each episode had a lot about how she didn't feel sure about writing the "gay stuff" at first--simply because she wasn't sure she'd do it justice, even though she'd touched on it (more with women, but also with men ) in the Buffyverse. Anyway the whole piece was fascinating.

(I do admit though, I've never really got the argument that It's Always a Woman was misogynistic, just because it seemed so beyond silly where it was placed in the show originally... I can see how others might, though). And yes, the whole "straight acting only please" gay thing is beyond annoying--aside from being hypocritical and usually ridiculous, and just a very sad statement (and I do think it holds a large element not just of not fully accepting other men, but of misogyny).

A lot of people would say that two gay men doing just that in song (or even not in song) would become an instant cabaret classic, and cleverly un-PC, but I get (and I think agree) with your point.

I can get down with that

Huffington Post had further details about the character (I'm not quite sure if it's quite as groundbreaking as they claim in the headline, but) with a feature on gay comic book characters (obviously leaving out manga, or else it would be hundreds of pages long).

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/11/buffy-the-vampire-slayer-gay-character-billy-series-_n_1875074.html

Oh, completely and it's hard to compare it to the superhero world. Yaoi fandom has kinda taken over, but the earlier classic examples of gay characters in primarily shoujo and josei comics (mainly for and by women), though are much more about characterization. Unfortunately a lot of that hasn't been translated--classic manga doesn't sell well here, but some titles have. Two of my fave examples:

Banana Fish by Akimi Yoshida is a brilliant crime drama that ran in the late 80s about a New York street kid (the depiction of 1980s New York is pretty hysterical) and a Japanese teen who gets sucked into his world. It's out of print in English but one of my fave comic titles ever. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_Fish

Moto Hagio is regarded up there with Osamu Tezuka as one of the masters of the genre, and the first woman who back in the 70s really gained a male readership, and her work deals a lot with gender and sexuality (particularly her sci fi work which is influenced by Ursula LeGuinn, as well as her masterpiece A Cruel God Reigns about a college student who was sexually abused as a teen by his step father, and then meets and develops feelings for his step brother at Oxford). Her works are just starting to be translated--Fantagraphics has a deluxe edition of her first hit, The Heart of Thomas (influenced by the French film Les amitis particulires as well as Cocteau's work). http://www.fantagraphics.com/browse-shop/the-heart-of-thomas-aug.-2012.html?vmcchk=1 She's my favorite comic book artist/writer ever (luckily much of her work was translated in French).

But even in modern boys comics, sympathetic gay side characters are pretty present, and of course seem to exist in nearly every shoujo manga. Yaoi gets all the hype, especially here, but is a pretty small representation of gay characters in manga as a whole, even if it's started to dominate translated titles here.

*sorry--that was kinda a rant*

I had to look up Funky Winkwhatever--I don't think it's syndicated much in Canada, at least not anywhere I've lived and read papers (then again, I tend to skip the funnies now that my local paper dropped the comic brilliance of Mary Worth and Rex Morgan MD--it's easier to catch up with them through the satire of http://joshreads.com/ ).

I do remember as a teen a big deal here being made about the gay teen storyline in For Better or For Worse.