Gay? In my cartoons?
I have a little niece and nephew at home, so the cartoons are always on TV at my house. If I can be completely honest, sometimes I’m the one that puts them there in the first place. Yes, I am a 21 year old college student who will occasionally watch an episode of We Bare Bears, and I’m not afraid to admit it! However, if you’re not like me, and still watch cartoons, you may have missed a bit of a new trend that has been going on for a while now, and that is LGBTQ characters on these shows. Shows like Gravity Falls, Steven Universe, Adventure Time, and Clarence to name a few. Now before we all rejoice and say that homophobia is over, we need to look at the facts, and the fact nothing is really certain. Think of it as positive form of queer-coding — the creators WANT to tell you that it’s gay, but their network isn’t letting them.
Gravity Falls has these two:
Steven Universe has her:
Who made a song about how their love makes them strong despite the discrimination they face:
Adventure time has these two:
And Clarence, with the most explicit form of representation has this:
They have to come up with creative ways to demonstrate that they’re gay without explicitly stating it and getting cancelled. The creators are basically doing this: Is “X” character supposed to be read as gay?
A lot of ignorant homophobes will be quick to yell “Think of the children! I don’t want my children to be expose to that kind of ‘life-style’”, but never seem to realize that queerness is not only something found in adults. Queer youth have been the worst off victims of representation because I least I get to name a handful of shows I can watch and get my fill of representation. They don’t have much that they can see and relate with, so shows like are the only lifeline connecting them to a community they didn’t think they were old enough to be a part of.
Adding gay characters in cartoons is still a controversial issue, as seen in the way that movies like How to Train Your Dragons 2, and, more recently, Finding Dory were received, even when they were just HINTING at gay characters. However, just as one of my professor said, “We can’t stop talking about just because it’s controversial”, and he’s right. We owe it to our queer youth to keep on fighting for the right to see ourselves in every form of media — not just adult content, but content for kids. We need to break away from the stigma anything but cisgender and heterosexuality is depraved because it isn’t, and introducing these concepts in cartoons is a good way to have this conversation with kids without making it seem like much of a conversation. Kids learn things through the world around them, and having them be introduced to new topic through the media they consume will just make them much more empathetic when they face these issues in the real world.
