If you can see it, you can do it...

What does queer representation actually mean and why does it matter?

It was either 2010 or 2011, I was 7 years old and eating dinner downstairs with my older sister. I obviously cannot remember the entire conversation, but, the most significant part has been a funny and very important feature of my wider ‘coming out’ story. I told my sister that I wanted to be a boy, she lovingly ran upstairs and relayed my message to my mother. As you already know, my parents are Jamaican and my mum is a Jehovah’s Witness. The comment was met with a brief dismissal and we never spoke of it again. And that was how I was taught that gender was fixed, I was born a girl and could only be a girl.

Me circa 7 years old

This may sound like a classic case of gender dysphoria. I did not have an understanding of gender but what I did know was that I was a girl and what was expected of me with that label made me feel very limited. It was secondary school where I realised that my lack of male crushes across my lifetime was not a case of me being coy or incredibly focused on school, I was gay. But, at 7, all I knew was that I wanted to be able to behave the way that boys were allowed, no, encouraged to behave. Specifically: being able to chase girls in kiss chase, wear shorts and t-shirts at family BBQs as opposed to cute dresses or skirts, and to run up and down with my male cousins without any comments about me being ‘unladylike.’ In my 7 year old mind, presentation and attraction was fixed in a way that I did not align with and I felt I had to be something else, to be someone else in order to conform to the binary.

I was listening to a podcast featuring the artist Kehlani and she mentioned how she makes an effort to represent and uplift her fellow black and brown queer women in the industry. This got me thinking back to the core memory I just shared and what representation actually means, specifically queer representation.

From all sides of the political spectrum, there are whispers (and if you are unlucky enough, sometimes shouts) of a ‘gay agenda’. From Nipsey Hussle to the Republicans in the U.S to the Conservative Party in Britain, different iterations of this ‘gay agenda’ has been proliferated. It presents the notion that queerness is malignant, and efforts to incorporate it into mainstream society are simply just attempts to undermine normalcy and brainwash our unsuspecting and vulnerable children. The ‘gay agenda’ in question usually takes the form of representing queerness; this can mean many things. It includes showing and including queer characters in media, to placing queer relationships on an equal footing to heterosexual relationships. Essentially, it is the idea that such people and relationships do exist and should be extended the same respect as their heterosexual counterpart. To me, this does not sound like an agenda or anything too radical (I might be biased though).

But seriously, I think there needs to be an open conversation about what queer representation is and why it is important. At the beginning of the year, I wrote a blog post entitled ‘What is left to be said about Intersectionality in 2024?’. For me, I have always understood the need for queer representation in conjunction with the need for empowering, black representation. These are both features in my identity and often times when I have conversations surrounding the former it easier to understand when comparing it to race as both are marginalised groups. To be clear race is not identical to sexuality, however, being black and being queer share a similarity in being oppressed identities; the question of representation is pressing to both, and, we can use one to understand the other.

Now, let me take you back to 2018. This was the year the Black Panther movie was released worldwide by Marvel. If you ask the majority of black people, they will agree that this was a culturally significant movement for the black diaspora. It was a predominantly black cast, based on a mythical country that had a predominantly black population and was directed by a black director. It was refreshing to see this after a habit of being supporting characters in the media and portrayed in a limiting, stereotypical manner. We finally had a black on-screen superhero, that was the main character. King T’Challa was and continues to be a figure that young black children look up to and want to be like for Halloween or dress up days at school or even simply on the playground when imitating imaginary characters during playtime.

I was born in the early 2000s; growing up I did see black people in media, but they were never really the main characters unless you watched specifically ‘black’ movies such as Love & Basketball, Are We There Yet, or Juice just to name a few. The movies mentioned spanned across 3 genres but they were catered to black people. However, Black Panther was created and marketed to a worldwide audience, defying racial borders. As previously mentioned, black people recognised and continue to discuss the importance of the black representation in the movie.

An example of the swathes of black people who celebrated the release of the Black Panther movie (2018)

We can recognise, or at least make the argument, as to why the representation of certain races is important, necessary and urgent. But when the topic of sexuality emerges, it suddenly becomes a different story. I believe they are not so different. In the same way that as a young black girl, I struggled to see representations of people that looked like me have leading roles in media, as a queer person I also struggled to find people that belonged to such a community with such a presence. My earliest memory of a queer character in media was Damian in Mean Girls. For ages there have been ‘token’ queer characters, storylines written in to fill the quota and ensure that we have marked another tick along the diversity list.

Damian in Mean Girls (2004)

I understand tokenism as a starting point, but it is time to go further and to understand why this must go further. That is not to disregard the advancements made in queer representation in media since the early 2000s. One of my favourite television series I’ve watched this year, Everything Now, had a mixed race queer young lady as the lead. What I loved about it was that this feature of her identity was not the only point of her identity, it was treated with significance and explored and her character was given a level of complexity and development that is typically reserved for heterosexual characters.

Mia Polanco in Everything Now (2023)

I resonated with Everything Now because it presented an alternative storyline for queer characters. They are typically centred around ‘coming out’ and battling the emotions in anticipation of that. I still believe that is a very important story to continue telling for such characters, but as Everything Now demonstrates, multiple storylines and characters arcs can exist for queer characters, they do not have to start with and only be confined to ‘coming out’.

Regardless of your views on queerness, queer people do exist. Arguing that they should not have any representation in the media will not erase the real life fact that queer people, once again, exist and live lives. These lives, like any other lives, are deserving of being heard and represented. Back to 2010/2011 Adrienne, my desire of wanting to ‘be a boy’ was driven by a desire to engage in behaviours that I thought were reserved for boys. At 7, I did not know that girls could be together or that they did not have to dress a certain way; this was indicative of ignorance. Being gay was not a thing in my household, it was not condemned or praised it was just not spoken about and I did not see any representation of it in the media I consumed, which was mainly Disney Channel and Nickelodeon.

There is no ‘gay agenda’. What is happening and what people fear is queer people trying to carve a space for themselves in a heteronormative world. They want to see themselves, diverse portrayals of themselves in movies, in television series, in music videos etc. It’s not an irrational or radical demand. I think it’s very human, it’s affirming. In a similar way to seeing my first black superhero, or my first black female lead in a teen drama it’s an acknowledgement of your existence, that you deserve to exist and to have books and movies and television scripts written about you. That your life means something and is worth telling a story about and representing to the masses.