Representation Matters

On my rare, unoccupied evenings at home, I like to occasionally curl up on the sofa and watch Netflix. My current program is Glee. Yes, I’m that far behind the times. I started watching it a few years ago but never got beyond the second season. I don’t remember why I stopped watching it the first time, but I enjoy the mix of musical numbers and high school drama. I’m not really a binge watcher, so I’ve only made it into season 3 so far.

(If you are even farther behind in your shows than I am, spoiler alert.)

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Last night I watched the episode Dance with Somebody. This episode, a tribute to Whitney Houston, made me so happy. I find it beautiful that this series finally in a previous episode allowed Santana to openly embrace her lesbian identity. In this episode we see her romance with Brittany celebrated to Houston’s song “I Wanna Dance with Somebody.” This alone delighted me. Even more, I rejoiced when the lyrics Santana and Brittany sing were modified to acknowledge the fact that they love each other as women. (I might also add that their dance number was quite hot.) Instead of the original lyrics they sing “I need a woman who’ll take a chance / on a love that burns hot enough to last” A small but highly significant difference. Representation matters.

I’ve wrestled with the lack of representation in the arts since coming to embrace my gender identity and sexual orientation. I grow weary of the perpetual focus on hetero-typical relationships, as if there are no others in the world. We are beginning to see small changes in this in television and movies, such as in Glee. Even there we are largely subjected to romances focused on a male and female character. When it comes to music, the absence of non-hetero romance is even more pronounced. How many songs do you know that celebrate the love between two men or between two women? I can’t think of any in the realm of popular music, and a friend of mine who is better versed in the music scene also couldn’t think of any. Which makes it necessary for us lesbians to queer romantic songs when we sing them, as Santana and Brittany did.

Last month I performed a couple songs for a karaoke night, including Gypsy by Lady Gaga. If you are heterosexual, you may not have even noticed that the song makes reference to a guy, making it another typical song about the relationship between a man and a woman. I wasn’t comfortable going on stage, even for a karaoke night, and singing about my interest in some dude. Not a chance. So I had to queer it. Thankfully it had few male pronouns and references, so it wasn’t hard to do, though I had to practice so my brain would override the help text displayed on the karaoke screen. Many other songs that I really like would be much more difficult to alter. When I hear them play I have to do the mental work to transpose the imagery from male-female to female-female.

You might think that I’m making a big deal out of nothing. If you are hetero-typical, you don’t have to think about how love and romance are portrayed in the arts, because your sexual orientation is already pervasive. You might find it jarring when something atypical is presented, such as a lesbian or gay relationship. If you are particularly conservative, you might even feel offended or protest being “subjected” to such portrayals. Do you realize that for those of us who are homosexual, this is what we endure all the time in media and the arts? Just the other day I went to a ballet performance. The show overall was a delightful compilation of original works by young choreographers, but even here the pieces that touched on romance or love all had a hetero-typical axis. How I’d love to see a ballet piece with powerful romantic tension between two women (or two men, though frankly that would interest me far less.) Recently I talked with a friend about how fun it would be to queer the musical The Sound of Music and have a transgender Maria who falls in love with a Countess. Oh for the day when a musical like that would be a Broadway hit.

Which is why seeing Santana and Brittany celebrating their love to the modified words of “I Wanna Dance with Somebody” delighted me so much. It’s a small but meaningful step in normalizing non-hetero romance. It doesn’t require the erasure of hetero-romance. That’s not going to happen. But society needs to make space for others who don’t fit within that narrative. The more we see non-hetero relationships and romance portrayed in film, music, and other art forms, the more they become recognized as normal and valid expressions of human love. Inclusion happens in part as people begin to recognize and affirm the humanity of people who are not like them. Someday, hopefully soon, I hope to hear hetero-typical people singing along to the lyrics of a song celebrating lesbian romance. That would make my heart sing.