#at this point I’m pretty sure my virginity has just respawned

[unpopularly-opinionated]

This might lose me a follower or two cause I know this isn’t what I typically argue, normally I’m arguing against this sort of thing, but I felt like it was somewhat worth mentioning. And in fairness, I’m not necessarily disagreeing with what I’ve argued in the past, I’m just adding a counterpoint or something idk get to the point.

I was thinking today about how, at least as far as I know, no one really teaches you how to flirt, or date, or do any of that relationship stuff, yet we all seem to enter the dating pool with some level of expectations, right? So clearly we’re getting that info from somewhere, and the only place I could think of would be movies, shows, books, etc. I was thinking about how there’s hundreds of thousands of movies about a man and a woman falling in love, which when you distill it down to it’s barest essentials (I.E. remove all the movie magic like coincidence, unrealistic expectations, impossible scenarios, etc.) they’re more or less a general guide to being in a relationship, right? Of course you can’t just see one romance movie and think you’re an expert, but once you’ve seen a pretty decent sample size, chances are you understand the gist of it, right?

And because there’s so many examples to pull from, we’ve basically seen it all. We’ve seen the popular and the jock, the nerd and the jock, the nerd and the popular, the nerd and the nerd, the fat with the skinny, the mean with the nice, the pretty with the ugly, etc. if you come up with the character archetypes, there’s more than likely a movie or show about it. The point is, it doesn’t matter what your personal situation might be, there’s probably a movie that at least attempts to emulate it.

But then I thought about gays and how we don’t entirely have that. Most of the gay films we have revolve around different topics like homophobia or AIDS or coming out, sure they usually have relationships sprinkled on the side but the gist of them is about something else. And the ones that do exist about relationships are…sort of all the same, 9/10 usually about sex (a lot of gay movies are basically softcore pornos). Overall though, there are too few of them to really get an understanding of how gay couples are supposed to be together.

The point is, I think there needs to be more gay movies that are strictly about the romance. Sure, sex, homophobia, aids, coming out, etc. are all important topics, but they’re topics that’ve been covered already. I think we need more examples of just normal gay relationships. Give us the nerdy gay with the gay jock, or the popular gay with the gay jock, etc. And I don’t mean just swap sexualities in established movies, I mean make some original shit.

Normally I’m someone who argues…not so much against this sort of thing, but it definitely comes across that way. I’m not against the idea of more gay representation in media, I’m just against forced representation and representation for representation’s sake. We don’t need more token gays, or surprise “this character who’s always been straight is actually gay/bi” moments. We also don’t need more serious films about how we all fuck each other and because of it we’re all gonna die, like my god, we get it. I think people with AIDS know they have AIDS and by god if people without it don’t know about it by now then that’s just Darwinism at play.