#this post is non-exhaustive btw I'm 99% sure I've forgotten a few things

[discyours]

I finished watching the latest season of Shameless and it’s reaffirmed to me how terrible this show is at LGBT representation so I’m gonna complain about it. Spoiler warning, obviously. 

Okay so first of all, Ian and Mickey were one of the best parts of this show. I’m not a gay man so my opinion on this is not that valuable, but as far as I know it was very well received by the gay community. Their relationship was as raw and as realistic as everything else that’s good about this show. How uncommon is it, even now, for media to show that guys like Mickey can be gay? How uncommon is it for them to show a genuine connection between growing up being shaped by an environment like Mickey’s and the way he deals with his sexuality, rather than just creating a character that never took on any part of their upbringing because they were simply too camp to fit in. The way Mickey and Ian both felt about their sexuality very much shaped their relationship at the start of it, but it grew from there. The writers didn’t make the mistake of making the relationship about the fact that it was gay. Neither character was killed off, the relationship was very on-and-off but wasn’t intentionally cut short, and they didn’t shy away from showing on-screen affection while also (in my opinion) not coming off as fetishistic either. Mickey and Ian was everything that is usually done wrong done right, and unfortunately the only real example of that on this show. 

The Kash storyline actually came before Mickey, but I wanted to start this post off with a positive example so I didn’t sound too salty. I have mixed feelings about how realistic this one was, and since I’m not a gay man I really don’t think it’s my place to state whether it was or not. But one thing is for sure; it wasn’t positive. I mean, it’s an affair between a seriously underage Ian (I think he was around 15 in the first season?) and his significantly older, married with children employer. Kash is also middle-eastern so this story fed into both homophobic and racist stereotypes. 

In season 2 Ian sleeps with yet another married man: Ned/Lloyd (Jimmysteve’s father). Lloyd is even older than Kash (likely 50s/60s) while Ian is still underage. Lloyd describes his sexuality as “anything that walks” meaning this isn’t actually bad gay representation, but terrible bi representation. 

Jumping ahead to season 6 (after Ian has been working in a gay club and had many hookups, but no real relationships aside from Mickey so nothing worth mentioning), Ian started dating Caleb, a black firefighter. Caleb turns out to be HIV positive but the show (in my opinion) handles it extremely well, making it a point that it’s possible to manage it with medication to the point where you can’t transmit it to anyone. It was a genuinely great, healthy relationship, until they decided to make Caleb cheat with a woman. Again, terrible bi representation, and once they’ve broken up the experience leads to Ian attempting to have straight sex too. It’s something a lot of gay men go through so I don’t think it was necessarily bad to add it to the show, but I do take issue with that even being needed as a plot device to show that Ian is truly gay, as that’s the way a lot of society views homosexuality too. 

Shortly after this, Trevor is introduced. Like I said, I’m not a gay man so my opinion on all of the former was of limited value, but I am a trans man and dear fucking god I hated Trevor’s story. Trevor is the embodiment of a character whose only defining trait is that they are LGBT. He’s overly sensitive to anyone not being immediately understanding about trans issues, and his relationship with Ian infuriated me. Trevor was offended that Ian lost interest upon finding out that he was trans, and the show made it seem like he was in the right for it. Ian apologised and they end up dating. They end up fucking. All this right after having shown that Ian tried to sleep with the opposite sex and absolutely hated it. Pure virtue signaling and my personal annoyance that every trans person in Trevor’s friend group was shown to be an “SJW snowflake” who had to introduce themselves with their pronouns is worthless next to the genuine harm that was done by showing that gay men can and totally should sleep with the opposite sex as long as they’re trans. 

I don’t even want to move on from that because of how genuinely terrible it is, but let’s do so anyway because there’s more. Further building on the pattern of terrible bi representation, there was the minor season 1/2 character Jasmine. She’s married but unfaithful, and her showing interest in women is seen as a part of her being so “free spirited”, if you can call it that. 

The “throuple” between Kev, Vee and Svetlana is another example. This post is getting long but I mean, for god’s sake can this show have a single bi character that isn’t super promiscuous if not a fucking unicorn? Every bi woman who’s ever used dating apps deserves to be mad at this storyline. 

Now for the thing that actually got me to write this post; the lesbian representation in this show. The first lesbian we see is Bob/Roberta, in season 1 and 2. She’s a literal stereotype as an extremely butch truck driver, dating a woman who is generally presumed to be straight. She and Monica try to take Liam away on the basis that he’s black and needs a black parent. Just like with Kash, this is doubly negative representation. She’s a minor character and all she does is “turn” a character by being so butch, and try to steal a fucking baby. 

In early season 9 this stereotyping stunt is repeated. Debbie meets Alex, another black woman so butch that she’s introduced as someone who’s passing as a man. Alex makes Debbie question her sexuality (though Debbie is later revealed to be bi, she wasn’t at this point so this was still falling into the “straight woman is ‘turned’ by an ultra-butch lesbian” trope) and they move in together right away. When they have lunch together after an argument, Alex spends hours talking about all of her exes, eventually reaching a point where Debbie can’t take it anymore and leaves. 

Also introduced in season 9 is Carl’s girlfriend, Kelly. When this character was introduced it was immediately obvious to me that she was coded to seem like a lesbian. She's the daughter of an army officer and plays softball, and just about everything about the way she looks and acts seemed gay. I initially thought that they made this character date Carl to kill any suspicions of her being a lesbian before they could begin, but then they actually turned “queer baiting” (not my term) into a plotline. They made her character flirt with Debbie, made Debbie try to “steal” her from Carl (again, a bi character not respecting established relationships), and very much hinted at a relationship happening. The preview for season 9 episode 13 showed them kissing, and they still ended that story with her being straight and apologising for accidentally leading Debbie on. 

I’ll throw in an honorable mention to Lea Delaria’s very brief appearance as a character so minor I can’t even remember what it was called; Lip’s potential AA sponsor; another ultra-butch stereotype, and an asshole. Oh and there was the whole gentrification plotline, where a bunch of rich lesbian couples (you guessed it, stereotypes!) moved into the southside. And Ford’s exes that Fiona met when she went bowling, which were barely actual characters and more of a joke about how gay they looked and how Ford clearly had a type. With Kelly being revealed as straight, the closest this show has ever gotten to a lesbian character that took actual part in the plot beyond being a stereotype was the lesbian couple in Fiona’s apartment building, and they still had one of them sleep with a man (off-screen, luckily) as a Totally Necessary Measure to get pregnant. 

Shameless was genuinely one of my favourite shows and it wasn’t too hard to look past most of this at first, considering so many characters are terrible people anyway. But I can’t ignore the flaws at this point. This goes beyond comedy and I’m almost angry that Shameless has ruined itself for me just by being homophobic.