TVs exciting switch from Burying Your Gays to marrying them
There are few things TV loves more than a wedding. It’s the perfect season finale spectacle because of the costumes, stress, payoff for at least two characters, opportunity for dramatic objections, and set up for a later stunning betrayal that the writers can dine on for at least another half a season.
Lesbian weddings are rare on TV, though. That’s silly, because the exciting parts of any TV wedding are usually the dress and whether the bride turns into a bridezilla, and lesbian weddings can double the return on that.
It was 25 years ago that Friends featured the first lesbian wedding on US televsion, but same-sex marriages have remained rare until now.
The first American lesbian TV wedding actually took place 25 years ago this year on Friends, which is surprising, given how homophobic the show was. Carol and Susan weren’t allowed to kiss, of course, but it was memorable progress. It was another 11 years before the first same-sex marriages were legal in the US, 19 years until they were legal in all 50 states, and 22 years until Australians had those same rights.
Since then, there’s been a rise of a lot of tropes involving same-sex attracted female characters. Usually, it’s that all the lesbians are dead (often referred to as Bury Your Gays), the bisexuals are pregnant, and both are evil.
But this year a new and exciting trend has emerged: Marry Your Gays. There has been more lesbian weddings on US TV in 2021 than there were in all the years between 1996 and 2005. Wynonna Earp, Black Lightning, Station 19, Lucifer and, my favourite, Legends of Tomorrow all had weddings this year. This week, Supergirl’s sister Alex married Jimmy Olsen’s sister Kelly on the series finale of Supergirl, and fully solidified the trend of one woman in a suit, marrying another woman in a dress, outdoors, near a wooden structure.
Reader, I cried every time, not just because I got overly invested in each couple and love a wedding. But because as a lesbian who wore a suit as I got married to my wife in a dress outdoors near a wooden structure five years ago, back when we had to travel to another country to make it legal, I honestly never thought I’d see this on TV.
We’ve made so much progress in representation in such a short period of time, and I’m so excited that kids these days get to grow up with The Owl House, She-Ra and the Princesses of Power, Lil Nas X, Hayley Kiyoko, Jojo Siwa, the new Superman, and even movies like I Hate New Year’s, Happiest Season and the brand-new Christmas at the Ranch. They’ll never know the struggle of watching four seasons of a mediocre show just to see one kiss to get representation, and they shouldn’t.
That’s not to say everything is solved in terms of representation. As in the law, Australian television is lagging behind in all areas, but we’ll catch up eventually. Plus, trans representation is still at least 15 years behind, as is non-white, non-blonde, and non-femme representation.
But sometimes you have to take a moment to celebrate and look at how far we’ve come.
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