Meeting Minutes - 9/14

9/14 - Depiction of Queer Characters in Media

• A survey will be sent out soon regarding preferred meeting times
• Movie tonight at 8pm! Fantastic Mr. Fox in Galileo! Snacks will be provided!
• Any other movie ideas for the future?
• Media + Queer characters:
• True Blood, Desperate Housewives, Glee, Modern Family, Torchwood, Greek, Dance Academy, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Teen Wolf
• Glee is very fixed on dichotomy of gay or straight, no in between
• Often, gay characters are flamboyantly so. This may be to make it obvious without outright saying their sexual orientation
• Greek has a non flamboyant gay character; Teen Wolf does a good job as well
• Degrassi has a person who is transgender
• Online: which tumblrs you follow labels you as queer
• On Starcraft, a transgender MTF was defended and supported
• Books: not many big publishers that output stories with queer characters
• Sometimes gay/lesbian characters, but nothing else
• Sci-fi also has gender swapping characters
• Is it better to have queer characters that are depicted stereotypically or not have any at all?
• Sometimes, the queer community gets angry when they are not depicted stereotypically 
• Hard to have this due to complicated scripts, etc.
• Is incorporating the fact that the character is queer into the story necessary?
• E.g. Dumbledore was mentioned after the series was written, almost. 
• People accused J.K. Rowling of making it an afterthought
• People also wondered why she had to bring it up if it wasn't relevant to the story
• Automatically assume that the queer character is then associated with the protagonist 
• A lot of the time, the fact that the character is queer is the main focus of their plot line.