Dear Glee:

Glee, I love you. I really do. Mostly, mainly, I love you for Kurt and Burt Hummel. This week, I love you for Brittney and Artie.
But Kurt is the reason I come back, time and again, Glee, because you have shown - beautifully - that you know how to handle a complex character. Your episodes on bullying were remarkable.

But. BUT! Glee - what are you doing? You've added Ashley Fink as Lauren into the Glee Club (which is cool! I liked her on Huge, and she's been a cool quirky bit player on Glee since the first season).

Except, Glee, you're....you're being mean. You're being sizest. You are perpetuating some very, very unkind and narrow-minded stereotypes about fat people, which is, in essence, a form of bullying. Every time we see Lauren, she is eating, and/or talking about food. She demands food as a requirement for joining Glee club. She demands food before she'll perform at sectionals. You've done a pretty shoddy job in making her a real character - you've made her a caricature, a rather tired, unpleasant stereotype of a fat person who eats all the time. 

This is not cool. Do you not know any of the statistics about women - especially young women - and body image? I understand if you're not up on the latest in academic Fat Studies; I wasn't, until fairly recently. But Fat Studies intersects with body politics, which intersects with Queer Studies - and Glee, I know you know about that.

Glee, I expect better from you. I expect WAY better from you. You've done amazing things - amazing - with your representation of a gay teenager. Kurt's character has been dazzling to watch, especially this season, as you've given him a gay love interest. You know how to push boundaries and change the way people think and talk about things. You can do this with Lauren's character, too, and it doesn't even need to be a big plot point. Just turn her into a person who isn't just, only, and all about eating. As Marilyn Wann (a leading Fat activist and Fat studies pioneer) writes in the introduction to the Fat Studies Reader, the only thing you can tell by looking at a fat person is the level of your own prejudices.

Making Lauren into a fat person who does nothing but eat and/or talk about food is no different than any other offensive or bigoted stereotypical representation. Glee, you do a good job of being playful about difference, but you also are always respectful and supportive of difference. Except in the case of Lauren (and sometimes Mercedes), the non-thin members of the cast.

You can do so much better than this, Glee. If you're not sure how, please watch a few episodes of Huge. If you don't want to watch a show from a competing network, why not go read Lesley Kinzel's extremely intelligent blog?

I don't want to have to stop watching Glee because of indirect body shaming and fat jokes. I will if you continue, but I'd rather see Glee do what it does well (superbly well, in the case of Kurt) - push its viewers and its cast toward a more inclusive, comprehensive view of the diversity of human existence.

most sincerely yours,

Kerry M

teenage dream: Glee and gay boys

I watch Glee with a mix of delight and frustration; it's inconsistent, it has an infuriating habit of starting, then dropping, plotlines, it has an obnoxious tendency toward "special" episodes of guest stars or themes that disrupt any momentum the show may have developed. But it also has some great secondary characters (ones who chew up that scenery like crazy), some thoughtful and captivating plotlines, and the best parent on TV.

A couple of weeks ago, Glee hit it out of the ballpark with "Never Been Kissed." I've been thinking about this episode a lot, and not just because it introduces a new location, an all-boys high school that I have been referring to as gay hogwarts (it's the blazers and the senior common room that got me).

THE moment of that episode is Kurt's visit to gay Hogwarts, when he meets adorable Blaine, who sings with the Warblers, the school glee club. In this delirious alternate-reality, the Warblers are "like, rockstars" who stage impromptu performances in the aforementioned common room. Blaine and his cohorts launch into a cover of Katy Perry's "Teenage Dream," sung to Kurt (played with even more than usual aplomb by the staggeringly fantastic Chris Colfer, about whom I cannot say enough in praise).

Watching the episode the first time, I kind of groaned; I don't really like the song and so that made the moment less charming than hoped for.
But then I read the post Tom and Lorenzo wrote about the episode. And ever since reading that post, I can't stop thinking about "Never Been Kissed."

TLo write:

Sure, teenage romantic fantasies are inherently silly to adults because they come from a place of such inexperience and naivete, but they serve an important function in the sexual development of kids. They train them to dream about the best possible outcome. Just as they've been trained their whole lives as to how to make that outcome happen.

Which is some incredibly astute theorizing on adolescent fantasies about romance.
And then, because they're amazing, TLo go on to say:

Teenagers see thousands of murders depicted onscreen by the time they reach 18 but most of them never see a boy kiss another boy or sing him a sweet love song. You want to prevent gay kids from killing themselves? Push for more scenes like the above. Giving a young gay boy the dream that someday Prince Charming will come and sing a love song to him? You cannot imagine. You simply cannot imagine how revolutionary such a thing is.

And even though I spend my days thinking about queerness, thinking about adolescence and childhood and queerness, even though I was more aware (and I sincerely hope, more sensitive) of queer issues when I was in high school - despite all that, TLo are absolutely right: I cannot imagine. I simply cannot imagine how revolutionary such a thing is.

Because of the way criticism works, though, and because I think about what I read, I am beginning to both imagine and understand how revolutionary such a thing is.
even if Glee falls apart again, even if the show goes downhill from here, I will be thoughtful and thankful for this episode that shows us - not in a jokey dream sequence, not in a way we giggle or sneer at - the teenage dreams of a gay boy.