Recently, I had a chat with my girlfriend about the much-anticipated sequel of a beloved childhood movie. As two Disney/Pixar buffs, both of us have hardly been able to contain our excitement for "Finding Dory," and we'll be among the schools of moviegoers flocking to see it in the coming weeks. Our latest Dory-centered conversation, however, wasn't about the movie itself. It was about a little ripple of controversy that's been stirring up social media lately. The "Finding Dory" creators recently released this trailer for the movie, in which there is a short clip of what appears to be a lesbian couple. Whether the women are actually a couple has neither been confirmed nor denied, Now, this clip is approximately two seconds long, and all the women do is act surprised by an octopus in a stroller, but it's enough to have some conservative folks declaring a boycott against "Finding Dory." These people find it outrageous and offensive that Disney has dared to hint at lesbianism in a children's movie. My girlfriend even showed me a post on Twitter where someone claimed to have "nothing against gay people," but who wanted to know why the LGBTQ+ community felt the need to "put gays in everything" when straight people don't "put straights in everything."
Under most circumstances, I would do my best to ignore Internet controversy, as I've found arguing with strangers online shortens the life span of my brain cells. Even so, when social media is saturated with tweets and messages like the one above, a person can only smile and endure the frustration for so long. So, for anyone who has ever felt that the LGBTQ+ community is pushing too hard for representation, or that we're somehow overshadowing heterosexual people, I have one simple truth for you: straights are everywhere.
Think of the last movie you saw, TV show you binge-watched, advertisement you tried to ignore, video game you played, or book you read. No matter what kind of entertainment you've indulged in recently, odds are the main character was a straight person. The main romance was also probably between a man and a woman. Even if the entire story was about animals, there was probably a straight romance, with the gender division between the male and female animals as blatant as possible. Most of their friends and family were probably straight. Perhaps they had one or two gay associates, but those people were most likely on the fringe of the story. If they had a significant part, they were probably an incredibly flamboyant gay man, or a lesbian who is constantly tormented with every problem under the sun and who will probably end up dead, if she hasn't already. It is incredibly rare to find any story that doesn't feature a heterosexual person as its main star, and rarer still that token gay characters are anything except that - tokens.
Of course, there is arguably a much broader field of LGBTQ+ representation in the media today than there has been in the past, even as recently as the last decade or so. Shows like "Modern Family," "Orphan Black" and "Steven Universe" have brought gay characters into the spotlight, all of them dynamic and compelling in their own ways. Cinema is taking a step in the right direction, too, with films like "Carol" sweeping through the box office. Advertisements for more liberal companies have started to become more inclusive, and video games are beginning to bring in LGBTQ+ elements into them as well, particularly with titles like "Dragon Age" where players can choose their own romance paths.
However, the progress our media industry has made for the LGBTQ+ community is still incredibly small compared to the overwhelming influence of heteronormativity (for those of you unfamiliar with this term, I'll explain it further down). Straight characters and couples vastly outnumber LGBTQ+ ones in everything except perhaps Internet fandoms. Movies like "Carol" are kept corralled in "select theaters only," meaning none of the theaters in my conservative hometown show them, even though they're perfectly happy to run movies like "Deadpool" through the local circuit. The "bury your gays" trope is still alive and well on television networks, where lesbians and gay men have a depressing tendency to be killed off for no purpose other than shock value. Every new LGBTQ+ character that arrives on mainstream media is incredibly important to representation, provided they're taken seriously by their writers, but the fact remains that heterosexual people and images still dominate.
Now then, instead of thinking about the last fictional characters you interacted with, think of your most recent stroll through a public locale. Think about the last time you walked through your high school or college campus, or perused the mall for a few hours. How many straight couples did you see? How many pairs of men and women were holding hands, or had their arms around one another, or were tucked into a semi-secluded corner so they could test the limits of public decency? I would wager I pass by dozens of heterosexual couples every time I leave the house, most without even noticing.
Every time I come across a gay couple, though, they're all I can pay attention to until they're out of sight. They stand out. They're clearly not jiving with the status quo, and while coming across gay couples makes me incredibly happy, many people would not react in the same fashion. Two men holding hands or two women exchanging kisses instantly nails them with a spotlight, because according to our heteronormative society, gay couples are "abnormal." They don't get to blend in with the crowd like straight couples do. They don't get to see themselves represented in every romance story, every character on TV, every advertisement plastered on billboards and store windows. Heteronormativity assumes that everyone out there is straight, so anyone who blatantly disrupts that idea is somehow wrong, a disturbance in the normal flow of life.
So, to the anonymous Twitter user who was most definitely not against gay people, but just couldn't understand why we try to douse everything in rainbow sprinkles - we have to fight for whatever representation we can get. If we didn't, we would have none at all, nowhere we could turn to in the media and see ourselves reflected back at us. You can bristle and complain about how pushy we're supposedly being all you want, but tell me this: would anyone be boycotting "Finding Dory" if the couple in that two-second clip had been straight?