On National Coming Out Day

I came out to my friends aged fifteen via the then near-universal medium of a chain email personality quiz.

'Do you like girls or boys? asked one of about fifty questions. 'GIRLS' I put, alongside answers about my favourite colour, what I wanted to do when I left school, and how many pets I had. Then I sent it to everyone I knew.

My thought process was basically to act as though everyone already knew about my romantic and/or sexual preferences and to carry on with exactly the same attitude as before. I was hoping that people would take their cue from my behaviour, and also decide to carry on as if nothing had changed. Because, fundamentally, nothing had changed. I was who I had always been: a fat, opinionated, nerdy teenage girl who harboured both a deep love of science fiction and the loathing of a thousand firey suns for PE.

And I was nervous when I arrived in school the next day, after the sending of the fateful quiz, but for the most part... it became clear that everyone kind of had already known, much to my relief. For the first (and, frankly, last) time during the emotional cesspit of my teenage years, my mouthyness had done me a favour. I'd never exactly been subtle with my outspoken fascination with female characters in the Canadian sci-fi shows I was obsessed with (oh, Trance Gemini, you were purple, and you had a tail, and I thought you were sexy as hell).

In fact I'm fairly certain that a couple of my mates had worked out that I was gay before I had.

Still. The older I get the more I resent the idea of 'coming out' to begin with. You never 'come out' once and get to be done – it's a conversation you have over and over again, in every new situation you come into. Straight people will absolutely insist on believing that everyone around them is heterosexual until told otherwise, much to my continued chagrin, and, like most people in the LGBTQIA community, I've lost track of the number of conversations I've been forced to make faintly awkward and uncomfortable by correcting some casual acquaintance's assumptions about me.

A straight friend once opined to me his well-intended presumption that if all the 'gay people' in Hollywood would just come out it would essentially cure homophobia in one fell swoop – erase the stigma, set a shining example. I thought his naivete was adorable, and also that he was entirely missing the point.

Homophobia is not a problem that it should be up to the LGBTQIA community to solve, for the simple reason that there aren't enough of us to be somehow perpetuating our own discrimination. The idea that we can really change anything, long-term, by coming out is sort of baffling. It's notable, for instance, that in the wake of equal marriage laws being passed in New York, the number of homeless LGBT youth on the streets there swelled by 40%*. Tragically, in the wake of this supposedly accepting atmosphere, hundreds of queer young people had 'come out' to their families – and were thrown out by heterosexual parents whose attitudes had not somehow been magically altered by their child coming out at all. Coming out didn't save them, equal marriage laws didn't save them – famous queer people in Hollywood didn't save them.

Yes, it's great – admirable – when someone famous makes the decision to be open about their sexuality. (I may have cried when Ellen Page did it). But famous queer people are under no obligation to be open. Certainly, they are under far, far less of an obligation to be 'out' than any straight person, famous or not, is under to not be homophobic. And one of the major ways in which straight people can stop being homophobic is to remove the necessity of 'coming out' in the first place, by ceasing to assume that everyone around them is also straight.

It shouldn't be up to us queers to tell heterosexual people who we are – what label they should be applying to us. Straight people just need to stop assuming that we don't exist all around them, within every community, every environment. They need to make room for us, need to allow, within their mindsets, the possibility that we are there, whether they know it or not.

I mean, none of us are entirely 'out' the entirety of the time – I don't walk into a coffee shop and tell the barrista that I'm a lesbian when I order a latte. I don't introduce myself to a new tutor at filmschool with my name, speciality and sexual orientation. And yet when I mention to this same tutor that my subject matter is often 'queer' in its content, I always get the same faint look of surprise as I am re-evaluated, re-categorized in their heads – as a question they're probably too polite to ask comes up in their minds, about what I am, anyway.

Because they always, always assume that I'm straight and the hint that I might not be always jars them.

Do I blame these individuals? Not especially, because we live in a media culture that is absolutely saturated with heteronormativity, so, you know, of course most straight people – barring some obvious visible marker of queerness, which I tend not to have – assume that everyone is as cis!het as they are. When we exist in the simulacrum of media narratives that permeate our world we are, at best, 'special interest' – faintly (or not so faintly) 'other', odd, edgy, unusual enough to constitute a talking point or a notable extreme. But not main characters in dramas that aren't specifically about queerness, not human enough, in that respect, to simply exist in stories where being queer isn't our biggest problem. We are constantly positioned in opposition to a 'straight' default.

Straight people are taught early that they are the norm and we are not – that they are the rule and we the exception – and this is the foundation upon which homophobia rests on both an institutional and a personal scale. That there is any 'norm' at all from which to deviate is the idea that straight people need to start deconstructing – for themselves as well as in the name of making the world safer for the queer community. Because ideas about normative sexuality also tend to form the neck from which a hydra of other evils spring: rape culture, toxic masculinity, that especially virulent form of able-ism which loves to assign arbitrary value to people in order of how fuckable they are – to name a few.

This is why 'coming out' is not something queer people should feel obligated to do. Straight people might instead choose to celebrate national coming out day by rethinking their personal assumptions, by challenging heteronormativity by themselves – by calling out homophobic behaviour from those around them, by making it safe for queer people to live openly and comfortably.

*For this statistic and other depressing facts about homeless LGBT youth rates, see this article in the Rolling Stone.

Queer on the Straight Edge: To be young, homo and sober

My name is Islay, I am 25, and I've never been drunk.

It wasn't until I encountered punk culture, a couple of years ago, that I learned there was an actual name for one of my social quirks beyond me just being... you know, quirky (being both a lesbian and a nerd, at this point terminal quirkiry has become a way of life so my personal decision to swear off addictive substances seemed otherwise par for the course).

But on the punk scene, they call it 'straight edge'. People who turn refusal of drugs and alcohol and all those hallmarks of the counter-culture into a kind of counter-culture of its own.

I don't drink – I've never had a drink, really. I was allowed the odd sip of wine as a kid, but when I was thirteen I got a pretty harsh look at the end result of a lifetime of abusing something that harmful, and decided that I would never allow myself to end up on the same road.

I should point out that my dad's death was not directly related to his alcoholism – he had a heart attack due to years of generally failing to take care of himself, the drinking being one shitty corner piece of that whole situation. But, aside from contributing to his overall ill-health, in the last year of his life his addiction robbed him of perhaps the most meaningful elements of his life: his relationship with his wife, and with me and my sister. Though the details are hazy to me now – I suspect I've blocked most of that miserable period of my life out and replaced the memories with mental images of kittens, in a kind of psychological screen-saver I hope never to disturb – it seems that my mother spent several years giving him ultimatums about his problem, and finally carried through her threat to leave him if he wouldn't stop drinking. The end of his marriage devastated him, and he was still struggling (and mostly failing) to come to terms with her decision when he died, less than a year later.

For better or worse, I have a similar personality type to my dad. The obsessive/addictive psychology that made him this formidable, awesome, well-remembered guy – hard working, stubborn, whip-smart, passionately opinionated and hilarious – also made him vulnerable in others, and I see exactly the same tendencies manifesting in my adulthood (given the right inspiration I can sit down and write a full length feature film in a week. I can also spend literally seven hours in one go picking through an actor's entire instagram account because I need more pictures of her face and yes I know that makes me a creep but her face, you guys, her face). And the bottom line is that I don't think it's worth risking allowing myself to develop a taste for anything more problematic than caffeine, given my family history.

So I don't drink. I will never drink. I will never take any substance that's less than legal and I'm even cautious about painkillers most of the time – anything beyond standard ibuprofen makes me nervous.

Beyond a simple instinct toward self-preservation, I get a sick feeling in my stomach about the idea of handing money over to the same industry that effectively ruined my dad's life. Of course he was a grown man arguably exercising a personal choice, but there's no denying the fact that booze culture in this country utterly enabled my dad's behaviour. If it had been less acceptable for him to binge-drink regularly, if it had been less routine – hell, encouraged – for a man to drink as heavily as he did, if all of his behaviours weren't so goddamned acceptable, there's at least a chance he'd have understood the nature of his problem sooner, and might have been able to save himself – maybe even save his marriage to my mother.

Booze culture enables the behaviour of a growing number of people who are addicted – it encourages behaviours that grow inescapable before the individual realises that there's an issue. I've seen it in people my own age, I continue to see it, and it frightens me. When I hear my friends talking about how much they 'need' a drink, talking cheerfully about how wasted they were last night, how wasted they plan to get again tomorrow, I can't help but see a flash of my dad's ruined life come up behind my eyes and wonder if this was how he started – if this was how he was able to keep going so blindly. I wonder why this behaviour – overspending, over-drinking, merrily, contentedly – has become so totally normal when it is also fundamentally destructive.

Increasingly I don't socialise in situations where I know people will be drinking heavily. What seems to be a good time for some is just a forceful reminder of stuff I'd rather not have to relive, and I'm not comfortable asking others not to get drunk around me, so I just avoid them. What do I say? 'Please don't drink so much that you smell of the same beer my dad did when I was eight years old because now I'm having to relive the quagmire of that trauma?' Given that these functions are often semi-professional (oh, the amount of 'networking' that gets done in bars) I know I can't spill my personal ugliness on someone like that. And it often seems taboo even to just be there and not drink, so I stay away, because I don't want to be prodded about it.

Counter-cultural types, especially of the queer variety, tend to come together out of a wish to escape what we feel is a grindingly destructive mainstream: power structures that alienate us, seek to censor or crush us. I'd call that the Patriarchy, punk calls it The Man – but in general counter cultural efforts are centred on creating, or re-creating, ourselves, not destroying them, as a reaction against a society that would rather we didn't exist.

Booze and drug culture seems an odd thing to have wormed its way in amongst this sort of ideology, and yet, of course, anyone who spends time in any creative industry – where us queer, counter-cultural types have a tendency to turn up in vast numbers – knows that there's an epidemic of addictions, of one kind or another, in the environments we are often attracted to.

It's perhaps a personality type issue: the same addictive/obsessive personality types that, like mine and my dad's, are vulnerable to these issues, tend to be the same shade of batshited-ly stubborn required to stick it out in the artistic queer circles I often find myself in.

But it's also about marketing.

One of the things that disturbs me about the coorporate nature of PRIDE these days is that events and parades are increasingly sponsored by alcohol companies. Most research (links at the bottom) highly suggests that rates of alcohol dependency are higher in the LGBTQIA community than they are elsewhere. Figures run between 20% and 45% of the LGBTQIA community being affected by some kind of addiction, compared to between 9% and 15% of the general population in the UK and America (I haven't been able to find statistics for elsewhere). We are a marginalised group more likely to be homeless and/or unemployed and more likely to experience violence and abuse and less likely to have access to medical and mental health resources than our heterosexual cis gender peers are – it's not hard to understand why addictions happen in greater numbers to us, we just have far, far greater risk factors.

To assume that an alcoholic beverage company doesn't know these facts feels to me rather willfully blind. When a company like Bicardi sponsors big pride events, which they have done in both LA Pride and Harlem in America and Brighton Pride here, they get two things: some nice fluffy good press, and further access to a market which has a dependency on their products up to three times the norm.

So whilst I harbour my own personal reasons for refusing to drink, increasingly I harbour political ones, too. Just as I try, as far as my extremely limited budget will allow, to be ethical in my consumerism elsewhere, I'm not going to give money to companies that exploit my community like that. Given that many good wee lefties are very conscientious about other consumer choices – about fairtrade and organic foods, about vegetarianism and veganism, about buying second hand and from local sources – it seems odd to me that there doesn't seem to be a similar debate about the ethics of alcohol consumption, tobacco use or drugs.

There are many, many ranges of engagement with ethical consumerism amongst my friends in these spheres, from the entirely freegan second hand crunchy granola hippies, to those who maybe attempt to recycle once in a while but have otherwise prioritised other forms of activism because ethical consumerism seems like such a minefield (and it is, and I don't judge people who eat meat and use amazon – there are compelling arguments to be made that these choices are no more damaging than the opposite, because, well, this crap is a minefield). But every one of them have at least thought about these issues carefully before making the choices that seem right to them.

I've never seen similar thought and choice put into whether or not to consume alcohol.

People just... kind of do. Which is odd, right?

Similarly with people who smoke – given that tobacco companies may in fact be Satan (no really, google 'Bannatyne Takes on Tobacco', watch the documentary – it's up for free – about how these companies are advertising to children in economically developing nations, and tell me tobacco companies aren't the lowest form of scum on this earth), why in the hell do I see so many lefties who seem to consider smoking to still be a kind of counter-cultural badge of honour? Just because you're doing something that is increasingly no longer socially acceptable doesn't make it automatically subversive, kids. Where is the carefully critical consideration about where that shit you're inhaling comes from and what it is costing the wider world when you hand over money for it?

The long and short of it is that I'm not going to support a booze and/or drug culture which wrecks the lives of the most vulnerable people under the queer rainbow. I don't think that makes me a mood killer or a stick in the mud – I think that makes someone just doing her best to choose an ethical way of life. And I really wish there was wider consciousness of this issue, that criticism of booze culture wouldn't automatically be dismissed as harshing someone's good time. I'd love to see queer events go dry, to question the need for the presence of alcohol in order to 'have a good time' and instead consider the wholescale damage that need is doing to us as a group and the greater damage companies like these do worldwide.

Sources on LGBTQIA addiction rates: http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/lgbt/report/2012/03/09/11228/why-the-gay-and-transgender-population-experiences-higher-rates-of-substance-use/

http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/health-news/drug-use-seven-times-higher-among-gays-8165971.html

http://pride-institute.com/programs/lgbt-treatment/lgbt-alcohol-addiction/

http://www.nalgap.org/PDF/Resources/LGBT.pdf

On Ambition

'And I know, too, how destructive ambition is, and how it deforms what one might create. And yet, and yet, I want to be acknowledged.' - Willa Muir, Journal, 20^th of August 1953

***

When I was six, I had the good fortune to be at a school where the academic priority seemed to be to get us to write. Write whatever, as long as we were writing. Most of us couldn't even read yet but that was apparently unimportant as long as we were cooking up our own works of literary genius. I remember that I understood how to use metaphors, for instance, but not full stops.

It was an interesting time during my personal artistic development.

Amongst other things, we would have to write descriptions of what we did at the weekend every Monday morning. At some point, presumably around Guy Fawkes night, I wrote about going to see fireworks, and received a special gold star sticker and the mysterious commendation from my teacher that I 'could be a writer' when I grew up. I had no idea what that meant, but if it came with more of these gold stars, I was game.

Thus was an ambitious young writer born.

***

In my third year at university I fell in love with a little known Scottish novelist named Willa Muir – which is a pity because by that point she'd been dead for forty years.

She's much less famous than her poet husband, Edwin Muir, although current research suggests that it was she, not Edwin, who was mostly responsible for the Kafka translations that made his name in the western literary scene of the early-mid 20^th century.

And therein lies something of what drew me to her work and which pulls me back to it every now and again.

In her lifetime, Willa wrote only two novels: Mrs Ritchie and Imagined Corners, both witty examinations of family, class and gender in small town Scotland in the 1920s-40s, both of which I loved. They're vibrant, funny books full of bristling politics and human characters, keenly drawn with a sharp voice that feels about a generation ahead of its time.

But she never wrote anything else and eventually died in relative obscurity. This woman lived into the 1970s and was, as a result, witness to some of the greatest social upheavals of our time: the fact that her work reflects only a fraction of that is a horrible shame. What Willa didn't write about is, frankly, as telling as what she did.

It's clear from Willa's personal writings, journals and letters, that though she wasn't without ambition, she sacrificed her aspirations to help with her husbands' – that instead of pursuing her own career, she supported his, to the point of doing most of the work he was famous for, for him.

What is also clear is that she regretted it. In her personal letters and diaries she voices a concise knowledge of what it cost her and how that pains her:

'I am a better translator than [Edwin] is. The whole current of patriarchal society is set against this fact, however and sweeps it into oblivion, simply because I did not insist on shouting aloud: “Most of this translation, especially Kafka, has been done by me. Edwin only helped.” … So that now … I am left without a shred of literary reputation.' (Journal, 20^th of August, 1953).

Willa was a woman with ability and ambition who felt that her lack of courage (she called it her 'dicky backbone') had held her back from the work she should have spent her life creating, which in turn denied her the reputation that she deserved.

I'd argue that she may have been overly harsh with herself: it's easy for me, living three generations later, to look back and see the myriad of societal forces stacked up against female writers trying to find their voices during this period. In many cases, it feels more like luck and class privilege that allowed those few women who broke into the mainstream to be heard, not courage. (I'm aware that that is often still true today). But, facing far fewer of those obstacles myself, do I have any excuse to give into my own fears the way Willa felt she did hers?

Willa reminds me, forcefully, never to fear reaching for my ambitions.

***

There are days when I wake up so restless I feel like I have ants under my skin.

I once wrote a story about my grandmother's death – the closest person I had to a grandmother, anyway. I said that when she died her body blossomed. I turned the swelling caused by all the steroids she was on into a garden, I said her body was only brewing life, her death was transformation.

I'm not sure that that's true. I miss her, and she hasn't turned into a garden.

I feel like I might, though. I feel like I could grow flowers, in her place. Just as I can't fathom her going to nothing (I don't believe she went to nothing; I know that nothing in this world ever truly disappears, that water is recycled, that Helen of Troy cried tears that are still out there, somewhere), I know I can't allow myself to go to nothing. I want to cough up seedlings, I want to grow bluebells in my belly; I have an oaktree in my head.

I choke on words – I have to practice not swallowing them.

***

I'm Scottish. I was born in Edinburgh, I've spent most of the first twenty five years of my life there. I moved south only last year. I miss it.

I left because I had to. Like Willa Muir, like Muriel Spark, like Jackie Kay – there are a wealth of Scottish writers across three generations now who had to get the fuck out of the country before they could write about it or about anything else. Scotland is precious and beautiful and strange and brilliant but also small, and it lacks the resources necessary for an ambitious young screenwriter like me to launch the kind of the career she really wants.

If I'm honest with myself I want more than I ever publicly state. I was reluctant to come to terms with that some years ago when it first dawned on me that I would have to move to London (I thought, I'll stay in Edinburgh, become a teacher and write novels – that's enough, isn't it? But I knew it wasn't); I am reluctant to come to terms with it now that it dawns on me that I may have to move even further afield.

I say I want to work in British TV and I do. But the more familiar I become with that world the smaller the reality seems (soaps. Soaps are were the steady money is. Christ. Soaps? Soaps. And if you wanna write soaps that's great but... do I? Really?), and I remember that a woman who graduated only two years ahead of me from my filmschool just sold a script to an American production company for three hundred thousand dollars and I think Jesus I should dream a little bigger.

Why shouldn't I dream a little bigger? What, like the soaps are going somewhere? I have precisely nothing to lose, and yet I'm afraid to even breath the possibility of more than feels safe. I don't feel entitled to that.

Ambition is a tricky thing because women are told not to be ambitious. Or, well, we can be ambitious (lean in, ladies!) but we can't be bitches about it – which boils down to us being told that we can want whatever we want but we must never ask for it. Which boils down to sitting on our hands and hoping our dreams will land in our laps and I can't accept that.

Willa Muir didn't die in obscurity for me to accept that.

And I don't believe that the problem is with the attitude of the oppressed, I believe, as Hellen Keller once said, that the inferiority of women is man-made. We live in a patriarchy: individual women taking the initiative will not change that. It's often not possible for many individuals, especially those in poverty, to take any kind of initiative at all (doubly or more so for those of us whose sexualities or gender identities or disabilities or skin colours increase our risk factors for poverty, for suffering violence and and non-violent oppression during our life times). That's why the patriarchy is considered an oppressive system.

But I'm increasingly convinced that being ambitious may be the only way for me, personally, to survive it.

My vulnerabilities, my social anxieties, the level to which I care – deeply, unfathomably – about how others perceive me, all habits picked up via a lifetime of homophobia, of misogyny, of myriad societal systems chip-chip-chipping at my self-esteem, all play into blinkering me even from dreaming bigger than myself, let alone reaching. And that is not okay. I will not take that, the robbery of my dreams, without a fight.

I don't want to be obnoxious – I'm at a filmschool, I see plenty of obnoxious people and good god save me from getting lost up my own arse – but I've decided, lately, that I won't be weak. (And if that means having to be obnoxious sometimes? Fine.) I turn twenty five in a couple of months and I am tired of acting like a little girl, of swallowing my ambitions, of staying meek and helpless to make others comfortable – because god forbid I be thought of as anything other than that horrible word 'nice'. I am a grown up, I have a fucking career to worry about.

I am full of potential – there are bluebells in my belly – and I can't look back in thirty years and know I wasted it, especially not because I was afraid. 

The stories are what remind me to breathe:

I have some thoughts brewing, about being a woman and having to find ways to cope with the ways in which our society consistently denies us our sense of safety, our security. Because yesterday I was harassed on a train, and in the grand scheme of things it was a relatively minor incident, but I’m stewing over it still, today - because for half an hour or so yesterday I was legitimately frightened for my immediate physical safety, because a man twice my age decided he had the right to make me feel that way. 

It was gross and I’m angry with him, with the world, with myself for still being so knocked off-centre by it today - enough that I almost didn’t get back on the same train I was on yesterday to head back into London to meet friends. I didn’t wanna be on that train again, travelling alone again.

But I did it, and I listened to Happy on repeat the whole way there on my favourite Uncanny X-men headphones, and I met my friends, and I bought comic books and bubble tea, and I made myself a good day, although by the end of it I felt wrung out and exhausted. Whether that was the right thing to do for my mental health - whether it might have been better to simply allow myself to retreat and rest in my, I don’t know; I don’t think there’s a right or wrong way to deal when something like this happens.

But mostly I did what I would have done either way: tried not to think about a tall, heavy man pinning me to my seat, demanding I have lunch with him, trying to stop me getting off the train, and when that didn’t work following me off the train himself, up the road, still demanding I come with him, saying he would follow me home, until I got so breathless and scared I had to turn round and scream at him (and the shithead got frightened and ran the fuck away, because when the girl is scared and clearly trying to get away from you it’s all good to push her, but god forbid she turn round and show a hint of something harsher, darker than vulnerability - something closer to absolute fucking rage - at you daring to try to pull this on her). 

Today I read the new Captain Marvel, and I bought Birds of Prey and Batwoman too. I wished for super powers - I thought about how much safer I’d feel in the world if I had super powers. I thought about how Carol Danvers must have felt when she couldn’t fly - how her friends built her a flying motorcycle instead and dang I wish irl was that easy.

In these situations, when your power is taken off you - when your sense of security, your feeling of having a right to exist happily and undisturbed in the world - is threatened, I think the power to dream, to escape an unkind world temporarily, is an important one. I remember curling up around a laptop reading fanfiction the night after I was violently mugged when I was eighteen (there’s still a lump of scar tissue in my lip where I was punched, where my front tooth was snapped in half and driven into the gum). I think about how every time I’ve felt truly afraid in my life, I have found fiction, until I’ve felt able to breathe again.

It reminds me of the other worlds in which we can be untouchable - of the power of art, of female creators writing female characters. Of the worlds we are conquering - the real ones, the fictional ones.

We are important: female writers, female readers, female artists, female fans. I think sometimes we’re the only thing holding 51% of the population together, huddled round a campfire telling ourselves stories to keep the shadows at bay.

A Brief History of the Sapphic Fangirl

The following is actually an extract from the introduction to my Masters dissertation, but I thought it might prove interesting to some readers, so....

***

'In the more recent films that naturalise lesbian desire, but offer it as an alternative that is not viable within the ‘real’ world of the film’s fiction, lesbians can either invent their own narratives that allow the lesbianism to be enacted or can become engaged with the film through an attraction to one of the characters. (If all else fails, there is always the girl sitting next to you in the theatre).’ – Andrea Weiss, Vampires and Violets: Lesbians in the Cinema, p83

***

It is ten in the morning on a murky London Saturday, in September, 2010, and I have pulled my best friend, T., around the back of the Southbank BFI to snog her face off.

T. accuses me of biting her. I’ll admit I may have been somewhat careless about what I was doing with my teeth in my fervour, but this still seems like an uncharitable observation given the circumstances. I’m being romantic, for fuck’s sake!

I have been attempting to get us to this point in our relationship – from ‘best friend’ to ‘girlfriend’ – for almost the entirety of the two years that I’ve known her: we met on one of Merlin’s online fanfiction communities whilst the show’s first season was airing. I do not know yet that the entire two year courtship is an absolutely fucking terrible idea (Closeted Girls: They’ll Take A Shit On Your Heart – a memoir), I’m just giddy. My stomach is in knots because I haven’t eaten yet – I can never eat on Merlin days – but I’m happy.

Today is the preview of the first episode of Merlin’s third season, airing at the BFI two weeks before it airs on TV. I have already been to other BFI previews of Merlin episodes in T.’s company, but this time in the cinema I hold her hand. When Morgana wakes screaming from a nightmare and her loyal maid, Gwen, leaps onto the bed to embrace and console her, we giggle conspiratorially.

We know that the show will never allow any actual expressed romantic love between these two characters, but we've built the foundation of our relationship on fictionalising Morgana and Gwen’s romance for ourselves. I run the primary online community for fan-authored stories (‘fanfiction’, ‘fanfic’ or just ‘fic’) about the couple and T. and I have probably spent more time than is sensible dreaming up Morgana and Gwen’s off-screen adventures together.

We like ‘MorGwen’ because they, like us, are an interracial queer couple – but, unlike us, their problems are less about the dull, grinding presence of a patriarchal racist heterodoxy, and more about dragons, magic, and stupid princes who won’t do as they’re told. It makes for excellent escapism.

T. and I broke up some time later and I found another Merlin fangirl to date – and then another – but Merlin’s presence in the backdrop of these relationships remained constant, as did my reworking of stories about its central female characters in order to ‘queer’ them to my satisfaction.

By the time Merlin had finished its five season run, I was well aware that the history of my development as an adult queer woman was now bizarrely but inextricably linked to this TV show. I had formulated a queer media consciousness through its fandom; I had met, seduced and broken up with my first love almost entirely via the show and its fan communities. I had, in fact, embarked on a wide array of variably successful relationships with girls I knew entirely because of Merlin – the show had operated both as my muse, and my dating service, throughout my university career.

And then, after graduating and job-hunting necessitated the winding-down of my participation in Merlin fandom, I fell for Gwen, a girl who was totally unconnected to the show's fandom but still shared a name with one its main characters. As if the Gods of Queer were mocking me.

(And, bless her, she didn't turn and run the minute I got her in my bedroom to be confronted with one entire wall dedicated to signed pictures of Katie McGrath's face). 

The fact is that it was the combination of my queer identity and Merlin’s influence that drove me out of my bedroom and into the industry upon graduating from university. Having spent years writing fanfiction primarily for Merlin, but also a handful of other British dramas, I realised my ‘queering’ of the narratives presented in the source material was better serving my needs and desires as a viewer than the shows themselves were, and I resolved to enter the industry as a writer in order to do better.

The recent emergence not just of deliberately queer subtext but of openly queer characters in British TV drama is viscerally enlivening both to me personally as a viewer, and professionally as a young screenwriter. Even more encouraging is the inclusion of queer characters in drama aimed at a ‘family’ audience. ‘Family’ drama tends to include a presumed subsection of child viewers, and what a culture will expose its children to is arguably a litmus test for what is considered ‘decent’ in a public place in general. For a community whose media representation was historically censured under obscenity laws, our transition from unspeakable to downright PC feels like it represents a monumental step forward, toward true equality.

But I'm suspicious of the source of this wider representation – and am probably not the only queer person to have noticed, as Andrea Weiss points out, ‘that [the queer community’s] ability to appropriate images from the dominant culture is often matched or surpassed by the dominant culture’s amazing capacity to absorb and co-opt marginalised groups’ (Vampires and Violets, p163). That is, I worry that in some cases not just ‘out’ queer characters onscreen, but queer subtext itself (traditionally a haven from which queer viewers can reinterpret the narrative), may be being systematically co-opted by a hetero-centric media culture in these dramas.

Weiss is talking specifically about lesbian images in film, which are notoriously fetishized and co-opted by the heterosexual male gaze; but I think her argument here is easily applicable to wider queer representation in television.

My hunch is that, in family dramas, ‘queerness’ is appropriated by television makers for dramatic effect. Because of its relative novelty in a pre-watershed timeslot, subtextual or overt queerness can be used to create mystique around a character, which lends intrigue to their presence and power to their actions in the story.

And whilst the subversive power of the marginalised is refreshing to see in pre-watershed drama, and certainly has the potential to be progressive, there are troubling implications if my hunch is correct. Firstly, the character who I will prove has the most queer subtext on Merlin is Morgana – who is also the villain of the piece and whose murder at the hands of our heterosexual male heroes is celebrated. The power that Morgana’s subtextual queerness grants her is almost always negative in tone, spectularly so in her arc with Guinevere in the show’s fifth and final season, which I will draws heavily on regressive ‘lesbian vampire’ tropes. (Right down to Morgana 'dying' and coming back).

Secondly, even in cases where the power associated with queerness is positive – as in Madame Vastra and Jenny Flint on Doctor Who, who are presented as allies to the Doctor – this power is still ‘othering’. The way the viewer is invited to perceive these characters is from an oppositional ‘norm’, so the characters can be presented as ‘other’ to this norm, which grants the ‘other’ the novelty that makes it dramatic. But that still leaves the queer character(s) abnormal and strange, however benign.

Five Reasons to watch CW's Arrow

Felicity Smoak:

Originally intended to be a one episode guest appearance – little more than a nod to the comic book character for DC fans – cast and crew reacted so well to Emily Bett Rickard's adorkable performance as Felicity Smoak that she was promptly offered a recurring role. (Apparently, Stephen Amell's grin in his first scene with her is not scripted.He hadn't had much chance to reherse with Bett Rickards and her comic timing knocked him off guard so much that he momentarily broke character).

Serendipitous both for Emily Bett Rickards – this is her first major role – and for the show's audience, it's now extremely hard to imagine Arrow without her, to the point where it seems odd that she was never originally intended to sit at its emotional heart as firmly as she now does. The basic fact is that, like Doctor Who's companion characters, Felicity provides a much-needed audience surrogate for a world that can sometimes feel the wrong kind of cartoonish. She's the character who can wryly point out the weirdness of a life lead amongst masked vigilantes and psychotic supervillains (“It's getting really hard to keep track of who knows who's secret identity!”). But the warmth and sincerity about Rickards' delivery allows such winks to the audience to feel genuine rather than cynical, building confidence in the show's quirks rather than undermining them.

By season two Felicity had become such a fan favourite that she'd been deservedly upgraded to a regular, appearing in every episode. Her fangirls are now so numerous that they've been known to riot (or at least, start passive aggressive twitter trends) when Felicity's not in an episode long enough for their satisfaction. She remains an absolutely vital breath of air on a show that might well feel too dark for its subject matter without her, and is walking proof that happy accidents can be great – even vital – for scripted drama. 

 Laurel Lance:

At first introduced as the show's nominal romantic lead in the Arrow's obligatory love triangle (blech), Laurel Lance has, thank the TV gods, been given a chance to breathe in season two, and has had an exceptionally strong arc this year. The writers' bold choice to decimate the love triangle entirely by killing off Oliver Queen's best friend and rival for Laurel's affections, Tommy Merlyn, and break up Laurel and Oliver for the forseeable future, has given this character much needed development independent of her relationship with either man. From something of an unfortunate cliché in season one, to potentially one of my favourite fictional women in season two, is quite a progression.

Laurel's spiral into addiction and depression this year was both a surprising and brilliant choice for the writers' to make, granting the character a new level of complexity. And Katie Cassidy was able to bring subtly and genuine pain to an arc that could have felt over-dramatic in the wrong hands. As it is, I believed Laurel's grief and guilt in the wake of Tommy's death, believed her rage at the world and in particular her sister, and I reckon her reconciliation with her formally-dead sibling may be my favourite scene of the series so far (never has a character moment on an action/adventure series NOT marketed at women so thoroughly passed the Bechdel test – and made me cry, all at the same time).

Sober and beginning to claw her life back together, when not delivering grown up relationship advice over virgin martinis, Laurel is currently facing the revelation of Oliver's secret identity, and I'm left extremely excited to see her continued development in season three.

Sara Lance:

Sara Lance had me at 'leather-wearing bisexual vigilante who punishes rapists and thinks Felicity Smoak is cute'.

Not only may she be the biggest badass on a show that is something like 80% inhumanly badass people hanging out and being casually badass because it looks cool, but Sara Lance proves that you don't have to be a rich straight dude to be the proud possessor of great abs, a secret identity and a tragic origin story. Hell, Sara Lance has come back from the dead at least once more than Oliver Queen has.

Caity Lotz's other roles include a terminator style she-robot and it's kinda easy to spot why: this lady is built like a spectacularly adorable tank. And as someone with an ex girlfriend who can deadlift grown men (competitive weight lifting ladies ilu) I do not apply that imagery lightly. But I remain kind of childishly gleeful about seeing such a physically powerful woman on TV – a woman who is noticeably muscle-bound rather than, say, the ridiculousness of being asked to believe that tiny little Gwenyth Paltrow could actually have performed that stunt at the end of Iron Man 3. Sara's both powerful and powerfully built, without being overly sexualised or totally de-sexualised in an attempt to make her seem less threatening for male viewers. Sara just is what she is: incredibly fucking awesome, and the show is happy to let her be that way.

There's also the fact that she gets on with all the other female characters, despite there having been plenty of excuse to fall back into catty cliches in at least a couple of instances. She is ostensibly Felicity's rival for Oliver's affections, but the show (VERY WISELY) steers around another potential love triangle by making Felicity and Sara friends. She's not even threatened by the fact that she's dating her sister's ex – taking advice from Laurel about how to deal with Oliver's moods and bonding with her in the process. Sara even has a tiny equally leather-bound female sidekick – Sin – and a gloriously dangerous ex-girlfriend, Nyssa, who turns up to attempt to drag Sara back to the League of Assasins in an episode that also involves one of my favourite coming out scenes ever.

(It's my favourite because it takes approximately two lines: Sara tells her dad that she has an ex-girlfriend, her dad blinks, accepts it, and moves on to the entirely more pressing matter of that ex-girlfriend trying to kill them all. Minus the homocidal ex, this is petty much how my own 'coming out' went down and I love when dramas take the less obvious path and underplay those moments because sometimes, it really is that simple).

Sara Lance is basically just my FAVE in all areas and if she is killed off there will be letters, I tell you. Angry ones. 

The sheer number of LADIES:

You may note that numbers 1-3 of this list are all female characters. What may also interest you is that that isn't even half of the female characters on this show.

I have no idea how a show in a genre that, in most cases, adheres to a strictly limited quota for female characters, has ended up with more women than men on its central cast. But it has, and it's kind of glorious.

It's glorious because it makes a otherwise slightly absurd world feel much more natural – unlike in other adaptations that are weirdly devoid of 51% of the world's actual population, Arrow has a fairly representative proportion of women, none of whom fulfil any particular stereotype, all of whom have at least one definable character arc. Of particular note is the presence of mothers on the show: superheroes tend not to have mothers at all – and where both parents are dead it is most usually the father who is the heroes' greatest lost (see: batman, spiderman and iron man). But Oliver has a mother – the complex, sympathetic and occasionally terrifying Moira Queen, who is the driving force behind several of the show's major arcs – and Sara and Laurel have an equally realistic feeling mother who pops up every few episodes, played by stalwart cult figure Alex Kingston. 

And if most of these women only have a place on the show because they are connected to Oliver in some way, I say: baby steps. They are all increasingly well developed, and tend to have relationships with each other that are not centred on him. For a show in a genre that is as misogynistic as comic book adaptations can sadly sometimes be, this is huge. And the show is an Arrow adaptation, after all, not Birds of Prey – although rumour has it that a Birds of Prey spin-off may be somewhere in the pipeline, most likely depending on whether the current spin-off, Flash, does okay and whether fan interest in Sara Lance remains strong.

I think ultimately what's important to remember is what Hayley Atwell (Peggy ala Captain America) argued for re: female action heroes:

“...even though they’re strong you need to also see the messiness of everyday life, that complexity. Even with Peggy Carter… Can we see her have a really shit day, put her pyjamas on and eat loads of ice cream and weep into chick flick? Can we have her be neurotic, hysterical, funny, depressed and all those things that we all relate to that aren’t regularly depicted because they’re not seen as sexy or comfortable for men to watch and masturbate over?”

And we have absolutely seen most, if not all, of these female characters be messy and strong in ways that are not masturbation fodder. Sara Lance might be wearing a leather corset, but she's beating the shit out of rapists in it. Laurel Lance might have started as Oliver's main love interest, but she's since had an incredibly ugly breakdown and pulled herself back together with as much help from her sister as from Oliver. 

It's not perfect by any means: the show's most glaring slip-up into tired cliché this year has been the demise of Shado, a fridging so classic I may or may not have capslocked angrily about it for several days after. (was it really sodding necessary to kill off the only woman of colour on the regular cast just to give Oliver and Slade man!pain?!) But this is otherwise a better superhero drama for women than any other right now and that's important and praise-worthy. Arrow really, really benefits from the range of women on its cast in a way that Marvel adaptations (and, frankly, DC's big-screen counterparts) could stand to learn from.

I love a comeback kid:

What may also be notable from the above is that most of Arrow's really interesting developments, especially for the female characters, have come about in its second season. 

Arrow has done something incredibly unusual, and improved dramatically in its second season compared to its first. This almost never happens – see: Heroes, Lost and almost everything Ryan Murphy touches. Most shows can only hope to maintain their quality in season two, and many dip because it can be hard to find the rhythm to an arc showrunners may not have been sure was going to happen at all in the incredibly uncertain world of TV (re)comissioning.

Arrow's first season wasn't terrible – as evidenced by the fact that it got recommissioned at all – but it wasn't brilliant. I watched the odd episode but wasn't sucked in (it was kinda dull and riddled with issues I felt I'd seen dozens of times before), and was only persuaded to go back by the promise of Sara Lance in its second season, and an expanded role for Felicity. Arrow originally struggled to balance the grimness of its subject matter with the cartoonishness of its world – this is, after all, a show that disguises a blond character by having her wear a blond wig, I am not kidding – and the result was a show that was difficult to know how to take seriously. Add to that the previously mentioned love triangle situation so clichéd it kinda made me want to go pull out my own eyelashes, and the fact that I am more of a Marvel fan than a DC one anyway, and I wasn't at all convinced of Arrow's merits this time last year.

But the bold decisions made by writers clearly determined to push their show beyond the obvious have really paid off since then. More women, more things for those women to do, and better use of flashbacks to create a genuine two-teared non-linear narrative rather than simply flesh out Oliver Queen's man!pain, have all helped immensely. There's also been a slight easing of an attempt to make a vigilante who uses a bow and arrow as opposed to say, anything vaguely more efficient, to fight crime seem in anyway dark or gritty. Instead, we have more truthful feeling character development and moments of light and warmth brought by a wider ensemble feel to the show's cast, which invest the audience emotionally in said bow and arrow weilding vigilante – so even if we know it's all a bit silly, that matters much less because damn it, we care what happens to Team Arrow now.

As a result, we now have a show that Time magazine recently named 'The Best On-Screen Superhero Franchise', and I can't say I disagree.

Honourable mentions:

John Diggle: the show's first taste of political commentary; also basically the awesomest.

No more exposition via Oliver's gloomy internal monologues: hurrah for the rule of show don't tell! Also goddamn, supervillains monologue less than Oliver did during Arrow's first few eps. That shit hardly even works in films these days – no idea who thought it'd work on TV but I'm glad they cut it the hell out.

Review Wednesdays: The Problem with Marvel's Agents of Shield

I've been watching Agents of Shield for two reasons.

The first being that I am a massive comic book nerd with a compulsive need to consume anything and everything with a Marvel logo stamped on it (see: my complete collection of Captain Marvel comic books, my Spider-Man duvet and the fact that I am almost certainly going to pay actual money to go and see the Ant-Man film).

The second is that this season's flavour of Hot Girls Miss Isles Fancies The Pants Off is apparently trending toward 'geeky/techy/super-intelligent ladies in sensible shoes being awesome', and Elizabeth Henstridge's adorable performance as Jemma Simmons fits the bill nicely.  For more on that front see also: Felicity Smoak on Arrow, and Cosima Niehaus on Orphan Black. Intelligence is sexy, yo.

Please note, however, that I'm not watching Agents of Shield because I think that the show is... brilliant.

Don't get me wrong, it's passable – it's cute, the cast are cute, Elizabeth Henstridge is SUPER CUTE. But it's nowhere near the unmissable juggernaut I was expecting before it premièred last Autumn. Instead, it's an okay distraction that I stick on when I'm hoovering, cleaning the kitchen or turning the heel on a sock I'm knitting. The cast are certifiably adorable, and as a result the characters are reasonably charming. I've been pulled in by their precious wee faces enough to be following most of the cast on twitter, to have a short playlist dedicated to Skye/Simmons on my iTunes and to have deliberately sought out fic to read.

Also Minga-Na Wen, playing Agent May, was the voice of Mulan in the titular character’s Disney film and thus I feel I owe her a significant chunk of my childhood's imaginary landscape.

But it's telling that what little investment I have is entirely bound up with the show's cast and it's fanbase - the femslashers in particular, as always, being the coolest kids to hang round with - rather than, say, the show's actual content. I got to liking Skye, the show's audience surrogate, only after finding fanworks that added much needed depth and intrigue to the character's psychology, and after watching interviews in which Chloe Bennet's enthusiasm for the character was infectious enough to soften me up. The character as-written on the show is... pretty effing bland (sorry Chloe, I appreciate you're doing your best). 

Agents of Shield lacks something. It's ratings are solid enough, but critically it's a mess, and Marvel fans are more likely than not to be complaining that it's dull. And I can't disagree. Certainly, compared to last year's other breakout new show Sleepy Hollow, there's been a distinct lack of forward moment for AoS. It took eight episodes to establish only a single plot point, and in that time it failed to develop the characters enough for me to care by the time we discovered that Skye may or may not be an alien.

Is it simply that no show could have lived up to the hype of a Marvel spin-off? Maybe... but I also think it just isn't being run very well. My hunch is that Agents of Shield is suffering because a certain amount of nepotism has left the wrong people in charge.

For those who are unaware, the Agents of Shield totes itself as one of Joss Whedon's creations, but the legendary showrunner and writer-director of The Avengers, was only really involved with the pilot, and has almost nothing to do with AoS's daily running. (This is clear enough from the fact that the entirety of the cast is in fact still alive this far into proceedings.) Instead, at the helm are Joss's brother Jed, and Jed's wife Maurissa Tancharoen.

Both Jed Whedon and Tancharoen have a fair number of TV credits, but almost all of them are associated with Joss's projects – you take away any job they wouldn't have got without his involvement, and both their filmographies start to look incredibly thin for execs on such a big show. Hell, even with Joss Whedon-related work, neither of them have the sorts of projects under their belts you'd expect showrunners to have experience with. Tancharoen has only been a staff writer once, on another Whedon show: Dollhouse. Jed Whedon has more credits as a composer than he does as a producer. You compare that to the track record of Joss Whedon himself, the sort of heavy hitter you would expect to be in charge of a show this big, and both Jed and Tancharoen start to look woefully inexperienced.

It's frustrating to see such a blatant case of who you know being more important than how much experience or talent you have, especially when Agents of Shield is... well, just passable. These situations are much easier to forgive when the output is stellar – say what you want about Steven Moffat's shows (and oh, I could say a lot), but doing 99% of his work with his wife and best mate Mark Gatiss has produced some juggernauts in the British TV industry, from Coupling to Sherlock.

Sue Virtue, however, was and remains a powerhouse producer without her husband's involvement and Gatiss has similarly vast experience outside of his work with Moffat. Both these individuals would likely be getting high profile projects whether or not Moffat was involved.

The same cannot be said of Jed Whedon and Tancharoen. By comparison with something like Sherlock, Agents of Shield has failed to attract much of a fanbase or make any particular cultural waves. The AoS fanbase certainly exists, but makes up a proportionally tiny section of the wider Marvel fanbase. In fact, it's particularly telling of the show's failings that it has made so little impact on Marvel's fanbase, a fanbase that should have been difficult not to attract. A brief glance at Archive of Our Own turns up roughly 67025 fanworks under the general Marvel tag, compared to just 2064 under the specific Agents of Shield tag. Where is the force of the wider Marvel fanbase for Agents of Shield?

A show with Whedon's name on it ought to have attracted at least a strong cult following. A show with Marvel's logo on it certainly ought to have. And between them you'd definitely expect a consistently exciting, daring show full of compelling characters getting into interesting situations. Instead what we have is something that is only slightly more entertaining than the most stagnant seasons of CSI have been. And when you're only one step above a crime procedural so formulaic that you can predict the story beats down to the minute, I'd suggest something might be wrong.

The shame of it is, Jed Whedon and Maurissa Tancharoen are clearly not incompetent – Agents of Shield does at least hang together, the plots are coherent and the characterisation is consistent, if rather stagnant feeling. But they've been left on their own and as a result they look like kids dressing up in their parents' clothes: the shape of what's meant to be there is clear enough, but the execution is almost laughably amateurish. It's just boring, and has had pacing issues throughout, perhaps the clearest sign that the people in charge are not especially experienced. A knowledgable showrunner would not have spent eight episodes setting up only one plot point, for instance. What the show needs is someone at its helm with a little more vision and a great deal more technical knowledge of how to structure multi-episode story arcs.

As a result, a really great opportunity to further the Marvel universe on-screen has been badly squandered and, ultimately, its the audience that has been cheated, because someone somewhere didn't bother to look beyond Joss Whedon's front garden for competent showrunners.

Thanks to steady, if not stellar, ratings, AoS is almost certain to be renewed for a second season, and whether it can hold its audience at that point will be the test of whether the show can grow legs – although it won't necessarily say anything about the quality of the programming itself. See: the fact that CSI is in it's fourteenth bloody season, where Firefly, arguably Whedon's greatest work, was cancelled after only eleven episodes – albeit with a fanbase that is still vibrant eleven years later.

Tancharoen seems to have at least vaguely admitted to Agents of Shield's pacing issues, referencing some “growing pains”, but insisting that “we’rehappy we’re getting the kind of season where we feel like we’rereally hitting our stride” . So hopefully the kids in their parents clothes are gonna grow into them soon enough. It just seems a shame, and a little disrespectful of the viewing public, that two inexperienced writer-producers got to use a twenty two episode season of a multi-million dollar TV show in a massive and beloved pre-existing universe, as their classroom. Don't audiences deserve better than that?