Hollywood is never kind to women who have sexual or romantic relationships with other women. Whether it’s on film or TV, lesbians or bisexual women often turn out to be villains and frequently end up dead at some point during the course of the script. The Children’s Hour (1934 and 1961) to The Fox to Basic Instinct on the silver screen are but a few examples of films in which a non-hetero woman ends up demonized or dead at worst, or no longer in a same-sex relationship at best. Personal Best, long held up as example of forward progress for its portrayal of a female same-sex relationship, ends with the main character in a relationship with a man. Television treats women who express same-sex affection no better.
Television excels at portraying women in same-sex relationships as desperate in their deviance: from 1977’s In the Glitter Palace in which a bisexual woman asks her former boyfriend to defend her lesbian lover against murder charges to My Two Loves in 1986 in which a woman grieving the death of her husband is coaxed into a same-sex relationship to the otherwise imminently wonderful Battlestar Galactica in which the Number 6 models are entirely flexible when it comes to their sexuality and their desire to exterminate the human race.
More often, though, same-sex expressions of sexuality or romantic feeling are portrayed as acts of desperation engaged in by women who aren’t in their right minds, women who, once they are on the “right” path manifest realization of the error of their ways and the regaining of their sanity through relationships with men.
I had hoped, though, that after Ellen, in a TV season with the highest number of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered characters ever seen on television, that we had grown past the lesbian relationship equals unhappiness/heterosexual relationship equals happiness dynamic. Tuesday I learned that, unfortunately, we have not.
Be Warned: Here There Be Spoilers
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I watch House M.D. for a number of reasons. I like Hugh Laurie. Gregory House is an annoying, fascinating character who violates all principles of social etiquette and is allowed to get away with it. The show routinely features good dialogue that sets a disturbingly high bar for how real people might talk. The past two seasons, though, have showcased House’s new team which includes the bisexual Thirteen (aka: Dr. Remy Hadley) played by the entirely not hard on the eyes Olivia Wilde.
If you don’t follow the show the thumbnail sketch is this: after many shenanigans last season Thirteen finally gives in and gets a DNA test to find out whether or not she has Huntington’s disease (degenerative disorder that results loss of mental faculties, uncontrolled movements, and emotional disturbances). Her positive diagnosis results in some rather nihilistic behavior: drug taking, sex with a lot of random female partners, and generally cranky disinclination to do anything to ameliorate the on-set or severity of the disease. Basically, after learning she’s only got about a decade to live, Thirteen has essentially given up on life. That is until last night.
Last night’s episode involves a gunman who takes House, Thirteen, and several patients hostage in his desperate search for a diagnosis. Long story short: we end up with a scenario where, after some failed trickery by House, the gunman forces Thirteen to take first every medication House says he should take to make sure they aren’t knockout drugs or something fatal.
By the end of the episode, Thirteen is going into renal failure and the last drug could, potentially, kill her. Her revelatory moment – that she doesn’t want to die – comes with syringe in hand and a gun to her head.
Over the course of the season Dr. Eric Foreman (Omar Epps) has been pestering Thirteen about her treatment regimen, or lack there of, and by the end of last night’s episode Thirteen is prepared enter herself in a clinical trial of a new Huntington’s drug that Foreman is running, a trial she refused to even consider before the hostage situation and her revelation.
It was a good episode overall, dramatic, interesting, and showcasing the characters that I like. And then I opened up last week’s Entertainment Weekly and read this in “The Ausiello Files“:
Q: Any exciting surprises coming up on House? —Yolanda
A: Yes, and they all seem to be jammed into the Dec. 9 episode. In addition to the first-ever smooch between budding lovebirds Foreman and Thirteen, the holiday-themed outing also boasts a show-altering twist that is nothing short of a miracle. A true-blue spectacle, if you will. A miracle come true. (Hint: It doesn’t involve a Barry Manilow cameo. I swear.)
Now, I get that House is a drama that thrives on tension between the characters, and nothing breeds more tension in a workplace environment than two characters having sex (or romance). And as a writer I get why they’d pair these two characters up: House is a male dominated show; the only two other female characters, Dr. Allison Cameron (Jennifer Morrison) and Dr. Lisa Cuddy (Lisa Edelstein) are already spoken for. Introducing another female character wouldn’t work: that tension wouldn’t exist with a new character.
From a character development perspective having Thirteen get involved in a romantic relationship now that she’s out of her nihilistic funk makes sense as well: nothing says “life” like love (or sex depending upon how much of a romantic you are).
But no matter how much I understand it as a writer and as someone used to analyzing texts, it still irks the living shit out of me that now that Thirteen is ready to embrace life, now that she’s admitted that she really does care about whether she lives or dies, they’re pushing her into a relationship with a guy.
I guess we’re a far cry from The Children’s Hour but the continued equation of lesbian relationships with miserable, self-destructive deviance seems to be hanging around like the odor of rotten fruit.
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