Thank you, but I didn’t actually get cancelled in any meaningful way. Valiant attempts were made to drown me (figuratively), but since I don’t have a job I can’t be fired, I’m a tough old bat, I’m too elderly to give much of a poop about my future “career,” it’s not the first hanging party and book-burning featuring myself, and it seems that my Dear Readers were having none of it. Thank you, Dear Readers. It is for you, after all, that I write, not for some craven scholar trying to save her own behind by beating herself up in public for having built her reputation on studies of my oevre. (You know who you are. I accept apologies.)
Why the posse tried to take me down: I signed (and refused to retract, Bad Me!) an open letter to the University of British Columbia (“UBC Accountable”) calling for due and fair process for writer Stephen Galloway, who had been accused — dubiously, it now strongly appears —of rape –a violent criminal act, lest we forget. Nine years later, this claim has still to be thoroughly investigated in a court of law, due to the prolonged and frantic efforts by those being sued for defamation to keep such a trial from happening. But enough preliminary court cases have gone on so that a number of folks have now reversed their snap judgments, and some have gone full Mea Culpa.
You can read all about it in Brad Cran’s Substack called Truth and Consequences; start at the bottom and scroll up. It just gets worse and worse. What was amazing to me was the casualness with which the posse — mostly academics — tossed the Declaration of Human Rights and the Canadian Rights and Freedoms out the window, with cries of “Burn it all down” and the like. But every sword has three sides: your side, the other side, and the Oh Shit! side you didn’t anticipate. Some are now beginning to smoulder themselves, as folks set fire to their feet. Darn, where are those Rights and Freedoms now that a person might need them?
The novelist Margaret Atwood responds in an acerbic style to the attacks she received for having called for due process when the writer Stephen Galloway was accused of rape.
The fact that calling for due process was treated like a crime, while presuming an accusation was true without due process was treated as normal behaviour, shows the level of dystopian tyranny that has overtaken Canadian institutions.
It shows how academics are at the forefront of trashing fundamental pillars of civilisation for the sake of their own ideologies and malignant self-righteousness, which includes smearing and threatening anyone who dares to disagree.
When we acknowledge that many malign tyrannies have been spearheaded by academics (Nazi racism was promulgated by German academics in the 1920's; China's Revolution of 1949 thrived in the universities), then we cannot be surprised by examples such as this.
Such conduct wouldn't be nearly as effective if so many refused to be intimidated and toe the line. When the majority are cowards more concerned about their reputations than about justice, brave voices such as that of Atwood and others who have dared to displease the disciples of currently fashionable movements are seen as radicals: easy to intimidate, abuse, and threaten.
It's time for people to stand up to such intellectual thuggery by defending freedom of speech and the right to the presumption of innocence. When the bullies see that people have a backbone and can't be threatened into silence, they lose their repugnant air of impunity and imagined righteousness.
2 notes
·
View notes
SHELBIE: “We also actually have seen a difference in characters. So there are 80 less characters last year, queer characters, like WLW characters. There are 80 less WLW characters in the last TV season than the year before so it’s kind of like-“
EMILY ANDRAS: “Where’d they all go?”
SHELBIE: “ABC lost 18. Netflix lost 22.”
VALERIE: “Just walked into the parking lot and disappeared.”
EMILY ANDRAS: “Yeah, exactly. Or they all got on the wrong bus to the greatest party that we can go to.”
NOELLE: “Oh that’s much better!”
EMILY ANDRAS: “Yeah, I wish that was true. I wish that was true.”
SHELBIE: “From an industry perspective do you think that there’s - because of the backlash of 2016 - there was an uptick in like ‘Oh, we have to do rep” and kind of now, everybody’s a little afraid of how to tell those stories. Do you think maybe that’s what’s happening?”
EMILY ANDRAS:
*to Noelle*
“That’s such a good question and I’m looking at you.”
NOELLE: “Yeah, I mean, I would say anytime you get a finger pointed at you and someone telling you you’re not doing a good job - especially like from a network perspective where those optics are really important. In the US, they seem to care more than they do here. I would say, not to be cynical but I would say, yeah, that is probably why there were more. But that doesn’t mean that those stories, clearly, were being told more responsibly or in a better way or that those characters were three-dimensional characters who were fully fleshed. I think if you can lose that many, they probably weren’t integral enough to your show to begin with.”
EMILY ANDRAS: “Yeah, that’s my fear a little bit. It’s almost like this cute trend for some people and I’m like ‘It’s not a trend. These are real people and this is real representation and this needs to be what it is going forward’. So I think there was a little bit of a sense from some networks - One Day At A Time - that maybe it was like, ‘Well we gave you some candy and then you are the candy and now there’s no more candy left’. And I’m like ‘It’s not candy’ and they’re like ‘We love candy. How dare you!’. Um… I think it’s both things. I think it’s both like ‘Well, we can just throw in a bunch of LGBTQ characters and like that’ll feed the masses’. But also the other fear is that I do think there is a little bit of a resistance particularly, potentially from writers who are older or more established that they’re like ‘Well, I’m so terrified to wade in here and tell these stories that I’m just not going to tell these stories or include these characters at all’. But that’s just bullshit. You just have to learn to be better maybe and try harder.”
SHELBIE: “Be more creative.”
EMILY ANDRAS: “Yeah, be more creative.”
NOELLE; “Retire!”
EMILY ANDRAS: “Yes, retire. Yeah, exactly.”
*crowd laughs and applauds*
SHELBIE: “Do you think there’s a way that we can use Wynonna Earp as a little bit of kind of like a flagship saying ‘Listen, you can tell queer stories and you tell them with drama’. What I hear a lot, I feel like from writers is ‘Well, I mean you don’t want to be bad rep, so then we can’t tell any stories because we can’t have any bad storylines’. But Wynonna Earp kind of - you guys have been proving that you can have the drama and you can tell the stories and then still treat your characters with respect. So do you have any idea how we could get that information in to like a more of a way where it could be digestible by executives or showrunners or other writers?”
NOELLE: “Yeah, I mean I think just tell everybody to watch the show. I mean like, come on.”
EMILY: “Everybody.”
NOELLE: “Everybody, tell your everybody. Um… I mean for me it comes back to making sure that your queer characters aren’t secondary or tertiary to the main characters. Like I think the fact that when Emily built this world, you know, um, the queer characters became-“
EMILY ANDRAS: “Team effort.”
NOELLE: “Yes, team effort. Whatever. I wasn’t even here…. Um the fact that you can, you know, have - you can have an episode where, you know, where Wynonna’s sister’s girlfriend can be in the entire A-story with her, like is a testament to the fact that though, you know, Nicole, or if you have a story with, you know, with um, with Doc and Jeremy, like those characters are fundamental to the lifeblood of the series. They’re not just somebody you go out to for kissing scenes so you can tick the box and say, you know, ‘We did our rep. We did a good job’, you know, and pat ourselves on the back. I think if more shows did that then you,… the drama would be inherent. Like if when you created those characters you thought how they related to everybody on your show, not just the person they were sleeping with or smooching with, then I think that would just give yourself more opportunity for drama because, um,… because those characters are real and they matter to more people than just their partner.”
VALERIE: “And then your only options for drama aren’t relationship drama because you have so many other relationships and you can tell so many other sides of the story and it’s a lot more exciting that way.”
SHELBIE: “If they’re actual characters, yeah. If they’re only the ‘gay character’ then you have no other story to tell than their drama I guess. Their relationship drama.”
EMILY ANDRAS: “Their sexuality can’t just be their story. It has to be intrinsic to their character - but their whole story can’t just be ‘I’m gay’ all the time, although that’s not the worst.”
NOELLE: “I would also say that I think as writers and, you know, producers and people in the industry, we are conditioned because it’s the way we came up. Because it’s what TV has always been. That the thing that’s the most dramatic is loss and tragedy. And I think we undervalue how much emotion and how much drama a queer audience can get out of a happy ending because it isn’t the standard. You know?
*crowd applauds*
I think we need to put more value in happy endings for queer characters and not just go ‘Well, you know, for straight characters a happy ending - like who cares? We should probably kill somebody’. Like maybe we could have a happy ending every once in awhile.”
VALERIE:
*to Shelbie*
“And to sort of go back to what you’re saying about like Wynonna Earp being a flagship. It’s why like sometimes the running joke on the Autostraddle TV team is like ‘I bet Valerie is going to bring up Wynonna Earp on this roundtable again’”
EMILY ANDRAS: “‘How dare you!.’”
VALERIE: “Because it’s true… yes, I’m definitely biased because I love the show, but it’s also true that there are so many things that you can point to. It’s like ‘Well, okay this show failed us, but look how Wynonna Earp did a similar thing and succeeded at it.’ So it’s like it’s kind of always pointing those things out to hopefully get future TV writers, future people who are reading TV critic recaps, and things now, that will go on to create, like have it kind of in the back of their mind.”
NOELLE: “I hope so.”
EMILY ANDRAS: “I am impatient though, like the one thing I want, which we’re not quite there yet is like, it would be good to have a world where you can also have like queer villains, you know what I mean? Like I want to get to the point where we have our heroes, so then we’re going to have awesome LGBTQ-like villains and complicated people and it’s… we just need more of everything. Do you know what I mean? And then it’s going to be more fully rounded. But I’m not completely sure we’re there yet.”
SHELBIE: “I think Gentleman Jack is making at least a little bit of a stride.”
EMILY ANDRAS: “It is. It sure is.”
SHELBIE: “Because as much as we all want to love her… she’s not exactly the greatest person in the world.”
EMILY ANDRAS: “She’s complicated. Exactly.”
VALERIE: “Villanelle.”
SHELBIE: “Oh, yeah, that’s a good one.”
EMILY ANDRAS: “Villanelle. Yup. Fine. I’ll write a gay villain. Okay?”
NOELLE: “But then you get…”
EMILY ANDRAS: “Friends to enemies, enemies to friends.”
NOELLE: “Then you get into the situation though where you’re like, ‘We have this amazing part… and it would be great to cast this character or to write this character as a queer character’, but ultimately the bad guys die, generally, and so you’re like well… so if we’re a show that has really good rep, is it okay if we kill the… if we write this amazing part for an amazing queer character, but then at the end they have to die. So then that’s an added level of, you know, if we had made real sustainable progress since 2016, maybe, but the fact that we haven’t means I don’t know that… I mean it’s-“
EMILY ANDRAS: “Difficult.”
VALERIE: “As of right now there’s still a very fine line between like a queer villain and villainizing queerness.”
EMILY ANDRAS: “That’s so true.”
SHELBIE: “That’s a good way to put that. I think though that there’s, from like a straight statistics point of view - somebody’s going to be crazy, somebody’s going to die, somebody’s all those things. So if you have enough to balance it. I think that’s how you do that. So if you have 4 gay characters and you kill one from like our, you know, objective scoring system, you’d still have a really positive score because you’d have enough positive to balance out… the thing that you’re doing.”
EMILY ANDRAS: “Right.”
NOELLE: “It’s still scary as hell though. It still would give me hives.”
EMILY ANDRAS: “Yeah, I don’t know. We have a super hero that shoots people in the face. So I just like, do not think that’s a good plan at this stage. Like, no, I just like honestly, I just like think about it all the time. It’s like, I just wanted to move faster. Do you feel like that for diversity in general? I’m just like if it was faster, then there’s going to be more times for people who are queer too. Do you know what I mean? Like that’s the other truth. Like the actors I know who are LGBTQ are like ‘I just want to do everything’ right? Like ‘I want to play Bobo Del Rey. I want to play everything’.”
SHELBIE: “It’s an interesting argument ‘cause we want queer people playing queer roles and queer writers writing queer stories. But at the end of the day you want queer actors to be able to just play anything right? The same way that we wouldn’t want anyone else to get boxed in. So that’s kind of a… it’s an interesting argument I feel like that’s happening right now in the industry.”
EMILY ANDRAS: “It is, but at least we’re having it. At least we’re talking about it.”
SHELBIE: “We’re having the discussion.”
EMILY ANDRAS: “Yeah, exactly.”
NOELLE: “And you can’t really ask like, you know? I was just on a show where I was like, it would be great to get like a queer actor to play this role, but you can’t ask so unless you know, and you don’t always know, like… how do you do that?”
SHELBIE: “Yeah ‘cause you can’t not hire them because they’re not queer or hire them. Yeah, that’s tough.”
I had to transcribe this entire question and answer segment from this EH Con Canada 2019 panel because it’s such an important conversation to have and set of questions to address regarding LGBTQ representation in TV art/entertainment. What they talk about is what I’ve been writing about frequently and recently about how to provide better and more positive LGBTQ representation - particularly surrounding WLW characters - and the representation anxiety and cancellation anxiety that so many TV show creators feel over potentially accidentally perpetuating the harmful trope of Bury your Gays and being mistakenly accused of queerbaiting through main characters that can be perceived as gay or queer when they’re not canon gay or queer main characters.
They specifically talk about how to go about telling stories with and about gay or queer main characters that are the same or similar stories that we see with straight, cis and white male characters all the time because there is much less controversy over it when it’s a straight, cis white male main character because those main characters are everywhere and their stories - both positive and negative - in TV art/entertainment are everywhere because they get to be all different types of negative and complicated characters like villains that are abusive and destructive people that do deserve death or other forms of punishment and there’s no resistance against that by the general public because it’s not ever marginalizing or villainizing a specific group or community of people that need representation.
I would recommend you to watch the whole video because it’s all important but I specifically think this part of the panel is the most important and I am so proud of Emily Andras, her entire Wynonna Earp team, and the Earper fandom for spearheading this incredibly necessary initiative in addressing LGBTQ representation in the TV art/entertainment industry. This is a conversation that everybody that cares to talk about this subject needs to have to make a real difference in achieving better and more positive representation for gay or queer characters that aren’t or won’t always be the greatest people and telling their stories where they have a negative or darker character arc than other characters that are also gay or queer that have a positive and lighter character arc.
How do we do this? We need to have the in-depth conversations in addressing this subject together as a LGTBQ+POC community before we go asking for and pitching it to TV showmaking networks that have a sincere interest in providing better and more positive LGBTQ+POC representation but are afraid to because of representation anxiety and cancellation anxiety.
This video is long but it’s well worth the watch. If you don’t want to or don’t have the time to watch it, at least read the little segment that I have transcribed and if you feel like you want to talk about it - I’m here.
Let’s have the conversation. It’s incredibly important.
I will link you to where I’ve written about this before if you don’t understand and want to know more: https://www.tumblr.com/girl4music/743149350219333632
2 notes
·
View notes