InsaneJournal

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Entry tags:	babylon 5, blogs, geekery, sci-fi

[SPOILERS] Babylon 5 and the LGBT community
Okay, so I may have mentioned before that I love Babylon 5, but it still bears repeating. Today's post looks at Babylon 5 as a queer-affirming work, while acknowledging its many failures, and attempts in a lovingly biased way to determine its overall queer-friendliness level.

By the numbers:

-Officially queer members of the main cast: 2.
-Specific references to homo- and bisexuality: 2 casual mentions, 1 minor storyline, 1 one-line confirmation of an implicit storyline.

Qualitative analysis of the above numbers:

-Officially queer members of the main cast: REALLY TRYING HARD.

More details:
On the pro side, we have two bisexual women who are not experimenting heterosexuals or magic overnight lesbians but are actually consistently bisexual. Then, too -- the reason I wrote this -- the two characters seem to have evolved independently. According to a site I can't find any more, which claimed to have gotten it from a magazine, Andrea Thompson, who played Talia Winters, said that she found out that her character was going to be bi on her first day on the job. On the other hand, Claudia Christian, who played Susan Ivanova, somewhat incoherently said the other day (yes, that's me in the comments squeeing, so what?) that she believes her character's bisexuality to have originated with her partway into the first season. That would imply that the characters weren't both bi just to out them by putting them together, necessarily. (Bear in mind, I'm still not totally clear on that, as the subtext is heavy from episode one.) This relationship, in a nutshell, was two prominent characters who simply happened to be bisexual -- pretty dang' unusual for TV! -- and who were believably so. Also they were really cute together.

On the con side, the evil/dead lesbian/bisexual trope showed up, there was only one line in the whole show that made it more than a bunch of serious subtext, all the het relationships got proper development (including one involving Ivanova later on that she apparently spent twenty years doing nothing but moping about,) and the episode with the actual relationship development in it kind of sucked because it tried to cram the whole romance into Andrea Thompson's last episode and sacrificed the larger plot in the process.

Counter to the con, of course, is that a) it was awesome, b) Ivanova was a perfect allegory for a queer person in our society because she was also "closeted" and coincidentally "came out" at the same time as her bisexuality became visible, c) it was a realistic portrayal of bisexuality and that's AWESOME, and d) apparently their sponsors threatened to pull out if they went forward with the lesbian storyline, so with that restriction I think it's impressive how much we got.

Our casual mentions are, in order:

-Ivanova saying she "thinks she loved Talia," the only explicit confirmation we ever have of their relationship. Positive.

-Marcus Cole and Stephen Franklin posing as a married couple to sneak past hostile forces. Marcus is vastly entertained by it and teases Stephen a good bit, while Stephen seems embarrassed, the guy who masterminded the scheme is amused, and Stephen's love interest doesn't buy it for a half-second. I rank this positive, because it's clear to me that the humor in the situation comes from the characters involved (both would react similarly to fake marriage with a woman) and not from the m/m aspect. Besides, it's a portrayal of same-sex marriage as completely unremarkable from 1997, four years before any country recognized such marriages as valid, perhaps the clearest indication the show ever gave that it was down with queer people.

-A guy using a "holo-brothel" conjuring up a simulated woman, only to have mysterious forces create a man too (part of the A plot, don't worry about it.) He protests that he didn't program a threesome, and he's not really into -- well, there was that one time at camp -- or words to that effect. I rate this negative, if only slightly, because it's played for laughs and this guy's contemptible.

-Later the same film, a holograph of Captain Lochley from that same holo-brothel appears, prompting a guy in the cast to comment on how he can understand why some guys might be into that. Holo-brothel owner says actually it's usually women. (Lochley I classify as "highly suspicious," incidentally, because her "ex-roommate" showed up in a weird episode Neil Gaiman wrote and it was really subtextual. If I'm reading that right, that puts the holo-brothel guy's comment in an interesting light.) Again, played for laughs, but I like this one because it challenges the standard assumptions about pornography by making women the consumers as well as showing B5verse as queer-accepting.