Non-Fiction

He walked a few steps ahead of me on the Bund. In one gust, the air smelled of the briny Huangpu salt water. In the next, it smelled of dead pigs and chemicals.

“Martin, look. This is the old side of Shanghai.” He spoke out of obligation, like a tour guide, telling me about the history of the older architecture behind the trees and pointing across the river at the Oriental Pearl and the Jin Mao towers. I asked him how people got to the other side and he said that there were ferry boats and a shuttle tunnel with colorful lights and sound effects on the inside.

His voice was vague and apathetic. He wore Harry Potter-esque glasses, Adidas sweatpants with stripes on the side, and a grey hoodie, which he kept covered over his head. In his hand, the plastic grocery bag he carried swung with each stride, and I heard the contents shifting but couldn’t tell what was inside. The wind blew his hood off and he rushed to put it back on, as if he didn’t want me to see the back of his head. Unintentionally, I mimicked his reservedness, pressing my shirt down to stop it from showing the skin on my stomach.

He turned back to me sparingly, only looking to check if he hadn’t lost me in the crowds. When I did see his face, he was not unattractive; his facial features were not disproportionately large or small and his skin was neither perfect nor blemished. He walked cool, like an athlete. I tried to decide whether I had a crush on him or not.

In broken English, he asked me if I’d seen enough of the water, and I gleaned from the boredom in his posture that he was trying to tell me that he had. I told him that we could leave if he wanted to. He led me down the steps to the lower level platform by the street, away from the noisy crowds on the riverside. There, people wandered along a 12-foot wall of flowers. As I passed by, I brushed my fingers through the petals, which mixed into psychedelic waves of green, orange, and purple and stretched around the bend so that I couldn’t see the end.

“This is the Qingren de qiang. It means lover’s wall,” he told me in a mix of both languages as he walked towards a bench in the square. “It’s nothing special.” He sat and opened the plastic bag, revealing colorful packs of Chinese coconut candy and yogurt drinks inside. “My mom packed this for you.”

I reached my hand into the bag and pulled out one of the yogurts. The bottle was still fairly cold and dampened by condensation. The tart liquid rolled on my tongue just as I had remembered from my visits to China as a kid; I thought back on how my mom used to buy packs of the drink from the grocery store beneath our Chengdu apartment so we could have them with steamed buns or pastries for breakfast.

*

We took a cylindrical glass elevator up the Pearl Tower. Framed between thick cement pillars outside, the sky tried to be blue; the Shanghai smog ensured that it could not. His hoodie was black and he wore a bracelet, a braided one whose blue and white intertwined around his wrist. I caught a glimpse of it before he hid it in his sleeve.

At the top, with her hand gripped firmly around her father’s, a little girl touched one foot onto the glass floor as if the panel might loosen. As I watched tourists point their cameras downward to take photos of their feet floating way above the grass at the base of the structure, I wondered how many of them could stand on the glass until it would start to crack, and how many more you’d have to add for the floor to give way completely and cause them all to fall a thousand feet.

I asked if this was his first time up here and he told me no, that he’d been up here with his friends many times before because they knew that there would always be foreigners. He said that he didn’t get to see foreigners often. I saw some American students with University of Michigan sweaters by the elevator, and I knew I didn’t seem to be as interesting to my host as they were.
            Again, he handed me snacks: rice crackers and lychee gummies. The river below circled halfway around us and moving through more city on either side, like the tortuous, wound up sensation of yearning for an attachment, with anything, but failing. Watching the crowd shuffle in front of us in silence, my inadequacy seemed as heavy as the Shanghai sky. I wasn’t hungry, but I accepted his food and the nostalgia that it brought me nonetheless.

Over the next few days, he took me to other touristy landmarks during the day and sequestered himself in his room when we returned home each night. On the night before I left, we visited Jing’an Temple, a single street block of sloping gold roofs and traditional architecture among a hundred blocks of metropolis; the surrounding towers of metal and glass seemed to stare pompously down upon the temple. I wondered whether the attraction was built as another tourist attraction in Shanghai or whether long ago, the city had been carefully built around the temple. I’d like to imagine that it was the latter.

He bought us a pack of incense sticks from a wooden stand in the courtyard. After my great-grandmother died, my mother had taught me that I was to light the yellow end and hold the stick from the red portion on the bottom, bow three times, and place them in the ash. After we’d both finished, we stood in front of the smoke for a while, watching the rows of tips glow.

That night, his parents cooked me a farewell dinner of red braised pork belly, sweet red bean soup, and other dishes usually reserved for special occasions. Against my host’s mother’s nudges and sighs, his father poured me a small shot glass’s worth of a strong Chinese alcohol and a cup of the same colorless liquid for himself. He encouraged me to drink, which I did. The bitter taste moved from the roof of mouth into my nostrils and burned all the way down my throat, where it remained for the next few minutes. After I’d helped them clean up, my host disappeared into his room as he’d done every other day this week.

Left by myself in their living room, I figured I’d do some homework, anticipating my return to America. I almost looked forward to the emptiness of my suburban neighborhood and the familiar sound of my garage door under the floor of my bedroom, and being alone, still, but at home. I carried my thick, hardcover, history textbook from my suitcase to their kitchen table and opened to pages filled with images of the conquest of the New World. From there, I moved through each line, word by word, feigning reading. I underlined a date or two and circled some names to convince myself that I was really doing anything productive.

I had gotten a quarter of the way through the chapter when I heard my host pad his slippered feet around the table and pull out the chair to my left. I looked up at him for a second and quickly turned my head towards the living room. In the dark window behind the couch, I saw our silhouettes on the same side of the table, a row of vacant chairs across from us. We were close enough that I could smell the fabric softener on his clothes. He had taken out his phone, and the tapping of his fingernails on the screen became background noise. We did not talk or look at each other. In the hallway, a key clicked inside a lock and a door closed; I presumed that the person across the hall had just returned home after a day of work or school. Behind our reflection in the window, the lives of other people played on the illuminated windows of neighboring buildings like programs on television screens. I couldn’t quite make out the characters but I could imagine them inside, wiping down kitchen tables, tucking children in, and getting ready for bed.  My host remained at my side until I got through the whole chapter pretending to read and felt weary enough to excuse myself. As I collected my books, he told me goodnight.

The next morning, I left China early on a packed United flight no doubt full of tourists like me, heading home. Halfway, I opened the parting gifts my host’s parents had given me: egg custard tarts and purple sweet potato buns. They were nearly sickeningly sweet but I ate them all.

 

Justin Li is a rising senior at The Pingry School. He was born in New Jersey and has lived there his entire life. The recognition his writing has received include a regional American Voices Nomination and a national Gold Medal from Scholastics Art and Writing, as well as an Honorable Mention award from YoungArts. In addition, one of his pieces has been published in Issue 6.1 of the Maine Review. He also attended the Iowa Young Writers’ Workshop as a rising sophomore.

In Hindi my name means beautiful creation. It means wisdom and grace. Flower petals and olive wood. the number seven, indecisive and unstable, a petal too large. A dark and dusty green, that of a deceased trunk. It’s the jazz on the streets of sleepy Portland, the smell of burnt bacon wafting into the street from a dingy looking pub. It’s rusted and iodized, like the skeleton of a façade.

Along with my house I inherited her name, but not her grandiose or whispering voice. She was the pure meaning of ‘Sukriti’, muted and unfurled like a cherry blossom. symmetrical, with every petal a replica of the next. Open rooms and windows as though calling the overlooked with open arms. a soft breeze whipping the pale curtains, as though she was ruffling her feathers. An air of acceptance to her that I could never understand, let alone recreate.

A towering mother, who protected us from the storms outside, an entity you could feel safe with. A hearth for a nature, but a scythe for a mind. The numerous facets of the diamond of a heart that I could never excavate, my vision blackened by the coal concealing it. The raging winds of the tempest easily whipping me away into an abyss. An abyss of unspoken insults and barking hellhounds. That’s how they did it, the storm clouds of uncertainty.

Soon she got weaker, as even titanium does. An air of acceptance mutating into an air of foreboding. Ceilings falling to the ground, walls caving in and heart flickering from the blow of the outside world until only the grandfather clock remained on the porch standing poker straight, showing how much time had really passed. Along with my house I solely inherited her name, the diseases of her old age and the drug to cure the malady that destroyed her.

My name has been twisted and turned into grotesque rip-offs more often than not, leaning towards being a block stuck in your throat rather than a whisper of mere air. In Sanskrit it means the trickling of water, the balance of nature, the fluid motion of a running cheetah and a soaring eagle. Sukriti churned down to Shukku. Plain Shukku. Ordinary Shukku. But no matter why the ceiling crumbled or why the grandfather clock stood unswerving on that cloudy day, I will forever remain me, myself and I. Sukriti.

 

Sukriti Sinha is an eighth grader living in North Texas. In her free time, she loves to read, write and play the violin, but her all-time favorite activity is sleeping. She was born in the drowsy town of Portland in spring and moved to Texas when she was eleven.

 

 

(Inspired by Sandra Cisneros)

You never thought you’d be here, but the clock hanging askew on the opposite wall reminds you otherwise. Its hands push forward the way you wish you could. This time will be different, you tell yourself in a last-ditch attempt to soothe this building anxiety. This could not have been further from the truth, but then again, what do you know? You’re sixteen, and you left school for this. You could be writing shitty poetry in the back of physics class right now. Instead, you’re writing shitty poetry in the holding room of a courthouse, white walls bordering you in. You wonder if divorce court is intentionally designed to be this bleak, this clean solemnity that signals: We handle this like adults.

So do you feel like an adult now? The severity of the present is jarring enough to catapult you back to playground days, back when setting the table for four wasn’t a blasphemous sin. You’re starting to regret ever wanting to grow up. You cross your arms and hug your backpack tight, hyperaware of the irony present between your falsified maturation and your awkward schoolgirl uniform. You stick out like a sore thumb in the courthouse, your adolescent disposition warning of a naivety these white walls haven’t welcomed in a while. The way the hands of time mock you from across the room forces you to stew in your own rage; you fiddle impatiently with your phone and try to focus on the positive—this means the yelling will finally stop. Isn’t that what you’ve wanted?

The judge waves you and your brother in, and this silent calamity triggers your fight or flight response. You’ve never wanted so badly to escape as you do right now, so you settle for dissociating out of your body (for running away like you always do). You feel like you just walked into an active battlefield—smug and frustrated expressions threaten to implode, and all you can do is try to find shelter.

He starts: I know this must be difficult for you.

You hear: I can’t believe your parents brought you to this.

He drops: We’ve reached a separation agreement with both parties.

You hear: This is how love dies.

He pleads: I hope you can understand and support your parents.

You hear: You’re the adults now.

 

You stare back at the judge, mentally present but emotionally elsewhere. You feel numb numb numb, like your feelings finally decided your wasteland of a heart was too barren, too empty; they packed their bags and you’ve been searching for them since. A prolonged silence hangs between everyone, but you refuse to relieve it. You’ve been expecting a catastrophe, some seismic upturn in the world.

But all you feel is a change in your soul—something shifts ever so subtly, so quietly that only you can hear it move. You dig deep and try to uncover what you’ve lost, but all you find is an emptiness where home should fill. Where no amount of love could ever parch your thirst for safety. Where love doesn’t exist, clearly, because if it did, you wouldn’t be praying for a reprieve. If love existed, it wouldn’t be reduced to tan lines where wedding bands used to be, or the stack of settlement forms laid out in front of you right now.

Do you hear that? That’s the sound of trepidation settling in your heart, of bitterness planting its seed in your soil. This unassuming placidity clutches onto you, but it’ll be days before it sinks its teeth into you. You’ll spend the rest of your newfound adulthood wondering if you’ll ever break free from it, if time would ever lend a hand to liberate this fear. If love—the idea of it, the home you so desperately craved for— will ever mean the same again.

You walk out of that courthouse unscathed, but you’re struggling to piece it all together. Is this what love is supposed to look like? You don’t think you ever want to find out.

 

 

Natasha Lim is a psychology student from Singapore. She writes poetry and prose, and is an editor for the Interstellar Literary Review. In her spare time, she enjoys drinking copious amounts of coffee and reading books that make her cry.

Guarded by trees and heavy foliage, dotted with bulbous lamps, a winding road covered with wandering leaves lead to the streaked pink walls of a hospice. Cahercalla Hospice; the scene to my childhood. Despite the smell of old soup and antiseptic, stifling in its pungency to a child as young as four, it was homely and bright. The corridors were yellow, like the few patients who kept their teeth. The hospice was the heart of my youth; it held within its walls my nana, a great area to play in, and all of the friends I had made.

I don’t remember what she looked like, or her voice, or the feel of her embrace, but I remember the fudge. Rolled into tiny balls by my small hands and stationed upon the bedside locker like soldiers in formation. Nana loved fudge.

Mam and I would visit twice or three times a week. The nurses loved me because I was generally well-behaved and very cute. Sometimes I would sneak them fudge, too, but never rolled. Only Nana received such special treatment. She liked to call me, fondly, her ‘little nurse’. The real nurses would watch over me if mam needed a moment. I never thought my early childhood to be strange. Didn’t all children spend their formative years in a hospice?

I found out that most children did not, in fact, spend the first four years of their lives running along shiny corridors, weaving through the legs of kind orderlies and trading gummy smiles with patients. I found it even stranger when some friends told me that their nanas lived in their own homes, that their nanas didn’t have fake teeth and trouble chewing. Their nanas could walk and talk and smile and sing and dance. My nana used a wheelchair and her speech was slurred, and when she smiled it was toothless but enough to make me giggle. I had never heard her sing. I certainly never saw her dance.

These things bothered me up until they didn’t. My nana was special and I was her special nurse; that was enough.

***

The clearest memory I have of her is quite a simple one. I’m standing next to the railing of the bed, bag of fudge abandoned while I concentrate deeply on creating perfect tiny spheres of sweet goodness. Nana watches me with a smile. My efforts were always praised to the highest and I would glow with pride. Mam observes the scene with glistening eyes I was too young to consider.

One ball of fudge is swallowed, and another. Nana gifts me a present of my own, then. A porcelain Easter egg, small and pastel pink and covered in delicate white frills. I take it reverently, amazed, and watch as a frail hand quivers and removes the lid. Inside sits a rabbit amongst grass, a daisy in its mouth, ears perked happily. I stroke its shell and babble my thanks and carefully climb upon the bed to hug her.

I wish I remember what that felt like.

***

Nana died not long after and I never set foot in Cahercalla Hospice again. I often wonder if I missed it, and if it missed me in return. If it mourned me the way I mourned Nana. I hope so. I missed her deeply but never understood where she went. Or maybe I did, and I simply couldn’t think about it. I can’t recall. I don’t want to.

***

Uncle John was a man whom I knew more from seeing him cycle through town than from any actual conversation. A flash of grey hair, a quick salute, gone in a flash. In truth, the first honest conversation I had with him was when he lay on his deathbed.

Cahercalla hadn’t changed. Same bend in the road, same obnoxious lollipop lamps, and the same gaudy walls. I felt conflicted; childlike joy from years lost warring with the urge to burst into tears and flee. The corridors were too cramped, or I had grown too large. It felt totally different. The essence of Nana was lost in the place I had hoped it would remain. I was mocked by the sign: Mortuary.

Up the steps. Legs of lead. Through the corridors, past patients unfamiliar and wrong. The nurses didn’t smile with any sincerity. I nearly grabbed for my mother’s hand like a scared child. I had never been scared here before. Not even when I split my upper lip on a glass table and it had to be stitched together. The nurses were there to help, and Nana had given me an extra piece of fudge for my bravery – what was there to be afraid of?

The scent of lung cancer permeated the room. The flowers by the window drooped sadly. Were they hiding, too?

My uncle lay in his bed, resigned to the inevitable. He looked weary. If I spent my days surrounded by sunflower-yellow and white trim while relatives visited and got their goodbyes out of the way before the shopping in the boot defrosted, I would look the same. A bag of fudge would have done Uncle John some good, I thought. Maybe I would have even rolled it for him, for old time’s sake. Those little soldiers, standing en garde again. I thought perhaps the flowers would have waved a final goodbye if I had.

***

Uncle John was laid to rest in the same plot as Nana and Granddad. Wind and rain whipped noses till they shone like red beacons and camouflaged the tears cascading from heavy eyes. Dozens of flowers wept their sorrows as they sat by the tombstone.

Here Lies James “Jimmy” Daly and Catherine “Kitty” Daly, they warbled, and their son, John Daly.

On the way home we pulled into a shop. Bags of fudge hung on hooks. They stared as I marched towards check-out, as I shook in damp funeral clothes, as I paid and brought them home. Older. Taller. Hair longer, shoes bigger. Same scar on my lip.

I rolled the fudge. Same texture, same taste.

 

 

Bríanne O’Gorman (she/her) is a twenty-year-old Creative Writing student from Ireland. Previous work is featured in Neuro Logical Magazine.

Being African is different from being Black. If you are an African, it means you do not get to know anything about your past, except that you know that your grandmother died due to malnutrition or any of those simple propositions your parents tell you to remind you that you are a product of a particular genealogy through ejaculations. Why is this? History has been excluded from your school curriculum, since the beginning of your primary education, because you are expected to see your ancestors as carcass of what seems to be of value and white men as the originator of what and where you are today. So, you just go to the exam hall and tick the box that says Mungo Park discovered the river Niger, even though when he came to the town, women cooked his meals with water from the same river. However, Mungo Park is white and everything a white man sees he names.

You are African and you don’t get to learn history in school because, today political leaders see themselves as failures. Old people don’t want their young ones to know of their failures. Old men can bear no shame. Yakubu Gowon could not imagine his great-grandchildren learning that he orchestrated the pogrom of Igbo people. Obasanjo, too, could not bear the guilt of relearning that he was a commander of the army that attempted a pogrom. Therefore, here we are, living in the shadows of our fathers fear and for that, we do not get to learn history except if it is the history of America, history of Britain or the history of the transatlantic slave trade as explained from a very Eurocentric perspective by a European.

There are many things I do not understand: How somebody like Donald Trump, despite the pinkish color of his body, fits into the race of whites or how Barack Obama exhibited chocolate all over his body and he still counts as black. Human beings, most times, are wrong when it comes to descriptive analysis. An editor after accepting my poem in a UK based online magazine said I cannot substitute pink for white and they have to edit. I asked them not to publish the poem – they get to define me as black, despite the fact that I might be yellow, but I cannot describe them as pink, even though it is a very subjective opinion, because colonialism makes me unworthy of that. If that is not racial, then I must be too sensitive. Western validation should not be a necessary requirement towards authenticity of being African and African academicians do not care. In 2019, the Oxford Dictionary added some vocabularies and calls it Nigerian English. Nigerian and African academicians will reject a research paper that does not italicize such words like danfo until pink people said,” it is okay, and we’ll let the vulgar word count as English.” That is imperialism and African academicians do not care. Most lecturers if not all, are doing the work to feed their families and not because they have a major interest in changing the face of Africa educational system which is majorly westernized.

Being African is quite eccentric. You don’t get to get annoyed with your past because you don’t know it. Africans will not have time for race discussion because there is no time. The little time Africans have, they have a lot to fight already: bad roads, epileptic electricity, no salary, corruption, sex trafficking, climate change, bad leaders, terrorism, the other person at the neighborhood who they don’t like because he/she just bought a car, patriarchy, poor water, poor healthcare… among others. So, talking about racism, with all these problems, is quite subtle. Neglect, therefore, becomes Africans ally when it comes to issues related to race.

The character Ifemelu, in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s sublime novel “Americanah” tells a lot about Africans and race. Ifemelu does not identify as black, but just African, when she is in Nigeria. It is until she gets to the United States of America that she realizes that there are boundaries to one’s personhood. Being African is different from being Black. Being African means that you live in a geographical place marked as Africa or furthermore, you came from the continent but you now live somewhere else, though your grassroots are from Africa. That is what makes you count as African and even though your British accent is fluent and you barely know that in your mother’s town, they speak another language different from English, you count as African. So of course, African is different from being Black. Egyptian, Libyan and Algerian folks will rebuke the attribute of being Black because the Arabs have systematically eradicated the Black community from the social and political scene, albeit retaining them in the economic –labour- scene. Blacks in those countries now serve at the back stage curtain. Chimamanda Adichie emphasized the strangeness of transforming one’s personhood from being African into Black through Ifemelu in one of her blog posts:

Dear non-American Blacks, when you make the choice to come to America, you become black. Stop arguing. Stop saying I’m Jamaican, Ghanaian. America doesn’t care.” 

With those lines above, Adichie systematically appraised the fact that anywhere you come from in Africa, when you get to America or Europe or any country that is dominated by pink (conventionally called white) people, for the pink people you have no longer any heritage that qualifies you as African. You have been initiated into the class of former Negroes, as Adichie stated. Because for white people, it is a privilege that you get to be in their country; to enjoy all the luxuries of their good government, who albeit, corrupt and poke-nose in other countries’ affairs, yet, still take good care of their citizen’s welfare, unlike the government of African countries, that all they do is steal and launder money abroad. African leaders are not concerned about a lot: epileptic electricity is never an issue for them to tackle; bad road is normal since they get to travel in luxury cars. In Nigeria, the country in which I am writing this essay, people no longer buy newspapers; the problem is everywhere for them to see: if you turn your face to the right side, you will see bad-roads, turn it to the left you will see a senator sharing radio for members of his constituency. Despite all these socio-political absurdities, Africans, due to insensitivity, are yet to develop resentments, excluding few who read books out of school curriculums.

The facets of racism in white dominated countries are so large. Providing justification for this assertion, former Nigerian Football Star, Jay Jay Okocha, said, “I do not know I was black until I got to Germany.”

Africans do not talk about race, Blacks do.

It is easy to identify, as an African, and then Black if you live in Africa. One does not get conscious of the self as black until one gets to America or Europe. This is because Africans don’t care about race. Even though Achebe’s Things Fall Apart is a negation of another story that attributes Africans as irrational, and Wole Soyinka’s poem Telephone Conversation is another, we opt to know that these writers were not conscious of their Blackness until they came into acquaintance with white supremacy and how it diminishes being Black. In other words, their reaction to racism was not born through intuition but through acquaintance with Race.

This is the simple reason Blacks talk about race but Africans do not: when the p.m. news was reported, and you are in the living room with your white folks drinking beer, and the broadcaster starts reading a report about a crime, you start murmuring prayers that the person is not Black. Because one of the folks in the room, while trekking back from school to your apartment, said most Blacks in America are into drug trafficking and you’d tongue-lash him for not knowing much but saying too much. Now, he might just prove his proposition with just one premise.

Another reason Blacks talk about race is while walking to the first-class section in a plane, white folks are looking at her like hey, girl, you actually don’t know where you are walking to, right?” And when she tells her white friends about it all they say is racism is no more and it is because of too much sensitivity that makes you think people, especially white folks, are watching you when you walk to the first-class section.”

You will think you are just an African, but you will transmit from being African to being black when you travel to a white dominant country who psychologically initiates you to the class of former Negroes. So, please, after transmitting to black, while walking in pedestrian areas, don’t pocket your hands. A cop might have a reason to blow your brain cortex with a pistol. And (s)he will have justifications. Justifications like self-defense. Some white cops may think you were bringing out a gun when they say, show me your hands. Pink people expect every Black person to be a rogue.

 

 

Idowu Odeyemi is a Nigerian poet and essayist. He is the winner of the 2019 Merak Magazine Annual Recognition Literary Awards for Poem of the Year. He was shortlisted for the 2018 Nigerian Students Poetry Prize, and the Christopher Okigbo InterUniversity Poetry Prize.

Honest, thoughtful, and well-rounded popular representation of historically oppressed groups in the media is a difficult hurdle to overcome. Even women, arguably the most prolific group that has experienced historical inequality, are underrepresented on film and television, so much so that the Bechdel Test has gained popularity as a way to measure whether female characters on-screen do not entirely revolve around men. Dynamic queer characters are even rarer; the LGBTQ+ on-screen demographic is oversaturated with white, gay men who are either brimming with sassy one-liners or are deeply tragic. Many of them also die at the end, a feature that is perpetuated by the legacy of the Hays Code. Unsurprisingly, when the queer and female demographics are combined, numerous problems arise, creating a surplus of poor representation. Transgender women are so underrepresented that they are essentially nonexistent in fictional media. Lesbian and female bi+ characters do exist, but those characters are almost universally fraught with issues, three of which are distressingly pervasive: the “predatory lesbian” trope, bi+ erasure, and oversexualization.

Many queer women can recall a time when a straight woman made a remark insinuating that lesbians are naturally vulturine or greedy, and oftentimes such statements are upsetting to hear. The “predatory lesbian” archetype only bolsters the ideas behind these comments. In a nutshell, the trope consists of a self-assured lesbian “converting” an apparently straight woman. The novel, The Price of Salt, is generally considered the stock example of this plot, along with its movie adaptation, Carol. The cliche can also take the form of a young queer girl exploring her sexuality by kissing her straight friends without their consent, as in the Netflix show Insatiable and its character Nonnie Thompson. Admittedly, both The Price of Salt and the character in Insatiable are considered to be at least slightly more complex than just the trope, but the overtones are still definitely present. Representation in this form is generally detrimental to the status of queer women, because it implicitly adds predatory undertones to their actions in the eyes of straight women.

The representation of bi+ women in cinema and popular culture is also faulty and largely contributes to the erasure of their demographic. There are many characters who are “just experimenting,” or “don’t want to put a label on it.” Alternatively, they can be obviously bisexual and yet never say anything about it at all. Amy Farrah Fowler from The Big Bang Theory is an example of a character that is clearly bisexual but never actually addresses the topic. And although the show Glee is often held up as a paragon of queer representation, the character of Brittany S. Pierce is actually deeply problematic in terms of a well-written female queer character. Not only does she never say that she is bisexual, she plays into the “slutty bisexual” stereotype. The same goes for the show Orange is the New Black. Language like “she used to be gay and now she is straight” permeates the dialogue. The character of Beca Mitchell in the Pitch Perfect trilogy has an ongoing joke about her sexual confusion, but never actually acknowledges the topic head-on and instead treats it as a punch line. Bisexual erasure is a real issue, and it is exacerbated by the existence of characters like these in the mainstream.

One of the most egregious issues when it comes to creating valuable representation of queer women is their oversexualization. “Lesbian” is one of the most popular search terms on porn websites, and there is no shortage of queer women in popular media whose characterization is either the direct product of male fetishization or indirectly stems from it. The popular sitcom Friends falls victim to a litany of jokes about the character Joey’s fetishization of lesbians, and Ross treats his ex-wife Carol as if her being a lesbian is a personal affront to him—a point which the show never fully contends with, thereby centering its female queerness around men.

Here again Glee fails, especially in its early seasons: many aspects of the relationship between Santana Lopez and Brittany S. Pierce are mildly ludicrous. There is a scene in one episode where they share a fateful kiss. And people in same-sex relationships being openly intimate in the same high school corridors where homophobic bullying is rampant is momentous, but that point is completely undercut by the fact that Santana and Brittany kiss from roughly a foot away and pucker up a ridiculous amount. It looks exactly like two straight girls putting on a show for the male gaze. It was almost certainly not intended that way, but the director and the writers clearly did not understand how to depict queer female relationships in any other light, which is indicative of the larger problem of fetishizing lesbians and bi+ women. Poor representation usually begets poor representation if nothing changes, and the writers who grew up with poor representation then begat poor representation.

The television show The L Word, another classic example of a trailblazer in the field of LGBTQ+ representation, also has its own points of contention regarding oversexualization. For instance, many of the scenes are unapologetically sexual. This is not an issue on its own, especially since queer people having healthy sexual lives is a topic that is generally unexplored on film and television.  However, the problem arises when these scenes become oddly numerous and graphic, and appear to cater to a male audience. People disagree about whether this is in fact true, but the issue is still there as long as people can interpret those scenes that way, because that means that dubious undercurrents are present.

Both The L Word and Glee showcase the pervasiveness of the problem of oversexualizing queer women. They are hailed across the board for their levels of inclusivity and pioneering natures, and even they fall prey to the same pitfalls. Incidentally, both also have poor representation when it comes to bi+ people, and the character of Kurt Hummel in Glee displays “predatory gay” behavior early on in the show.

Queer women of color have a particularly difficult time finding themselves onscreen; their characters fall prey to tropes more often and are much rarer. The majority of characters on The L Word are white, and those that are not are often tropes. The character of Bette and other characters of color are generally depicted as more belligerent than their white counterparts. The show Orange Is the New Black also has a limited number of Black lesbians, and there are no bi+ people of color at all. Glee has a Black genderqueer character, Unique Adams, but her identity is handled in such a ham-fisted way that it does not really count as proper representation. Her characterization regarding her gender is muddled and inconsistent; the show conflates gender performance with gender identity and the writers are only ever vaguely sure of obstacles that she should face. One memorable scene involves the bigoted principal being so opposed to making the bathrooms inclusive that she dumps a Porta Potty decorated with a question mark into the center of the choir room of the high school. Such an action, while based in a real issue, is so utterly outlandish that it loses touch with reality. Clearly, the writers have never witnessed a real “bathroom battle,” and Unique’s storyline suffers because of it. Furthermore, treating bigotry in such a lighthearted manner is actively dangerous. Unique constantly faces a mountain of transphobia, but the harm done is often laughed off or ignored. Since her identity is so unclear, and since her roadblocks are so grievous yet treated with so much levity, Unique Adams does not feel like a person with real struggles, meaning that her character does not represent those people.

None of this makes any of these television shows or movies terrible pieces of media, of course. They are flawed, as is everything we consume on a day-to-day basis, and they deserve credit for the ways they did advance representation. You are allowed to enjoy flawed media—that being said, it is important to acknowledge and think critically about those flaws, or you risk internalizing queerphobic messages.

I remember when I discovered my sexuality. I immediately went on a hunt for characters I could watch on screen that would represent my experience as a bi+ girl. For the most part, I was only able to find static, oversexualized characters. There definitely were several gold nuggets: the character of Rosa Diaz in Brooklyn Nine-Nine, Reagan in New Girl, and, more recently, Amy in Booksmart. The landscape is changing, and every year there are more fantastic female LGBTQ+ characters. However, Brittany and Santana in Glee were really considered the premier example of queer female relationships on television when I was exploring, and I ended up internalizing some of the harmful aspects of that depiction. I did not know what well-rounded queer female characters were because there were so few of them and, consequently, I suffered. When I was still in elementary school, I saw the first two Pitch Perfect movies and the lesson they taught me was to treat attraction to the same gender as a joke.

That is why representation is so important. If I had been surrounded by thoughtful and relatable queer characters, especially when I was younger, I would have grown up to be more accepting of myself, and those around me would have been more accepting too. As is, the media has a plethora of issues regarding representation, but, with more care from creators, they can be overcome. Again, the situation is improving. Shows like Sex Education feature a diverse cast of queer characters, even including an asexual girl, and that is a fantastic step in the right direction. Nevertheless, we have room for improvement, especially when you consider that the most inclusive media often cater to the same demographic and thus reach the same audiences again and again. We need more diversity across the board, and, until then, we all have to gauge even champions of inclusivity with a critical eye.

 

Natalie Parker is a longtime literature lover and current high school junior from Long Island, New York. Her writing has been recognized in a contest affiliated with the AAUW and her local library, for which she wrote a prize winning essay. She has also been published in the online literary magazine Inspired Ink. When Natalie is not writing, she enjoys acting in community theatre productions.