She creates video essays and media commentary on her YouTube channel, Night Owls, which she co-produces with her sister.
The Construct of the Coming Out Narrative
What do teen romcoms and coming out stories have in common? Sometimes, stories try to accomplish both, but they don’t always mesh well.
In the late 2010s, stories about teenage queerness started getting the mainstream Hollywood treatment. It’s been a few years since then, and now we have enough examples for a proper retrospective on how well the tropes of a teen romcom map onto queer coming-of-age stories.
LGBTQ+ Representation in Children’s Media
In February 2005, the PBS children’s television show Postcards from Buster enveloped the United States in a culture war because of an episode that was planning to air at the beginning of the month.
Why? The episode was prepared to show an LGBTQ+ couple on kid’s TV. That crisis ended when PBS decided to pull the episode from over 300 of its stations, after having gotten thousands of letters in backlash and a threatening condemnation from the U.S. government.
But 15 years later, LGBTQ+ representation is appearing left and right in youth-oriented TV. Let’s look at what happened between then, now, and before to figure out what opened the door for current children’s media representation.