Creators are constantly hearing that their ideas are too “niche” (read: risqué, controversial), while corporations and brands wish to assume a more neutral stance.
Joan Didion wrote in The White Album, “We tell ourselves stories to live.” What she meant, I think, is that we come to rely on our stories as a kind of infrastructure; we build lives, friendships and marriages on top of them. They become foundational, tectonic in ways that are deeper than we understand. And like anything tectonic, it was alarming for me when the stories I’d always told myself about being a gay man started to move.
When I first heard the word “nonbinary,” I didn’t know what it meant.
At first, I watched beautiful rethinking of gender that Gen Z queer culture hath wrought as if it were happening on the other side of a generational glass wall. And then one time, I was telling my “coming out” stories to friends college age daughter, and when I said “I felt like I was undercover as a boy” I could see on their face a little shift of the eyes — They heard it differently than others had. And I started to listen to my old stories in a new way: Like the dream about being an animated character, I looked back and remembered that character hadn’t been a boy. They’d been gender neutral.
Gay Directors. By Emanuel Levy Columbia University Press.
In Pittsburgh shooting A League of Their Own, I told my husband that maybe if I was in my 20s, I’d think about identifying as nonbinary. And in his wonderful-husband way, he just said, “does that mean you are?” “Pass me the dog,” I answered, as I tried to pretend that his words hadn’t just rung a bell between my heart and my stomach.
In the absence of a full one, I believed I was seeing my whole reflection. We know that representation matters because 89 percent of queer people say seeing themselves in TV and film helps them understand who they are and makes them feel better about themselves. We know intellectually that large numbers of queer people say that seeing themselves in stories, being given the infrastructure of understanding themselves, has helped them with depression and even helped them stay alive. But I’ve had a I’ve had a personal experience of that in the last few years, as I’ve been part of retelling a set of stories that were part of my childhood, and finding a better mirror for myself within them.
I grew up on Penny Marshall’s A League of Their Own and loved it as an unpretentious, funny, outsider-y piece of Americana.
But as Abbi Jacobson and I, along with our beautiful team of writers, started to research the stories behind the movie when working on the Prime Video series, it became clear that sitting underneath it was a history that was new to me. It was joyful, emotional, warm and, yes, Americana — and at the same time, it was deeply and authentically queer, and centered on women of color who were left out of the film. In the process, we met an incredible group of queer people in their 80s and 90s, including a woman named Maybelle Blair, who shared her stories with us, and when we asked her what it was like for her to find that so many of the other players were like her, she said, “oh it was a party.” A party! For queer women in 1943! Of course, there was a lot of pain underneath that statement, including a story about running from a bar raid that made its way into the show.
A huge part of my experience had nothing to do with the show, but telling those hidden stories with other queer people also made me feel profoundly not alone, a personal experience of why representation matters. And I wasn’t alone.
Reel/Real Impact
Since Season 1 of the show was released, Abbi, me, Desta Reff and our cast have experienced a response unlike anything I’ve ever felt or seen. It’s one of the most beautiful things I’ve been a part of — Even 10 months after the release of the show, we get dozens of messages, art, poetry, from people who watched the show and changed their pronouns, who watched with their parents or grandparents and came out to them. More than anything about the show itself, to me it proved an intense need for these kind of stories. Which makes sense, of course, if you look at what’s happening to LGBTQIA+ lives in the world around us.
These efforts are having their intended effects — corporations and brands are beginning to assume a neutral stance on our rights and existence rather than incur the wrath of these customers. GLAAD reports a decline in LGBTQIA+ representation in media this year, and I, along with most other queer writers, can tell you personally that the atmosphere has turned frigid in the past year and a half, and A League of Their Own has been one of the lucky ones. While states are passing “Don’t Say Gay” laws, we’ve seen a corresponding tidal wave of cancellations of shows with strong queer characters — especially female, trans and nonbinary characters. Creators now hear constantly about the need to find shows that are bigger, broader, that aren’t catering to a “niche” audience, without deep recognition of the fact that queer people are being attacked by some portion of that “broad” audience. And when we’re talking about “global TV,” there’s little recognition that LGBTQIA+ rights are still in their infancy in many of the countries that now represent the growth opportunities for platforms.
This moment is a tipping point for queer representation. What we know is that, if our stories are “moved to the back of the museum” for now, we will see an effect. Teenagers coming of age, 100 year olds like Maybelle Blair, and people like me won’t have the profound impacts that diverse and authentic queer storytelling can bring: A more full mirror to see yourself in, a greater sense of confidence and of self, and a connection to a bigger community and to our own history. If Joan Didion is right and we “tell ourselves stories in order to live,” then what happens when we lose those stories?
