40 “Won’t somebody please think of the children?!” Helen Lovejoy exclaims in “The Simpsons” episode from 1996, “Much Apu About Nothing.” Despite the line’s satire, American children’s media took the lesson quite literally. Many parents still behave like Helen Lovejoy, believing they must protect the minds of children from any force considered mature, immoral and corrupting. One such force is queerness. During my childhood, I never observed LGBTQ+ representation on either the big or small screen. I only witnessed cisgender and heterosexual characters and romances, conditioning me to think in heteronormative ways. As a bisexual woman who was aware of my identity early on, this did not produce healthy, self-assured feelings in me as a child. I have no memory of my parents, relatives and other adults actively speaking against the LGBTQ+ community around me, but I still felt that something must be wrong with me because I possessed no language about queerness. Shame and self-loathing welled up inside me because I believed I was the only “abnormal” person in my limited worldview. Such feelings are not uncommon among LGBTQ+ children, which can lead to tragedy when those emotions are heightened enough to impact mental health. According to The Trevor Project’s “Facts About Suicide,” “LGB youth seriously contemplate suicide at almost three times the rate of heterosexual youth…[and] are almost five times as likely to have attempted suicide compared to heterosexual youth,” while “40% of transgender adults reported having made a suicide attempt. 92% of these individuals reported having attempted suicide before the age of 25.” The sharp difference in rates of suicidal
The Invisible Queer: Hidden Life in Children’s Media
WRITTEN BY SARAH GARCIA ART BY MONICA JUAREZ
ideation between LGBTQ+ and cisgender, heterosexual children demonstrates the absolute necessity of validating LGBTQ+ children’s identities from an early age and showing them that their lives are just as valuable as those who are cisgender and heterosexual. One way to combat early heteronormative conditioning is to positively and actively represent LGBTQ+ characters in movies and television. While this may appear as a superficial method to some, major links have been established between marginalized children’s consumption of media and self-perceptions. In Ebony M. Roberts’ 2004 article “Through the Eyes of a Child: Representations of Blackness in Children’s Television Programming,” Roberts argues that “television is a child’s early ‘window’ to the world” and that “starting around age 4, children take what they see on the television screen as trustworthy information.” This is vital for showing how children accept what they see as truth and can thus be easily influenced into accepting certain views about others or themselves. In relating her specific argument to Black children’s experiences watching television, Roberts concludes that “Black people and culture were better represented” in the children’s show “Sesame Street,” which could “create feelings of pride and personal identification” in Black children. On the other hand, when studying “Mighty Morphin Power Rangers,” the White Ranger, a white male himself, was valued over the other Rangers, who were women and people of color. Roberts saw this as communicating “the message that ‘white is right,’ or in this case, more powerful,” leaving a negGendertainment
